Tag Archives: traffic

Key to national railroad on-time performance is Chicago?

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In an interview, Amtrak’s leader suggests Chicago plays a critical role in the nation’s railroad structure:

I want to talk about on-time performance, and especially the role of freight prioritization. How has that played out?

The big problem I see right now is the on-time performance in and out of Chicago. Chicago is the hub for the long-distance system. All freights today are having a fluidity problem in and out of Chicago.

One of the things I’ve just done recently is every senior manager of this company had to adopt a train that operates in and out of Chicago. The reason for that is to get them really paying attention and focusing on a major part of what we do as a business. To make sure that our employees know that senior management’s paying attention to this. Communities know that senior management is out there looking at this. So that they understand our business better than they have in the past. That they can see what might be hurting us. Where can we improve ourselves? So that we can continue to hold a higher ground on the need for the freights to move our trains.

This is both a boon and a problem. For Chicago, this means that there is a tremendous amount of rail traffic going through the region, providing more opportunities for jobs and facilities. On the other hand, there is a limited amount of land, a lot of at-grade crossings, and getting trains through this bottleneck can be a headache. These issues have helped push more trains and facilities further out from the Loop, whether beltway lines or new intermodal facilities.

And this isn’t just a railroad problem in Chicago. As a transportation center, Chicago can be a bottleneck for air traffic with the soon-to-be world’s busiest airport (and recent infrastructure issues). The road traffic isn’t so great either.

Odd poll: Rahm Emanuel more negatively rated than Eisenhower traffic

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One challenger to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used some dubious questions to find how the mayor ranks compared to other disliked things:

The poll, with questions tailor-made to grab headlines, was paid for by Ald. Bob Fioretti (2nd) and conducted Sept. 26-29 by Washington D.C.-based Hamilton Campaigns…

Fioretti’s pollster was apparently looking to put a new twist on the issue by testing the mayor’s unfavorable ratings against some high-profile enemies, including the Bears’ archrival Green Bay Packers.

Of the 500 likely Chicago voters surveyed, 23 percent had a “somewhat unfavorable” opinion of Emanuel and 28 percent had a “very unfavorable” view of the mayor.

That’s an overall negative rating of 51 percent, compared to 49 percent overall for morning traffic on the Eisenhower. Conservative-leaning Fox News Channel had a slightly higher unfavorable rating in Democratic-dominated Chicago while the Packers stood at 59 percent.

Odd comparisons of apples to oranges. As the article notes, it sounds like a publicity stunt – which appears to work because the article then goes on to give Fioretti more space. Giving space to bad statistics is not a good thing in the long run with a public (and media) that suffers from innumeracy.

Two thoughts:

1. I could imagine where this might go if Emanuel or others commission similar polls. How about: “Chicago’s Mayor is more favorably rated than Ebola”?

2. How did the Packers only get a negative rating of 59% in Chicago? Are there that many transplanted Wisconsin residents or are Chicago residents not that adamant about their primary football rival?

A beer pipeline to help relieve congestion in Bruges

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The city council of Bruges has approved a beer pipeline that will cut down truck traffic from a brewery shipping beer to the city center:

In the years since the De Halve Maan brewery opened a bottling facility outside Bruges in 2010, the company’s faced a tricky logistics problem. It still brews beer at its original site downtown, just as it has for nearly five centuries. To get all that delicious beer to the new factory for filtration, bottling, and shipping, it uses trucks. Trucks that burn fuel, spew carbon and clog the city’s cobblestone streets (which surely froths all that beer).

No more. The city council has approved the brewery’s unusual but clever plan to save time and money while reducing emissions and congestion. It will build a pipeline to ferry the good stuff across town, underground. Yes, you read that right: A beer pipeline.

Instead of making the 3-mile drive in one of dozens of tankers that traverse town each day, the award-winning beer will flow through a 1.8-mile polyethylene pipeline, making the trip in 15 to 20 minutes. The pipeline will move 6,000 liters of beer every hour, De Halve Man CEO Xavier Vanneste told Het Nieuwsblad.

As CityLab points out, Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing Company uses underground tubes to move beer between its brewery and its pub, across the street. But this is a longer journey, one with real environmental consequences, and the Belgian pipeline surely will have a bigger impact in terms of reducing traffic and carbon emissions. “In time, this innovative investment plan would reduce the amount of transport by heavy goods vehicles by 85 percent,” says Franky Dumon, the alderman for spatial planning who approved the project on behalf of the city council. “It is a win-win situation for everyone.”

A fascinating solution. Indeed, I expect there will be a lot of efforts in the years ahead to try to limit congestion through all sorts of means like piplines or drones or new means that haven’t yet been tried. And I imagine such an unusual feature could be used to attract tourists. Perhaps the pipeline could have an ongoing “leak” where people could get a small amount for a fee?

This idea makes me think of The Simpsons episode from eighth season titled “Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment.” Operating as the Beer Baron, Homer has a Rube Goldberg-esque pipeline that connects the alcohol production facility to the bowling alley where the illicit booze is delivered in bowling balls. I’m sure the pipeline in Bruges will be more efficient and has the benefit of the blessing of the local government.

Bike lanes in Barrington Hills could unravel the whole fabric of the community?

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Feuds between bicyclists and drivers are not uncommon but the recent conversation in Barrington Hills about bike lanes seems like rampant NIMBYism:

Residents say their roads are being clogged by unlawful, unsafe riders of the “professional biking community, clad in spandex.” Bicyclists, they say, flout the rules of the road, block vehicles from passing and, in some cases, have been caught urinating in yards.

Cyclists say Barrington Hills residents have driven them off the road, harassed them and even pelted them with objects as they ride by.

The long-simmering feud came to a head this summer amid talk of adding bike lanes along a village thoroughfare, a proposal quickly shot down by town leaders and upset homeowners.

If there is one thing the two sides have in common, it is an appreciation for the scenery of Barrington Hills. The affluent community of about 4,200 residents features thousands of acres of open space filled with forest preserves, horse farms, riding trails and rolling hills. Homes are built on lots no smaller than 5 acres, and village leaders have fiercely defended the town’s borders against encroachment by development that doesn’t meet their standards…

“We have no obligation to a professional biking community, clad in spandex, who are regularly abusive to our residents and drivers, and urinate on our property,” the website reads. “We have no obligation to out-of-town traffic speeding through our community. It is time we stood up and said NO MORE TRAFFIC!”

This is just an outside perspective but if Barrington Hills residents are so threatened by bicyclists, there are larger issues at work here. Bicyclists could be annoying on relatively low-volume roads. Yet, their level of traffic is minimal compared to vehicular traffic. It sounds more like the residents want to close off their roads to any outsiders.

See a story from a few years ago about arguments in Barrington Hills about how much outdoor lighting residents could have in order to limit light pollution. If lights and bicycles can rip the fabric of your community, I would guess the community is one in which people generally want to be left alone. This is one of the paradoxes of suburban community as pointed out by M. P. Baumgartner in The Moral Order of a Suburb: community is built by leaving your fellow suburbanite alone.

Chicago to get its own “Carmageddon” on the Kennedy in June

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Major repair work on the Kennedy in June is being dubbed Chicago’s own Carmageddon:

Chicago-area drivers are being urged to steer clear of the downtown stretch of the Kennedy Expressway during the last three weekends in June, officials said Thursday. That’s when bridge demolition on the Kennedy interchange at Ohio and Ontario streets will require shutting down expressway lanes, first in the inbound direction, then outbound and finally the Ohio and Ontario feeder ramps…

Officials hope the stern warning will help prevent hourslong snarls along the expressway that carries an average of 260,000 vehicles a day, avoiding what some traffic engineers have referred to a “carmageddon.”…

The work to tear down sections of the bridge, drop the concrete pieces onto the Kennedy and haul away the debris is scheduled for a series of tightly choreographed 55-hour periods on the weekends of June 13-15, June 20-22 and June 27-29, according to IDOT plans…

On an average project, IDOT tries to “scare away’’ 15 percent of the traffic to compensate for lane closures, officials said. During the Kennedy work, they hope to divert about 25 percent of traffic elsewhere.

There are echoes here of the Carmageddon in Los Angeles several years ago that ended up working out pretty well. While this location is a key part of the Chicago highway system, there are alternative routes either in the downtown area or different highways that can route people further around the city. At the same time, this does highlight the importance of fixing the Circle Interchange nearby to have better traffic flow.

It will be interesting to watch the PR for all of this. In fact, is two weeks enough time to start alerting people to Chicago’s own Carmageddon? Yet, I imagine local news outlets will eat this up.

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…

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.

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.