5 ms·

Tackling congestion as an economic, not engineering, problem

29 points by nkurz 11y ago

Simulacra 11y ago
For a brief moment there I thought this was going to say "make the poor walk. "
- wnoise 11y ago
  It's more "make the poor use public transportation."
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Depending on how crappy public transport is, GP might be right. Not everyone can thrive on a bicycle.
  - ItsDeathball 11y ago
    In many cases we already do that. In the economic analysis of the author, poor people's time would be worth less. All other things being equal, then, they would be best served economically by the slow-moving local buses that otherwise lose out in an assumption of a time value of $20 per hour. FWIW, simval advocates expanding rapid transit so that the marginal cost in time and money is favorable to all economic classes.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    The poor already use public transportation. The ones clogging up the highways are the middle class.
    - wnoise 11y ago
      To the rich, the middle class is poor; they just haven't finished making them quite as destitute yet.
hiram112 11y ago
10 years ago I never paid a toll except when travelling interstate over long distances. Voyaging through the DC-NY Megalopolis would cost about $15. It now costs about $70. What's worse, most intra-city travel is or will eventually be pay-per-use. This is already happening in DC and other large US cities, as major throughways are first converted to HOA lanes (2 or three users/auto), and then fully transitioned to completely tolled. Pay up or sit in traffic. For example, within about a 15 mile radius of DC's Beltway, I get charged about $35 / week for my basic commute and one or two trips into the District. This is using only about 8 gallons of gas. Coworkers that must take certain costly routes (on privatized tolls no less) pay easily triple that. Essentially, this is just another 'tax' or wealth transfer between young and old, IMO, that governments have added to cover up the collapsing local financial pyramids.
- jdc 11y ago
  > collapsing local financial pyramids I don't know what you mean here. Would you unpack this for me?
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I'm going to take a shot at what hiram112 meant. Lots of things that should've been paid for (pensions, infrastructure) haven't been, because taxes have been too low or the money has been spent elsewhere. The chickens are coming home to roost, as it were, and now the money has to be found. For example, Illinois is broke. Really broke. They don't pay lottery winners over a certain amount now because they're not permitted to without a ratified budget [1]. Yet, they still take lottery ticket revenue in. Pensions are so underfunded, Chicago is looking at raising hundreds of millions of dollars through property taxes [2]. Boomers (in general) enjoyed prosperity by kicking the can, and now younger generations are being expected to pay for it. Sidenote: A separate issue is that automobile owners pay nowhere near what it costs to maintain local and state road infrastructure [3]. Taxes must go up for those users, or people need to move to dense urban areas where public/mass transit can provide for their mobility needs. Iowa is going as far as to letting roads go fallow [4]. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-receive-iou-amid-lack-of-budget.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-rece... [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-property-tax-hike-met-0903-20150902-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-em... [3] http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker [4] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-admission-we-need-fewer-roads/398021/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-adm...
Mz 11y ago
I rather like this line of thought: On a tangent, many cities currently limit population and job densities in areas to keep vehicle traffic at a manageable levels. Except that is based on the supposition that, no matter what. people are going to travel by cars, or maybe that being able to own a car and to use it is a basic right. In fact, people have different ways of getting around, and those without cars are even forced to find other ways of getting around. So if you want to limit vehicle trips to avoid congesting the road network, instead of restricting population/job density, why not restrict vehicle density by restricting the number of parking spots available? That way, you can restrict vehicle trips without actually restricting development unduly. At one time, I was pursuing an Environmental Resource Management degree with intent to later get a Master's in Urban Planning. I gave up my car some years ago. I think we do need to start questioning our autocentric assumptions in the U.S. in order to make other options more viable for people who don't want to be joined at the hip to car culture.
- hugh4 11y ago
  How about instead we start to question our city-centric culture? It's no problem getting around by car in a town of ten thousand, or even sixty thousand. But in a city of six million, transport is inevitably going to be a huge issue. There's no really good reason, especially in the internet age, why we should be trying to cram into ever-larger cities rather than trying to spread people out a bit more into medium-sized cities which don't suffer from so many problems.
  - simval 11y ago
    In a city of ten thousand, there is no reason why 20 to 40% of trips shouldn't be done on foot or on a bike. A bus network can easily provide mobility in a city of 50 to 100 thousand. In Sweden, some mid-sized cities have lower car use per capita than Stockholm, the capital. Anyway, I think you've got it all wrong. There's no good reason NOT to cram into large cities. In the past, people had one job and they did it till the day they died. Most small towns of the size you describe were built around one employer. In the modern economy, having one job only during one's life is next to unheard of, at least, in the private sector. What replaces job security is the ability to find another employer in close proximity, so you don't need to uproot yourself and your family when you change job. It also means that you can have a few big companies working the same sector, then have a lot of small companies specializing in providing professional services for these big companies, which creates a very dynamic industry where the contractors acquire expertise working with the big companies and can share that expertise with startups and smaller companies. That's why Silicon Valley exists and why even IT companies, the most liable to transfer to telecommuting, tend to gather around a few hubs rather than spreading far apart. Telecommuting is also not applicable for a lot of industries, even when it is, being physically present in one office can be quite beneficial for expertise sharing through casual contacts rather than relying on formal internet communication.
lkfewnf 11y ago
In what way is rationing transportation a valid way to solve congestion problems? Here in the Seattle area they're converting lanes on already heavily congested roads like I-405 into toll lanes with a maximum fee of over ten dollars a trip, effectively reducing it from three lanes each way to two lanes each way. Traffic has only become more congested since then.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  What about the traffic in the toll lanes? Surely the traffic is much better there. In Southern California, a similar thing happened to CA-91. Immediately after construction, traffic in the toll lanes moved at the speed limit or faster, while traffic in the non-toll lanes appears stopped during the heaviest commute periods. It seems like requiring an economic solution almost guarantees congestion problems (and is perhaps, arguably, the point -- to extract a toll (ie. easy profit) from a carefully designed scarcity). Why not try solutions that directly address the causes of the congestion (lots of vehicles trying to move through the same small area at the same time)?
0xcde4c3db 11y ago
I don't think this post accurately represents traffic engineering or the nature of congestion. As far as I know, traffic engineers have been doing sophisticated dynamic simulations for decades. Likewise congestion is naturally more likely when a road is heavily utilized, but it's primarily a coordination problem rather than a capacity problem (cf. ALOHA vs. slotted ALOHA).
- simval 11y ago
  I'm the author of that piece. Just pointing out that I am a traffic engineer, I have seen, analyzed and criticized traffic studies. Believe me, your faith in traffic engineering is quite misplaced. Most cities do not have the resources to do complex dynamic simulations. In Québec, the Transport Ministry has a model (EMME) supposed to take into account trip choices and modal choices, but I haven't heard any confirmation of its prediction capabilities. The big issue with such simulations is the amount of input data you would need to adequately model reality. A metropolitan area has hundreds of thousands of workers, or even millions, to have a reliable model, you would need to know where everyone lives, where they work, what is their work schedule, their income level, etc... Obviously, collecting that data is essentially impossible, after you add up the uncertainty of the inputs, you often realize that the uncertainty makes the results completely unreliable, almost no better than an educated guess.
  - 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
    Fair enough. My thinking was that you'd use probabilistic methods and run many trials to see where the failures are, but I guess that's likely to fail if the real-world patterns are too cross-correlated, which they undoubtedly are (rush hour, etc.).

29 points by nkurz 11y ago

Simulacra 11y ago

For a brief moment there I thought this was going to say "make the poor walk. "

wnoise 11y ago
It's more "make the poor use public transportation."
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Depending on how crappy public transport is, GP might be right. Not everyone can thrive on a bicycle.
- ItsDeathball 11y ago
  In many cases we already do that. In the economic analysis of the author, poor people's time would be worth less. All other things being equal, then, they would be best served economically by the slow-moving local buses that otherwise lose out in an assumption of a time value of $20 per hour. FWIW, simval advocates expanding rapid transit so that the marginal cost in time and money is favorable to all economic classes.
- imgabe 11y ago
  The poor already use public transportation. The ones clogging up the highways are the middle class.
  - wnoise 11y ago
    To the rich, the middle class is poor; they just haven't finished making them quite as destitute yet.

hiram112 11y ago

10 years ago I never paid a toll except when travelling interstate over long distances. Voyaging through the DC-NY Megalopolis would cost about $15. It now costs about $70. What's worse, most intra-city travel is or will eventually be pay-per-use. This is already happening in DC and other large US cities, as major throughways are first converted to HOA lanes (2 or three users/auto), and then fully transitioned to completely tolled. Pay up or sit in traffic. For example, within about a 15 mile radius of DC's Beltway, I get charged about $35 / week for my basic commute and one or two trips into the District. This is using only about 8 gallons of gas. Coworkers that must take certain costly routes (on privatized tolls no less) pay easily triple that. Essentially, this is just another 'tax' or wealth transfer between young and old, IMO, that governments have added to cover up the collapsing local financial pyramids.

jdc 11y ago
> collapsing local financial pyramids I don't know what you mean here. Would you unpack this for me?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I'm going to take a shot at what hiram112 meant. Lots of things that should've been paid for (pensions, infrastructure) haven't been, because taxes have been too low or the money has been spent elsewhere. The chickens are coming home to roost, as it were, and now the money has to be found. For example, Illinois is broke. Really broke. They don't pay lottery winners over a certain amount now because they're not permitted to without a ratified budget [1]. Yet, they still take lottery ticket revenue in. Pensions are so underfunded, Chicago is looking at raising hundreds of millions of dollars through property taxes [2]. Boomers (in general) enjoyed prosperity by kicking the can, and now younger generations are being expected to pay for it. Sidenote: A separate issue is that automobile owners pay nowhere near what it costs to maintain local and state road infrastructure [3]. Taxes must go up for those users, or people need to move to dense urban areas where public/mass transit can provide for their mobility needs. Iowa is going as far as to letting roads go fallow [4]. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-receive-iou-amid-lack-of-budget.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-rece... [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-property-tax-hike-met-0903-20150902-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-em... [3] http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker [4] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-admission-we-need-fewer-roads/398021/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-adm...

Mz 11y ago

I rather like this line of thought: On a tangent, many cities currently limit population and job densities in areas to keep vehicle traffic at a manageable levels. Except that is based on the supposition that, no matter what. people are going to travel by cars, or maybe that being able to own a car and to use it is a basic right. In fact, people have different ways of getting around, and those without cars are even forced to find other ways of getting around. So if you want to limit vehicle trips to avoid congesting the road network, instead of restricting population/job density, why not restrict vehicle density by restricting the number of parking spots available? That way, you can restrict vehicle trips without actually restricting development unduly. At one time, I was pursuing an Environmental Resource Management degree with intent to later get a Master's in Urban Planning. I gave up my car some years ago. I think we do need to start questioning our autocentric assumptions in the U.S. in order to make other options more viable for people who don't want to be joined at the hip to car culture.

hugh4 11y ago
How about instead we start to question our city-centric culture? It's no problem getting around by car in a town of ten thousand, or even sixty thousand. But in a city of six million, transport is inevitably going to be a huge issue. There's no really good reason, especially in the internet age, why we should be trying to cram into ever-larger cities rather than trying to spread people out a bit more into medium-sized cities which don't suffer from so many problems.
- simval 11y ago
  In a city of ten thousand, there is no reason why 20 to 40% of trips shouldn't be done on foot or on a bike. A bus network can easily provide mobility in a city of 50 to 100 thousand. In Sweden, some mid-sized cities have lower car use per capita than Stockholm, the capital. Anyway, I think you've got it all wrong. There's no good reason NOT to cram into large cities. In the past, people had one job and they did it till the day they died. Most small towns of the size you describe were built around one employer. In the modern economy, having one job only during one's life is next to unheard of, at least, in the private sector. What replaces job security is the ability to find another employer in close proximity, so you don't need to uproot yourself and your family when you change job. It also means that you can have a few big companies working the same sector, then have a lot of small companies specializing in providing professional services for these big companies, which creates a very dynamic industry where the contractors acquire expertise working with the big companies and can share that expertise with startups and smaller companies. That's why Silicon Valley exists and why even IT companies, the most liable to transfer to telecommuting, tend to gather around a few hubs rather than spreading far apart. Telecommuting is also not applicable for a lot of industries, even when it is, being physically present in one office can be quite beneficial for expertise sharing through casual contacts rather than relying on formal internet communication.

lkfewnf 11y ago

In what way is rationing transportation a valid way to solve congestion problems? Here in the Seattle area they're converting lanes on already heavily congested roads like I-405 into toll lanes with a maximum fee of over ten dollars a trip, effectively reducing it from three lanes each way to two lanes each way. Traffic has only become more congested since then.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
What about the traffic in the toll lanes? Surely the traffic is much better there. In Southern California, a similar thing happened to CA-91. Immediately after construction, traffic in the toll lanes moved at the speed limit or faster, while traffic in the non-toll lanes appears stopped during the heaviest commute periods. It seems like requiring an economic solution almost guarantees congestion problems (and is perhaps, arguably, the point -- to extract a toll (ie. easy profit) from a carefully designed scarcity). Why not try solutions that directly address the causes of the congestion (lots of vehicles trying to move through the same small area at the same time)?

0xcde4c3db 11y ago

I don't think this post accurately represents traffic engineering or the nature of congestion. As far as I know, traffic engineers have been doing sophisticated dynamic simulations for decades. Likewise congestion is naturally more likely when a road is heavily utilized, but it's primarily a coordination problem rather than a capacity problem (cf. ALOHA vs. slotted ALOHA).

simval 11y ago
I'm the author of that piece. Just pointing out that I am a traffic engineer, I have seen, analyzed and criticized traffic studies. Believe me, your faith in traffic engineering is quite misplaced. Most cities do not have the resources to do complex dynamic simulations. In Québec, the Transport Ministry has a model (EMME) supposed to take into account trip choices and modal choices, but I haven't heard any confirmation of its prediction capabilities. The big issue with such simulations is the amount of input data you would need to adequately model reality. A metropolitan area has hundreds of thousands of workers, or even millions, to have a reliable model, you would need to know where everyone lives, where they work, what is their work schedule, their income level, etc... Obviously, collecting that data is essentially impossible, after you add up the uncertainty of the inputs, you often realize that the uncertainty makes the results completely unreliable, almost no better than an educated guess.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
  Fair enough. My thinking was that you'd use probabilistic methods and run many trials to see where the failures are, but I guess that's likely to fail if the real-world patterns are too cross-correlated, which they undoubtedly are (rush hour, etc.).