The U.S. is choking on its traffic and it's going to get worse (fwd)

[jbs]

Some interesting commentary on commuting via auto vs. transit in the US - by Tom Ruben

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From: "transport policy" <transpor...@yahoogroups.com>
To: "transport policy" <transpor...@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 2:08:02 PM
Subject: RE: [transport-policy] The U.S. is choking on its traffic and it's going to get worse

 

TAR:  While the delays are important, what is far more important is the actual travel time.  For most, the most important purpose of travel is home-to-work commute,
which is why the Census Bureau/American Community Survey reports this.

 
… and, what you see very consistently, in every urbanized area, is that the home-to-work commute via transit is just under twice as long as drive alone.  I don’t
have the very latest data, but, for 2008, it was 24.5 minutes by auto and 48.3 minutes by transit.

 
OK, that’s a difference of 23.8 minutes, per one-way trip.

 
So, if we do the calculation the usual (and incorrect) way of assuming 52 weeks a year, five days a week, two-way, that’s 23.8 x 2 x 5 x 52 = 12,376 minutes, which
is >206 hours/year.

 

So, if you take transit, on average, your commute takes 206 hours longer per year.

 

Now, keep in mind that the delay per driver IS included in the drive travel time.

 

… which is one of the two big reasons why a lot more people drive to work than take transit.

 

The other big reason is that the vast majority of jobs are just not accessible by transit in anything approaching an acceptable travel time.  The Brookings study of
a few years back – which, believe it or not, was actually intended to show why transit had to be greatly expanded – reported:
 

“About one-quarter of jobs in low- and middle-skill industries are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to
one-third of jobs in high-skill industries. This reflects the higher concentration of high-skill jobs in cities, which are uniformly better served by transit. It
also points to potentially large accessibility problems for workers in growing low-income suburban communities, who on average can access only about 22 percent of
metropolitan jobs in low- and middle-skill industries for which they may be most qualified.”

 
So, we’re clear, that’s 90 minutes EACH WAY – a three-hour daily there-and-back commute, which works for 30% of jobs.

 
Tom Rubin

From: transpor...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:transpor...@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:06 PM
To: transpor...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [transport-policy] The U.S. is choking on its traffic and it's going to get worse

 

 

Meanwhile, in the UK and Europe, you know, those “smart-growther” paradises of mass transit investment and punitive dissuasions to automobile use:

 

http://inrix.com/press/scorecard-report-united-kingdom/

 

Delay per driver per year –

Washington 82 hours

Los Angeles 80 hours

San Francisco 78 hours

New York 74 hours

San Jose 67 hours

 

Compared to:

 

London 96 hours

Brussels 74 hours

Cologne 65 hours

Antwerp 64 hours

Stuttgart 64 hours

 

 

It would be interesting to know more about the scores of the US cities that are medium and small in population – the Washington Post Report below suggests delays of
around 42 hours for mid-size cities and 30 for smaller ones.

 

The fact that Europe has so many mid-size and smaller cities with dire congestion delays, raises the question how appropriate their policy approaches are. Wellington
NZ, where I live, is not covered by INRIX but going by TomTom, it is worse than anything of any size in the US or Europe, in spite of being 350,000 in population!
But it achieves a outlier-high CBD employment share and mode share for commuter rail into the CBD.

 

I suggest there is an iron law, though, that the losses to the economy in congestion have to be worse than the “gains” in the transit mode share that result.

 

The European result that interests me, is that Paris apparently fell from 55 hours in 2013, to 45 hours in 2014. Any suggestions how? Of course Paris has for a long
time had a great ring-road system, as well as “good mass transit”. But what happened last year??

 

Phil Hayward

NZ

 

 

 

 

From: transpor...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:transpor...@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Thursday, 27 August 2015 2:18 a.m.
To: 'Transport-Policy Group'; American Dream Group (Preservingthe...@yahoogroups.com)
Subject: [transport-policy] The U.S. is choking on its traffic and it’s going t o get worse

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/the-us-is-choking-on-its-traffic/2015/08/25/17fe4e7a-4b35-11e5-902f-39e9219e574b_story.html

 

Transportation

The U.S. is choking on its traffic and it’s going to get worse

By Ashley Halsey III August 26 at 12:01 AM

 

The United States is choking on its traffic, with the average driver losing 42 hours a year in the bumper-to-bumper grind and a drain on the economy costing
$160 billion, according to a new report.

The report to be released Wednesday shows that traffic delays in most parts of the country have bounced back to pre-recession levels. That undermines the hope that
three trends — telecommuting, the movement of people back to cities and a decline in millennials seeking driver’s licenses — might provide an antidote to congestion.

And with the U.S. population projected to grow by 70  million in the next three decades, there is little chance that the transportation network can keep pace with
that growth or alleviate the current crush. In other words, it’s going to get worse.

“If you look at corridors like the Capital Beltway, it’s going to be hard to figure out how you scale up to make it accommodate another million people, 20 or
25 percent more travel demand,” said Tim Lomax, co-author of a joint report by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and the traffic monitoring firm Inrix. “We need
to figure out how to use our existing capacity smarter.”

The report arrives five days after the U.S. Transportation Department said that Americans drove a record 1.54 trillion miles in the first half of this year, topping
the 1.5 trillion miles driven in 2007.

On the United States’ 10 most-congested highways — six are in Los Angeles, and Chicago and New York have two each — drivers sacrifice an annual average of 84 hours
caught in gridlock, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute-Inrix report says.

When calculated by urban region, Washington ranks worst, with 82 hours of delay per driver. Los Angeles, with drivers delayed 80 hours per year; San Francisco (78);
New York (74); and San Jose (67) fill out the top five.

But congestion is no longer a distinctly urban phenomenon. The report said that drivers in midsize cities were delayed in traffic only slightly less than the 42-hour
national average, and small-city backups cos t drivers in those areas 30 hours a year.

Total the numbers and, the report says, Americans spend 6.9 billion hours battling traffic and burn 3.1 billion gallons of fuel while nudging inch by inch down the
roadway.

 

It’s also more than rush-hour headaches for workaday commuters. When considering the vagaries of traffic — bad weather, collisions and construction zones — for a
trip at any time of day, drivers need to allot an average of 48 minutes for a trip that would take 20 minutes in light traffic.

 

“One of the strategies we point to is, have some realistic expectations,” Lomax said. “If y ou live in Washington, D.C., for example, and you don’t think you’re
going to encounter traffic congestion on the way to work, you must work the night shift.”

 

Although he said it was too early to say whether the millennial generation will rethink its dedication to the urban lifestyle, Lomax says there are inklings.

 

“Some of what we may be seeing as the economy recovers is that many of these millennials aren’t so different from their parents,” he said. “They have an economic
reason to not buy a car and live relatively close to where they work. When those hard times start to go away, the behavior begins to look a whole lot more like
everybody else.”

 

Lomax sees another congestion challenge in the creation of planned satellite urban hubs around big cities.

 

“You see the jobs sort of chasing the workers out into the suburbs,” he said, citing the development of Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia. “The people who developed
Tysons thought, ‘Oh, well, let’s move out to where the houses are.’ Now you see people commuting really long distances into Tysons Corner. The houses just went
farther out” into suburbia.

 

In addition to losing 82 hours a year to traffic con gestion, drivers in the Washington region burn more than 88 million gallons of fuel stuck in traffic. For a
must-make-it appointment, the region’s drivers need to allow 35 minutes for a trip that would take 10 minutes if there are no backups.

 

“Some of this is individuals taking some responsibility for knowing their options and figuring out how to plan around stuff,” Lomax said, “and their employers
offering options that still work for the business but make that commuting experience less onerous for their employees.”

 

That balm for the irritation of traffic will come from technology, he said.

  ;

“The ability of the car to sense that it’s going to hit the car in front of it,” he said. “That kind of technology can help the Capital Beltway handle more cars.”

 

But it’s greater integration of traffic-monitoring apps into vehicles that will take the next leap forward.

 

“You can also take that same kind of information stream and turn it into something that helps people understand that there’s a crash six miles up ahead, here are the
options,” he said. “Maybe that helps you to understand that transit is a better option, rather than have the car shove you toward the Beltway on a big accident day.”

 

He foresees a day when information about the daily commute will feed into a home computer calendar a few minutes before the alarm clock rings.

 

“Say you’re commuting in from Manassas: Your computer looks at your calendar, sees that it’s a regular commute day and that the weather’s going to be terrible so
traffic is going to be bad, and there’s already been a big crash on I-66,” he said. “So, your computer goes out and finds the VRE train schedule and the bus
schedule, and here’s the Metrorail schedule and where it drops you off. So, at 5:45, you’re shaved and showered and your computer presents you with y our travel
options for  today.”

 

washingtonpost.com

© 1996-2015 The Washington Post

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Posted by: "Thomas A. Rubin" <tar...@earthlink.net>

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[Jerry Roane]

Jerry

Here is my spin on the data presented:

"24.5 minutes by auto and 48.3 minutes by transit."

24,5 commute by traditional ground-bound car

48.3 minutes by transit only in cities where they have transit

6.7 minutes by TriTrack

From the piece: "that’s 23.8 x 2 x 5 x 52 = 12,376 minutes, which is >206 hours/year."  --- car Vs transit

                                   17.8 x 2 x 5 x 52 = 9,256 minutes, which is >154 hours/year     --- TriTrack Vs car

to complete the matrix add those two results so transit Vs TriTrack ==> 360 hours/year

Using the same argument it seems the ground-bound car is junk too.  "Transit" is just crazy talk.

Transit costs far more than Uber in ground-bound cars so transit costs more takes longer and thus should already be retired.  Transit has so much tare weight that it polluted far more than can be justified.  When an electric train is running empty about 10:15 in the morning it is polluting like it has 1000 passengers on board when it has none.  It is the ineffective use of transit on fixed routes that destroys any hope of them being competitive in this century.  On-demand might allow transit to justify some amount of longer use but that advance which they are not prepared or equipped to make will only delay the inevitable.  It is time for the world to move on on transit.  To get our money back we could sell the buses to the third world but then they don't need that pollution and poor service and higher cost.  It would be mean to sell those buses and trains to the third world.  Best to recycle that massive amount of steel and cheap vinyl and lower the world steel price for several years.      

He is right that you cannot ignore the baseline when looking at mobility rationally.  Absolutes avoid the percentage games statisticians use to lie about the data.

Jerry Roane 

[Walt]

These numbers are borne out in the San Diego Regional plans back to ~1997 I am familiar with.

But in each case the funding is a mismatch as approved by the 19 Directors of the Association of Governments;  SANDAG.

The $40 Billion question is how to make the Directors follow the facts. Until recently when mass transit share was increased, analyses aside, funding followed a political smoke-filled room to attract votes, even allocations would go o to mass transit, local streets, and highways. Mass transit in the current plan is ~45%. New draft being circulated, the share of capital goes to ~50%. That's the $40 billion.

Apprroval for the current Plan was 17 for; 2 against. One of the 2 against wanted more for mass transsit.

When 6  or so years ago superior energy and emissions by cars was evident, emphasis shifted to access. By a massive network id LRT and buses, low income 30 minute commute share increase for 5% to 25%. But autos are still 3 times better.

That is where Uber and PRT can pick up the marbles.

Don't they deserve the same subsidies as mass transit?

Lot's of luck making that happen.

Walt Brewer

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