Province columnist Keith Morgan proves Upton Sinclair right again. For those working in a medium dependent on auto advertising, it’s hard to understand something when your salary depends on not understanding it.
Upside of adding new asphalt to landscapeFriday, November 14, 2008
The anti-road lobby mantra for years has been that you cannot build your way out of congestion. …Well, the venerable Royal automobile Club Foundation has published what it describes a “myth busting” paper “that reveals the truth behind the most prolific myths” about roads and road building. It’s called Misconceptions and Exaggerations about Roads and Road Building in Great Britain and is authored by David Bayliss, OBE. …Bayliss asserts that: “New road capacity does not simply fill up with traffic but … will generally reduce congestion and travel costs. Some new traffic may result, but this is not necessarily negative, as users will benefit from easier access and journeys. Adding new roads will not lead to extra traffic generation if the right land use policies and pricing regimes [tolls] are in place.” …
There’s lots more, and you can find it here.
While it’s important to have debates with a healthy exchange of facts and viewpoints, I don’t think it makes much difference to Motordom. (That’s the name the industries promoting vehicle use and road building called themselves in the 1920s, according to Peter Norton in “Fighting Traffic” – a great read.)
So I try to cut to the essential point.
Name me a place has succeeded in addressing traffic congestion effectively by building more roads that we’d like to be more like.
Just one.
And no qualifiers, please. “Adding new roads will not lead to extra traffic generation if the right land use policies and pricing regimes [tolls] are in place.” …” Look, Motordom never brings “the right land use policies” to the table. Not their jurisdiction.
No, I want just one good example of the model urban region – an actual place – that Motordom would like us to be.
And really, if there’s not even one, shouldn’t they at least acknowledge that?
What is really sad is that David Bayliss, the author of the original report used to be the head of the Transportation bit of the old Greater London Council’s Department of Planning and Transportation – and thus one of my boss’s bosses.
It was he who was responsible for introducing SCOOT – a computer driven traffic light control system – to Central London. This made the management of traffic much better – and traffic speeds increased, to much self congratulation. Until it became apparent that it was also drawing more traffic into the area, and speeds fell back. To around 10 mph, which seems to be a sort of equilibrium in most cities. Except that when anything happened – say a lorry shedding its load – the resulting congestion was much, much worse.
He was also the man who decided to close the Albert Bridge – mainly due to concerns about its structural ability to bear ever heavier lorries – and the traffic in that part of London suddenly got much better. That experience was the stimulus of a meta study of road closures around the world – all of which had similar positive results. It was conducted by MVA for London Transport who published it in the early 1990s.
So in fact the theory is now well established and is quite symmetrical. Traffic expands to fill the space available – and contracts when space is reduced. And is more than adequately observed in practice and very well documented. The only difference is in English it is referred to as “traffic generation”, in North American it is called “induced traffic”.
“Name me a place has succeeded in addressing traffic congestion effectively by building more roads that we’d like to be more like.
Just one.”
This too is just a mantra, a slogan, as Morgan suggested. I am reminded of the time a very senior City of Vancouver engineering official repeated for me the 90s Kevin Costner slogan, “if you build it they will come”. I tried to point out to him that this was just a throwaway line from an entertainment flic, but he didn’t care.
Mr Price, … can you name a place has succeeded in addressing all its housing issues effectively by building subsidized social housing that we’d like to be more like.
Just one.
And if you cannot name one, will you please fall to your knees and admit that the Fraser Inst is totally correct in opposing all subsidized social housing projects? No?!?! Really?
BTW, … I noticed your own bit of hedging in the addition of the subphrase “that we’d like to be more like”. I guess that’s a sort of reserve clause that will allow you to repudiate any examples brought forward by stating that these places are somehow socially or aesthetically undesirable, IOWs, the LA smear one more time.
I order to find a place that has “succeeded” you’d have to find a place that ceases to continue growing immediately upon completion of the road building project. It’s really a question of trying to catch moving goalposts.
Essentially, what you’re asking is – name a place where one expansion project has resulted in a permanent solution despite continued growth in population.
The transit analogy would be: Why should we buy more subways cars and expand capacity when we know full well that they’ll get crowded again in the future – so that won’t solve congestion on the subways, will it?!?!
Ron – you’ve got it in your statement “a place that ceases to continue growing immediately upon completion of the road building project.”
I’m thinking that Phoenix might fit the description. The economic downturn and housing crisis has stopped growth. So all the new highways are probably not that congested.
Actually, one could argue (as Richard Florida has) that right now the entire suburban-freeway-oriented-consumer-fordist-lifestyle is collapsing in on itself. So, many American cities may find that freeways are less crowded going forward.
That said, I’m not sure we want to see an entire collapse of the metro Vancouver economy in order to stop new roads from becoming clogged.
Interesting.
I suppose any “infrastructure facility” that is “overbuilt” would also fit the bill, with respect to that facility.
I’m saying that as I look out my office window down to the Granville Street Bridge in downtown Vancouver – which was built to meet up with an unbuilt crosstown expressway along Broadway. In that respect, the 8-lane Granville Bridge (built to expand upon a narrower 4-lane 1909 structure) has never reached its design capacity. I suppose that could be considered a “successful” project.
“Mr Price, … can you name a place has succeeded in addressing all its housing issues effectively by building subsidized social housing that we’d like to be more like.
Just one.”
Well, actually the free market haven of Hong Kong has one of the largest housing authorities that I have seen (http://www.housingauthority.gov.hk/en).
From the 1950s to the 70s, many refugees and immigrants descended upon the then-British colony. Many people lived in shantytowns of some sort. A large program to house all these new citizens was developed
The initial buildings were hardly anything to write home about, but Hong Kong did create large amounts of subsidized public housing so that families could have a roof over their heads.
Not to say that the program is not without its problems. In the late 80s, I still saw a lot of homeless in Hong Kong, and now there are fewer. However, I cannot attribute that to the social housing. There could be other factors. All the same, Hong Kong certainly did provide a form of social housing that gave dignity and hope to many in the former colony.
Now, do we want to be more like Hong Kong? Probably not. However, we can definitely take the good from other places and adapt them to Vancouver.
I have to support what “metrobabel” says. I agree with her/him. I have just returned to B.C. from Hong Kong after 7 years, and I am shocked by the vagrancy and homelessness that I see in Vancouver but rarely saw in Hong Kong. Don’t even get me started on Singapore….
Hong Kong does a great deal of road pricing that I think should and could be adopted in GVRD.
Also, as an aside, how about changing Canadian tax rules so they encourage savings and investment as in Hong Kong rather than consumption as Canadian rules do now?
Ron C., I agree that a metro area whose population and vehicle population growth came to a stop after a round of highways expansion, … or transit expansion, … would provide a good test case.
Using the approach of Anthony Downs, even with a fixed population and car population, you would expect some percentage of the increased road capacity to be taken up, at least during peak periods, by additional traffic coming from other routes or other times of day. And you could measure that quite accurately given that overall population and vehicle growth wasn’t the cause. Some one ought to undertake a case study of that type.
And yes, any public utility, from sewer and water works, to highways and roads, to public transit, to phone and cable systems, and electricity and gas networks, all have capacity and in particular peak capacity problems. But in Vancouver the anti-highways lobby has a special game going that involves unmeetable tests they would never apply to any of these other systems.
If a new highway or freeway or bridge is actually constructed in the GVRD, over their vehement objections, and it remains free-flowing five or ten or fifteen years later, they will say you spent too much money on it, you built excess capacity that wasn’t needed. If on the other hand the new roadway does reach capacity fairly quickly, they’ll say induced demand caused the entire increase in traffic (not real population or economic or labour force growth) and say you shouldn’t have spent anything at all, it’s all just a nasty, vicious cycle.
I sometimes think these people must have a private club somewhere where they can go and laugh themselves sick over the number of people out there who fall for this pre-package “got ’em either way” rhetoric.