Tag Archives: traffic

Chicago traffic bad and, perhaps worse, unpredictable

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Having heavy traffic is bad enough but Chicago also has unpredictable traffic, according to a new report.

Residents of the Chicago area are accommodating that increasing uncertainty by setting aside more time each day — just in case — for the commute, new research shows.

For the most important trips, such as going to work, medical appointments, the airport or making a 5:30 p.m. pickup at the child care center to avoid late fees, drivers in northeastern Illinois and northwest Indiana should count on allotting four times as much time as it would take to travel in free-flowing traffic, according to the “Urban Mobility Report” to be released Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The analysis is based on 2011 data, which are the most recent available.

It is the first time that travel reliability was measured in the 30-year history of the annual report. The researchers created a Planning Time Index geared toward helping commuters reach their destinations on time in more than 95 percent of the trips. A second index, requiring less padding of travel time, would get an employee to work on time four out of five days a week…

The Chicago region ranked No. 7 among very large urban areas and 13th among 498 U.S. cities on a scale of the most unreliable highway travel times. The Washington area was the worst. A driver using the freeway system in the nation’s capital and surrounding suburbs should budget almost three hours to complete a high-priority trip that would take only 30 minutes in light traffic, the study said.

This sounds like an interesting new way to measure traffic. The absolute amount of time spent in traffic is interesting in itself but this study gives us a sort of confidence interval for time spent in traffic. This suggests that traffic is not just an issue of getting stuck but it is the threat of getting stuck that would affect a lot of behavior. Just the threat could lead to a lot more lost time and productivity.

It would also be interesting to look at how often the average driver gives themselves this time cushion. Could traffic be improved if people planned to take more time to get to their destination?

Building intricate intersections to help drivers avoid accidents

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Here is a quick look at some “intricate” intersection designs that are intended to help drivers avoid accidents. These go beyond the “Michigan Left” to the “Jughandle,” the “Superstreet,” and the “Diverging Diamond.”

Here is a little explanation of the difficulty these intersections face:

As you can imagine, these designs are not an easy sell. “It’s a two-fold sale that has to happen,” Sangster tells us. “We’re not going to build these if they’re not safe. We’re also not going to build them if they don’t work better.”

I wonder if the better question is how drivers would react to them. People tend not to like change in their predictable roads. Of course, with repeated exposure people will get better at handling these kinds of intersections and eventually they become normal. (Having some extended experience with the Michigan Left as well as a roundabout, I can attest that they seem strange at first but become second nature pretty quickly.) I could even imagine a situation where a local community comes to regard their “intricate” intersection as a badge of honor, particularly if the intersection is much safer.

There are also cost and construction concerns with these new intersections. Check out an article about a 2010 proposal for a diverging diamond to be installed at Route 59 and I-88 in Naperville that suggests American engineers have been reluctant to be some of the first to spend the money for such intersections.

New study says congestion could be lessened by reducing a small number of trips from certain neighborhoods

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A new study suggests a targeted reduction of trips from certain locations could greatly reduce congestion:

To learn more about traffic congestion in the hope of finding ways of relieving it, an international team of scientists analyzed road use patterns in the San Francisco Bay area and the Boston area. They used mobile phone information from more than 1 million users over the course of three weeks to map out where drivers were concentrated on roads. (The data was rendered anonymous before the investigators looked at it, the study authors noted.)

Based on their analysis, the researchers suggest that certain neighborhoods in these urban areas were home to drivers that caused major congestion. The scientists found that canceling just 1 percent of trips from these neighborhoods could drastically reduce travel time that was otherwise added due to congestion.

“In the Boston area, we found that canceling 1 percent of trips by select drivers in the Massachusetts municipalities of Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell and Waltham would cut all drivers’ additional commuting time caused by traffic congestion by 18 percent,” said researcher Marta González, a complex-systems scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In the San Francisco area, canceling trips by drivers from Dublin, Hayward, San Jose, San Rafael and parts of San Ramon would cut 14 percent from the travel time of other drivers.”

The location of these neighborhoods apparently makes it easy for them to impact their cities. “Being able to detect and then release the congestion in the most affected arteries improves the functioning of the entire coronary system,” González  told TechNewsDaily.

There are many ways people might reduce the number of drivers hitting the road from these key neighborhoods, the scientists said. For instance, the authorities might encourage alternatives “such as public transportation, carpooling, flex time and working from home,” González said. Mobile phone apps that connect people using the same roads might help them coordinate carpooling, she added.

Two things stand out to me:

1. It seems like the advantage to this method is that it allows officials and drivers to target traffic flows from particular locations and then plan accordingly. More often, we settle for traffic solutions like adding more lanes over a stretch of highway or extending mass transit to a particular location. But this kind of analysis is able to help people target particular areas rather than having to apply catch-all solutions.

2. Collecting and using this data sounds very interesting. This is big data at work: taking information that is collected about over 1 million cell phone users and then using that information in a new way. It also allows researchers to see the system as a whole.

My next question would then be is it be easy politically to target particular areas for congestion reduction?

The issues involved in solving the railroad traffic bottleneck in Chicago

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The Chicago region is an important city for America’s railroad traffic but it is also a bottleneck:

Six of the nation’s seven biggest railroads pass through the city, a testament to Chicago’s economic might when the rail lines were laid from the 1800s on. Today, a quarter of all rail traffic in the nation touches Chicago. Nearly half of what is known as intermodal rail traffic, the big steel boxes that can be carried aboard ships, trains or trucks, roll by or through this city…

Now, federal, state, local and industry officials are completing the early stages of a $3.2 billion project to untangle Chicago’s rail system — not just for its residents, who suffer commuter train delays and long waits in their cars at grade crossings, but for the rest of the nation as well.

The program, called Create (an acronym for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program), is intended to replace 25 rail intersections with overpasses and underpasses that will smooth the flow of traffic for the 1,300 freight and passenger trains that muscle through the city each day, and to separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots. Fifty miles of new track will link yards and create a second east-west route across the city, building redundancy into the overburdened system.

Fourteen of the 70 projects have been completed so far, and 12 more are under way, including the $140 million “Englewood flyover,” or overpass.

This is a massive infrastructure issue involving a whole region. Some of the issues involved (several of which are pointed out by the article):

1. Paying for all of this. How much should the railroad industry itself chip in for this? We’ve also seen some of these issues with passenger lines. For example, the STAR Line would provide a circumferential commuter line between Joliet and O’Hare Airport but it has been on the drawing board for years without funding. And there hasn’t exactly been immediate funding for high speed rail in the Midwest region.

2. Geography: railroad traffic bunches in the area southwest of Lake Michigan. There is one way around this that railroad companies have been using now for some years: push facilities further out from the city to take advantage of more space. For example, Union Pacific built an intermodal facility in Rochelle, Illinois roughly 80 miles west of Chicago’s Loop. Additionally, there are large shipping facilities southwest of the city near the intersection of I-80 and I-55 (see CenterPoint Intermodal Center, “the largest master-planned inland port in North America,” see Union Pacific’s facility here) which could lead to the construction of a new interstate.

3. Lots of at-grade crossings in the Chicago region. These cause traffic issues for trains and cars. Plus, numerous commentators have pointed out the safety issues. Even when these crossings are fixed, they take a lot of time, can involve acquiring and utilizing pieces of land,  and limit car and pedestrian options in the meantime.

4. Tracks that are also used by commuter trains.

5. Suburban communities generally don’t want more railroad traffic. This was illustrated by the fight several years ago over whether Canadian National should be able to purchase and then run more freight trains along the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern tracks. The suburbs which would see a reduction in traffic because more trains would be routed around the city were in favor while those along the railroad line were not. Thus, local governments often get involved in negotiations with the railroads and they have their own interests.

6. A public which is generally unaware of the importance of railroad lines to the American economy. Yes, railroad traffic may sometimes be inconvenient and noisy but a tremendous amount of traffic is involved.

This could be a great opportunity for regional cooperation.

New public relations campaign to convince Chicago area residents that congestion pricing is the way to go

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning launched a campaign today intended to raise support for congestion pricing on Chicago area highways:

Would driving a steady 55 mph the entire way be worth the price, say, of a latte, particularly on days when you are crunched for time?

Officials at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning think drivers will see value in a congestion-pricing plan that the agency is recommending be implemented on new highway lanes planned on six major existing and future roadways across the six-county area. Under congestion pricing, drivers who opt to use free-flowing express lanes pay a fee, or an extra toll on the Illinois Tollway, during peak traffic periods. The price goes down when fewer vehicles are on the roads…

In the proposal, the amount would be 5 cents to 31 cents per mile during rush hours, depending on the specific roadway. That comes out to $2.76 in the Stevenson scenario and $3.41 on the Eisenhower…

CMAP officials said their goal is to get congestion pricing up and running within three or four years, starting on the Addams. A widening project is slated to begin on the I-90 corridor next year, and the tollway has previously identified it for a possible congestion-pricing experiment.

I will be interested to see how people respond and what this public relations campaign looks like. It seems that certain highway solutions in the Chicago area, such as adding more lanes and increasing traffic capacity, are reaching an end or have run their course. Just how many lanes can you add anyway – and it really doesn’t help as this tends to attract drivers. There have been some plans in place to extend mass transit, such as through the delayed STAR Line, but money is lacking. High occupancy vehicle lanes have been discussed but haven’t really gone anywhere. Thus, congestion pricing might kill two birds with one stone: reduce highway traffic (or at least stabilize it) while raising some money that can be reapplied to highways. Of course, this will strike some as unfair, particularly coming after a toll hike (that hasn’t limited tollway traffic much), but no one is being forced to use the express lanes…

Los Angeles survives Carmageddon II

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The Los Angeles area has now survived Carmageddon and Carmageddon II, which just took place this past weekend. And it also ended a few hours ahead of schedule:

The reopening of the busiest and most congested freeway in the U.S. came hours earlier than predicted. Crews working on dismantling the Mulholland Drive Bridge had a 5 a.m. Monday deadline, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a Sunday evening press conference that there would not be an early opening.

Starting around midnight Saturday when that stretch of the I-405 was fully shut down, crews had 53 hours to complete their work. Had they overshot their Monday morning deadline, a late penalty of about $360,000 would have been charged to them every hour…

The demolition is part of the $1-billion Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project, which adds a 10-mile northbound carpool lane. On Sunday, crews also paved the freeway between the Skirball Center Drive and Mulholland Drive bridges…

As for the benefits of Carmageddon, officials said if this year is anything like the last, a lot of people will be breathing a little easier when the weekend is over. According to a study at the University of California, Los Angeles, the air quality in the area of the 405 closure improved more than 80 percent during the 2011 Carmageddon event.

If you live by the highway, you can also die by the highway (closures). See some photos of the work here.

Apparently, the site of an empty highway in Los Angeles is a strange one:

Like Villaraigosa, some drivers couldn’t resist comparing the scenario to a movie.”It’s like that movie `Vanilla Sky,’ … where Times Square is empty,” Sterling Gates told KABC-TV. “It’s kind of like that. We’re known for our traffic, and it’s just nothing.”…

The rare sight of a carless freeway attracted many onlookers, including seven people who were cited for sneaking onto the roadway, the California Highway Patrol said.

Last year, three people slipped onto the freeway at the crack of dawn and snapped photos of themselves enjoying a gourmet meal on an eerily empty freeway.

It is a post-apocalyptic scene…for two days.

Sao Paulo traffic jams can stretch over 100 miles

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A massive traffic jam in China last year attracted a lot of attention but it sounds like Sao Paulo has this beat: how about traffic jams over 100 miles long?

This is the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the BBC reports that, in the city of 11 million, traffic jams average 112 miles long on Friday evenings. It can even stretch to 183 miles on particularly bad days. With so much time spent in cars, it’s inevitable that life events like meeting your future spouse occur there too.

IBM’s annual Commuter Pain Survey (which did not include Sao Paulo) awarded Mexico City the ‘most painful’ ranking:

The index is comprised of 10 issues: 1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic.

Mexico City scored the worst overall, and Sao Paulo’s traffic jams may cover the longest distance. The record for worst traffic jam ever, though, goes to China.

Any solutions to this problem? The BBC report has some ideas:

Professor Barbieri says Sao Paulo has skilled and experienced traffic engineers that somehow manage to get the city to flow, albeit slowly.

“But the big problem is that we Brazilians are terrible with planning and traffic will only become more manageable if we start looking into real long-term solutions.”

But he is also clear that a “more manageable traffic” environment is the best possible scenario that can be achieved.

“No city in the world will ever manage to end congestion because when traffic flows, people are drawn to their cars. The key is to find a balance, the point at which it is worthwhile for commuters to use public transport because it’s faster then driving,” he says.

“That way Sao Paulo needs urgently to invest more in public transport instead of building new roads and expressways that will only be filled up with more cars.”

While the article suggests the local helicopter industry is thriving, it sounds like an opportunity for an enterprising politician or leader to chart a new course.

Reminder to drivers: using all the possible space to merge is more efficient

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A large road expansion project is taking place near our house and this has led to multiple busy intersections having lane closures where two lanes merge into one. As often happens, drivers in these situations often get amazingly territorial, deliberately moving over to block the closing lane hundreds of feet even before the lane is closed.

Here is the problem with this behavior: these protectors of the lanes are actually making the whole process more inefficient. Traffic moves like waves. Not everyone starts driving at once when they can so changes filter down through a line of cars. Therefore, making one single long line takes a lot longer to get through than having two lines half the size that merge at the end. We could all get to our destinations quicker if people could stop worrying that someone is getting ahead of them. People successfully merge from two lanes into one on highway ramps all the time so why can’t they don’t it construction situations?

A note: having two lanes that are supposed to merge into one is a lot different situation than one described in the Chicago Tribune yesterday. At the infamous and congested Circle Interchange, there are more dangerous situations where people try to cut into two dedicated lanes meant for another highway (say going east on the Eisenhower Expressway and getting off to exit for both the Kennedy and Dan Ryan) from a third lane that is headed in a different direction. As the article suggests, these late attempts at cutting in can be quite dangerous.

If you want to read more about this, I highly recommend Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic.

Wheaton to get new downtown overpass – for pedestrians

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The City of Wheaton has long looked into the possibility of an overpass in or near the downtown so that traffic could avoid the frequent trains on the Union Pacific (formerly Chicago & Northwestern) tracks. It looks like Wheaton is going to pursue an overpass in the next year, but only for pedestrians:

In 2010, Metra officials had announced plans for the proposed pedestrian overpass, as part of more than $3 million worth of improvements that Metra and the Union Pacific Railroad had drawn up for the Wheaton depot. The work also was to include moving the Wheaton station’s platforms entirely west of West Street.The project had been set to be completed in 2011 but hit a snag, Metra officials said, after complications related to gaining a needed easement from a private landowner on the south side of the tracks. Without that easement, the work could not proceed, said Metra spokesman Michael Gillis…

The pedestrian overpass would be the first of its kind at Wheaton’s Metra station. The College Avenue station, a mile or so east, has a pedestrian tunnel, but Wheaton Metra commuters have no easily available bypass to get from one side of the tracks to the other.

Gillis said the pedestrian overpass would be constructed between 530 and 550 feet west of the West Street rail crossing.

It appears this was first announced in the Metra “On the Bi-Level” newsletter for the UP West line March 2009. I’ll be curious to see how this overpass looks and how it fits in with the surrounding area.

This will be helpful at the downtown commuter train station. However, it doesn’t help with a vehicular traffic and congestion issue in Wheaton: getting over the railroad tracks when going north-south. The bridge on Manchester Road is helpful but it requires going out of the way and it not right along the Gary Avenue/Main Street/Naperville Road corridor.

My take on why such a vehicular overpass has not been built is that it would change the historic downtown too much. Proposals made in the past would have required severely altering the Main Street/Front Street intersection, home to some of downtown Wheaton’s oldest buildings. Better options may have included extending Naperville Road across the tracks but this runs into the Courthouse area, the library, and a residential neighborhood and the Gary Avenue corridor is more residential. In the end, Wheaton may just have to live with trains stopping traffic: those same trains gave the community a reason for existing as Wheaton was initially founded around the then Galena & Chicago Union railroad tracks in the 1850s.

Traffic, corruption, and a 40 mile traffic jam in Lagos

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A journalist recounts being stuck for 12 hours in a 40 mile traffic jam in Lagos and ties his experience to the level of corruption in Nigeria:

But the biggest problem appears to be the unsavory ties between Nigeria’s political and business elites. Under the military dictatorships of General Ibrahim Babangida and then General Sani Abacha, both from the north, a small group of northerners came to dominate the trucking business. These men have reportedly played a key role in shooting down every effort to improve or privatize the country’s moribund, British-built rail system, ensuring that almost all goods must move by road.

According to Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), “Traffic behavior is more or less directly related to levels of government corruption.” Vanderbilt cites a clear correlation between traffic-fatality rates per miles driven and a country’s ranking on Transparency International’s corruption index. (In terms of road safety, the Scandinavian countries fare the best; Nigeria is near the bottom of the list.)

In March, Nigerian authorities made an attempt to unclog the highway, arresting illegally parked truckers and confiscating 120 vehicles. The Nigeria Truck Owners Association retaliated by calling a one-day strike that crippled the ports. The next day, traffic was as calcified as ever. About half a dozen agencies—the Inter-Ministerial Implementation Committee on Port Approach Roads in Lagos, the Lagos State Traffic Management Agency, the Federal Road Safety Commission, the Vehicle Inspection Officers—share responsibility for keeping traffic moving on the highway, but all of them are considered toothless.

Does Vanderbilt’s correlation hold independent of a host of other factors (such as central government spending on highways, etc.)?

I suspect experiences like these would leave Americans much more grateful for their roads and highways which they can tend to complain about. It reminds me of the 2010 story of a “nine day, 100 km” traffic jam outside of Beijing. This sort of stuff simply does not happen in the United States, even in the worst case scenarios such as really bad accidents (like the smoke-caused one earlier this year in Florida) or natural disasters (such as evacuating New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina). Granted, Americans may lose many hours a year in congestion, particularly in big cities, but the traffic does eventually clear and it does have a predictability to it. In other words, well-paved, maintained, and policed roads should not be taken for granted: they aren’t guaranteed in much of the world.