Tag Archives: driving

A Chicago congestion tax reveals regional issues in addressing traffic

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Looking for revenue and to reduce traffic, a congestion tax may be on the table in Chicago:

According to Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Alderman Ed Burke recently persuaded Mayor Rahm Emanuel “to study the feasibility and logistics of collecting a congestion fee from suburbanites who drive into the city.” The move could raise millions for the city and keep cars off city streets, easing congestion.

A panel has since been tasked with determining how such a fee would be collected, where it could be collected, and the costs of operating such a program…

In the Sun-Times, Burke was quoted as saying a congestion tax has been “extremely successful” in European cities such as London. There, drivers pay a charge for being able to enter certain zones from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays. Cameras monitor the zones and drivers who don’t pay are fined.

About 194,000 vehicles drive to Chicago’s main business district each day from elsewhere in the city and the suburbs, according to a Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning study conducted before Feb. 2010.

Traffic is a major problem in the Chicago region; see a recent report as to how many hours are lost each year. A congestion tax could be part of a comprehensive answer to this. However, it would be silly to expect this tax on its own to solve all the problems. Having effective mass transit across the region would help. If you want people to drive less, they need to have viable train and bus options. Having denser development near job centers throughout the region would help. Promoting Chicago’s core may be good but it also means concentrating more people from throughout the region on a single place. Promoting more bicycling and walking would help. Simply adding more lanes and roads does not necessarily help.

The other interesting part of this story from the Daily Herald are the predictable negative reactions from suburban leaders. They don’t want suburbanites to be penalized for going into Chicago. Yet, solutions to these issues have to be at the regional level. If suburban leaders don’t want a congestion tax, what are they willing to give to improve transit throughout the region? Can everyone contribute some money to help all residents of the region? The efforts of individual communities – even Chicago if it is just acting alone – won’t be enough.

LA plans to add bike lanes, reduce driving lanes

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The city of highways has approved plans to reduce driving lanes and provide space for biking and other transportation options:

The City Council has approved a far-reaching transportation plan that would reshape the streetscape over the next 20 years, adding hundreds of miles of bicycle lanes, bus-only lanes and pedestrian safety features as part of an effort to nudge drivers out from behind the wheel.

Not surprisingly, in the unofficial traffic congestion capital of the country, the plan has set off fears of apocalyptic gridlock.

“What they’re trying to do is make congestion so bad, you’ll have to get out of your car,” said James O’Sullivan, a founder of Fix the City, a group that is planning a lawsuit to stop the plan. “But what are you going to do, take two hours on a bus? They haven’t given us other options.”

For Mayor Eric Garcetti, the Mobility Plan 2035, as the new program is being called, is part of a larger push to get people out of their cars and onto sidewalks that began with the expansion of the mass transit system championed by his immediate predecessor, Antonio R. Villaraigosa…

Mr. Garcetti compared people who fear that removing lanes will make the streets horrific to lobsters boiling slowly in a pot: The changes may make traffic 15 percent worse instead of just 5 percent worse each year, he said, but the situation is already becoming untenable.

Perhaps only in Los Angeles would residents file lawsuits to ensure their ability to sit in big traffic jams. According to one recent study, LA area residents lose on average the second most hours a year to traffic (first is the Washington D.C. area). Of course, there is no guarantee that these changes will quickly make things easier for drivers as well as for all travelers. Yet, adding more lanes does not usually help traffic; it simply serves to add more drivers to the road.

There are some allusions in the article to the issue of social class. We might think that more mass transit options would help lower-income residents as owning a car is expensive (maintenance, insurance, gas, parking). And bicycles are pretty cheap. Yet, is urban biking primarily something desired by middle- to upper-class residents who could afford cars but want greener options? Biking often also requires a certain density so that rides aren’t too long. Thus, even good bike options may not help many people who have to travel more than 10 miles each way to work. It can also be difficult to get wealthier residents to ride buses.

While it would take much more than this plan to transform LA’s transportation network and self-understanding away from the car and highways, it will be interesting to see if this plan can keep nudging the needle toward other options.

Four options for road diets

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Watch planner Jeff Speck explain how four different road diet strategies might work. Here is an example of one approach:

40-footer lane insertion

(Jeff Speck / Spencer Boomhower)

This time we focus on a 40-foot street with two 12-foot lanes of opposing traffic and two parking lanes at the curb. Many cities have adopted 12-foot lanes with the assumption that they move more traffic; in fact, as Speck has argued at CityLab before, they present a major safety hazard for cities by encouraging faster driving. He recommends slimming them down to 10 feet—a design configuration that leaves room for a bike lane and makes the street safer, even as it more or less preserves traffic flows.

This is a reminder of some of the paradoxes of road design. Provide bigger lanes and more lanes and cars tend to drive faster and traffic increases. Narrow the lanes and drivers have to slow down and pay more attention, leading to improved safety. And all of this might actually free up space for other uses – like bike lanes or more pedestrian space.

If you want more on such techniques, read Speck’s Walkable City.

“Turning Suburban Tysons [Corner] Into a Walkable City Will Take Time”

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Eric Jaffe discusses the slow transformation of Tysons Corner, Virgina from car-dominated edge city to walkable city:

Last week marked the Silver Line’s first birthday, and with so much riding on it, so to speak, attention naturally turned to the lower-than-expected ridership numbers. The Washington Post reported that the Silver Line is serving about 17,000 daily riders during the work week, well off the pace of 25,000 riders that planners had set by this time. The “bulk” of this ridership aren’t even new users, according to the Post, but rather people who used to take the Orange Line instead…

But while it’s far, far too soon to declare the great Tysons shift a failure, it’s not too early to point out some of the little failings that still need to be addressed.

Poor walkability is one. Citing an internal analysis, Martin Di Caro at WAMU reports that Metro officials believe a lack of “sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes” is a key reason behind the low ridership numbers…

But the neuroscience of driving habits clearly shows that mode choice is most susceptible to change in the early stages of a major life event, such as moving homes or starting a new job. Insofar as Tysons developers have been slow out of the gate when it comes to encouraging transit, walking, and biking, they might be missing a critical opportunity to change commuter behavior…

A third setback might fall more on Metro itself. The Post’s Dr. Gridlock reports that the biggest problem facing Silver Line ridership isn’t the stations—it’s the service. A delay on new rail cars forced Metro to stretch the existing fleet thin. The proposed fix involves running fewer eight-car trains during rush-hour twice a week so the older cars can get maintenance; given the strong ties between transit service and transit ridership, that’s not an encouraging proposition.

Transforming an exemplar of suburban sprawl is not easy: the community has to respond with corresponding infrastructure (improving walkability), changed mindsets (getting people into new patterns and perhaps this requires newer residents), and adequate service to make it viable alternative.

However, we might ask how much time is needed before we could properly evaluate the impact of the Silver Line. Five years? Twenty years? A couple of generations? And it matters who is doing the evaluating and for what reasons. Is this about seeing a financial impact (paying for the construction of the new line plus measuring new development prompted by the new line)? Assessing the decisions of politicians? Trying to reach a magic number of daily users? It will be interesting to watch the ongoing analysis and who gets to take the credit or blame.

Argument: solve Interstate issues by handing them back to the states

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One writer suggests it is time for the federal government to get out of the business of funding interstate highways:

Assuming time travel is off the table, let’s learn from our mistakes. First, let’s get the federal government completely out of the business of maintaining the interstate highways crisscrossing our big metropolitan areas. Hand these roads over to state governments as soon as possible, and free state governments to finance these roads in any way they see fit, from higher state gas taxes to variable tolls they could use to reduce traffic congestion. Second, for interstate highways that connect cities across deserts and cornfields, let’s replace the federal gasoline tax with per-mile tolls. One of the many problems with the gas tax is that as gas mileage improves, and as a small but growing number of drivers turn to electric vehicles, gas tax revenue is not keeping up with the needs of the highway system. Per-mile tolls can solve that problem by charging drivers according to how much they actually use the highway system, regardless of the kind of vehicle they’re driving. And as Robert W. Poole Jr. explains, they can be pegged to the cost of each road and bridge, which will help ensure that roads and bridges are adequately financed.

After adopting this approach, we will see states investing in the infrastructure projects that best meet their needs, with some states, like California and New York, choosing to invest more heavily in urban mass transit while others, like Texas and Utah, build bigger and better highways. What remains of the federal highway system, meanwhile, will evolve over time, as the routes that attract the most traffic will grow in line with their per-mile toll revenue while those that attract the least will stay the same size, or perhaps even shrink. We’ll have an infrastructure worthy of a bigger, denser, more decentralized America—the kind of infrastructure that Ike, in his infinite wisdom, would be proud of.

An interesting argument that might have appeal for both liberals and conservatives. For conservatives, having more local control is generally good and states could innovate in a way that a larger bureaucracy might not. (At the same time, corporate interests cross state and national lines and they might not like a decentralized highway network.) For liberals, highways have often been used in redevelopment projects harming poorer neighborhoods and state control would theoretically give neighborhoods and communities more say over the fate of highways. Additionally, interstates encourage sprawl and liberals might want to reign in highway building and maintenance in many places.

I could also imagine several objections to this argument:

1. How many states would be willing to take this on right now given budget issues? This would have to be phased in over time. Which government officials want to take responsibility for raising tolls for driving?

2. Uniformity in the system could be a good thing ranging from common road signs to expectations regarding levels of maintenance and service across states.

Mexico City’s pedestrian superhero back in the news

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Continuing to fight for pedestrians in Mexico City is “The Little Pedestrian”:

The mighty Peatonito (Little Pedestrian) pushes cars blocking the path of pedestrians, creates crosswalks with spray paint, and climbs on vehicles parked on sidewalks — though his mother has begged him to stop stepping on them.

“Pedestrians are happy because they finally have a defender,” Peatonito said, his face covered by a wrestling mask adorned with a pedestrian symbol and wearing a striped cape (sewn by his grandma) adorned with the black and white stripes of a pedestrian crossing.

“We live in a car dictatorship. Nobody had fought for pedestrian rights until some activists emerged a few years ago.”

Meanwhile, below the city streets five clowns are on a similar mission to send up urban incivility, barging into a metro carriage making monkey noises and holding a sign saying “It’s better without pushing.”…

Peatonito aims to reduce traffic deaths in a city where pedestrians account for more than half of around 1,000 annual road fatalities, according to health ministry statistics.

This is a fascinating way to draw attention to the issue. It is one thing to publish statistics or to have more road signs (read about the campaign in Illinois to post the number of driving deaths for all to see) but another for a handful of people to act in public spaces. With the line of “we live in a car dictatorship,” I’m surprised others haven’t taken up similar routines in other cities around the world (including the United States which might be as much as a car dictatorship as one can have). But, two things might be problematic:

1. I wonder if police or local officials could actually arrest them for being a disturbance. In a real car dictatorship, you don’t want fake superheros running around in the way of cars. Might it take some complaints from drivers or others who feel that these crusaders have gone too far?

2. How does one translate these activities into a broader social movement or changes in policies and regulations? If the pedestrians of Mexico City wanted to take over the roads, they certainly could. At the least, this superhero might publicly shame the city but that doesn’t necessarily lead to large-scale change.

By the way, this isn’t the first time Peatonito has drawn international news coverage. See this story from 2013 that discusses what his actions led to:

Peatónito is the alter ego of Jorge Cáñez, a 26-year-old political scientist in Mexico City who has also worked with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP)…

His efforts got him invited to speak at the Walk 21 conference in 2012 and has met with officials from Mexico City’s department of public security to discuss the importance of putting pedestrians first in street design and traffic enforcement. He is hopeful about government efforts to improve infrastructure. At least, he says, they are now talking about giving pedestrians priority — which would only make sense in a city where 80 percent of the population doesn’t drive…

“Once the government has adopted the ‘pedestrian is the king’ in their speeches, I’m going to monitor and help them till the day there’s no pedestrian fatalities nor accidents, and also decent sidewalks and safety crossings in the streets. But even if the government calls me to collaborate, I will always be a non-partisan citizen hero of the public domain.” He has registered Peatónito as Creative Commons, so that anyone who wants can become Peatónito.

Perhaps there really are superheros…

Three reasons Millennials are driving less and going fewer places overall

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A new study attributes less driving among Millennials to three factors:

The truth might be a little of this, a little of that, and even some of the other. That’s the takeaway from a new analysis of Millennial driving habits from transport scholar Noreen McDonald of the University of North Carolina. Writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association, McDonald attributes 10 to 25 percent of the driving decline to changing demographics, 35 to 50 percent to attitudes, and another 40 percent to the general downward shift in U.S. driving habits…

What makes McDonald’s work especially useful and compelling is that she compared the travel patterns of Millennials (born between 1979 and 1990, by her definition) with those of Generation X (born 1967-1978) at the same age. So she looked at driving data (both trips and miles) from tens of thousands of individuals in 1995, 2001, and 2009 alike.

But, it isn’t just that Millennials are driving less – they are going fewer places overall.

This analysis provides evidence of a long-term decrease in automobility that started in the late 1990s with younger members of Gen X and has continued with the Millennial generation. The decrease in driving has not been accompanied by an increase in other modes of travel or a decline in average trip length, meaning that younger Americans are increasingly going fewer places.

Those smartphones are media gadgets are pretty compelling and make accessing the rest of the world easier. Perhaps there is less need to wander and display independence by leaving the house. Maybe all those fears about crime out there have crept in for a whole generation.

If local mobility is reduced, does this mean this newer generation of Americans will have less geographic mobility within the United States (fewer moves or significant moves throughout their lives)?

NYC Council to Google: mark truck routes, no left turns

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Two members of the New York City council have two recommendations for the routes provided by Google Maps:

Council members Brad Lander, deputy leader of policy for the council, and Ydanis Rodriguez, who chairs the council’s transportation committee, wrote a letter to Google on July 1 suggesting two enhancements to the company’s maps. One would create a “stay on truck routes” option for truck drivers. The other, which has a much broader application, would allow users to select “reduce left turns,” minimizing the number of such turns required on a given trip.

Why reduce left turns? In their letter, Lander and Rodriguez cited an extensive report from WNYC reporter Kate Hinds about the danger of left turns by motor vehicles in an urban environment where lots of people travel on foot and by bicycle. According to data compiled by Hinds and her colleagues, 17 pedestrians and three bicyclists were killed in New York by left-turning vehicles last year. The fatality rate for pedestrians struck by drivers making lefts in the city is the highest in the nation, according to Hinds’s report…

The city’s department of transportation has been redesigning intersections to make left turns safer by changing signals and incorporating other design measures. But Lander and Rodriguez got the idea to ask Google to help by giving its map users the chance to request a “reduce left turns” routing option. “We haven’t heard back yet,” says Rodriguez. “But we hope, knowing that Google is one of those good private entities, that Google can look at this.”…

Nationally, a quarter of motor-vehicle crashes involving pedestrians occur during left turns. A 2013 study found that when drivers make “permitted” left turns—in which they do not have the protection of a left-turn green arrow—they are not even looking to see if there is a pedestrian in their path as much as 9 percent of the time. Such turns, the study found, pose an “alarming” level of risk to pedestrians.

Generally, I would be in favor of Google Maps and others programs offering more route options for those who have particular routes they might want to choose. Routes with late night gas stations? Routes that are more scenic? Routes that avoid long stretches of strip malls? Scenic routes? Routes that involve driving near fewer semis? Routes with more interesting sights along the way? Just like Google Mail has lab features you can turn on and off, why not do some of this for driving routes?

Even if Google makes the left turn information available as an option, how much of an effect would it have on safety? The average driver probably doesn’t think much about reducing left turns. So, Google could help by suggesting people might want this but I could also imagine a public campaign advising against left turns. Now, if Google started eliminating left turns without telling people, that could get interesting…

AP gives five solutions to nation’s growing traffic problems

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The Associated Press discusses five ways to reduce traffic in America. Here are the quick summaries of each:

PUBLIC TRANSIT RENAISSANCE…

TOLLS ARE ‘HOT’…

DUMB CARS, MEET SMART CARS…

SELF-DRIVING CARS…

IN TECHNOLOGY WE TRUST

Perhaps we will have a situation where each of these options will be tried out in different places. For example, some cities will pursue mass transit – which can be quite expensive in already expensive areas – while others will simply add tolls to existing highways.

But, if I had to guess which options will prevail, I would guess numbers three through five which do not require people to give up their cars or the distance they commute to work and other places. (Some will voluntarily go for denser housing in more urbanized areas but others will interpret this as the government trying to force people out of suburban or rural living.) The first two require a lot of political will, either to spend the money for mass transit or to get people to pay new money for things they didn’t pay for before. Of course, the new technology won’t come cheap – it will be built into car costs in the future – but still appears to give the individual owners more options. Plus, American society tends to have quite a bit of faith in science and progress to solve problems.

Testing a pay-per-mile tax in Oregon

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Looking for more revenue, Oregon is starting a test program of paying for miles driven rather than gasoline used:

The program is meant to help the state raise more revenue to pay for road and bridge projects at a time when money generated from gasoline taxes are declining across the country, in part, because of greater fuel efficiency and the increasing popularity of fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars.

Starting July 1, up to 5,000 volunteers in Oregon can sign up to drive with devices that collect data on how much they have driven and where. The volunteers will agree to pay 1.5 cents for each mile traveled on public roads within Oregon, instead of the tax now added when filling up at the pump…

Private vendors will provide drivers with small digital devices to track miles; other services will also be offered. Volunteers can opt out of the program at any time, and they’ll get a refund for miles driven on private property and out of state…

Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking.

For those who use the GPS, the state and private vendors will destroy records of location and daily metered use after 30 days. The program also limits how the data can be aggregated and shared. Law enforcement, for example, won’t be able to access the information unless a judge says it’s needed.

 

I suspect a number of governments will be interested in how this test works out. One big hurdle to overcome would seem to be privacy, though government tracking of vehicles may not be far off anyhow (through cell phones, insurance company monitoring devices, black boxes, toll booths/devices, license plate readers, etc.). The argument about deincentivizing electric or hybrid cars doesn’t really hold up because these vehicles still use the roads and add to the maintenance burden. Yet, ultimately this will be about revenue: is this a better model for bringing in the money needed for roads?