Category Archives: Transportation

What routes would Waze recommend that drivers would turn down?

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The question in the title of this post is prompted by a 32% grade Los Angeles street to which Waze routes drivers:

But residents along Baxter Street in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood—reportedly one of the steepest streets in America (comprising two major hills)—are now banding together to try to change local traffic patterns. Neighbors have contacted city officials and Waze’s parent company, Google, to try to mitigate the problem…

The street, which dates back to 1872, has a 32-percent grade—more than double what current city law allows for today.

In 2003, the Times described the street this way: “Unsuspecting motorists gasp when they reach the crest and discover the roadway in front of them has dropped out of sight and there is nothing but empty space in front of their car’s hood.”

A decade later, Los Angeles magazine noted:

Baxter later became a proving ground for automobiles, as manufacturers staged elaborate stunts to demonstrate their vehicles’ power. In one such event in 1916, a four-wheel-drive truck loaded with 4,300 pounds of baled hay groaned its way up the grade, pausing twice for newspaper cameras. Nearly 100 years later, Baxter Street continues to bewilder uncertain drivers and confound elongated vehicles.

The appeal of apps like Waze is that drivers can avoid traffic by taking lesser-known routes. While residents may not like this, the more interesting question is how far drivers would let Waze take them. The apocryphal stories of drivers turning into lakes may make more sense when the story begins with a driver frustrated with the ridiculous or unpredictable traffic in many major American metropolitan areas. Would they drive through standing water? (The regular stories of drivers getting stuck on flooded roads suggest yes.) Would they be willing to go off pavement? Would they navigate through extremely tight places? Take a road with a severe and unblocked drop-off? Are there as willing to go through higher-crime areas? Apparently, a 32% grade is not enough so perhaps 40% would be too much?

I know this would not help Waze’s cause but I could imagine the company issuing some sort of award or recognition to users who are most willing to do something unusual to get around traffic.

What could kill the McMansion, SUV, and suburban way of life: $10 a gallon gas

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One of the ways that the American suburban way of life of single-family homes and driving could come to an end is really expensive oil. Here is one prediction of the fallout:

For decades, we’ve lived — and driven — in denial, somehow assuming we have the “right” to cheap gasoline, and therefore, low-cost transportation. Now it’s time to face reality and consider what will happen when — not if — gas hits $10 a gallon, not because of taxes, but because we will use up the planet’s petroleum…

Highways

Rush-hour on Interstate 95 is a breeze as half of all motorists can no longer afford to drive. But the highways are riddled with potholes as the price of asphalt — made from petroleum — quintuples, making it impossible to maintain the roads because gas tax revenues have dropped with decreased sales. With more people working from home or on flex-time, traffic congestion is a thing of the past.

Homes/offices

With home heating oil at $12 a gallon, people close off rooms in their “McMansions” and huddle in the few remaining spaces they can afford to heat, usually with wood stoves, which are also in short supply. Office buildings, by law, will be allowed to heat to no more than 60 degrees in colder months. Sweaters become a fashion rage…

Around town

Local traffic drops as people consolidate their few truly necessary shopping trips. Because farmers are so dependent on oil (for fertilizers, packaging and transport), food prices skyrocket. Food imported out of season becomes an occasional treat. Few can afford to eat out at now-chilly restaurants dealing with the same food shortages. Wagons and carts, bikes with racks, mopeds and scooters replace SUVs. Kids take the school bus daily instead of being chauffeured by mom. Suburban housing prices continue to fall as people flock to the walkable cities with good mass transit. Small town taxes rise, encouraging further migration. Schools can’t afford good teachers who must still commute from far away due to lack of local affordable housing.

If gasoline was indeed $10 or more a gallon, I imagine a lot would change. Perhaps even more so if there was a sudden spike to that price range instead of a gradual increase that would provide time for people and communities to adjust. Even with significantly higher gas prices, some would be very reluctant to give up the American lifestyle organized around driving.

One question to ask in this scenario is how quickly society could adjust. The American suburbs have been decades in the making. How quickly could they be dismantled? It is common now to hear social scientists, policymakers, and others discussing resilient cities and communities. Could the country adjust if the suburbs became unsustainable due to high gas prices? (According to this one prediction, we should all have bicycles on hand and hope we live close enough to mass transit lines.)

A second question: if the American government has spent many resources in support of the suburban way of life (such as socialized mortgages), would the various government actors try to sustain suburbia in the face of such a threat? Just because living in suburbia might be tougher does not necessarily mean Americans will stop wanting to live there.

Construction, ride-sharing doom Chicago parking lots

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Parking lots are disappearing in Chicago:

Big increases in condominium sale prices and apartment rents have pushed up the value of well-located land, Lev said. At the same time, revenue has decreased as much as 30 percent in some parking lots his firm owns. “Many downtown garages are not doing the kind of business they used to, which is indicative of ride-sharing and not as many people owning cars,” Lev said.

The lowly surface lot will play a role in reshaping Chicago’s skyline, with plans for two of the city’s tallest buildings in the works on parcels now used for parking…

U.S. parking needs will be cut in half during the next three decades, the Newport Beach, Calif.-based real estate research firm projects. Widespread adoption of ride-hailing and self-driving cars will eliminate the need for swaths of parking spaces — enough that the square footage of the unneeded spaces will be more than the cumulative size of every currently existing apartment, office, shopping mall, retail strip center and warehouse property in the U.S., according to the Green Street report.

Dwindling car ownership could have a major impact on land use and urban planning in the coming decades. It’s already affecting the way new towers are designed. Towers built over parking lots often include spaces within the new structure.

Americans may like driving and owning cars but a decrease in the number of vehicles could influence many areas of American life. Parking lots may just be one domino in a chain of cultural phenomena that will slowly fall if driving patterns change significantly.

Or, perhaps this change in parking could be seen as a necessary correction to having too much parking supply in the past. Some have argued American parking has been too cheap for too long as it encourages driving. This reminds me of two past phenomena. First, communities had battles over free parking and parking meters as customers came to expect plentiful free parking at shopping malls. Second, you can find plenty of images of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century where parking is prominently displayed even as the city was booming. For example, Grant Park was an important area for parking (and still is – it is just better hidden underground).

Additionally, holding on to urban parking lots could be a lucrative investment strategy. In the short run, an owner and/or operator could collect parking fees. In the long run, they could wait until the price of land increased dramatically and then convert a humble parking lot or structure into an expensive development. These urban surface parking lots are rarely meant to be there forever.

Cars, homes, and the American way of life

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Can comparative data about owning cars and homeownership in the United States help us think about how the two together help define a unique American way of life?

The data across countries suggest Americans are world leaders in owning vehicles and not so high on the list of homeownership. Few countries have more vehicles than us but over forty have higher percentages of homeownership. Yet, put these two features of life together – driving and owning a home – and they create something fairly unique in the United States.

To start, it is not just that Americans have a lot of vehicles: daily life and spaces are structured around these vehicles. For most Americans, getting to the places that are required for daily life – work, food, school, recreation – requires a vehicle. This is seen as normal and we have adapted in unique ways to this including developing fast food and big box stores (both could not exist in the same way unless people have their own vehicles, and often large ones at that, to operate). It does not have to be this way and indeed many other industrialized countries are not as dependent on vehicles for these daily activities.

As for homes, the availability of cars plus a desire to have a private single-family homes means that Americans are pretty spread out. This way of life reaches its apex in the American suburbs, which range from denser communities where driving involves shorter distances to places on the metropolitan edges where significant driving is needed for every major activity. This suburban form already existed to some degree before cars with the help of trains and streetcars. But, the availability of cars to the public in the 1920s really helped boost suburbanization as did subsequent decisions by different bodies of governments and others to promote an automobile-based society.

Critics of this way of life are plentiful even as we are nearing one hundred years of this arrangement. For more than a third of the existence of the United States, the goal of many is to own a vehicle and a home. To change this would require significant adjustments in a variety of areas. Imagine an America with smaller car companies (think of everything from the economic ripples to what commercials would replace auto ads on TV) or fewer fast food restaurants or no new sprawling suburban developments. We can see the resiliency of car and home narrative still: even as fewer than two-thirds of Americans own their dwelling (with more recent drops after the fallout of the housing bubble plus rising housing costs in certain places), it is still the goal of majority of residents (including younger Americans) and is said to be worth aspiring to. When the economy picks up, it seems Americans return to purchasing cars and homes.

Either cars or homeownership separately may not be enough to mark a unique American lifestyle. Put them together and they shape an entire society of over 300 million people.

Understanding car ownership in the United States through comparative data

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Americans like cars. Just how much they do is easier to see with two sets of comparative data (first image, second image).

MotorVehiclesPerThousand

1510B35-vehicles per person finland andorra

Several things to note:

  1. The United States is toward the top of the list with a number of notable smaller countries. Other large countries tend to be further down the list (except for Italy).
  2. It is interesting that the number of vehicles per person is so high in many countries that have smaller populations and a smaller land area. In the United States, cars often seem necessary because it is a big country and the population is spread out. (This would be interesting to measure exactly: before the widespread popularity of cars, was the dispersion of the American population significantly different from other countries? This would help get at whether the car caused greater American sprawl or Americans had already spread out and it only accelerated with the availability of cars.)
  3. Having higher levels of wealth seems to be at least slightly connected to higher rates of car ownership. However, this is not necessarily a strong relationship. In other words, different wealthy countries have different approaches to vehicles. Compared to the United States, the other G7 members are far down the list.

Back to the SUV and McMansion comparisons

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With a stronger economy, it may be time now again to link McMansions and SUVs. Here is one review of “gargantuan SUVs” or “extra-large luxury SUVs”:

But when you drive one like the new 2018 Lincoln Navigator (starting at $73,250), you start to understand why these whales of the highway are a rare yet growing subgenome of the SUV originally created in the heady days of the late ’90s. (Sales were up 5 percent in 2017.) They have become less McMansion, less family trucksters gussied up in questionable leather and wood veneers, and more bespoke luxury condo—the mobile living room for sophisticates with a growing brood that they always tried to be.

Space is a luxury, sure. But the stretch-your-legs-out room and cushy rear-seat experience that would normally require a first-class Emirates ticket? That’s a rare kind of decadence on the road that the Navigator handles with surprising grace. The interior is a treat for grown-ups (copious soundproofing, massage seats) and their kids (it can take up to ten WiFi connections).

Three quick thoughts:

  1. There is still an emphasis on space in these comparisons. SUVs and McMansions both provide significant amounts of room compared to the typical vehicle or home.
  2. Both are luxury goods that are a step up from the normal experience. Yet, the line that these newer SUVs are less McMansion and more luxury condo suggests their opulence is more acceptable. Indeed, it is okay to spend a lot of money for a flashy urban condo while the suburban McMansion is still looked down upon.
  3. Are we sure that the SUV and McMansion are the mass consumer goods that mark this era (roughly late 1990s to now) of American life? To critics, they represent wasted resources as well as American conspicuous consumption. The cell phone becomes popular over this time period but not until the smartphone of the late 2000s does it reach its peak.

I will keep looking for the comparisons of SUVs and McMansions. At the least, they suggest the economy is back to the point where more Americans are making or considering these purchases.

Social change through a bureaucratic manual

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Producing a manual may not seem like an effective pathway to social change but it can help in certain areas, such as new standards for bicycling in American cities:

To codify their emerging practice, they turned to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). NACTO had been formed in 1996 as a forum for big-city transportation planners to swap ideas, but it had never published a design guide before. That became one of its top priorities after Sadik-Khan was named president of the organization. For several months beginning in 2010, a group of 40 consultants and city transportation planners reviewed bike-lane designs from around the world and across the United States.

The result was NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide, the first national design standard for protected bike lanes. Like other standards, it answers the questions of space, time, and information that are at the heart of street design. How wide should a protected bike lane be? At least five feet, but ideally seven. How does one mix bike lanes and bus stops? Send the lane behind the bus stop, with enough space for bus riders to comfortably board and get off the bus. What about when bike lanes and turn lanes meet? Give bikes their own exclusive signals, or create “mixing zones,” shared spaces where people in cars and on bikes take turns entering the space…

The publication of the NACTO bikeway guide didn’t directly result in the creation of any new bike lanes. But the planners and engineers who wrote it recognized that for each of them to further progress in their own city, they had to collaborate on standards that would enable progress in any city.

As it turns out, the Urban Bikeway Design Guide was just the beginning. NACTO later released the more comprehensive Urban Street Design Guide, a broader effort to push back against America’s car-first road designs and define streets that support urban life, with narrow lanes that encourage reasonable driving speeds and traffic signals that give people plenty of time to cross the street. More recently, the organization has published guides on designing streets to speed up public transit, and incorporate storm-water infrastructure.

It sounds like the manual was the culmination of collective efforts in multiple cities as well as the form that would be recognized in that particular field (urban planning). But, it hints at larger issues involving social change: it can happen through a variety of materials and people. If I were to teach about social change in an Introduction to Sociology class, we might talk about (1) large-scale social movements or (2) significant shifts in large institutions (like the economy or politics). We acknowledge material changes here and there: think the revolution of the printing press, the arrival of social media or smartphones, the invention of air conditioning, etc. Yet, bureaucratic changes (except national laws) receive little attention even though such shifts can influence many people without even knowing. Take the bike lanes example from above: the average city resident may notice the shift but would probably attribute the change to either local officials or local interest groups (and both would be partly true). But, the manual behind the changes will only be known to experts in that field.

Infrastructure grade for Illinois: C-

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The infrastructure of Illinois did not receive a good grade in a recent report from the American Society of Civil Engineers:

The overall Illinois grade was a combination of individual grades for different elements of state infrastructure, including aviation, bridges, drinking water systems and rail.

The card’s lowest individual grade — a D- — went to the care of navigable waterways, noting that the confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Ohio rivers are crucial to the country’s navigation system. But this advantage is threatened by deferred maintenance on locks that have “long exceeded” their 50-year design life, the group said.

Illinois’ roads got a D, as they are ranked third worst nationally for travel delay, excess fuel consumed, truck congestion cost and total congestion cost, the engineers’ report found. The report noted that despite the need for maintenance and repair, the state’s 19-cent-per gallon fuel tax has remained the same since 1991. Other states have raised their gas taxes in recent years to fund road programs.

Illinois transit also got a D, because of lack of capital funding, according to the society.

This is not just a concern because Illinois is a populous state where many people rely on the infrastructure. This also matters because Illinois depends on this infrastructure quite a bit for industry and business. Because of the state’s location roughly in the middle of the country plus containing a path from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and numerous busy facilities that enable travel and the shipping of freight (railroad lines, O’Hare and Midway Airports, intermodal facilities), Illinois’ infrastructure is particularly important as it helps make many other things happen.

Despite its importance, I’m not sure I hold out much hope that significant efforts will be made to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure in Illinois given the state’s budget and political issues. Illinois could be a fantastic example of a state that builds for the future by comprehensively addressing infrastructure here and now to set up future decades.

New standard and platform for city maps

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Maps are important for many users these days and a new open data standard and platform aims to bring all the street data together:

Using giant GIS databases, cities from Boston to San Diego maintain master street maps to guide their transportation and safety decisions. But there’s no standard format for that data. Where are the intersections? How long are the curbs? Where’s the median? It varies from city to city, and map to map.

That’s a problem as more private transportation services flood the roads. If a city needs to communicate street closures or parking regulations to Uber drivers, or Google Maps users, or new dockless bikesharing services—which all use proprietary digital maps of their own—any confusion could mean the difference between smooth traffic and carpocalypse.

And, perhaps more importantly, it goes the other way too: Cities struggle to obtain and translate the trip data they get from private companies (if they can get their hands on it, which isn’t always the case) when their map formats don’t match up.

A team of street design and transportation data experts believes it has a solution. On Thursday, the National Association of City Transportation Officials and the nonprofit Open Transport Partnership launched a new open data standard and digital platform for mapping and sharing city streets. It might sound wonky, but the implications are big: SharedStreets brings public agencies, private companies, and civic hackers onto the same page, with the collective goal of creating safer, more efficient, and democratic transportation networks.

It will be interesting whether this step forward simply makes what is currently happening easier to manage or whether this will be a catalyst for new opportunities. In a number of domains, having access to data is necessary before creative ideas and new collaborations can emerge.

This also highlights how more of our infrastructure is entering a digital realm. I assume there are at least a few people who are worried about this. For example, what happens if the computers go down or all the data is lost? Does the digital distance from physical realities – streets are tangible things, not just manipulable objects on a screen – remove us from authentic streetlife? Data like this may no be no substitute for a Jane Jacobs-esque immersion in vibrant blocks.

Defining a social problem: “transit gaps” or “transit deserts”

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One skeptic of the concept of transit gaps explains his concerns:

The Chicago-based nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology recently unveiled its AllTransit Gap Finder—an online mapping tool designed to point out areas with “inadequate” transit service. It’s a good effort, and it’s certainly good that we have more tools for understanding transit demand…

A transit gap is some kind of difference between transit service and transit need or demand. But need and demand are different things. A need means that there are people whose lives would be better if they had transit. A demand is an indication that transit service, if it were provided, would achieve high ridership.

These terms correspond to the two opposing goals of transit service. If the goal of service is ridership, then it should provide excellent service where there is demand. On the other hand, many people who need transit wouldn’t be served if transit agencies ran only high-ridership service. So transit agencies run a certain amount of service for the non-ridership goal of coverage, which responds to need. In other words, they spread service out so that everyone has a little bit, even though low ridership is the predictable outcome. This critical distinction is explained more fully here. It’s a difficult budgetary choice about dividing resources between competing goals, one that local governments need to think about…

Although AllTransit’s claims are framed in misleading terms, the idea of being able to accurately see exactly how well any given neighborhood is served by transit is a laudable one. Over the years I’ve written about other efforts to get this right. An especially important idea, buried deep in the overly complex methodology, is that a transit quality index should be about where you can get to in a given amount of time, rather than what transit is available. In my own work I routinely use this measure to describe the human benefits of transit service changes, because getting to destinations, and having a choice of more destinations, is what makes for a great life.

There seems to be two issues here: separating community values from possibilities as well as how to best measure transportation options. No city has an endless pot of money with which to fund mass transit. Yet, I imagine proponents of transit deserts would note that the general American orientation is toward driving and roads while mass transit has to regularly scrap for money. The measurement issue is hopefully an ongoing conversation as researchers with different decisions and aims work to find measures that both reflect the social realities as well as provide helpful information for residents and local governments.

But, I also suspect that this is critique is missing a key concern of some of those working in the food/transit/grocery stores/parks/medical care desert literature: the key is which groups are most affected by these deserts or have less access to these necessities. Many of the deserts – however defined and regardless of the goals of the community – seem to affect lower class and non-white residents. One could argue that a community might not have the resources or vision to extend mass transit to a particular area but this does not necessarily address the issue of residential segregation that is alive and well in the United States.