Sorry, gridlock is unfixable

[M II A II R II K]

Sorry, gridlock is unfixable


APR 16, 2014

By EDWARD KEENAN



Read More: http://www.thegridto.com/city/politi...-is-unfixable/

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The research is pretty firm on this, and has been for decades. One of the most authoritative recent studies, a 2011 report by University of Toronto economists Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner, summed it up as “the fundamental law of road congestion,” which says that whenever you increase road capacity, either by adding lanes, adding new roads, or improving traffic flow, the space will be filled by additional drivers in less than 10 years. This is true not just of major highways, but of all roads. Not only that, the law suggests that even if you get people out of their cars by increasing transit service, roads will fill up again with more cars in less than a decade.

- It works like this: If you build more roads and traffic starts to flow better, people who didn’t drive on that road will start doing so. If you build a highway to make it easier to commute downtown from Etobicoke, people in Mississauga will quickly realize they can drive in faster, which jams the lanes with traffic. If you widen the highway and engineer the flow of cars to make things faster, more people will realize they can start commuting from Oakville. If you build a subway line to entice people in Etobicoke and Mississauga to use transit, drivers will realize they can now drive in from Hamilton, and fill up the newly free road space very quickly. Traffic doesn’t change—or if it does, it doesn’t stay changed. No matter what you do, it still grinds along at the same speed.

- The only thing that has historically worked in practice to reduce congestion is not something anyone’s likely to propose. Since traffic is caused by a city’s prosperity, it can be eliminated by what you could call the “rust belt” approach—have the economy totally tank. If there’s mass unemployment and the office towers downtown become vacant, then congestion will be significantly reduced. But no one wants that.

- Another idea that could theoretically work is a command approach, where some people (based on licence plate numbers or postal codes or eye colour or some other criteria) are forbidden to drive on certain days of the week. It seems like a straightforward solution: banning some cars means less traffic, right? But in Mexico City, where a system based on licence plate numbers was implemented to fight pollution, studies have shown it had no real effect. People found all kinds of ways to cheat the system—many bought second cars, most of which were were cheap and actually emitted more pollution—and the congestion and air quality failed to improve.

- In London, Stockholm, and Singapore, where they have implemented meaningful prices on the roads, Turner says, the evidence shows that congestion actually eased. He suggests that a system where a trip from Bay Street to Hamilton would cost $5 to $6 could have a very significant impact on this city’s traffic level—some people would move closer to where they work (or work closer to where they live), some people would switch to transit, and some people would pay. We’d see fewer cars on the roads.

- But as of right now, no prominent politician is willing to support road pricing to fight congestion. Instead, they focus on things we know—or should know—will not work. Which is not to say we shouldn’t build transit and fix traffic lights and do the other things politicians propose. Adding capacity to roads allows more vehicles to travel on them—even if they don’t wind up going any faster—so more people get served. Adding new bike lanes encourages more people to ride, and lets them do so more quickly and safely.

- Most significantly, though, transit changes can improve commute times even if they don’t ease gridlock. According to Statistics Canada, the average Toronto transit commuter spends more than an hour and a half getting to and from work. Any express bus, LRT line, subway line, or new GO train service that gets them to work faster cuts that commute and makes their lives better. But we’ll still have just as much traffic on the roads when we’re done.

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LONDON

The solution: A fee of £10 (about $18.36) per vehicle per day to enter the central commercial district of London (no charge at night, on weekends, or on holidays).

The result: After the scheme was introduced in 2003, motor vehicle traffic in the pricing zone decreased by about 16 per cent.

STOCKHOLM

The solution: A “tax” of between 10 and 60 Krona ($1.67-$10.04), depending on the time of day and the duration of driving, to drive in the central business district.

The result: A study conducted five years after the tax’s 2007 introduction showed a 10 to 15 per cent decline in traffic volume on the busiest roads.

SINGAPORE

The solution: The world’s first congestion pricing scheme was introduced in 1975, and was extended and made fully electronic in the late 1990s. Charges accrue (roughly $1 to $13 Canadian) depending on routes taken and distance driven in the city centre.

The result: Approximately 65 per cent of commuters now use public transit.

MEXICO CITY AND BOGOTA

The solution: Ban cars on certain days based on licence plate numbers.

The result: In both cities, traffic decreased by up to 20 per cent immediately after the ban was implemented, but in longer-term studies, evidence suggests people found ways to get around it.

BEIJING

The solution: Capping the number of new licence plates issued each month, banning vehicles from outside the city from entering it during rush hours, shortening legal parking hours, banning cars with certain license numbers on certain days.

The result: Massive hours-long traffic jams continue to plague the city, and congestion increased more than six per cent per year since 2010. Late last year officials began publicly considering a congestion charge.

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[jg6544]

You also need to offer a fast, clean, safe, reliable alternative to the private automobile. Relatively few cities do.

[Nouvellecosse]

Doesn't everyone on SSP and similar sites already know all this? If they don't they at least should. Induced demand has been pretty standard stuff for awhile now.

It's out in the rest of the world that people still struggle with these concepts. You regularly hear people saying things like "If we decommission highway X, reduce the lanes on arterial Y, or don't widen route Z, the results will be total chaos!! It'll be a traffic jam 24/7!"

In reality, demand adjusts and once people realise that a particular route isn't as fast or convenient as they expected, then many will stop trying to use it.

[Ragnar]

I think the real solution to gridlock will come as more companies and workers go virtual. Think of the space freed up by not commuting to and from work every day.

More and more people are working from home, and I think this will impact the "demand" side of the supply/demand traffic equation.

[Rizzo]

Originally Posted by Ragnar

I think the real solution to gridlock will come as more companies and workers go virtual. Think of the space freed up by not commuting to and from work every day.

More and more people are working from home, and I think this will impact the "demand" side of the supply/demand traffic equation.

Well, then there's triple convergence. Even if more people work from home existing or new drivers will take their place. It just encourages surface street drivers to use freeways that have been typically jammed or people that left earlier to leave later. Plus, a region's population isn't flat. Normally it's growing, so you hope those people don't get on the roads. That's why transportation is so important. You can always increase capacity on a fixed transit route and often requires people to abide by schedules and travel to a centralized location vs decentralized job centers.

More people are working from home or remotely, but I think it has it's limits.

[Leo the Dog]

The solution: A tax to drive into the CBD....right. This won't work in America. We have so much land. This will just kill inner city small business and create an awesome incentive to build suburban office parks...creating more congestion.

[Aylmer]

Originally Posted by Leo the Dog

The solution: A tax to drive into the CBD....right. This won't work in America. We have so much land. This will just kill inner city small business and create an awesome incentive to build suburban office parks...creating more congestion.

As opposed to overcrowded Sweden?

It isn't a tax to drive downtown: it's a congestion charge. So, when there's congestion, there's a price. It'll probably dissuade people from driving into downtown during the morning rush-hour to do their shopping, but I have no idea who does that anyways

During the day, evenings and weekends (when people actually shop), it won't be any more difficult or cumbersome than it is now.

[M II A II R II K]

It's also a free market supply and demand thing. You pay more for to use scarcer resources.

[waltlantz]

Yea, I hear ya.

But in America..........that's a tax. Even in New York City, it didn't fly.

Traffic is just going to have to get worse before politicians even THINK about proposing such a radical maneuver.

[i-215]

Why does this need to be fixed?

Traffic represents commerce. A traffic jam is a sign of economic prosperity. To some degree, increasing the capacity is a "stimulus" for more economic growth, but there are obvious limits. Streets and freeways can only get so wide, and you can only run so many trains.

NYC without the gridlock wouldn't be NYC. And once the streets jam, transit becomes more appealing (as a carrot). No sticks required.

[Wizened Variations]

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

It's also a free market supply and demand thing. You pay more for to use scarcer resources.

That is the solution: the trend lines between population, resource consumption, cost of resource extraction, and changes in world economic structures will continue to reduce auto usage progressively up the economic scale.

And, IMO, this change will not be a smooth, linear decrease in car usage, but an erratic and crisis driven change.

I have said for many years that transportation planners must hedge their bets against steadily decreasing real individual wealth. For example, light rail systems need to designed to POSSIBLY handle far more people than are projected using assumptions based on a least a constant standard of living over multiple decades.

Transportation aspects such as same seat travel though downtowns, good transfer point design, near station right-of-ways that can handle longer trains and more tracks, wider turn radii, and multiple track main lines need to planned before build out.

Even in the 20 year event that severe economic adjustment is postponed, hedging for vastly increased use will produce more efficient, and, faster public transportion.

Bus services need to be able to rapidly expand route coverage and frequency in the event of economic emergency. The potential use of school buses to supplement existing bus service should be part of any city's emergency planning.

+++++++++++

We need to realize that this inevitable decline will affect some nations sooner than others. Nations with a high resource to population ratio, such as Canada, Australia, Mongolia, Norway, some of the OPEC nations, and, Russia will be the last to change. Nations with lower resource to population ratios, and, nations with current high debt levels, will be the first to have to make the change.

For our US friends, think of filling up your gas tank with virtual money and consider the interaction of printing press induced inflation and resource scarcity.

The problem will self-correct.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Ragnar

I think the real solution to gridlock will come as more companies and workers go virtual. Think of the space freed up by not commuting to and from work every day.

More and more people are working from home, and I think this will impact the "demand" side of the supply/demand traffic equation.

I realize that this is becoming more common but encouraging workers to go virtual is not a healthy development for society. It will increase mental illness because of the lack of normal person to person interaction and potentially increase obesity as people don't need to leave their houses around the clock.

[Jasonhouse]

^The last company I worked at tried doing that on a large scale with their workforce, and had to pull back. And they were simply trying to get to the point where certain departments would work from home just 2 days a week, opening up seats in the main office for someone else on those days. Had all kinds of problems with productivity and quality of work.

[Wizened Variations]

Originally Posted by Jasonhouse

^The last company I worked at tried doing that on a large scale with their workforce, and had to pull back. And they were simply trying to get to the point where certain departments would work from home just 2 days a week, opening up seats in the main office for someone else on those days. Had all kinds of problems with productivity and quality of work.

Millions have learned via personal experience that almost any job that can be done virtually from home can be done virtually from anywhere on the globe.

Any job that can be done virtually from home or even an office can now, or in the near future, be accomplished through interactive algorithms.

Two things are very difficult to replace: activities that involve one touching physical things, and, activities that require group interaction. While the first is obvious, the 2nd is not as, to this point, no conference call whether audio, audio/TV, or audio TV and computer can provide the synergies provided by small groups of people with face to face contact in a informal everyday atmosphere.

Of course, Google and others are working furiously to change this, but so far, nothing yet works nearly as well.

[ardecila]

It's hard to replace the environment of an office. Not everybody is self-motivated, so the interaction and supervision helps keep productivity up.

Psychologically, it definitely helps if work stuff and personal stuff occur in two different spaces. In a big suburban home, people can sometimes set aside space for a home office, but this is tougher to do in constrained urban apartments.

[Nouvellecosse]

Depending on how productivity is measured, I can see how it can slip in some jobs when home-based. But there are also productivity gains like being less likely to be late due to commuting disruptions like weather events or accidents. And people are also less likely to need sick time as it's easier to simply climb out of bed and log into work when not feeling well than to dress and groom for a professional setting, battle crowds and traffic for 30, 60, 90 minutes etc. and risk spreading illness to coworkers.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Depending on how productivity is measured, I can see how it can slip in some jobs when home-based. But there are also productivity gains like being less likely to be late due to commuting disruptions like weather events or accidents. And people are also less likely to need sick time as it's easier to simply climb out of bed and log into work when not feeling well than to dress and groom for a professional setting, battle crowds and traffic for 30, 60, 90 minutes etc. and risk spreading illness to coworkers.

While that is true to a degree, my job requires deep concentration. If I am ill, then I am going to spend my time in bed or doing something a lot less taxing on my mind.

[Jasonhouse]

^Same with mine. If I'm sick, I'll do monkey work at home, but that's it. If I try getting into some heavier stuff, it always needs to be gone through again later. I prefer to do things once and leave it at that.

[atlantaguy]

Telecommuting can be tricky. I've been doing it for over two years now and didn't think I would like being away from co-workers, not being in the city every day, etc.

I'm now convinced that for me, it's perfect. I'm now dedicated to one account, skype and call back and forth all day with team members and my boss, and the client has never been happier.

I realize this isn't the typical story, but it's working for my company and I very well.

[ssiguy]

Unless a city has a significant population decline or a major economic collapse, gridlock will always exist.

Transit helps but if it leads to a decline in drivers and less traffic on the road it will encourage others to take that route..........a zero sum game.

I think one of the best ways is the use of HOV lanes which has the ability to easily triple road capacity all for the cost of painting a few signs on the lane.