Tag Archives: roads

Oregon to adopt driving tax by miles driven on volunteer basis in 2015

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Oregon is moving ahead with plans to institute a miles driven tax rather than a gasoline tax:

The program, springing out of a recently signed bill, is expected to launch in 2015 on a volunteer basis. But it’s charting relatively new territory, and other states aching for additional tax revenue are sure to be watching closely to see whether to imitate the model…

Oregon is purportedly considering several tracking methods for the pilot project’s 5,000 volunteers ahead of the 2015 start date – essentially allowing them to install mileage meters connected their vehicles’ odometers or GPS systems that could better track non-taxable miles on private and out-of-state roads…

A state spokeswoman said Monday that the project is still in the development stages with officials focused on public awareness, not registration.

Still, she acknowledge residents with electric cars, who pay no gas taxes, “won’t be running to sign up.”

As the article suggests, this is likely to be unpopular for a number of reasons including cost and privacy. However, I haven’t seen any other proposals for how to continue to maintain roads if cars continue to be more fuel efficient. Another option would be to raise the gas tax but no one would like that either. The roads have to be paid for somehow.

Perhaps the key would be to show people that they would be paying a similar amount through the gas tax or the miles driven tax. If the numbers are comparable for many people, it is just replacing one tax with another rather than adding on a new tax. But, the two taxes are based on two different things.

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.

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.

Observed in Manhattan: online shopping leads to more traffic

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A graduate student in Manhattan argues that more online shopping leads to more traffic issues on the dense island:

Consider it this way: people around the world seem to have a travel time budget of a little over an hour each day. Before the rise of e-commerce, part of that time would have been spent in the service of purchasing goods. But if that budget remains fixed, then people today may simply buy something online, then hop in a car and go visit a friend across town. In that scenario, personal travel stays constant while commercial travel increases — a net gain of people and goods on the road…

Woodard’s case studies of the Gehry and three other residential apartments in Manhattan found the answer to those questions may very well be yes. Surveying the buildings for several hours at a time in the middle of the day, Woodard found that, on average, delivery trucks stayed parked for 21 minutes at a time, and two-thirds of them were double-parked. Extrapolating the data over a full day, in the case of the Gehry, that means delivery trucks alone occupy road space that’s not a true parking space for seven full hours…

Though Woodard’s case studies were never supposed to paint an exhaustive portrait of the urban e-commerce problem, they do underscore how little is known about it. One study from way back in 2004 estimated that delivery trucks cause nearly a million hours of vehicle delay each year, but the stunning grown in online shopping since then (and the fact that companies like Amazon are reluctant to release their data) makes any precise estimate difficult. Many experts consider this process of moving freight that final mile to be one of the biggest forgotten problems facing modern cities.

At the core of the problem is street parking. In a dense urban area like Manhattan, where few buildings have the luxury of freight docks or loading zones, delivery trucks have little choice but to park at the curb. That leaves passenger vehicles and delivery trucks to duke it out for precious street-parking space, which in turn leads to double-parking, which in turn leads to general congestion.

Interesting question and findings. How much do they apply beyond Manhattan, a dense place?

One issue not addressed here: how much do commerce companies bear responsibility for this congestion? Shopping online is often viewed as cheaper and more convenient but this analysis suggests there are some hidden costs that someone has to pay for. Roads are public goods paid for with tax dollars. If they are causing more congestion, could they bear some of this cost?

Chicago tries out a “pedestrian scramble” intersection

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Chicago has started testing the “pedestrian scramble” at a Loop intersection:

The changes center on a new pedestrian crossing pattern – dubbed the “pedestrian scramble” – that will be introduced at the intersection of State Street and Jackson Boulevard…

The test involves stopping all vehicles – heading east on Jackson and north and south on State – for about 14 seconds every other light cycle to give pedestrians a jump on traffic to cross in all directions, including diagonally, according to Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Developed more than 70 years ago, the pedestrian scramble allows pedestrians a running start to cross six ways instead of four ways.

The experiment is part of a larger plan by Chicago Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein to reduce speeds and the number of vehicle travel lanes on busy streets in an effort to slash the number of crashes…

Klein’s strategy involves narrowing some streets, or putting them on a “road diet.’’

Two quick thoughts:

1. This reminds me of photographs of busy intersections in Tokyo where you see mobs of people crossing at all angles. See short videos here and here. Indeed, other countries have used pedestrian scrambles for decades.

2. People may not like the idea of a “road diet” but there is evidence that reducing traffic capacity could be more effective at dealing with traffic and congestion rather than continually expanding roads. Plus, you then get the side benefit of more safety and convenience for pedestrians and cyclists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argument for a flat tax for both electric and gas drivers

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There is ongoing discussion in several states about a flat tax for electric and gas cars per mile driven:

“EV drivers want to pay their fair share,” says Jay Friedland, the legislative director of Plug-In America. “We want the roads to be supported, but we’re still in a phase of early adoption and there’s a greater public good.”

That “greater good” is to give electric vehicle technology a chance to crack through its niche status, reducing the continued reliance on fossil fuels from unstable nations. The more state and federal breaks EVs get, the greater the possibility that drivers will look to them as an alternative. But they still need to contribute to the greater good of roads and infrastructure, and Plug-In America agrees.

The advocacy group believes a flat road tax is a better solution – taxing all drivers equally, no matter how their vehicle is powered. That idea is gaining momentum.

In New Jersey, a road tax proposed by Sen. James Whelan, a Democrat from Atlantic City, would charge all drivers 0.00839 cents per mile driven. For the average driver who travels 12,000 miles per year, that comes to a little more than $100. It’s an easy way for Jersey to recoup some cash from EV drivers without targeting them directly.

It’s the same idea with Virginia’s HB 2313, which eliminates the $0.175/gallon tax on fuels in favor of a tax of 3.5 percent for gasoline and six percent for diesel fuel, while imposing larger annual registration fees and a $64 per year for EVs, hybrids and alt-fuel vehicles.

There seem to be several competing interests in these discussions:

1. States who desperately need money to pay for roads.

2. Advocates of electric vehicles who don’t want new taxes and fees to limit the adoption of electric vehicles.

3. Where are the gasoline drivers and the trucking industries? There has not been much reporting on their status in these ongoing discussions…

Another factor that makes these conversations more difficult is the potential changing nature of driving in the coming years. States need certain levels of funding for roads but it is unclear how many people will be driving what and what the status of miles driven per capita will be down the road. All of this means it is harder to make projections and also suggests that whatever is decided in the near future will probably have to be revisited soon.

More privatization of public roads

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Eric Jaffe takes a look at a recent trend: the privatization of public roads throughout the United States.

Public-private partnerships for infrastructure (often called PPPs or P3s) have been on the rise in recent years, and many experts believe the trend has yet to peak. If the activity of the past several weeks is any indication, they may be right. A billion-dollar PPP for the East End Crossing, in Indiana, was announced in late March. News of a $1.5 billion PPP overhaul of the Goethals Bridge, in New York City, came in April. The Pennsylvania D.O.T. placed an open call to private firms for PPP projects just last week.

PPPs provide a valuable public service while shifting the financial risk to private wallets. Advocates also mention efficiency: private developers, driven by an urgent push for profits, can keep costs lowers and complete work faster than the public sector. Supporters believe that in exchange for this revenue share they provide the public with the broader economic advantages of improved metro area mobility. Besides, states just don’t have the money right now to do these projects on their own…

The first “major” public-private road partnership of this new era was the E-470 tollway in Denver in 1989, says William Reinhardt, editor of Public Works Finance. That $323 million project, organized by a highway authority distinct from the state DOT, didn’t rely on public funding. In doing so it sent the country down a new road for new roads.

Since then the growth of private partnerships has been steady if not overwhelming. Twenty-four states plus Washington, D.C., have engaged in 96 public-private road partnerships worth about $54.3 billion. In 2011, PPPs accounted for roughly 11 percent of capital investment in highways, according to Reinhardt, and that’s with about 20 state legislatures yet to permit these types of deals. In a brief history of PPPs for a road builders association in 2011 [PDF], Reinhardt concluded that PPPs “will likely be the primary model for building new highway capacity in heavily congested urban areas in the decades ahead” — particularly for mega projects valued in the billions…

Still, as an urban scholar, Sclar is more frustrated that public-private partnerships tend to interfere with comprehensive approaches to city planning. He uses the example of State Highway 130 near Austin, Texas, a public-private toll road that made traffic worse because truckers chose to take the free I-35 through the city rather than pay the toll. The point is that seeing roads as individual profitable projects distracts from their role as part of the greater public network — capable of influencing everything from transport equity to urban density to environmental sustainability.

As I read through this overview, I’m struck by one thing: the biggest issue seems to be the lack of money available to governments to build roads. If they had such money, they likely wouldn’t choose privatization. But, in an era of growing infrastructure costs, privatization offers some up-front cash and moves the costs off the books for a while. This seems to be a matter of convenience rather than the preferred option for most governments.

Additionally, I don’t see much here about whether this helps or harms drivers. Again, governments are worried about their bottom lines and these certainly impact constituents and taxpayers. Roads aren’t really free. But, private firms want to make more money than perhaps governments might try to generate through roads. Do consumers come out ahead financially or in their experiences on these private roads?

Will a new design for Chicago’s Circle Interchange prove beneficial in the long run?

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Illinois and Chicago officials are putting the final touches on plans to reconstruct the Circle Interchange where the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Dan Ryan expressways come together. But, will a new design lead to better outcomes?

But other urban planning experts criticized the agency’s decision, saying the claimed benefits of the Circle project were not put to a rigorous test. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that IDOT’s estimate of at least a 50 percent reduction in traffic delays on the three expressways would materialize, some independent experts said.The Circle project also scored poorly on criteria designed to determine whether ridership on public transit and access to transit would be enhanced by the work, the experts said.

“The data that CMAP made available showed that this project would not produce a significant return on investment,” said MarySue Barrett, president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable transportation and land-use policies…

IDOT officials insist that Alternative 7.1C would do the best job of reducing congestion, bottlenecks and crashes, leading to faster and safer commutes, according to traffic modeling that simulated the estimated 400,000 cars and trucks that travel over the Circle Interchange each weekday.

An average of almost three accidents a day occur in the vicinity of the Circle, which is also the slowest and most congested highway freight bottleneck in the U.S., according to the Federal Highway Administration.

It sounds like there are actually two conversations going on:

1. How to improve this specific stretch of road. The primary emphasis seems to be on adding lanes, both for the Kennedy and Dan Ryan through the area as well as for the congested ramps. Of course, adding lanes it not necessarily a panacea – drivers tend to fill in the supply that new lanes provide.

2. How this stretch of road fits in with larger traffic concerns in the Chicago area. It is one thing to reduce congestion at this particular point but another to improve mass transit on a broader scale that would help reduce demand for this traffic bottleneck. Traffic could be viewed as a region-wide issue where policymakers could try to reduce the number of highway trips through this area. Some would argue Americans have tended to privilege trying to fix roads rather than tackle the larger issues of why congestion occurs in the first place.

Four years of major construction is a long time to wait if the alterations don’t change much in the long run…

How much driving time is saved by the completely synchronized LA traffic light system

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I noted the synchronization of all Los Angeles traffic lights a while back but a new piece in the New York Times describes how much time the new system is supposed to save drivers:

The system uses magnetic sensors in the road that measure the flow of traffic, hundreds of cameras and a centralized computer system that makes constant adjustments to keep cars moving as smoothly as possible. The city’s Transportation Department says the average speed of traffic across the city is 16 percent faster under the system, with delays at major intersections down 12 percent.

Without synchronization, it takes an average of 20 minutes to drive five miles on Los Angeles streets; with synchronization, it has fallen to 17.2 minutes, the city says. And the average speed on the city’s streets is now 17.3 miles per hour, up from 15 m.p.h. without synchronized lights.

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who pledged to complete the system in his 2005 campaign, now presents it as a significant accomplishment as his two terms in office comes to an end in June. He argued that the system would also cut carbon emissions by reducing the number of times cars stop and start…

“If we reduce average travel time in Los Angeles by 20 percent, then we will see more people traveling,” Professor Moore said. “It’s money well spent, but part of the benefit is not speed, but throughput.”

These seem small fairly small changes, a few minutes for each average trip, but these would add up over time for individual drivers. Additionally, small improvements in a complex system like LA traffic could have very beneficial outcomes for the whole system.

But, as the article notes, these reduced times may not last long because more people want to drive. This is a rule of road construction: if you add lanes or improve traffic flow, more people will likely get on the road, limiting the benefits of changes. Sychronization of traffic lights may speed things up but there are larger issues at hand including the number of cars on the road and too much reliance on streets and highways to get people where they need to go.