Archive for September 26th, 2008

Here’s another in the ongoing series of unconventional traffic-calming treatments. Over at Cognitive Edge they’ve got photographs of a recent community project to put up so-called “scare-cars,” or traffic-calming scarecrows, in a small English village that apparently gets occasionally overrun thanks to sat-nav-enabled shortcut seekers. This taps into the idea that people slow for novel things, or when reminded they’re in a human place.

Bonus points for socio-economic realism: There has been a documented outmigration of “Polish plumbers” from England back to the more favorable climes of Poland.

(thanks to John Dodds)

From the BBC:

“Sao Paolo police who pulled over Armando Clemente da Silva were shocked to discover he had clocked up nearly 1,000 violations, local media report.

Mr da Silva had accumulated the fines for speeding and running red lights over a seven-year period.

The driver, 36, said he had not received any penalty tickets because he had been too busy to register his car.”

The driver, incidentally, owes close to two million dollars. The car is worth about $6500.

I last read Martin Amis’ novel London Fields ages ago, before I ever started thinking about traffic. But this passage begs a revisit:

“Now — the streets, the traffic. We know that traffic reflects the temperaments of the great capitals (and here in a farewell flourish I invoke my world citizenship): the unsmiling triumphalism of Paris, the fury and despair of old New York, the cat-and-mouse audacity of Rome, the ragged murder of Cairo, the showboat longevity of Los Angeles, the industrial durance of Bombay or Delhi, where, four times a day, the cars lash the city in immovable chains. But here, in London — I just don’t get it.

They adore doubleparking. They do. This is true love — a love whose month is ever May. They park in the middle of the goddamned street. I turned into the All Saints Road — and it wasn’t a road any longer. It was a lot, a doubleparking lot. The traffic lights are barely more than decoration, like Christmas lights. You hit a red at the crossroads but you inch forward anyway, in the lock, into the headlock. You may even decide the time is ripe to get out and run an errand. Why? Why not? Everybody else does it. It seems clear to me, after five seconds’ thought,t hat if everybody does it then nobody gets around, nobody gets anywhere. But everybody does it because everybody does it. And here’s the other thing: hardly anyone seems to mind. At the crossroads the drunken youth drops out of his van and waddles into GoodFicks or Potato Love or the Butchers Arms, and the cars don’t mind. They just nudge and shove each other, the old heaps, and not angrily, in this intimacy of metal and rust and not getting anywhere.

That was more or less how it was ten years ago. That was more or less how it was ten days ago. Now, in the last little packet of time, it’s all changed. We have moved from purgatory to full inferno. And suddenly everybody minds. Even the gentler sex. And if plump mums scream over the grizzle of their strapped kids, if old ladies in old Morrises parturate with venom and smack freckled fists on the horn, then how are the men taking it? Four times in the last few days I have sat tight in the car, gridlocked under the low sun, with no way out, while jagged figures discover what the hard machine can do to the soft: what the hood of the car can do to the human nose and mouth, what the tyre-iron can do to the back of the human head. Traffic is a contest of human desire, a waiting game of human desire. You want to go there. I want to go here. And, just recently, something has gone wrong with traffic. Something has gone wrong with human desire.

I don’t get it. No — I do! Suddenly I do, though there’s no real reason (is there?) why anybody else should. In traffic, now, we are using up each other’s time, each other’s lives. We are using up each other’s lives.”

(Honk o’ the horn to The Monuments We Build).

One of the themes in Traffic is the difficulty individual drivers can have in understanding how the system as a whole functions. Ramp meters are a perfect example: Many drivers, particularly at the moment they are asked to pause at the ramp-meter light before joining the freeway, are under the impression that they make congestion worse than if the highway were left to its “natural” state.

But a recent example from Atlanta provides yet another example of how ramp meters generally help, not hurt, traffic flow. Drivers may have to wait briefly on a ramp, but this typically means a faster trip on the “main line.” The concept is in some ways similar to way “congestion windows” are used to manage things like Internet traffic, holding up bits of incoming data if the network is already crowded.

Atlanta, by way of introduction, home of some of the U.S. worse congestion, has embarked on a ramp-meter spree, with 70 new signals coming online. In a recent paper presented at the Institute for Transportation Engineers conference (by Marion G. Waters III at Gresham, Smith and Partners), I came across this curious example of “before and after” (the after is in the photo above):

“A completely unexpected event occurred in March 2008 to validate the benefits of the existing ramp meters in use in Atlanta and to encourage their use in a system of traffic management.

A tornado hit downtown Atlanta for the first time (or at least in a very long time). It damaged one ramp meter and virtually destroyed another one. This was two of the four ramp meters being operated as a traffic-adjusted system on southbound I-75/85 in the downtown area.

The results were dramatic. Congestion on the main line of the freeway was noticeably worse, and the ramp congestion at the adjacent ramps became worse because the main line was completely full. Mainline operating speeds dropped (peak hour operating speeds) and were measured to be lower by as much as 16 mph in the most congested hour.

When these ramp meters were restored to full actuated operation, the conditions were reversed, demonstrating the effectiveness and value of the ramp meters working together in a system along a segment of freeway.”

The report goes on to note that since the meters were turned on in June, “the first indications are that free flow was extended an additional 10–20 minutes.”