Archive for September 8th, 2008

Via the Tri-State Transportation Campaign is this handy round-up of congestion pricing initiatives on the horizon in any number of places across the globe:

“* Milan, Italy: The cosmopolitan city implemented the “EcoPass” cordon charge this past January to cut pollution and reduce traffic. Higher-polluting vehicles are charged more, with the revenue going towards “buses, cycle paths and green vehicles,” according to the BBC.
* Valletta, Malta: The “Controlled Vehicular Access” system, implemented in May 2007, charges non-resident cars depending on how long they stay within the charge zone, limiting long-term parking and reducing traffic in the historic capital. The plan was named a best practice case study by the European Local Transport Information Service.
* Tel Aviv, Israel: By 2009, Motorists entering Tel Aviv will be charged NIS 25-50 (US $7-$15) to enter parts of the city based on time of day, area they are driving and the amount of pollution emitted by their car. The charge is meant to tackle the city’s huge traffic problem and encourage greater use of public buses. Revenue generated would help fund a long awaited light-rail system.
* Shenzhen, China: Looming in the future with an unspecified date, Shenzhen is to introduce a congestion charge for vehicles entering its downtown. Currently, officials are figuring out where the pricing zone will be and the amount of the charge. The revenue will be used to build infrastructure for public transportation.

Cities where congestion pricing is being considered:

* Seoul, Korea: The city government has proposed legislation to charge motorists who drive to stores and buildings in Seoul’s vehicle choked center. Mostly a traffic reducing measure for the city, officials tout its benefits for energy and the environment. If passed, the charge could begin March 2009.
* Greater Manchester, England: This December, residents of the area will decide through a referendum if they want a congestion charge. If yes, the charge will be implemented in 2013. The revenue generated would expand public transportation across the areas’ 10 boroughs with extra trains, buses and improved stations, with an additional £1.5 billion (roughly $2.8 billion) in investment coming from the central government.
* Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: A recent report issued by the country’s Department of Planning and Economy noted that traffic congestion and limited mass transit were inflicting a “heavy economic toll” on the city. The report lists a “demand management scenario” as one of four options to improve mobility and improve public transportation.
* Bangkok, Thailand: City government is conducting a feasibility study of implementing a congestion charge in Bangkok’s business district. The main impetus of the plan is to tackle the notorious traffic problem and encourage carpooling.
* Jakarta, Indonesia: Based on the recommendation of an outside consultant, the Governor is considering charging drivers as a way to ease traffic jams in the capital. The city is conducting feasibility studies now, but the plan could be piloted next year.”

Occupational hazard I suppose, but lately I seem to be having traffic thoughts wherever I go, times when I feel like I really need an operations engineer on hand to answer burning questions of perhaps little consequence.

To wit, I’ve been boarding a lot of planes lately and have been curious about the boarding process. Certain seat parameters are announced, a bunch of people rush up to the agent, they are scanned through, and then there’s that stretch of gloriously empty boarding tunnel you go bounding down — until the moment, usually when you round the curve, that you hit the back of a queue. So you set your bag down, until the person ahead moves, then you creep up, then you wait, etc. It often gets me to wondering: Would it be any more efficient to allow people through the initial bottleneck any more slowly, so they could magically walk uninterruptedly to their seat? How much time is wasted in these shuffling stop and go steps? Would it be better to stagger arrivals so that there’s less chance for a queue to form? Or would the queue just form somewhere else? I know many people have thought long and hard about the best way to “plane” passengers, but not sure if this particular quirk has come up.

These thoughts came up again when reading an interesting post I missed the first time around over at Khoi Vihn’s Subtraction. It concerned the author’s interest in the new “destination-based dispatching” elevator system at his place of work. DDB, as I’ll call it, is the new new thing in the elevator biz; basically, instead of putting people onto an elevator and having them choose their appropriate destination, it has people choose their destination and then puts them on an appropriate elevator.

In any case, Khoi Vinh rounded up an elevator expert to talk these things over. One thing that came up was an idea that I touch lightly upon in the book: The comparisons of elevator traffic to vehicular traffic. (in the case of Traffic it’s an engineer with LA DOT comparing the problem of synchronizing traffic signals to elevator flow). But in this case, Vinh makes another analogy: “For instance, there are four basic modes of traffic: balanced mode, in which up and down calls are evenly distributed throughout the building; up-peak mode, in which most traffic wants to go up (mornings, usually); down-peak mode, in which most traffic heads downwards (close of business, usually); and lobby-peak mode, in which the majority of the traffic goes from the lobby upwards.”

In essence, “vertical transportation engineers,” as elevator types are known, have a very similar job to “horizontal transportation engineer,” at least in terms of managing peak-hour flows. Shortly after everyone in a place like Shanghai has fought through the traffic and gotten to their job at a tall office tower, they then face new traffic troubles (which have even included calls for “traffic cop” style monitors). Of course, elevator types have an edge, as I can’t imagine how “destination-based dispatching” could really be made to work in the vehicular traffic world (perhaps if DOTs manipulated routing and real-time traffic data?).

Another problem similar to traffic is the idea that some waits seem worse than others. As the engineer tells Vinh, “destination-based dispatching changes the name of the game — because the technical problem to solve is [no longer] minimizing people’s hall call wait time, but rather their total elevator involvement time.” DDB plays a bit of psychological havoc because while people’s total trip may be shorter, they may spend longer in the lobby, watching others board first, wreaking havoc with their sense of social justice. Ramp-meters in traffic have the same rough effect (even though their better for the long-term trip in most cases).

Still, it’s a fascinating world, extolled in places like Elevator World magazine. There, we learn such things as the fact that lunchtime elevator traffic, in one building study, accounted for 12% of building population (almost seems low, no?). As in car traffic, there’s all sorts of clever counting devices too, from photos of “lobby counts” to “traffic analyzers” that “record the time every landing and car call is made and cleared.” As in car traffic some have even suggested “flex time” arrangements would help alleviate morning up-peak flows.

For more on this, do see, if you haven’t already, Nick Paumgarten’s piece on elevators in the New Yorker, which I have to say is the piece that’s brought me the most pleasure in that magazine all year.

One of my pet peeves in the reporting of traffic crashes is the inevitable question asked by a correspondent at the scene: “Do we know if drugs or alcohol were involved?”

This question subtly implies that if they were not involved, that somehow qualitatively changes the nature of the crash. The person could have been driving in a criminally negligent manner, but as long as drugs or alcohol were not involved we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. It must have “just been an accident.” The legal penalties are adjusted accordingly.

To use just one example of how this obsession with alcohol in crashes can skew the actual causes of risk on the road, Leonard Evans notes that while MADD was formed after the death of a child by a drunk driver, about 90% of child pedestrians killed in traffic fatalities are killed by sober drivers.

Kent Sepkowitz, in an op-ed in today’s New York Times, makes several interesting points on this theme. One is that speeding is not treated as an agency “priority” at NHTSA, and that “unlike the statistical attention afforded alcohol (20 pages of a 150-page document), the section devoted to speeding comes in at a measly three pages.”

He also points to the statistical aberrations littered throughout NHTSA reporting: “Consider this: in Texas, in 2005, 3,504 people died in a traffic accident; 1,426 (about 41 percent) were considered speeding-related. In sharp contrast, for Florida, 3,543 died yet only 239 were considered speeding-related — about 7 percent.” Were Texans just driving vastly faster than Floridians? “Not likely,” says Sepkowitz. “Different states, for various reasons, analyze their automotive fatalities in different ways, but the result is that the safety agency’s official speeding-related fatality rate of 28 percent is almost certainly a low-ball estimate.”

He goes on to make an argument that, in many other contexts, would be seen as sensible, but in the context of the road has always been seen as somehow draconian and repressive: Limit the speed automobiles can travel. There would be fewer lives lost, less of a social cost in crashes (twice the cost of congestion, some estimates have found), and a reduction in fuel consumption and emissions. We also wouldn’t need to spend vast sums for police troopers to sit on the side of the road (or install automated speed cameras) and catch the random trickle of offenders. Instead of trolling around trying to clamp down on the unpleasant side effects, why not go straight to the source?

It remains a good and open question why cars are sold with the ability to perform at over twice the statutory limit. We tend to bang on about “personal responsibility,” freedom, etc. I frankly don’t really care whether someone, like the Lamborghini driver recently in Los Angeles whose car disintegrated into flame upon high-speed impact with a parking structure, chooses to take his own risks. But, given that the roads are public, shouldn’t the rest of us have the freedom not to be routinely threatened by the actions of people like this?