Tag Archives: driving

Gathering more support for mass transit by telling drivers it helps keep the highways clear

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The growing popularity of mass transit in Utah may be explained by an interesting pitch to drivers:

Oddly enough, one of UTA’s most effective strategies for uniting people was targeting those who don’t use public transit. The agency and its advocates pointed out that TRAX ridership saves 29,000 trips — or two full freeway lanes — in the Interstate-15 corridor every day. Road-reliant businesses like UPS ran ads explaining that FrontLines would help residents get their packages quicker by reducing traffic.

As the article notes, this is just part of the picture in how expensive new mass transit can be built. The message explained above is intriguing: drivers, you may not use mass transit, but you should support it for others so that it makes your drive easier. What is the tipping point here where you need enough of those drivers to stop driving and use mass transit versus some drivers wanting to keep driving because there is less traffic? I wonder if this could also verge into classism: those who can afford to drive and help pay for mass transit will continue to do so while those who would economically benefit from not having to drive as much will do so.

The most used subways in the world and American complaints about crowded mass transit

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Check out this list of the subways with the most riders. This is the top 10: Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing/Moscow (tied), Shanghai, Guangzhou, New York City, Mexico City, Paris, and Hong Kong. Here is how the story describes these subways:

While vital to both big-city residents and visitors, subway systems can inspire a love-hate relationship, with overcrowding blamed for much of the frustration. While we may not love riding in sardine-like train cars, we do appreciate the efficiency and even beauty of many of the world’s most popular subway stations.

I’m not sure why there is consternation about the crowded nature of these subways: are there more efficient ways to move millions of people in some of the densest areas humans have every known? If everyone could have their personal space, like in cars which Americans prefer, it becomes really hard to have cities with densities like those in the top 10. If we operate with the assumption that all humans would prefer to be in less crowded spaces if they could afford to, then this might make sense.

I wonder if such complaints in the United States about crowded mass transit betrays American sensibilities for privacy and space. While people in other countries might choose mass transit over the costs of cars (and they are expensive to operate, in addition to the space, infrastructure, and resources they require), Americans work in the opposite direction: they would prefer a car until it becomes too difficult. For example, see this discussion about getting wealthier Americans to ride buses.

Traffic caused by the actions of individual drivers

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Tom Vanderbilt has been talking about traffic for several years now and he highlighted again in a recent talk what leads to traffic and congestion:

Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, gave a great 20-minute overview on the counterintuitive science of congestion at the Boing Boing: Ingenuity conference in San Francisco last month. Turns out a lot of the problems we ascribe to poor roads or other drivers are really our own fault. “[T]he individual driver cannot often understand the larger traffic system,” says Vanderbilt…

In fact, says Vanderbilt, traffic would be much better off if cars stayed in both lanes then merged at the very end, one by one, like a zipper. It’s safer (fewer lane changes), it reduces back-ups (often up to 40 percent), and it quenches road rage (still on the rise)…

A big reason for traffic is that too many cars are trying to occupy too little space on the road. But that’s not the only problem. A human inability to maintain a steady speed and following distance on the highway makes traffic a lot less smooth than it could be…

“You’re not driving into a traffic jam,” says Vanderbilt. “A traffic jam is basically driving into you.” He thinks autonomous cars will reduce this problem considerably...

That’s too bad, he says, because even a small drop in driving would improve congestion dramatically. One recent study of metropolitan Boston found that getting 1 percent of commuters off the road would enable the rest to get home 18 percent faster. Vanderbilt ends his science of traffic talk without suggesting ways to target this 1 percent. Fortunately there’s also a science of mass transit on the case.

In other words, individual drivers put their self-interests over the health of the entire system. So, then isn’t the trick getting drivers to recognize the larger system issues? Imagine signs at zipper merges where drivers were told to use all of the lanes – or even if this was the law. Or, if cities cut parking supply even further – this might prompt people to use mass transit more. Or, perhaps autonomous cars can really provide some solutions.

Another thought: this explanation of traffic sounds suspiciously like a sociological approach. The system is what is important when analyzing traffic, not starting with the individual drivers who will generally act in their own self-interest. New Urbanists tend to make a similar argument: roads should be designed less for cars alone, putting their interests first, and instead should make room for others like pedestrians, cyclists, and those living along the street.

Raising speed limits doesn’t lead to faster driving

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I’ve seen several articles about this lately as several states consider raising highway speed limits: raising the speed limits does not lead more people to drive faster.

Traffic experts say that motorists tend to drive at a speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted speed limit. And according to Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman Rob Morosi, comfortable drivers generally make for safe roads.

“There’s a misconception that the faster the speed limit, the more dangerous the road,” said Morosi, “and that’s not necessarily true. Speed limits are most effective when the majority of people driving are comfortable at that speed.”…

Common sense, then, would suggest that increasing a speed limit would lead those motorists to increase their speed at a similar rate. But Megge, pointing to I-96 in Flint as a striking example, says that belief is not supported by the research.

Before 2005, traffic studies indicated that most motorists were traveling the Interstate at roughly 73 mph, he said. After the speed limit was increased, most motorists still traveled the Interstate at roughly 73 mph.

“When we raise a speed limit, traffic speed does not automatically increase. That’s a myth,” Megge said. “I’ve been doing this 15 years and raised 300 speed limits, and never have we seen or observed a wholesale increase in traffic speeds. It’s a very counter-intuitive idea. But the science and engineering works. We want to ensure it’s safe and fair to the public.”

Common sense approaches often don’t apply to traffic. This finding about speed limits fits with another finding about traffic signs: drivers don’t necessarily pay attention. Read about several places in Europe that have no traffic signs and few traffic markers and safety improves. In the case of driving speed, drivers seem to pay more attention to nearby drivers rather than the official speed limit. So even as people often drive solo and might argue their actions on the road are the result of their own individual choices, driving is indeed a social activity.

Here is a second good example regarding traffic that counters “common sense” or common behavior: using all possible lane space to merge is more efficient for everyone rather than having drivers block off lanes that will soon close.

 

Greener driving doesn’t just involve greener cars; could also make a smarter, greener road

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In addition to greener cars, improvements to the infrastructure of roads would help make the whole system greener:

In Toronto, a university team has rolled out a software system that enables traffic lights to learn how cars and trucks flow under them—and then adjust their patterns of reds and greens to move that traffic more smoothly. The software, which uses artificial intelligence techniques, is installed at 59 intersections in downtown Toronto. The team’s computer modeling says this system of “smart self-learning traffic lights” reduces travel times by 25 percent and lowers carbon-dioxide emissions by 30 percent, according to a report issued this spring by the University of Toronto’s Baher Abdulhai, who is one of the system’s designers.

A slick piece of traffic-light software doesn’t get the juices flowing as much as, say, a battery-powered car that can rocket from zero to 60 in fewer than four seconds and never needs to fill up at a gas station. (That car would be the Tesla Roadster.) But such ho-hum advances may matter more. The United States has approximately 100,000 plug-in electric vehicles on the road, according to Plug In America, an electric-vehicle advocacy group. Though that’s a big jump from a few years ago, it still constitutes just 0.04 percent of the roughly 250 million cars of all types on American roads. And given that not quite 16 million new cars are sold in the United States annually, turning over today’s auto fleet will take many years. That means techniques that make the existing mass of cars move around more efficiently could have a much bigger near-term effect than radically environmentally friendlier ways to spin a car’s wheels…

The automotive analog of the smart grid is what some have dubbed the smart road. Companies from Google to major auto makers are testing cars that either are fully driverless or use technology to minimize a driver’s role in controlling the vehicle. One ostensible benefit of Big Brother sitting at the wheel is that he’d probably operate the car in a way that gets better gas mileage than you would. In Europe, a consortium of institutes and companies that includes Volvo is developing what it calls “road trains.” The concept, funded by the European Commission, is part NASCAR and part George Jetson…

Other, less technologically radical smart-road trappings have begun rolling out on a bit larger scale. More and more cities around the world have car-sharing programs, which use wireless technology to enable someone who has signed up to find an available car using a computer or smartphone and unlock it using a program’s membership card. Typically a user pays per-minute or per-hour for the car. When she’s done with it, she parks it near her destination, either in one of the car-sharing program’s designated spots or in a regular on-street parking space. The details vary according to the program. Because at least some members do away with owning a car, each shared car reduces the number of total cars on the road.

Fewer drivers tooling around city streets in their cars in search of parking spaces could have a sizable effect on the roads. An analysis of several studies conducted over many decades suggests that a whopping 30 percent of traffic in large cities is caused by drivers looking for parking spots, according to a 2006 report  by Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban-planning professor, who with his students conducted his own deep dive into traffic in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village. More traffic, of course, means more fuel consumed and more greenhouse gas emitted.

Perhaps all of these approaches would be best. It would be interesting to compare the costs and the beneficial impact of all of these options: having greener cars likely passes a lot of the costs to new car buyers but the other options dealing with the infrastructure could spread the costs across taxpayers and new apps or information (like Waze) could be put in the hands of drivers.

Additionally, these options bypass appear to bypass one sticking point for many Americans: feeling like they have to give up their car or that the government is trying to make driving more difficult. By making driving easier and letting them feel more in control (with some cost of course), they then don’t feel like their “right to drive” is being impinged upon. At the same time, this article doesn’t weigh all of these options versus increased mass transit.

Interstate highways are not intended to be military airfields in times of crisis

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This story about a plane landing on a North Carolina highway reminded me of a myth about the U.S. Interstate system: the idea that they could be used by military aircraft in times of crisis.

Numerous folks swear Interstate highways in the United States must be designed so that one mile in every five is perfectly straight and flat. According to this whispered bit of facetious lore, if the U.S. ever comes under attack, those straight, flat stretches will be used as landing strips.

Belief in this crazy idea should fail anyone’s logic test. It makes no sense to render inoperable the Interstate highway system during times of domestic crisis — moving troops and supplies on the ground would be too important an activity to curtail just to land planes. The U.S. is riddled with any number of small, private airfields that could be pressed into service if the need arose, with that need being dependent on some foreign power having first knocked out an almost uncountable number of major airports plus those airstrips on military bases, not to mention the American fleet of aircraft carriers. Folks who commit to believing this crazy notion of highways doubling by design as airstrips are letting the romance of a “cool fact” blind them to what their common sense should be blinking at them in bright neon letters.

Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Infrastructure and the FHA’s unofficial historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law that authorized designation of a “National System of Interstate Highways”). At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was ever heard of it. (A few countries do use some of their roads as military air strips, however.)

Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it’s part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be laid out. The act did not, however, contain any “one-in-five” requirement, nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later legislation either.

This myth could be countered without suggesting that this is such a crazy idea. Small, private airfields would not likely have the length for modern jets nor be able to stand the weight of larger aircraft, particularly bombers. Additionally, the federal government spent large sums of money on interstate highways; wouldn’t they have wanted to get more out of their outlay?

Another way to counter this myth would be to make a larger argument that yes, Americans considered driving so important that the government was willing to subsidize the construction of interstates. In other words, the highways are more about our love for and reliance on cars and trucks than a nefarious Eisenhowerian plan benefiting the military-industrial complex.

The Federal Highway Administration has an official myth-busting page. Here is their answer to two questions of whether interstates were built with defense purposes in mind:

President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.

President Eisenhower’s support was based largely on civilian needs—support for economic development, improved highway safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor vehicle-related lawsuits.  He understood the military value of the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but they were only part of the reason for his support.

Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.

The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature.  In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”).  However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.

Interesting that the federal government hosts such a page…

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

Unpopular revenue stream for Ohio inner-ring suburb: speed cameras

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The AP has an interesting profile of how Elmwood Place, a small suburb adjacent to Cincinnati, became quite unpopular for its speed cameras.

Settled by German farmers and laborers who came up from Appalachian Kentucky, Elmwood Place was incorporated in 1890. Like many “inner-ring” American suburbs, it hit its peak many decades ago. Older residents recall bucolic times of moonlit concerts and tire swings hanging from backyard trees.

But outsourcing of blue-collar work made life tougher for many residents, and the village’s incomes and housing values fell well below statewide averages. Housing stock deteriorated to the point where you can buy a two-bedroom fixer-upper for less than $60,000.

When William Peskin joined the police force in 1998, there were nine officers. Now the police chief is the only full-time law enforcement officer left. He said concerns grew after accidents around the elementary school; village officials looked into traffic cameras and became convinced that they were the most practical way to make the village safer.

Cameras at the village limits and in the school zone dramatically curtailed speeding once citations started going out, Peskin said. From 20,000 speeders clocked in a two-week trial period last summer, the number soon dropped to a quarter of that.

Former county prosecutor Mike Allen filed a lawsuit against the town. Among the plaintiffs: the Rev. Chau Pham, who said church attendance dropped by a third after that Sunday when so many congregants — including him — were ticketed; David Downs, owner of St. Bernard Polishing for 25 years, who said long-time customers had vowed to shop elsewhere because they had been ticketed; and a Habitat for Humanity worker who was cited four times.

“Elmwood Place is engaging in nothing more than a high-tech game of three-card monte,” Judge Robert P. Ruehlman wrote March 7 in a colorful opinion that has heartened camera foes across the country. “It is a scam that the motorists can’t win.”

The judge said the village was on pace to assess $2 million in six months (the village’s annual budget is $1.3 million). Maryland-based Optotraffic, owner and operator of the photo enforcement system in return for 40 percent of revenue, had already reaped $500,000 in about four months.

While the larger article is more about the legality and popularity of speed cameras (and they seem to be quite reviled, even in light of arguments about safety), it hints at a larger issue: how can inner-ring suburbs raise enough revenue to keep their communities and local services going? We have hints elsewhere in the article that Elmwood Place is struggling. It has a limited population, the tickets stretch the budgets of residents who already don’t have much money, and the police force has dwindled. So, if we take safety and irritation over getting tickets out of the equation, what realistically can be done in this community? Outside of some unlikely large developer suddenly taking an interest, here are a few possible options: annexation into Cincinnati (which is rare these days – suburbs started resisting big city annexation starting in the late 1800s in the Northeast and Midwest) or outsourcing a number of key services (a few California communities have pursued this – see here and here – while some Chicago suburbs have turned over policing to county sheriffs).

More broadly, a number of American inner-ring suburbs face the issue of how to raise revenues in declining or struggling communities to provide basic services. This has led some to argue that we need more metropolitan revenue sharing so struggling suburbs or neighborhoods could benefit from wealthier regional municipalities.

McMansions just a symptom of sprawl

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Reflecting on a recent case of building a wall along the edge of a suburban property, a Bakersfield, California columnist suggests the wall is a larger symptom of sprawl:

And now we’re a nation of cul-de-sacs and dense residential mazes that, except for the most ambitious among us, are navigable only by automobile. Wonder why the U.S. is the most obese nation on earth? Look no further than a culture that favors cars to walking shoes and cherishes the illusion of privacy over the interactivity of community.

The design of our cities is killing us. We drive a mile to a supermarket that’s just a quarter-mile away as the crow flies. We buy McMansions on the outer edge of the city’s metro footprint and drive 10 miles to work, sending up emissions we needn’t have produced. And we recruit city councilmen to help us block off walking paths near our houses because we’re tired of seeing people actually out and about on our streets.

So many of our societal ills can be traced to a Calle Privada mindset. Half-acre lots with three-car garages on longtime ag land instead of smaller homes closer to work. Municipal tax dollars devoted to new roads, new sewers, new traffic signals and new utility infrastructure instead of public safety and the maintenance of what we already have. And homeowners who barricade their streets instead of developing neighborhood bonds that encourage cooperation, build trust and hinder crime. Cinderblock walls don’t do much to facilitate any of that.

This is an example of what the critique of McMansions is often about. Note that the houses in sprawl themselves don’t get much attention in the argument above. We see that they are on large lots, half an acre, with lots of garage space. But, the bigger issue is what the sprawl in which McMansions are a part. Here are the problems with sprawl, as suggested above:

(1) the infrastructure is costly;

(2) driving is required;

(3) it is bad for the environment;

(4) and it inhibits neighborliness and the development of community.

Those who don’t like sprawl suggest it is a whole system of public investment and choices. Americans may like their large, private houses but there are costs associated with it. Opponents of sprawl tend to assume that if homeowners and policymakers knew these costs, they would make different decisions. That hasn’t exactly happened yet…but the term McMansion is certainly part of the critique of sprawl.

Building urban and suburban infrastructure better suited to the growing number of aging Americans

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Emily Badger highlights a new issue: fitting existing and future infrastructure to the rapidly growing older population in the United States.

Cities everywhere need to begin recalibrating for this moment now (a better crosswalk speed, for instance, would be closer to 3 feet per second). But this generational age bomb is also arriving at precisely the worst moment to pay for those changes that will actually cost money. And then there is the problem of imagination: How do you get urban planners, transportation engineers, and anyone running around a city in their prime to picture the places where we live through the shaded eyes of an octogenarian?..

Aging Americans, Waerstad predicts, are going to experience a lot of pain before we really have infrastructure and systems in place to accommodate them, particularly in a country where we’ve spent decades creating communities that can only be navigated by car. And then what?…

The biggest challenge, though, won’t come from neighborhoods like Harvard Square, where a couple of curb cuts and some slower crosswalks could actually make a difference. It will come from suburban communities where there are often no sidewalks at all, let alone places to go at the other end of them…

The prospect of an aging suburbia poses a challenge to the whole way we’ve been designing communities in America, not just how we lay crosswalks and print tiny-font bus schedules. Waerstad argues that the demographics of monetary power in America will play a crucial role. More than half of the discretionary income in the United States belongs to people who are older than 50. And so the same spending might that helped create suburbia will soon be clamoring to reinvent it, to create town centers that actually have stores and doctor’s offices, to turn residential neighborhoods into something more diverse, to expand transit access.

Several good points made in this article. Aging is a cultural as well as physical issue. It would be interesting to discuss further how major cities and new developments do take this American emphasis on youth and translate into design. How would a new condo building look different? How about a new streetscape? Second, critics of suburbia have pointed this out for quite a while: American suburbs require driving, which tends to disadvantage those who can’t drive. Sociologist Herbert Gans noted this way back in his early 1960s classic The Levittowners when noting that teenagers and the elderly are stuck.

I assume there are some places we could look in order to learn about how to do this better. How do other countries tackle this? What about American communities geared toward older residents – what adjustments does Del Webb make?