Why predicted gridlock almost never happens
cityobservatory.org
cityobservatory.org
Breass Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27_paradox
Removing shortcuts within a system can make the system more efficient.
Induced Demand/Traffic Evaporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Build it and make it easier to use will generate more traffic. Remove it and the traffic just vanishes. Traffic Evaporation surprises many planners. The problem being that they assume traffic is just like water and must go somewhere else. Traffic is intelligent movement of individuals and people shift modes when one mode becomes less efficient either in time and/or money.
I think it practice it often means for example taking less desirable jobs because a better one is now too far away in terms of commute time, visiting their friends and family less often etc.
I once lived in Seattle and worked on the other side of Puget Sound. My daily round trip commute involved two ferry rides, each of which ranged from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on which of three ports on the non-Seattle side I decided to use.
I'd use that time to relax in my car, listening to music and reading. Or I'd get out of the car and go up on deck and enjoy the view. Or go in and buy a copy of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal from the vending machine and read it over breakfast from the cafeteria.
That commute was in a way a little daily mini-vacation.
I find such environments miserable, and certainly not amenable to relaxing or focusing on anything. It's stressful enough to find something to stare at and keep from falling over.
E.g. we chose where to live because of the schooling and it's close to family. But I work from home so it doesn't matter that it's a suburb. However if I ever got an office job I could be met with a daily total commute of 90 minutes. Should I sacrifice family and schooling so I can be closer to the job centers? Why is doing so any less unacceptable than a 90 minute commute?
according to who? my commute is a combination of bus and walking and takes about an hour each way, but i actually kinda prefer it to when i lived close in the city. living in the city is not pleasant for me anymore, i can live somewhere i actually like, have time to myself on the bus to read/listen to music/whatever, and also get in several miles of walking every day.
you factor in things like, your spouses commute, do you like your child's schools, and more. throw in benefits, position, and seniority, and moves may suddenly incur expenses not seen on the onset.
my job has changed locations so that my commute is now six more miles that what it used to be but I would be loathe to change jobs because my commute is still "me" time and not stressing me
> I don't think of favorite roles like 'This was my favorite thing to do, and that isn’t.' I just wish they hadn't cancelled Shit My Dad Says because I could bicycle to work.
https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/11/10/17/150212/wil...
I already wish I could have back all the hours I've wasted sitting behind the wheel, and I'm not that old yet...
The view of driving is going to be very different from the perspective of people who never had to do it, whenever that generation is born. Clean, automated cars are going to make our era look like Victorians living with coal fires in their homes.
Never imagined I would care about climbing the corporate ladder until I realized it could mean cutting mass transit out of my life and living close enough to walk. The rent is at least $1000 more, but $300 less in fares will help, and not being on mass transit is priceless.
Look at how much it costs to live in SF, London, Paris, etc. Applauding these methods is questionable, it certainly doesn't help people trying to find work and puts up a barrier to entry to access these desirable jobs. Its massively gentries those areas which makes sure the only kinds of people able to get those jobs are the already well-off.
I find it ironic that HN'ers complain about SF and other big city pricing, but also encourage 'lock in' strategies like over-use of bike lanes, elimination of parking lots, and anti-car policies that only make real estate more expensive.
Most of your crap commute is caused by too many drivers on the freeway and arterial roads, where you spend most of your stop-and-go time.
The bigger problem is you insist on an absurdly large amount of living space (which is what causes all the sprawl and traffic) If you compromise on this, then in most US cities you can get a reasonable commute at a reasonable price
It's hard not to scream at the people telling me I should go back to a many-roommates situation, or lose even more than 10 hours a week commuting.
The average car travel time to work in the US is 25 minutes [0], by the way.
[0] https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html#5.00/42...
600 square feet is enough for about TEN rooms of size 6x10 each. Think about that.
Maybe it's arranged very poorly. Typical arrangements make it easy to waste lots of room. Also, if you grew up with lots of space and have never lived smaller, maybe it takes a while to get used to how to arrange things more efficiently?
Source: I live in 330 square feet, and have for many years (though I lived in 300sqft before that, and it was too small -- mainly because of the layout, which was square, which minimized perimeter; railroad layout feels much more spacious)
Areas that were on the verge of becoming urban wastelands 15 years ago are now upscale.
They won't ever admit it but city planners are trying to use economic forces to reverse the white flight of the 60s and 70s by pushing poorer, darker people out into the suburbs and attracting a more affluent, whiter demographic into the city. They're billing these things as quality of life enhancements but all they're doing is making traffic less tolerable.
This city has half the population it did 60 years ago and the commute is as terrible as ever.
I also think there's something wonderful about having streets and enough traffic capacity to allow people access to every part of the city and region. We shouldn't be building silos of rich areas that are foot or bike traffic only. Its just a big 'keep out' sign especially in my town where bike lane usage is low and 6 months out of the year unusable due to the cold.
I'm not sure what do you mean. Do you imply that poor people cannot afford to walk or cycle, only to go by car?
Where I live this is pretty much the opposite, but I'm pretty sure even where you live a not so well off guy can also park the car, get out and walk into a street reserved for walking. If those bikers are so well off, they probably won't steal the car.
Lets stop with the generalizations. There are shitty bikers the same way there are shitty drivers, the difference is shitty drivers get ticketed while shitty bikers function with impunity.
Plenty of cyclists get tickets, even if they're fully compliant with law, because some police are so ignorant of what the laws are.
Unless there have been big chances since 2013, about 60% as many people drive to work in London as take public transport [1] [2]. That's pretty significant.
According to that BBC story, as of 2013 1/3 of London workers relied on a car or van to get to work in London. 1/5 took the underground. Then came bus and train, then walking, then cycling.
According to one of the graphs in the report itself, which breaks down the categories more, about 28% of London workers get to work by car where they are the driver of the car. It looks like all public transit combined covers about 50%. Biking and walking cover about 15% (11% to walking, 4% to biking). The remaining 5% is mostly people working at home.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25175752
[2] http://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/d...
This in turn makes workers' pool smaller, which increases salaries, and encourages employers to move to the better connected areas.
And so on.
In that now expensive part of the city that most people can't move to. And reduces them everywhere else.
> encourages employers to move to the better connected areas
Moving the transit there at the same time.
There's something to say about creating infrastructure at the surrounds of the cities. It seems to have worked very well in the last decades. There's also something to say about forcing (by government power) a change in purpose for the center of cities. But simply cutting the movement of people does not look like a net gain most of the time.
This is the problem with this class of argument, and the one in the article. They rely on cherry-picking data or isolated observations. I haven't seen any of these arguments try to take into account transportation quality measures like travel time index, average commute time/distance, average trip time, physical mobility, number of jobs, wages and population over time, or satisfaction levels.
Part of that is surely the growing population with cars in the neighborhoods in-between where I live and where I work, but I wouldn't be surprised if WAZE somehow made traffic worse.
In the WAZE Driver Satisfaction survey, the Netherlands came out on top. I'm guessing this is because so many people can choose not to drive to work/school/shops/etc. https://www.waze.com/driverindex
The Netherlands also have the happiest children in the world with the best child travel independence. I'm guessing creating a world where active travel (walking and cycling) is built into your environment from the getgo sets you up for life to be active. Their diet is bloody awful. ;)
When services reach critical mass, they don't need to offer the same value proposition. Only value Waze has left for me is police awareness, but even that has been mostly thwarted by changing police patterns. They rarely camp out in one place anymore and instead operate more like stings -- pull over and nab a speeder in 20-30 seconds.
PS: Yes, I agree with taway_1212
Many people do not realize how damaging to one's health it is to be near a highway:
https://now.tufts.edu/articles/big-road-blues-pollution-high...
I'm sure they realize that, but most people can't seem change their lives to escape it by riding the bus or whatever.
There are certain areas of the city I just won't go to until they fix the bridge. Last night I had to go to Ansley Park and the traffic at Piedmont and Monroe was absurd. Not an area I visit frequently, but there was gridlock, and I suspect most people were there because they had no other route.
285, the perimeter road, is much worse in both directions at all times of day.
I've lived in Atlanta most of my life. I would prefer we spend no more money on roads and instead funnel those resources into public transit.
On the other hand, Friday evening was one of the worst Atlanta traffic jams I've ever been in, so I don't know what the new normal is.
This is the key problem of most NA cities. A lack of transportation options.
The car is the default and only option, and it's a terrible default option because it's expensive vs other modes.
Why not have a variety of transportation options?
> "46,000 fewer trips per day across the river after the bridge collapsed."
Can we also start including quality of life and transportation times and housing costs in these measurements. 46,000 people wanted to go somewhere and couldn't. The article plays this like a success, but that sounds like a quality-of-life drop for many people.
Something can still be a bad idea, even if it is not "the end of the world". Tearing down useful infrastructure is still a bad idea, even if it doesn't literally destroy the city.
The low grumble of car motors is pretty minor by noise standards. Fire engines and ambulances however...
It's amazing to me that car tires are even considered noise. That's just the floor. There are much worse offenders in urban environments.
I guess in a rural or suburban environment you might have actual silence without the highway, but I've never noticed the highway to be much louder than the wind unless a particularly bad diesel engine, illegal-exhaust motorcycle, or emergency vehicle is passing.
Cars drive at 30km/h (at most), and very few have reason to drive past. There aren't any 'fast' roads nearby, the nearest that could qualify is about 1km away.
Most noise is from people talking as they walk past.
While I sort of liked the tone of the article the same could be said about cutting off a limb. Sure you can survive without it.
Local congestion is only half the story. How many people simply altered routes, perhaps traveling longer? How many instead went elsewhere rather than not go anywhere? I want to see not a city-wide but an area-wide measurement of total miles travelled. That number matters more (economically, environmentally) than local congestion. If cutting traffic in the city core results only in greater traffic elsewhere, that is no net good. In fact it only contributes to urban sprawl as people travel further to reach various destinations.
Vancouver hasn't increased, only reduced, road capacity for decades and so resultantly the amount of cars entering the downtown core is the same now as it was in the 1960s.
Meanwhile the amount of jobs and people entering the area has exploded. How?
The city gave people other options.
Investment in public transit
Investment in protected cycling lanes
Built denser housing near the downtown core so people could walk to work.
Vancouver's housing affordability problems are a result of a combination of speculative foreign investment, government incentives propping up the housing industry, and the end of greenfield/brownfield areas for development.
Further housing growth in Vancouver will require densifying existing single family home areas, which is politically painful.
Toronto is experiencing the exact same housing affordability problems, and their transportation system is dramatically different from Vancouver's. It is more car oriented with a highway funnelling traffic into town, and has poorer public transit and cycling options.
I have no clue how one would go about measuring all of these factors.
If the only type of transport you support on a road is the car, then you are in a world of hurt.
In the UK, the bigger picture is that abotu 70% of road journeys are under 8km. Given good safe cycle infrastructure and maybe an eBike, most people could switch out of cars.
I live in Manhattan, the USA's most crowded place in terms of bikes and pedestrians. Yet, we are not anywhere near capacity for bikes and pedestrians, anywhere, anytime. For cars, we are at/over capacity pretty much all the time during the day.
Why is obvious -- cars are way bigger. Duh.
Cars are just very space-ineffecient -- the space consumed by one car could service many times more transit riders, pedestrians, cyclists. Getting people to switch from car to anything else multiples manyfold the number of people we can service, which is a good thing. Getting people to switch from anything else, on the other hand, doesn't do much good. Even if we did reach sidewalk capacity somewhere, it would make sense to just convert one car lane into additional sidewalk, since a lane can fit at least 10x as many people if they're walking versus driving.
This is not true. From the NY Times -> "New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets"
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/nyregion/new-york-city-ov...
The kind of congestion midtown manhattan experiences for pedestrians is comparable to stop-and-go-but-moving car traffic. A bit unpleasant but there is still capacity. There's wasted capacity in the streets right now so pedestrians will overflow there, yeah, but if there was a fence, we could still increase the pedestrian density a good bit before reaching capacity.
In other words, it's more comparable to stop-and-go averaging 15mph car traffic - uncomfortable, but still plenty of capacity left. It's not comparable to what we actually observe in car traffic at rush hour often -- mostly stopped, barely inching occasionally, averaging well under 5mph.
When an event like a protest happens, THEN you actually see what true full-to-capacity looks like, and you realize that the day-to-day, while crowded and uncomfortable, has a long way to go before getting to capacity.
Outside of an event like a protest, I've NEVER been walking through midtown and felt unable to make any progress at all. Compare that to driving.
Or to put it another way, even at the worst of pedestrian congestion, the pedestrian is still faster than the car, so there is obviously still room left to make it even slower.
https://mtayloranalysis.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/an-auto-ori...
Yeah, exactly. Very nice visualization of how space-inefficient car transport is.
...its a strong sign that more modest changes to road systems really don’t have much impact on metropolitan prosperity.
the amount of traffic congestion and the economic prosperity of the Atlanta region are not the same thing at all. where does the article support the notion that the economy was not hurt?
Just like adding fiber lines doesn't improve internet speeds, because more data will be moved around.
Just like using renewable energy doesn't reduce pollution, because more people will just use renewable energy.
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Except, that's not true, that's not what happens. On roads, or any of these other situations.
Induced demand is a small and rare situation only applicable when multiple other valuable alternatives exist with which to pull from. To slap that label onto any piece of infrastructure is simply not accurate.
It's like a restaurant that gives out free food - why wouldn't you want to eat there? Forget other restaurants, and forget cooking at home. Free food! Except the line will likely be longer than at a restaurant that costs money.
If you add a demand-priced toll to a road, and adjust the price to maintain a certain level of traffic flow, induced demand will not occur. If traffic is congested, raise the price. If traffic is flowing freely and sparsely, lower the price.
Because I'm not hungry. A restaurant is a good example -- it does not induce demand, it services it. If lots of hungry people are around, a free restaurant will service them. And if hunger is a persistent issue, then yes, your restaurant might be packed and busy.
But that's never an argument to tear down a restaurant! A restaurant does not create hunger, a restaurant does not cause hunger -- it solves hunger for some number of people. And making the restaurant free doesn't make that problem worse, it makes it better. Lots more people get fed, and almost no one is going to sit around and eat 20 lunches per day, even if it's free to do so.
> If you add a demand-priced toll to a road, and adjust the price to maintain a certain level of traffic flow, induced demand will not occur.
Sure it will, your just not measuring it. You've just "induced demand" on a bunch of other non-toll roads, that are all conveniently not this specific road, so your limited statistics of this road can artificially make your change look successful.
'Solving traffic' by tearing down roads, is roughly akin to 'curing diseases' by tearing down hospitals. It makes your stats look good, by making those statistics lie through omission.
If you are not hungry, you won't want to go to the restaurant. If you do not want to go anywhere, you won't use a road. When you are hungry, will you pay for ingredients, and expend the time and effort to cook at home, or will you just go to the free restaurant and expend no effort and pay no money? When you do want to go somewhere, will you expend the time and effort to walk there, or will you take the car down the motorway and park at negligible cost and in negligible time?
The restaurant analogy can only be taken so far, perhaps. Restaurants do not create hunger, but under-priced driving and parking does create the need for mobility because it encourages and enables sprawl. When mobility is cheap, it creates the incentive to decrease density, and low density creates the need for mobility.
The inefficient land use of auto-enabled sprawl excludes other modes of transportation. When you make things far apart, you destroy the practicality of slower forms of transportation, like walking and biking. When you make things spread out, you destroy the practicality of centralized transportation, like buses and trains. In sprawling cities like you see in America, that were shaped by driving, there is no alternative to driving. In this case, the hospitals (underpriced driving) are causing the disease (dependence on cars), and the symptoms of the disease (car traffic) is what most people recognize as the problem. If you just treat the symptoms, like Texas tried to do with the Katy Freeway (http://cityobservatory.org/reducing-congestion-katy-didnt/), the disease will continue to spread.
Before the news of the collapse, I was planning on performing an errand in midtown on my way home - but going right through town would have been especially painful since the normal route home from there is over the collapsed roadway.
People I've talked to in my neighborhood are avoiding going into or through Atlanta if at all possible. They're finding ways to make even otherwise mandatory trips "discretionary".
This article is a bit like the Y2K aftermath where many claimed that the hype was overblown. While it's true that the direst of predictions didn't come to pass, harping on those predictions as though they didn't effect behavioral changes seems to be ignoring half the picture.
(Other than the DOT will stop storing flammable material under the Interstate)
Additionally, many schools are on spring break this week further reducing traffic.
While it might not be total gridlock, the traffic is being impacted significantly and will continue to be.
This article focuses on local traffic congestion, which I honestly don't think is helpful in assessing the true effects of the bridge collapse.
While at first, it may be surprising that traffic isn't 10x worse without a segment of a major highway, traffic is the flow of individuals who are aware of traffic conditions, much like traffic on the internet.
My predictions for what is currently happening in Atlanta:
* Less trips are being taken (telecommuting / not going out for dinner)
* Mandatory trips average length has increased
* Mandatory trip average duration has increased
* Average speed on street-level roads has dropped
But this doesn't mean that all travel is discretionary, or that road capacity can be reduced by an arbitrarily large amount without causing traffic bottlenecks.
I work in a small (geographically) technopolis which has 2 main roads out (so more like intranet). Recently, a tiny secondary road was closed due to repairs. It was a carmageddon due to suddenly most of the people having to go through the same shared 1km bottleneck.
A closure on one of the less traveled routes into the city also has an enormous impact on the commute for everyone.
I absolutely take your point. Just saying that wasn't the focus.
Edit: I should add that current traffic feels as if it wasn't spring break. It will be interesting to see how next week shapes to be.
1. Many commutes around the city HAVE gotten a lot worse since the bridge fell. Anybody who has to get on 285 for anything is feeling the pain.
2. It's Spring Break for the public schools and many private schools this week. Let's see what happens next week.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3266133/All-FORTY-TW...
(kind of amusing that the number is 42)
Related conclusion is that crowdsourcing decisions works when a few conditions are met (all related to decentralized information). More here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Four_elem...