Can anybody help me by suggesting examples of urban highway projects where the amount of traffic a new road attracts far exceeds the amount predicted by the planners.
What I need are examples that show how a new road, in a heavily trafficked area will not solve congestion problems.
I would recommend the Council for the Protection of Rural England's
"Beyond Transport Infrastructure: Lessons for the future from recent road projects (Newbury Bypass evaluation)
An analysis of the ‘Five-Years After’ Post-Opening Project Evaluation for the A34 Newbury Bypass"
> Can anybody help me by suggesting examples of urban highway projects > where the amount of traffic a new road attracts far exceeds the amount > predicted by the planners.
> What I need are examples that show how a new road, in a heavily > trafficked area will not solve congestion problems.
I guess the answer to that one is to say "all projects"... the typical increase is 100% of previous traffic... We are now developing a document on Travel Demand Management which will have all this information, and is in an almost final state. We should be diffusing the publication around the next month or so. In the meantime, have you tried in VTPI's encyclopedia?
> Can anybody help me by suggesting examples of urban highway projects > where the amount of traffic a new road attracts far exceeds the amount > predicted by the planners.
> What I need are examples that show how a new road, in a heavily > trafficked area will not solve congestion problems.
Randy Ghent wrote a great article on that very subject with plenty of examples in Issue no. 4 entitled " traffic generation and evaporation". You can find it in the back issues section of www.carbusters.org .
I hope this helps!
Chris -- "Oil is a remarkable substance. One gallon of oil contains the equivalent of about 98 tonnes of the original algal matter, distilled over 90 to 150 million years, and which had itself collected enormous amounts of solar energy on the waves of the prehistoric ocean." - Rob Hopkins, Transition Towns founder
Friends of the Earth, Bral vzw, IEB and Greenpeace did an action at the Brussels motorshow on 17/01 to protest against the plans of the 3 regional governments in Belgium to expand the road network. We put up a road construction site in front of the entrance. Fun. Belgium had until recently the densest road network in Europe, but it was overtaken by Malta, so now the governments wants to fight back with a plan to make Belgium THE logistical centre in Europe.
-- Jeroen Verhoeven Car Efficiency Campaign Friends of the Earth Europe T: +32.2542.61.01 skype: jeroen_verhoeven (Brussels) Mobile: +32.477.46.31.81
> Randy Ghent wrote a great article on that very subject with plenty of > examples in Issue no. 4 entitled " traffic generation and > evaporation". You can find it in the back issues section of > www.carbusters.org .
Pippa's example is a good one, and I also agree with the comments made by Carlos.
A useful general reference is the British Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA) report "Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic" (2004). This is credited with triggering the end of the 'predict and provide' road-building policy, and the beginning of 'new realism'. Sorry, I don't have a copy. The lead academic on this issue in the UK is Phil Goodwin: http://www.transport.uwe.ac.uk/staff/phil.asp.
If one wishes to probe further into the reasons we continue to build roads despite everything we now know, one needs to understand some of the perverse economic appraisal tools used by conventional transport planners. So-called time savings (which are nothing of the kind, as people simply travel further within the same time budget) are used to justify the provision of new capacity, assuming free-flow traffic conditions. In Britain, motorists' value of time is typically assigned a larger number than that of pedestrians and cyclists. Add in the revenues from fuel taxation, and you have a system that will almost always favour new road construction or widening. I have a paper "The Myth of Travel Time Savings" if you'd like it off-list.
I have mentioned all of this on-list, as I think a great WCN project would be to develop http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/stats.php by pooling our knowledge to develop an expanded online resource dealing with such matters. For every argument offered by the pro-car lobby (that's a lot of websites to check, and many lengthy arguments in the pub!), we need an instantly available and even better counter-argument drawing on the latest statistics and peer-reviewed research. This would need to be distinct from the VTPI encyclopeadia and similar resources, perhaps through the use of humour (Singer cartoons?) and non-technical language.
Simon.
--- On Sun, 25/1/09, Pippa Gallop <pippa.gal...@bankwatch.org> wrote:
From: Pippa Gallop <pippa.gal...@bankwatch.org>
Subject: [carfree_network] Re: new roads don't solve congestion, examples needed
To: ianfidd...@hotmail.com
Cc: carfree_network@googlegroups.com
Date: Sunday, 25 January, 2009, 11:30 AM
Dear Ian,
I would recommend the Council for the Protection of Rural England's
"Beyond Transport Infrastructure: Lessons for the future from recent road projects (Newbury Bypass evaluation)
An analysis of the ‘Five-Years After’ Post-Opening Project Evaluation for the A34 Newbury Bypass"
> Can anybody help me by suggesting examples of urban highway projects > where the amount of traffic a new road attracts far exceeds the amount > predicted by the planners.
> What I need are examples that show how a new road, in a heavily > trafficked area will not solve congestion problems.
> /Ian
> Skype- ianfiddies
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