Category Archives: Transportation

The possible effects of driverless cars on cities

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With the advent of driverless cars, here is one take on how they might transform city spaces:

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be…

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year…

“The future city is not going to be a congestion-free environment. That same prediction was made that cars would free cities from the congestion of horses on the street,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a member of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “You have to build the sewer system to accommodate the breaks during the Super Bowl; it won’t be as pretty as we’re envisioning.”

Mr. Smith has an alternative vision of the impact of automated cars, which he believes are inevitable. Never mind that nice city center. He says that driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home.

Interesting suggestions. Would sprawl be even more acceptable to people if they didn’t have to do the driving themselves? Pair this with the idea that there is a near endless supply of oil/gas and sprawl might be around a lot longer. I wonder if this would also lead to more cars overall and an uptick in miles driven per year, a figure that has been relatively flat in recent years.

But, I think this article doesn’t go far enough in reimagining cities with a major transportation change. Where would parking be consolidated? How might this change how buildings are designed? Are we imagining some sort of Le Corbusier world with large buildings surrounded by parks, a more New Urbanist design with plenty of dense neighborhoods where cars stay toward the outside, or something else all together?

h/t Instapundit

The unfinished “concrete bathtub” Block 37 CTA station

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Here is an inside look at the partly completed Block 37 CTA station that was once intended to be home to express service to both Chicago airports:

The superstation, which was mothballed in 2008, runs on a diagonal from beneath the corner of Randolph and Dearborn streets, southeast to the corner of State and Washington streets. I’m not supposed to say how you access the space — security concerns, you know — but let’s just say that a variety of elevators, locked doors and ladders are involved.What’s striking once you get in the space is its size: as long as a football field-and-a-half (472 feet), 68 feet wide and averaging 28 feet high. Call it a concrete bathtub — or an “envelope,” as our tour guide, Chicago Transit Authority Chief Infrastructure Officer Chris Bushell, put it — with rows of support pillars receding into the dim far distance. And all completely unlit, except for some temporary light strung up on the mezzanine and the portable lights we brought along…

The money needed for express train service, likely in the billions, never was obtained. And any private-sector interest melted away when the economy entered its worst downturn in many decades in the late 2000s. So, the city stopped after completing the shell and built no more.

By that time, though, City Hall had spent $218 million — $171 million of CTA bonds, $42 million in tax-increment financing and $5 million from outside grants, the CTA says. And to make the station useable — to connect the tracks, build the escalators, attach all of the needed electrical and plumbing to the outlets — will take an additional $150 million or so, the CTA says.

It’s too bad the city won’t say what they envision doing with this space. Just how long will it stay empty? Because of this, I’m a little surprised Chicago was willing to show reporters exactly what they built. Not only was several hundred million spent, the city still does not have any faster train service to the airports. All together, this is not exactly a shining moment in Chicago infrastructure.

A $3 billion funding shortage for relieving Chicago area railroad gridlock

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A House hearing suggested there is a major funding shortage for the construction necessary to relieve railroad traffic in the Chicago region:

A potential drop of more than 60 percent in Metra delays.

That number alone makes an ambitious $3.2 billion fix for rail congestion in the Chicago region attractive in the eyes of area commuters. And railroads, with the backing of the business community, also support the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program, or CREATE.

But where funding for the $2 billion worth of work remaining will come from is a question both U.S. congressmen and industry officials pondered at a Monday hearing of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials.

The Chicago region hosts about 1,300 trains a day — 800 Amtrak and Metra trains and 500 freights. But the outdated infrastructure and numerous street level crossings make it a major chokepoint for freight trains, not to mention the delays caused for drivers.

State dollars for the project run out this year and there’s nothing forthcoming in the federal government’s latest transportation plan.

Funding is hard to come by these days. Yet, these are infrastructure improvements that affect not only the Chicago area but perhaps the entire United States railroad system. A large amount of freight traffic in the United States moves through the Chicago region. The railroads as well as local, state, and federal government have been chipping away at this for years including moving intermodal facilities and switching yards further from the city and making at-grade crossings safer and rarer.

Another question that could be asked: should money be spent on high-speed rail if there are still significant problems in the regular railroad system?

Better to expand Metra service to Oswego and Yorkville or use money to solve problems within the region?

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Discussion is growing about expanding Metra commuter rail service to Oswego and Yorkville but where the money will come from is an issue:

Metra board directors on Friday supported increasing a consulting contract by $439,631 for a total of $2.26 million to review the Yorkville option. The funding for the engineering study comes from a federal grant, earmarked in 2003 by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Yorkville.

The agency has been considering locating stations in Oswego but Yorkville is being added since it offers an optimal site for a yard to house trains. Montgomery is also in the mix as a new station.

But how to pay for operating the expansion and related construction — since most of the route is outside the six-county region that Metra serves — is an unknown. A sales tax in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties subsidizes part of the costs of running Metra, but it isn’t levied in Kendall County…

Oswego Village Administrator Steve Jones said the Metra station was “extremely important. Up until the housing crash, Oswego and the immediate area was one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. As residents move to the area, they have some expectations for transportation for employment and cultural matters … just being linked to the city.”

Since Oswego and Yorkville have been growing, this makes some sense. Yet, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to find money, grants and otherwise, to expand train service within the six county region. As currently constituted, Metra service is based on a hub and spokes model where riders have to go into the city before heading back out. Why not find money to develop belt lines where riders can move between job centers, particularly places like Naperville, Schaumburg, and Hoffman Estates as well as O’Hare Airport? Indeed, there are already plans for such a line that involve expanding an existing beltway rail line. Read more here about the STAR Line.

More broadly, this is a question of whether officials should encourage continued expansion of metropolitan areas through the construction of new infrastructure or help deal with the existing issues of metropolitan regions. People may choose to move to places like Oswego or Yorkville but officials don’t necessarily have to find the money to support it.

NHTSA asks states to wait on driverless cars

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The federal government is asking states to wait on approving self-driving cars for general use until more research can be conducted:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled new recommendations to states for self-driving cars, urging them to be used only for testing and to require safeguards to ensure they can be taken over by a driver in the case of a malfunction.

NHTSA also said it was embarking on a four-year research effort on self-driving or autonomous vehicles as it considers requiring features like automatic braking, in which the car takes action to prevent crashes.

“We believe there are a number of technological issues as well as human performance issues that must be addressed before self-driving vehicles can be made widely available,” NHTSA said in its 14-page automated driving policy statement. “Self-driving vehicle technology is not yet at the stage of sophistication or demonstrated safety capability that it should be authorized for use by members of the public for general driving purposes. Should a state nevertheless decide to permit such non-testing operation of self-driving vehicles, at a minimum, the state should require that a properly licensed driver (i.e., one licensed to drive self-driving vehicles) be seated in the driver’s seat and be available at all times in order to operate the vehicle in situations in which the automated technology is not able to safely control the vehicle.”

NHTSA says as self-driving cars improve, they will reconsider. NHTSA says self-driving cars being tested in California, Florida and Nevada by Google and Audi of America should have the capability of detecting that their automated vehicle technologies have malfunctioned “and informing the driver in a way that enables the driver to regain proper control of the vehicle.” The Michigan Legislature is also considering allowing self-driving car testing…

Safety on the roads is an important concern but I’d be interested to see how much testing it might take for the government to approve self-driving cars. And, even if the safety appears to works out fairly quickly, will it take more time to reassure the public that such cars are safe?

It would also be interesting know how alert drivers are going to have to be while not driving. If the driver needs to be alerted to retake control, how relaxing is not driving going to be?

Determining how Illinois road money should be split between Chicago area, downstate

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning argues Illinois needs to change its formula for how it apportions road money between the Chicago area and downstate:

A deal hammered out by the state’s top politicians in the 1980s means that 45 percent of all transportation revenues go to the Chicago metropolitan area and 55 percent is allocated to downstate Illinois.

CMAP wants to change the status quo with a performance-based system using population, congestion, pollution and economic impact as criteria when it comes to doling out dollars for significant projects such as new highways, bridges and interchanges or additional lanes…

The agency points out that the metropolitan region comprises 65 percent of the population and contributes about 70 percent of the state’s income tax and 65 percent of its sales tax revenues.

Yet, in IDOT’s 2014-2019 multimodal transportation improvement program, about $3.1 billion — or 45 percent — out of $6.9 billion goes to District 1 including Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties, CMAP planners said…

“It’s a very bad idea,” said Republican Rep. Dwight Kay of Glen Carbon. “The needs of southern Illinois in terms of total miles is far greater than in the suburbs or in Chicago. I would be somewhat dismayed if not shocked to think anyone would propose changes. We have hundreds of bridges that either need to be replaced or are older and in disrepair.”

My first question is how lawmakers came to a 55/45 split in the first place. I would hope this agreement was based on some hard numbers but perhaps they were the only figures that everyone could agree on?

It sounds like the current debate would shape up like this: downstate lawmakers argue they have plenty of road miles and infrastructure to maintain while Chicago area politicians argue they put in a majority of the money and have a majority of the population. Do Illinois lawmakers even have the ability to discuss something like this even in the midst of other major money woes? Wouldn’t this simply inflame the ongoing Chicago versus downstate debate? I suspect this won’t be on the front burner even if infrastructure is a growing conversation piece around the country.

Video of massive project to bring the Long island Railroad to the Grand Central Terminal area

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Wired has a new video with some impressive views of the massive infrastructure project underway in New York City to extend the reach of the Long Island Railroad. Watch here. In addition to the images, there is some interesting material toward the end about what it takes to work in this kind of environment. I imagine it has to be somewhat strange to be so far underground for so long…

Trying to predict the future driving habits of millennials

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The auto industry and suburbs might be at stake: as millennials age, will they continue to drive less than their parents?

“We’ve basically assumed in transportation planning for decades upon decades that the amount of vehicle travel and per capita VMT can go in only one direction, and that’s up,” says Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst for the Frontier Group, a public interest think tank. “And we have been planning our transportation system based on that assumption.”

Data from the last few years clearly show that this axiom is no longer true. So what happens next? In an effort to at least sketch out some of the possible scenarios, the Frontier Group and the US PIRG Education Fund today released a report outlining three alternative futures for America’s relationship to the car.

One assumes that Millennials will eventually revert to the driving patterns of their parents (the blue “Back to the Future” scenario on the below graph). The second assumes that America is in the midst of an enduring shift toward less driving, brought about in large part by the permanent new preferences of Millennials. And the last scenario assumes that the recent decline we’ve seen in driving will continue apace…

The other two scenarios are built on something of a mystery. Researchers have not yet been able to disaggregate how much of our current decline in driving has been attributable to gas prices, or the economy, or changing attitudes toward car ownership or urban living. But it’s been driven by something. And in these two futures, Dutzik says, “whatever constellation of things it is that has caused the shift in per capita driving over the last decade – we think that’s a real thing.”…

Millennials will inevitably wind up driving more than they do today as they age. This is virtually always true of people in their 20s as they enter their 30s and beyond. Certain stages of life demand more use of a car than others. But the question is: by how much? And by how much compared to their parents?

I don’t envy those trying to make these projections when there are a number of unknowns. And, if Millennials are not driving, how are they commuting (or working from home) instead? A lot of money could be at stake in these future patterns, whether it is spent on maintaining existing infrastructure or providing new options (like denser suburbs, more mass transit, more biking opportunities, etc.).

The “Big Parade” in Los Angeles really highlights the city’s lack of walkability

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A Los Angeles writer started an event called the “Big Parade” that makes use of a number of staircases in the city. But, this event serves to highlight the city’s overall lack of walkability compared to other big cities around the world:

Koeppel’s early obsession evolved into a piece for Backpacker magazine called “I Climbed Los Angeles” that ran in June 2004. It’s since developed into an annual event called the Big Parade — a two-day, 40-mile urban hike from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood sign that covers 100 public stairways along the way. For this year’s parade, the fifth, Koeppel expects several hundred people to join him from around the country…

The parade’s secondary mission is to encourage a sense of community. Koeppel says the parade keeps pace with the slowest walker; he describes it as a simple “walk with neighbors.” The event is free, and Koeppel has even rejected sponsors to keep things as casual as possible. Each day’s walk is divided into segments, with a main loop of five or six miles, and participants are invited to come and go as they please.

“The majority are people who have not walked more than five or six miles in L.A. in the streets in their entire lives,” he says. “Taking them and showing them what L.A. is like on foot — showing them secret passages and landmarks and things they never see from outside the window of their car — has been just really fun.”

Koeppel, who’s known beyond Los Angeles for his celebrated book on the history of bananas, maintains that his purpose in starting the Big Parade isn’t to prove that Los Angeles is a walkable place. He denies the axiom that nobody there walks — rather, he says, nobody seems to walk when you’re looking out from a car window — and sees the city’s infamous sprawl as simply an opportunity for pedestrian exploration. The Big Parade, he says, “is a way to reestablish the presence of individual propulsion within that sprawl.”

So the “Big Parade” is a pedestrian cry in a wilderness of cars and vehicles…

Two things in particular intrigued me in this story:

1. Walking can involve building community. This reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ famous axiom about “eyes on the street” or her thoughts about “public characters” who are out and about and known in neighborhoods. Places like Los Angeles simply don’t allow for much informal encounters on the street level. But, a group of people walking together or near each other can engage in conversations in ways that are very difficult to do in cars. (This also reminds me of an idea my dad had years ago about putting scrolling sign boards in the back windshields of cars so drivers could deliver messages to each other. I imagine the ratio of destructive versus encouraging messages would get high pretty quickly…)

2. The article suggests a number of the staircases were constructed for homeowners who wanted to get off the streetcar and make the trek up to their house. This is a reminder of the extensive streetcar system that Los Angeles once had. How might the city be different today if those streetcars had survived or had been replaced by a similarly spread-out system of mass transit? As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in Crabgrass Frontiers, streetcars had a number of factors working against them. However, these staircases are a suggestion of what Los Angeles might have been.

Mapping Chicago area income inequality by Metra route

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Crain’s Chicago Business put together an interactive map that shows income levels by Metra train stop:

The geographic disparity in Chicago’s wealth can be seen by tracking household income in the ZIP codes of Metra train stations. The Union Pacific North and Milwaukee District North lines pass through some of the wealthiest ZIP codes, while the Metra Electric and Rock Island lines go through some of the poorest.

Several quick thoughts:

1. This reflects historic settlement patterns in the Chicago region.

2. I wish there was another set of data layered on top of this: daily ridership from each stop. This way, we could see if income is related to ridership. Could these mass transit lines primarily benefit people from wealthier areas in the Chicago region? In other words, do these commuter lines reinforce income differences? Are these train lines generally a boon for communities compared to Chicago suburbs without commuter train stations?

3. Of course, looking at ZIP codes of the train stations is inexact. Depending on the location of the station, people might drive from other zip codes. What we really need is more exact information from riders themselves: where do they live, what is their income, why do they utilize this particular stop, etc.

4. Also, why use average household incomes rather than median household incomes? Using the average likely increases the variation among train stations but also allows outliers in income to have more influence in the data.

h/t Curbed Chicago