Tag Archives: highways

Which drives McMansions: supply or demand?

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Thomas Frank argued last week that America has a system that enables McMansions but another commentator suggests McMansions reflect the desires of Americans:

Still, it fascinates — are not horror films and comedies blockbusters too? — and, lest we snark too much, in this case on McMansions, let us remember these objects reflect consumers’ demand — our collective taste — not the other way around.

And just as soon as I try and boast of some superlative insight or immunity to things and stuff myself, I will have thrown a stone at a glass house — even if it is a two-story Palladian window, even if it’s draped in Pepto-mauve and installed over an entry door — and I bet a crumpled buck you will have too. I say we observe, look for the humor reflected therein (it’s there) and continue to try and learn from our own selves.

Classic question: do Americans buy McMansions because the system supplies them and makes them possible or do they exist because the demand is there from American residents?

This question is not a new one in the field of studying suburbs. On one hand, some argue that suburbs (and McMansions by proxy) exist because this is what Americans want. Joel Kotkin argues that Americans vote with their feet and when given the opportunity, will tend to choose more space and freedom in the suburbs (and the Sunbelt). Jon Teaford says in his book The American Suburb: The Basics that Americans tend to desire more local control and space to be individuals, traits that work well in suburbs. In contrast, some would argue the other side. Suburbs had to be sold to Americans; compare this to European desires to be closer to the central city. Suburbs were constructed by developers who wanted to make money and had to drum up demand. Frank’s argument echoes those of James Howard Kunstler who suggests the suburbs are a subsidized project – often through government action and money – that hollowed out our cities.

As a sociologist, I would argue both sides of the equation are present though we tend to emphasize the demand side in American discourse without realizing how the supply side is shaped. Sure, some Americans may want McMansions but where do these desires come from? Why would they choose to spend their money on a certain kind of large home rather than buying a smaller place in a more urban area or spending more on other luxury goods? Take the example of highways: Americans did take to the automobile quickly but major systems of roads and highways also arose in part because of lobbying efforts from motorist and industry groups, governments decided to spend relatively more money on roads than mass transit, and certain restrictions made it difficult for streetcars and other mass transit to compete (see Kenneth Jackson in Crabgrass Frontiers for more details). Consumer desires don’t simply come out of nowhere; they are shaped by social forces.

The beauty of highway over ramps

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A sample of photographer Alex MacLean’s aerial photography includes this picture of a highway intersection in Albuquerque.

Alex MacLean 2008

Beautiful. There are several dimensions to this:

1. The interplay of light and dark both from the sunlight as well as the darker roadway and the lighter desert.

2. The modernist twists of the highway ramps.

3. The smallness of the cars, a reminder of the limited lives we lead.

I know highways are concrete entities that lead to traffic and air pollution but I’ve always enjoyed seeing them from above.

The closing of a Chicago Tollway oasis

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In the 1950s, the new tollways constructed in the Chicago area included the occasional rest stop, including the Des Plaines Oasis which closes this weekend:

We spent 24 hours at the Oasis talking to people from all walks of life. Here’s a peek at what we saw and heard…

An extremely mismatched couple staggers in, tipsily leaning into each other. She’s tall and elegant in a long cashmere coat and large gold earrings, her hair stylishly up.

Him, he’s wearing ill-fitting pants and a bad baseball jacket with a white body and blue sleeves…

It’s not quite light out yet, but the Oasis bustles with customers. Many of them are truck drivers, like Freeman Barber of Cobbs Creek, Va.

Barber wears a shiny black jacket decorated with several American flag pins and a baseball hat bearing the acronym BARF…

Two buses pull up. Dozens of teenage girls — hair pulled into ponytails, some still in pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers — pile out.

They bypass the lunch crowd at McDonald’s and line up for the bathroom, talking as they wait. Moms, dressed more conservatively, join them.

In other words, a slice of life amongst American highway drivers. This is a good example of a modern-day journalistic human interest story that doesn’t tell us much about the more quantifiable side (number of people there each day, amount of goods sold, how much it costs to keep open, etc.) of the oasis.

It is interesting to note that this oasis is part of a longer chain of official Tollway rest stops that go all the way from the Chicago area through eastern Pennsylvania. This road, stretching from I-90 in Illinois to I-80 in Indiana and Ohio to I-76 in Ohio and Pennsylvania, was one of the first long highways in the United States. The reason it is a tollway is because it was built before the official Federal Interstate Act of 1956 which provided lots of federal funding for the American interstate system. States were responsible for funding highways then and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois put together a common road across their borders. Plans for highways in the Chicago area began in the 1920s and 1930s but it wasn’t until the 1950s that the tollways were built.

Having been in a number of these rest stops along this east-west route, here is my quick rankings of rest areas (from best to worst) between the Chicago stops through eastern Pennsylvania:

1. Tied for first: newer Ohio and Pennsylvania rest areas. They tend to feature good fast food options and airy buildings.

2. Illinois Oases. Pretty clean and lots of food options. Bonus: they take up less space since they span the highway and can be accessed from both sides.

3. Older Ohio and Pennsylvania rest areas. Dingier, worse food options.

4. Indiana rest areas. Nothing inspiring here.

A bonus: 5 fun facts about the history of the Des Plaines Oasis, including its short appearance in the The Blues Brothers.

Smart highway features coming to two Chicago highways

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A stretch of I-90 will be a “smart highway” within several years:

By 2016, the Tollway plans to install an elaborate system of sensors, cameras and overhead signs on a heavily traveled stretch of the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway (Interstate 90) between the Kennedy Expressway and Barrington Road in Hoffman Estates.

The plan is similar to, but more sophisticated than, a $45 million initiative that the Illinois Department of Transportation will implement during the next two years along the Edens Expressway and the northern stretch of U.S. Highway 41.

The Tollway plan includes installing signs with red and green signals over each lane at every half-mile that would advise motorists about safe speeds and warn of lane closings from accidents or breakdowns…

The goal is to make the Addams, which handles about 317,000 vehicles a day, “a true 21st-century, state-of-the-art corridor,” Tollway officials say.

The fiber optics and other infrastructure being installed on the soon-to-be rebuilt stretch of tollway will be able to accommodate even more sophisticated technology, which might someday automatically drive cars, officials say…

Tollway officials said Washington state’s experience with ATM has been compelling. The system is in use on I-5 in Seattle and on I-90 and State Route 520 between Seattle and Bellevue, and since 2010, the Seattle area has seen an 11 percent decrease in primary accidents and a 40 to 50 percent decrease in secondary accidents, officials said.

While highways in the United States are an engineering marvel, the lack of information about conditions on them has always struck me as a bit odd. It sounds like this new system is intended to provide information for two main purposes: warn people of upcoming obstacles which could then lead to fewer accidents and also to tell people of slower travel times so they can then make decisions about what roads to use.

Up to this point, motorists have been limited to varying levels of information:

1. You see what is front of you. Sometimes, you can spot some of these problems a long way away and get off sooner. But, too often, the line of sight is blocked and before you know it you are in a slow stretch without any alternatives.

2. Traffic reports on the radio. The veracity of these reports can vary.

3. Traffic data now available on GPS and smartphones. These seem to be generally accurate.

4. Cameras along heavily traveled routes. For example, see this set of images from cameras along I-80/94 at the bottom of Lake Michigan. This is more useful these days with smartphones.

Of course, this article also hints that this may just help set up the infrastructure to have completely smart cars where all of the information may be wirelessly passed between cars and limit the human dimension all together.

Did a lack of regionalism lead to the traffic nightmare in Atlanta after 2″ of snow?

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What caused the terrible gridlock in metropolitan Atlanta after two inches of snow (which quickly turned to ice)? Here is one argument for a lack of regionalism:

Which leads into the blame game. Republicans want to blame government (a Democrat thing) or Atlanta (definitely a Democrat thing). Democrats want to blame the region’s dependence on cars (a Republican thing), the state government (Republicans), and many of the transplants from more liberal, urban places feel the same way you might about white, rural, southern drivers. All of this is true to some extent but none of it is helpful.

How much money do you set aside for snowstorms when they’re as infrequent as they are? Who will run the show—the city, the county, or the state? How will preparedness work? You could train everyone today, and then if the next storm hits in 2020, everyone you’ve trained might have moved on to different jobs, with Atlanta having a new mayor and Georgia having a new governor.

Regionalism here is hard. The population of this state has doubled in the past 40-45 years, and many of the older voters who control it still think of it as the way it was when they were growing up. The urban core of Atlanta is a minority participant in a state government controlled by rural and northern Atlanta exurban interests. The state government gives MARTA (Atlanta’s heavy rail transportation system) no money. There’s tough regional and racial history here which is both shameful and a part of the inheritance we all have by being a part of this region. Demographics are evolving quickly, but government moves more slowly. The city in which I live, Brookhaven, was incorporated in 2012. This is its first-ever snowstorm (again, 2 inches). It’s a fairly affluent, mostly white, urban small city. We were unprepared too.

The issue is that you have three layers of government—city, county, state—and none of them really trust the other. And why should they? Cobb County just “stole the Braves” from the city of Atlanta. Why would Atlanta cede transportation authority to a regional body when its history in dealing with the region/state has been to carve up Atlanta with highways and never embrace its transit system? Why would the region/state want to give more authority to Atlanta when many of the people in the region want nothing to do with the city of Atlanta unless it involves getting to work or a Braves game?

The region tried, in a very tough economy and political year (2012), to pass a comprehensive transportation bill, a T-SPLOST, funded by a sales tax. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an attempt to do something. The Sierra Club opposed it because it didn’t feature enough transit. The NAACP opposed it because it didn’t have enough contracts for minority businesses. The tea party opposed it because it was a tax. That’s politics in the 2010’s. You may snicker, but how good a job has any major city done with big transportation projects over the past 30 years?

The argument here is that no one smaller group of government was prepared to deal with the roads and the problem was compounded because there was no structure to coordinate and organize activity when something like this happened. Additionally, regionalism could promote more mass transit to serve the entire region and reduce dependence on cars.

It would then be helpful to look to other major metropolitan regions to see how they tackle responses to natural disasters. Does regionalism lead to a better outcome for the region in such situations? For example, regions like Minneapolis or Indianapolis are held up as examples of regionalism – do they respond better in major snowfalls because of this? Without regionalism, is there a way to coordinate across levels of government in emergency situations that doesn’t require a full-level of regional cooperation on everything else?

Driverless cars might lead to the safest roads ever seen and highways that actually work

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Google’s Sebastian Thrun discusses the safety advantages of driverless cars as well as effective highways in this video. Two quick thoughts:

1. Autonomous vehicles can help stop the wave or accordion pattern of driving where someone slowing down at the front of a line of cars backs everyone up. Thrun talks about a a much more closely coordinated zipper kind of merging where cars going basically bumper to bumper can accept new vehicles with little change.

2. Even with a dip in recent years, more than 30,000 Americans die each year in vehicles. Strun says most of this is due to driver error, which can basically be eliminated when humans no longer control the car.

All of this sounds good…

“Have We Reached Peak Road?”

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With the decline in driving, perhaps it is time to consider whether we have reached peak road:

At his Transportationist blog last week, University of Minnesota scholar David Levinson pointed out that Department of Transportation estimates of public roads and street mileage in the United States — paved and unpaved alike — leveled off between 2008 and 2011 (the latest year given, with data missing for 2009 and 2010). Levinson charted the plateau (the y-axis mileage is in thousands)…

Like vehicle miles traveled, paved road mileage steadily increased for decades, from roughly 1.23 million miles in 1960 to 2.6 million in 2011. (Unpaved roads followed the opposite trend, declining over time as many became paved.) The paved peak might have occurred in 2008, when mileage reached above 2.7 million. The 2011 mileage, meanwhile, is about the same as that of 2005.

Given that the statistical peak coincided with the Great Recession, it’s probably too early to call things. It’s also important to keep in mind that there are multiple ways to measure a road. There is its end-to-end length (known as “centerline miles”) and there is also its total capacity (known as “lane miles”) — the latter calculated by multiplying the length by the number of lanes….

Levinson thinks the following factors will guide whatever subsequent shifts occur in centerline and lane miles: rural gravelization (converting paved roads into unpaved ones to reduce maintenance costs), tearing down urban freeways, designing complete streets and implementing road diets, and converting general lanes into exclusive bus lanes. Even further ahead, autonomous cars should enable cars to use the existing roadway far more efficiently.

I wonder how much this is tied to sprawl and population growth. Opponents of sprawl would want denser cities and suburbs and this doesn’t necessarily require adding new roads. But, expanding metropolitan regions can lead to new roads and highways.

The call here to use existing roads more efficiently ignores one overarching concern that may be on the mind of a number of local officials as well as taxpayers: who is going to pay for new roads? Here are the pieces involved:

1. Building the roads in the first place. If these roads are constructed in dense areas, the costs rise sharply in order to purchase land. If major roads are desired, we may see more public-private partnerships or toll roads.

2. Maintaining the roads for a long period of time. These costs include everything from filling potholes to adding capacity to complete rebuilds.

If we have reached peak road, perhaps we should continue to celebrate the massive highway building project the United States embarked upon and successfully completed in the second half of the 20th century.

One final thought: when exactly can we declare peak anything? If the data shows not much change over an eight year period, is this enough knowledge to predict no more future growth? I would be very hesitant to stake a lot on such a claim…

Chicago area highway drivers going faster: 85th percentile between 71 and 75 mph

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A new report highlights the fast highway driving along Chicago area highways:

Only a few are obeying the law. In those stretches, an average of 1 out of 20 motorists drives at or below that limit…

The data, gathered in April, May and September, showed that, depending on which tollway stretch was tested, 91 to 98 percent of drivers exceeded the 55 mph speed limit. In those stretches, the average speed ranged from 66 to 70 mph.

The studies followed a 2012 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report that showed that average highway speeds increased to almost 71 mph in 2009 from 65 mph two years earlier. At the same time, traffic fatalities — 33,561 last year — are dropping, except for a slight increase in 2012. The report concluded that the higher speeds might have been the product of less speed enforcement in 2009 and fewer cars on the road that year, leading to less congestion…

But perhaps the most fundamental metric in deciding where to set a speed limit is a concept known as the 85th percentile, or the speed at which 85 percent of drivers are either traveling at, or below. In essence, it measures the limit that most drivers place on themselves, regardless of posted speed limits.

Tollway data showed that the 85th percentile speed ranges from 71 to 75 mph.

Read on for more discussion of then how Illinois might or might not increase speed limits.

I’ve talked to numerous people over the years who are nervous about driving in the Chicago area because of these speeds. On one trip that involved driving through the Chicago region, I was asked to drive since I was used to it. While the speed is one factor, I wonder how much the overall traffic, particularly the large trucks, matter. It is one thing to drive fast in more open spaces – Michigan, for example, has had 70 mph speed limits for at least several years but it often doesn’t feel as bad with less people around. It is another thing to have at least three lanes and often four in each direction full of drivers of different sizes and speeds.

One thought: if we end up with a world of driverless cars in a few years, what speed would these cars travel on a highway? Presumably, the cars could go faster because the cars would share information and maximize the speed. But what then would be considered “safe”?

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.

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.