Archive for the ‘Congestion’ Category

Like a giant urban hovercraft sucking up traffic in its wake.

Notes dvice.com:

Do you hate waiting behind a bus as it loads and unloads? Well, friend, does China have the craziest solution for you! A Chinese company is looking to build buses so big cars can drive right under them, which will ease congestion. The company is serious about it, too.

Being developed by the Shenzhen Huashi Future Car-Parking Equipment company, the buses are currently planned for Beijing’s Mentougou district, where tracks on the road will make sure they stay straight as cars drive under them — and they drive over cars. Passengers get on and off at elevated stations, as the bus/trolley/what-have-you are so tall.

Interesting, but left unanswered is the question of how to keep cars in their lane.

(thanks Matt)

I was intrigued by Hoboken’s Corner Cars program — essentially a Zipcar style car-sharing program, albeit with even more direct car access — as I had written a bit about here before, so when New York Times “City Critic” Ariel Kaminer said she was going to check it out, I gladly hopped along for the ride (and, maybe it was just lucky timing or something, but I traveled by subway/PATH train from Brooklyn to Hoboken and was there shockingly quickly, even in this age of diminishing service, with no need to brave the city’s legendarily bad parking, pay the tolls, risk my life to NYC’s quantifiably substandard drivers — three cheers for transit!). One interesting question raised by the article (and please note that’s the NYT identifying me as a “traffic expert,” not me — though who isn’t a traffic expert in this town?) is the psychic hurdle of getting people to move past car ownership (in an area, ironically, where many people rent their houses):

There is another obstacle to car sharing in New York, perhaps the biggest of all. Given the paucity of street parking, the expense of garage parking, the traffic, the insurance costs and the toll to vehicle and psyche, New York car owners who aren’t motivated by true need must be motivated by some very strong force of will. So strong, perhaps, that it is impervious to reason. Is there any dollars-and-cents argument that could persuade New York’s discretionary drivers to give up their cars?

“I asked that question back when I was in city government in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Sam Schwartz, the transportation engineer who was once New York’s deputy commissioner of transportation. “In the ’80s we did several focus groups and we tried to find out what made them drive. And a very common theme is that they felt they were smarter than the people down in the tube. They’re the Brahmins. They deserve it.” He added, “I never heard of it anywhere else.”

Not to mention the endowment effect; i.e., once people own something, they feel it’s more valuable than before (even if, of course, the very value plummets the moment you drive the new car off the lot). One question for such programs, and the reason some people buy a car to begin with, is the issue of peak demand for weekends — it’s hard for a spontaneous lets-go-apple-picking trip when all the cars have been rented weeks in advance. And I’m not sure what to do about the alternate-side problem. That’s as intractable as the sabbath, or some force of nature.

Thoughts?

All the votes have been tallied, the loose chads swept off the floor, and “Nimble Cities,” the latest in Slate’s “Hive” series, has drawn to a close.

Check it out here, and thanks to those of you who voted/submitted ideas.

The three leading vote-getters at the Nimble Cities project, explained.

Over at the Slate Nimble Cities project, I discuss the suggestion from a few readers to install moving walkways in cities (as it turns out, an old idea).

I found myself on the carerra septima this afternoon in Bogotá just shy of 5 p.m. (having just consumed a wonderful dish of la posta negra de Cartagena at the Club Colombia, watched the Netherlands defeat Uruguay, and had a cup of tea from coca leaves to counter the effects of altitude sickness — it seemed to do the trick). In any case Carerra 7 is one of the city’s principle arteries, multiple lanes divided by an island. At 5 p.m., though, something curious happens on this street: It turns into a massive one-way boulevard out of the city, and towards the north. This is an old and much-discussed idea — contraflow lanes — one that was practiced briefly in cities like Los Angeles and made a splash recently in emergency management circles for mass disaster evacuations.

But it was striking to see it in action. At just the stroke of 5 our car was still on 7, and there was already a small stream of vehicles beginning to seep across from the other lane. Their movement was cautious, exploratory, with the first vehicles coming across employing their hazard flashers. Their numbers began to surge, and it was immediately evident that staying on 7 was not prudent. There were one or two traffic police scattered about, and there are signs advising of the change, but one got the sense this was just a bit of ingrained civic behavior, as routine as the clock itself.

I’m wondering if the new development pattern in the Lakewood scheme is having any effects on transportation (i.e., what’s the VMT of people living in Belmar versus others)? And on the subject don’t miss the National Academies podcast (and paper), “Driving and the Built Environment.”

(Thanks Michael)

Over at the Nimble Cities project, I sift through some of the latest developments in bicycle infrastructure for cities, from “bicycle superhighways” to “bicycle boulevards,” that are being rolled out around the world. Further examples/concepts always welcome!

Via Ian Sacs, here’s a program that speaks to the heart of the networked, “cloud commuting” city I talked about earlier, vis a vis Adam Greenfield (and it turns out “cloud commuting” has already been theorized by frequent Traffic appearer David Levinson): Hoboken’s Corner Cars:

The program, called Hoboken Corner Cars, seeks to sprinkle car-sharing vehicles on-street throughout the entire city – complete with exclusive, reserved parking spaces - so that these vehicles are much more accessible and convenient than any personally owned car. Existing car-sharing statistics in Hoboken justify this special treatment; for every one of these vehicles placed in the community, over 17 households will choose to give up their cars, taking cars off the street and culling the glut of “recreational” ownership for residents who commute daily via transit. An additional 20 or more households say they postpone or stop considering buying a car because car-sharing vehicles are available. The cherry on the sundae is a potential savings per household of $3,000 to $5,000 over vehicle ownership.

It’s early days over at Nimble Cities, but the ideas are coming in fast and furious (click here to see the most popular so far).

There’s some good proposals already, a mix of pragmatism and futurism, wild-eyed rants and thoughtfully considered suggestions. One thing I’m not seeing a lot of though is already existing ideas, in cities around the world, that should be extended to other metropoles. But I trust these will emerge as ideas and voting continues.

Photo by Stanza/Flickr

Over at Gerry Gaffney’s User Experience podcast, there’s an interesting conversation with Adam Greenfield (among other things, a user experience designer at Nokia) that takes a brief turn towards transportation:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about something that I’ve been calling transmobility. And I go into this to some degree in the new book, “The city is here for you to use”, the notion that once you take a vehicle, or any other object, and you make of it a networked resource, it’s no longer an object anymore, it becomes something with the nature of a service, it becomes something that you can schedule, something that you can share, something that has a presence on the network and is capable of locating itself, and you can book it or swap it or any of the other operations that you can perform on a networked piece of data you can now perform on that physical vehicle.

So yes, absolutely one of the things Urbanscale is interested in doing is the next generation of network shared bicycle systems.

Lovely word, that: Insufflate. But I was intrigued by Greenfield’s concepts (and thought they’d be suitable for the Nimble Cities project), which, I should say, are somewhat in spirit with the “mobility internet” as envisioned by Bill Mitchell and the other authors of Reinventing the Automobile (and please turn here or here for remembrances of Mitchell, by two friends of his, and mine; I didn’t know Mitchell but had engaged with his work on various occasions).

And I wonder if there’s some useful metaphor here vis a vis cloud computing; instead of just having one’s application (e.g. music library) running native on one’s own device (limited in memory, etc.), one can gain access to a shared music library as one needs, where one needs, through the cloud, for an arguably richer experience in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I hereby trademark the phrase: “Cloud commuting.”

Just stop charging. Geoff Manaugh notes:

“AT&T is launching a free wi-fi network for its customers in New York City’s Times Square,” Business Insider explained last week. “This will take a load off AT&T’s battered 3G network, by pushing peoples’ email, web, and app traffic onto wi-fi and off of 3G. And it should speed up downloads for AT&T customers in the area.” I’m reminded of Charles Komanoff’s proposed transportation policy changes for New York City, in which bus rides would always be offered free of charge, “because the time saved when passengers aren’t fumbling for change more than makes up for the lost fare revenue.” In other words, both cases suggest that offering certain urban services for free, at moments of high-intensity usage, often makes much better financial sense than charging for everything, all the time.

The flipside, of course, is that elsewhere, for the heaviest users (the so-called ‘data hogs’), AT&T is upping the pricing; and this too is the converse of Komanoff’s proposal — charging “road hogs” more for using the most network bandwidth at the most congested times.

I’m slow to this, but the video debate, featuring Charles Komanoff and others, is here.

For those of you who are, say, too gripped by World Cup analysis (Nani is out? Lee Dong-guk might return for South Korea?) to devote too much time to this sort of thing at the moment, Felix handily provides a crib sheet to the full video.

For my money, Reihan Salam is the most interesting voice in this debate: A conservative writer for National Review — which one might think would place him close to Corey Bearak in this debate — who is actually staunch defender of public transit — the result of being of a longtime outer-borough resident and subway commuter (of course, many right-wingers favor congestion charging — one might say, to rephrase the old saw about liberals and conservatives, ‘a congestion charging advocate is a free-marketeer who has been mugged by New York City congestion.’)

“The idea that you should pay $2 or $9 to drive in to New York when other folks have to pay some amount to take a subway into New York and have a much smaller impact, in terms of traffic congestion, seems pretty fair.”

Charles Komanoff gets a deserved star turn in this month’s Wired, courtesy of Felix Salmon.

In the end, Komanoff found that every car entering the CBD causes an average of 3.23 person-hours of delays. Multiply that by $39.53—a weighted average of vehicles’ time value within and outside the CBD—and it turns out that the average weekday vehicle journey costs other New Yorkers $128 in lost time. At last, urban planners could say just how big the externalities associated with driving are, knowing that the number was backed up with solid empirical analysis.

Via Donald Shoup. I could watch this stuff all day. Not a helmet in sight.

For an excellent case study of incredibly thoughtful and detail-oriented transportation planning — see a few of the details below — I recommend this dispatch by Meena Kadri, reporting from Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat.

On board the buses the most applauded feature is the provision of at-grade boarding — a hallmark of the best BRT systems, whereby passengers enter and exit buses at raised station platforms, without having to climb or descend stairs. Not only does this improve accessibility for the elderly, challenged and very young; it’s also been hailed as a plus point by many saree-clad female passengers. The span of income groups using the service is immediately evident and signals one of the BRT’s biggest impacts in Ahmedabad. Even motorists are being lured by the efficiency of Janmarg. Raju Schroff, who owns a local factory, now takes the bus to work. As a result, he says, “My daily commuting time has been more than halved, and I arrive at work calm rather than hassled from being stuck in traffic.” Jagu Desai, a tribal laborer, affirms her appreciation of its speed and comfort, and she seems pleased that her views were as much of interest to me as Schroff’s. Voice announcements and LED displays in both Gujarati and English — also a new feature for public transport in the city — are appreciated by the diverse passengers. As bus operator Panchal Kirti reports: “Not only can deaf people watch and blind people listen but people who can’t read are not excluded from being informed. So everyone on board can relax till their destination is announced.”

Ahmedabad’s comprehensive planning has pushed well past the mere concept of BRT — right through to encouraging physical resilience and solidarity amongst bus operators. Driver Jintendra Patel recalls that the two-month training included daily yoga sessions. “Yoga helps maintain calm and focus while driving,” he says, “and it counters the back problems that develop from sitting for long periods.”

Next up for Streetfilms: Ray Kelly?

Charles Komanoff reports from Gauangzhou:

With double-digit rises in car ownership and the city’s relentless expansion outpacing even the rapid provision of transit, the idea of charging a toll to drive into Guangzhou’s city center is gaining traction. The rationale is clear: drivers who pay only for their own lost time but not for the time their trips take from other drivers have little incentive to prioritize trips by car.

The stance of the domestic transportation experts here has been one of cautious interest: appreciation of congestion pricing as a virtually fail-safe tool, tempered by awareness that politics leaves little room for error in designing the toll, choosing the tolling technology, and marketing the program.

I was grooving on this almost Ed Ruscha-style illustration (”27 Onramp Configurations”?) in a new paper from David Levinson and Lei Zhang, “Ramp Metering and Freeway Bottleneck Capacity,” in Transportation Research: A Policy and Practice 44(4), May 2010, Pages 218-235.

The findings were sanguine on ramp metering:

Traffic flow characteristics at twenty-seven active freeway bottlenecks in the Twin Cities are studied for seven weeks without ramp metering and seven weeks with ramp metering. A series of hypotheses regarding the relationship between ramp metering and the capacity of active bottlenecks are developed and tested against empirical traffic data. The results demonstrate with strong evidence that ramp metering can increase bottleneck capacity. It achieves that by:

(3) and increasing queue discharge flow rates after breakdown – the average queue discharge flow rate is 3 percent higher with metering than without (with a 3% standard deviation).
Therefore, ramp meters can reduce freeway delays through not only increased capacity at segments upstream of bottlenecks (type I capacity increase), but also increased capacity at bottlenecks themselves (type II capacity increase). Previously, ramp metering is considered to be effective only when freeway traffic is successfully restricted in uncongested states. The existence of type II capacity increase suggests there are benefits to meter entrance ramps even after breakdown has occurred. This study focuses on the impacts of ramp metering on freeway bottleneck capacity. The causes of such impacts should be more thoroughly examined by future studies, so that the findings can provide more guidance to the development of ramp control strategies. It should also be noted that both types of capacity increases on the freeway mainline are at the expense of degraded conditions at the on-ramps and possibly arterial network. Therefore, without more comprehensive system-wide analysis, the findings of this paper, though in favor of ramp metering, do not necessarily justify its deployment.

The new INRIX scorecard is out — time for all you sabremetricians of the traffic world to drool — and reveals that congestion is creeping back to pre-recession levels. One can, I suppose, take this is another form of economic indicator — like same-store sales or new housing starts — as more jobs and more activity equals more miles driven. Then again, some of the congestion is directly a result of the economic crisis:

“Stimulus spending on road projects nationwide is starting to have an impact on congestion, particularly in off-peak periods. Delays across the country during off-peak periods – mid-days, evenings, overnights and weekends – were up 25 percent. Of the nation’s biggest new work zone slowdowns in late 2009, more than half were directly tied to stimulus projects.

There was the usual mix of interesting data points (hello Philadelphia and welcome to the Top 10 most congested metros!; Friday between 5 and 6 p.m. remained the worst time to be on the road in America), but one particular bit in the section on long-haul freight traffic caught my eye in particular:

INRIX data highlights that the nation’s truck freight network is highly interconnected, with some of its most important links located in places that aren’t immediately obvious (except to fleets and people traveling those roads). Nationwide, less than 5% of road miles have 3 times or more the average density of freight data, and less than 1% of road miles have 4 times or more. Of the most intensely used 1000 miles, California has the most miles of any state (271), closely followed by Arkansas (228); and I-40 has the most miles of any road (314).

I was surprised to see Arkansas pop up as number two in this category — I would have expected the Chicago region or some such — and I couldn’t help wondering, as one always does when one thinks of Arkansas, if there was a ‘Wal-Mart’ effect here? But the simpler explanation is that Arkansas itself is a trucking hub, home to a number of the country’s largest haulers and, it turns out, the state with the highest percentage of private-sector work force employed in the trucking industry. I’m sure there’s a bevy of interesting geographical/logistical reasons of why that came to be (e.g., proximity to rail hubs, the distribution center of Memphis, etc.), but in any case, it’s just one of the interesting tales lurking in the INRIX data.