Category Archives: Transportation

Cool images of underground subway construction in NYC

Posted on by

Building new subway lines is a massive undertaking and this gallery of photos gives some indication of the scale of the work. Here is what New York is undertaking:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has taken on three massive projects: East Side Access, the No. 7 subway line extension, and the new Second Avenue subway line. Construction for the projects is taking place deep underground, much of it simultaneously. The three projects span 14 miles and are expected to be finished in 2019 at an estimated cost of $15 billion.

This indicates a few things: New York has the kind of capital and ability to build such lines and the trouble it takes to construct such things suggests new lines must be needed in a city where a large percentage of residents use mass transit on a daily basis.

Six reasons Gen Y isn’t interested in cars

Posted on by

Howard Tullman gives 6 reasons in answer to the question “Why doesn’t Gen Y care about cars?”

Emotional ties…

Mechanical abilities…

Technical constraints…

Economic realities…

Environmental considerations…

Political and regulatory changes…

If I had to vote for one of these reasons as being most important, I might go with number four. Owning a car is simply expensive and requires a long-term investment. Cheap reliable cars, say, under $5,000, can be difficult to find and the costs of insurance, maintenance, and depreciation are very real on top of expensive gas.

But, I think there are a few other reasons Tullman missed that could fit under his first and fifth reasons. Under emotional ties, it isn’t just that people don’t see owning a car as a “civic duty” but that Generation Y and younger have emotional ties to other objects like computers, video game consoles, and smart phones. Additionally, an interest in living in more urban areas might fit under environmental considerations plus the other bonuses such as culture and “scenes” present in big cities that are much more difficult to find in suburbs. Living in denser areas is seen as greener and such areas often offer more opportunities for mass transit or walking and biking.

A few other thoughts about the six reasons:

1. I think the interest in mechanical abilities has definitely shifted from analog objects, like cars, to digital objects. Generation Y is interested in “mechanical” activity but in a very different way.

2. Political and regulatory changes may discourage driving to some degree with stricter standards but this could also work in the favor of cars. If gas mileage increases significantly in the coming years, cars could be greener and small ones, in particular, could fit an urban ethos. The trick here might be making sure that these regulations don’t increase the costs of cars in such a way to discourage purchases. And, it remains to be seen if the federal government will significantly shift money toward mass transit and further encourage people to drive less.

How much do McMansions contribute to traffic congestion?

Posted on by

After seeing the Washington D.C. region leads the country in traffic, one reader of the Washington Post suggests McMansions have contributed to the problem:

Regarding the Feb. 5 news article “Washington again rated worst for traffic congestion in annual study”:

I don’t understand. The entire metropolitan region builds, builds and builds, squeezing  condos onto every block and ruining old neighborhoods with ghastly McMansion and townhouse developments.

Do officials consider quality of life? Don’t they realize how these new homes have a tremendous effect on our local traffic? We have overbuilt this area to death.

It would be interesting to see a study on this. I suspect the real answer is not McMansions over other forms of housing and development but rather the issue of sprawl. McMansions may often be found as part of sprawl but not necessarily; McMansions don’t have to be built on large lots, which leads to more spread out development, and they can be built as teardowns in denser areas. But once sprawl has already happened, it is more difficult to provide effective mass transit (even as the Washington region sees an expansion of Metro service to suburban counties). In other words, McMansions are symptoms of sprawl which leads to a lot of driving and traffic.

Chicago traffic bad and, perhaps worse, unpredictable

Posted on by

Having heavy traffic is bad enough but Chicago also has unpredictable traffic, according to a new report.

Residents of the Chicago area are accommodating that increasing uncertainty by setting aside more time each day — just in case — for the commute, new research shows.

For the most important trips, such as going to work, medical appointments, the airport or making a 5:30 p.m. pickup at the child care center to avoid late fees, drivers in northeastern Illinois and northwest Indiana should count on allotting four times as much time as it would take to travel in free-flowing traffic, according to the “Urban Mobility Report” to be released Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The analysis is based on 2011 data, which are the most recent available.

It is the first time that travel reliability was measured in the 30-year history of the annual report. The researchers created a Planning Time Index geared toward helping commuters reach their destinations on time in more than 95 percent of the trips. A second index, requiring less padding of travel time, would get an employee to work on time four out of five days a week…

The Chicago region ranked No. 7 among very large urban areas and 13th among 498 U.S. cities on a scale of the most unreliable highway travel times. The Washington area was the worst. A driver using the freeway system in the nation’s capital and surrounding suburbs should budget almost three hours to complete a high-priority trip that would take only 30 minutes in light traffic, the study said.

This sounds like an interesting new way to measure traffic. The absolute amount of time spent in traffic is interesting in itself but this study gives us a sort of confidence interval for time spent in traffic. This suggests that traffic is not just an issue of getting stuck but it is the threat of getting stuck that would affect a lot of behavior. Just the threat could lead to a lot more lost time and productivity.

It would also be interesting to look at how often the average driver gives themselves this time cushion. Could traffic be improved if people planned to take more time to get to their destination?

Celebrating “a cathedral for commuters”

Posted on by

Grand Central Terminal is 100 years old and NPR provides part of its story:

Seven is one of the 750,000 people who walk through Grand Central every day. To put it into perspective, that’s more people than the entire population of the state of Alaska — a handy fact you can learn from Daniel Brucker, an enthusiastic New Yorker who’s managed Grand Central Tours for the past 25 years…

Fortunately, the Vanderbilt family, who owned the New York Central Railroad, had the money. And what they built was a 49-acre rail complex with more tracks and platforms than any other in the world. The buildings on Park Avenue, to the north, are built over it. And it’s an almost unfathomably busy place — during the morning rush hour, a Metro-North commuter train arrives every 58 seconds.

“It’s like a cathedral that’s built for the people,” Brucker says. “We’re not going through somebody else’s mansion, through somebody else’s monument. It’s ours. It’s meant for the everyday commuter, and it’s a celebration of it.”…

“It is the largest interior … public space in New York,” Monasterio says. The windows on the east and the west side, those windows used to open, they used to draw air from the east side, through the terminal, over and out the west side.”

Having been there a few times myself, it is a remarkable building. Public spaces that are so crowded, functional, and well-designed are rare.

It would be interesting to hear more about how Grand Central fits into the fabric of New York City. On one hand, it seems like quintessential New York: classical exterior, busy space, busy yet functional. At the same time, it doesn’t exactly fit with Midtown Manhattan and the modern skyline. It is a relic of the past, a building that had to be saved through the first federal conservancy act from the 1960s.

Broke highway fund might mean up to 250% increase in pay-per-mile tax

Posted on by

Here is more grist for the rumor mills about a pay-per-mile driving tax: a new GAO report suggests the tax will need to be increased from current levels.

An on-again, off-again move by the Obama administration to scrap the federal gas tax in favor of a pay-per-mile fee would boost the tab to Americans as high as 250 percent, raising their current tax of 18.4 cents a gallon to as high as 46 cents, according to a new government study.

But without a tax increase, said the Government Accountability Office study, the government’s highway fund is going to go dry. One reason the fund is going broke: President Obama’s push for fuel efficient cars has resulted in better mileage, and fewer stops at the pump.

The GAO study is just the latest review of federal spending that paints a grim picture of the nation’s infrastructure. Just keeping spending at current levels, the GAO said, would require a near doubling of the gas tax to 32 cents a gallon, and that would jump to as high as 46 cents should the federal government add spending to fix crumbling infrastructure and build new roads.

The average driver pays about $96 a year in federal gas taxes, said GAO. Should the administration seek to raise the highway trust fund from $34 billion to the $78 billion needed to fix and maintain roads, that could rise to $248. Translated into a pay-per-mile plan, drivers would face a tax of 2.2 cents per mile compared to the 0.9 cents they pay now. Trucks would pay far more.

Infrastructure and driving are not cheap. I imagine this might easily be the most unpopular tax in years even with its relatively small impact on individual drivers. How can the federal government make driving, a necessity in America due to our planning and past policies plus a favorite activity of Americans for decades, more expensive?

The “world’s longest fast train line” for the day after Christmas: Beijing to Guangzhou in eight hours

Posted on by

While high speed rail continues to inch along in the United States, China continues to build. A new line opened yesterday connecting Beijing and Guangzhou:

The opening of the 2,298 kilometer (1,428 mile)-line was commemorated by the 9 a.m. departure of a train from Beijing for Guangzhou. Another train left Guangzhou for Beijing an hour later…

Trains on the latest high-speed line will initially run at 300 kph (186 mph) with a total travel time of about eight hours. Before, the fastest time between the two cities by train was more than 20 hours…

More than 150 pairs of high-speed trains will run on the new line every day, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the Ministry of Railways.

Railway is an essential part in China’s transportation system, and the government plans to build a grid of high-speed railways with four east-west lines and four north-south lines by 2020.

When I see stories like this about infrastructure in China, I’m struck by three things:

1. The ability to construct these large infrastructure projects is remarkable. I wonder what China will do next. Faster trains? An even bigger rail network?

2. The contrast with transportation options in the United States is interesting. Our equivalent to high-speed trains is an extensive interstate network that connects all major cities. The interstate option plays on several American traits: it was built in the prosperous era after World War II, it allows more freedom for driving (which requires certain incomes and interest in driving), and it allows for more diffuse living patterns (meaning: suburbs).

3. I wish these stories were accompanied by ridership figures. Over 150 pairs of trains a day is impressive and these are two major population centers: Beijing has over 19 million people and Guangzhou has over 12 million people (and perhaps around 40 million in the Pearl River Delta). So are these trains going to be full? How much does it cost? Can the average Chinese resident ride these trains?

Selling car insurance by the mile

Posted on by

The idea of replacing the gas tax with a tax by miles driven is being tested so what about car insurance by the mile? One company has introduced the concept in Portland:

You wouldn’t buy an unlimited fare card if you only took a few transit rides per month, but when it comes to car insurance that’s pretty much how things work. Drivers who are similar in age, gender, and residence pay about the same premium even if some drive 5,000 miles a year and others 50,000 miles. The problem is not only that low-mileage drivers end up subsidizing high-mileage ones — it’s that everyone has an incentive to drive as much as they can.

One idea to undercut this system is pay-per-mile car insurance. Earlier this month at The Atlantic, Matthew O’Brien explained (via this 2008 Brookings report; PDF) just how much America stands to save with such a service. Driving would fall 8 percent nationally; oil usage and carbon emissions would drop 2 and 4 percent, respectively; fewer traffic and accidents could be worth upwards of $60 billion a year.

Since city residents have transportation alternatives at their disposal, they’re likely to benefit from mileage-based systems more than most. That’s the basic idea behind MetroMile, a new per-mile car insurance company that launched earlier this month in Portland, Oregon. While conventional car insurance companies dabble in mileage programs, MetroMile was created explicitly with that low-car lifestyle urban driver in mind — even down to the name…

MetroMile users receive a device called a Metronome (sadly, the “N” isn’t capitalized) that plugs into the car and tracks mileage in real-time. Drivers pay a monthly base rate that’s around $20-30, says Pretre, then pay 2 to 6 additional cents per mile. He says anyone driving fewer than 10,000 miles a year should start to save, and once you get down to 8,000 miles, the savings approach 20 to 25 percent over major car insurers…

While it makes sense to introduce this in Portland or a number of other dense cities where mass transit usage or alternatives to driving are common, would this work as well in the suburbs? Would the costs of paying car insurance be enough to prompt people to change their living patterns? Maybe it depends on how much cheaper that car insurance could be or perhaps the quest for the cheaper house that provides more bang for the buck would still win out.

The 2008 Brookings report cited above titled “Pay-As-You-Drive Auto Insurance: A Simple Way to Reduce Driving-Related Harms and Increase Equity” makes an interesting point: increased driving is related to increased income (see page 10 and 40). In other words, Americans who have the money to do so drive more. This helps explain the reluctance of higher-income Americans to use buses.

New study says congestion could be lessened by reducing a small number of trips from certain neighborhoods

Posted on by

A new study suggests a targeted reduction of trips from certain locations could greatly reduce congestion:

To learn more about traffic congestion in the hope of finding ways of relieving it, an international team of scientists analyzed road use patterns in the San Francisco Bay area and the Boston area. They used mobile phone information from more than 1 million users over the course of three weeks to map out where drivers were concentrated on roads. (The data was rendered anonymous before the investigators looked at it, the study authors noted.)

Based on their analysis, the researchers suggest that certain neighborhoods in these urban areas were home to drivers that caused major congestion. The scientists found that canceling just 1 percent of trips from these neighborhoods could drastically reduce travel time that was otherwise added due to congestion.

“In the Boston area, we found that canceling 1 percent of trips by select drivers in the Massachusetts municipalities of Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell and Waltham would cut all drivers’ additional commuting time caused by traffic congestion by 18 percent,” said researcher Marta González, a complex-systems scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In the San Francisco area, canceling trips by drivers from Dublin, Hayward, San Jose, San Rafael and parts of San Ramon would cut 14 percent from the travel time of other drivers.”

The location of these neighborhoods apparently makes it easy for them to impact their cities. “Being able to detect and then release the congestion in the most affected arteries improves the functioning of the entire coronary system,” González  told TechNewsDaily.

There are many ways people might reduce the number of drivers hitting the road from these key neighborhoods, the scientists said. For instance, the authorities might encourage alternatives “such as public transportation, carpooling, flex time and working from home,” González said. Mobile phone apps that connect people using the same roads might help them coordinate carpooling, she added.

Two things stand out to me:

1. It seems like the advantage to this method is that it allows officials and drivers to target traffic flows from particular locations and then plan accordingly. More often, we settle for traffic solutions like adding more lanes over a stretch of highway or extending mass transit to a particular location. But this kind of analysis is able to help people target particular areas rather than having to apply catch-all solutions.

2. Collecting and using this data sounds very interesting. This is big data at work: taking information that is collected about over 1 million cell phone users and then using that information in a new way. It also allows researchers to see the system as a whole.

My next question would then be is it be easy politically to target particular areas for congestion reduction?

The danger of railroad crossing accidents in the Chicago region

Posted on by

The Chicago region is a railroad hub. While this may be good for business, it is not great for accidents between trains, vehicles, and pedestrians. Here are figures on the number of accidents from recent years and what might be done to reduce them:

From 2006 through 2011 in the Chicago region, there were 641 collisions with trains involving vehicles or pedestrians, a Daily Herald analysis found. A total of 253 people in the six-county area died coming into contact with trains in that time period and an additional 267 were injured, according to Illinois Commerce Commission data…

A total of 9.5 million people live in Chicago and the suburbs, where nearly 500 freight and 700 Metra trains chug through daily. But the design of some crossings and stations makes that coexistence treacherous, expert Ian Savage explained.

Mid-platform pedestrian crossings at train stations, angled streets intersecting with tracks so drivers “can easily come around the gates,” and platforms transitioning into streets are everyday hazards, he said.

“Some of the designs of the stations are strange and bizarre,” said Savage, a Northwestern University economics and transportation professor. For example, “when you have the street merge with the platform, it signals to people that ‘you can just stroll around aimlessly.'”

As the article notes, there are a number of solutions to this problem. The most effective would be to limit the number of at-grade crossings, of which the Chicago region has many. Of course, this is an expensive option:

The ultimate protection comes in the form of grade separations — overpasses or underpasses that keep the public and railways apart. Chicago and some older communities such as Naperville boast such structures that were built decades ago.

But constructing a grade separation is an exorbitant proposition. One structure dedicated in Downers Grove this fall on the BNSF Railway cost about $60 million. Another planned for West Chicago at Roosevelt Road and the Union Pacific Railway will cost $26 million.

The solution to this is likely a long-term one since new devices cost both money and time. Communities that took care of some of this far in the past are quite fortunate. The article mentions underpasses in Naperville. The suburb has two underpasses, one at Washington Street and one at Mill Road. Both are nearly a century old and were probably easier to construct even then because both of the crossings are away from the downtown and denser areas, an issue for many suburban communities. For example, Wheaton has had multiple discussions in the past about an overpass or underpass in the downtown but such a structure would overwhelm the quaint core.

I wonder if one possible solution to this issue would be to run fewer trains through the denser areas of the Chicago region and route more along the outer edges. This has been an issue in recent years as regional planners and others have looked for ways to move freight through or around the region more quickly. What if this was also promoted as a safety issue?