“If you have been following debates over new freeways,” notes Peter Ladner in his blog, “you will be familiar with a well-known ‘fact’, most recently repeated by Premier Gordon Campbell and former premier Mike Harcourt: congestion is costing us $1.5 billion a year in the Lower Mainland.”
And so it is in Seattle. Congestion is reported as costing $1.5 billion. And in Denver. And Boston. And Philadeplphia. All of ’em: congestion costs $1.5 billion.
Peter turned to Google:
I searched for “traffic, congestion, costs, $1.5 billion.” I ran into a roadblock of cities. ]
The Xinhua News Agency, in a November, 2006 article, reports that “ the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences says traffic jams cost the southern city up to 12 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) a year….”
It’s everywhere. In a 1998 New York Daily News article, we learn that “extra transportation costs, such as overtime paid to drivers stuck in traffic, costs Brooklyn $1.5 billion a year.”
In Chicago, the good news was that transit saves the region, which, according to the Chicago Transit Authority has the second worst traffic congestion in the U.S. “over $1.5 billion in congestion costs”.
Peter’s conclusion: the number is a hoax. Congestion may cost us, but we don’t really know how much.
Maybe that is just an absolute truth: Just as objects accelerate due to gravity at 9.8 m/s2, so too does congestion cost $1.5 Billion. This is good news as now that we have hit that plateau, we no longer have to reduce congestion – apparently the cost will not keep rising (after all, if it is only costing Chicago $1.5 Billion, and we have a long way to go before our congestion equals theirs…. QED)
That’s…creepy.
What an interesting factoid. And seriously, since virtually every city has a “congestion crisis,” I wonder if this $1.5 billion number is truly that common? Might be a god project for a class in urban planning: get the commonly bandied-about number for the cost of congestion in the world’s 200 leading cities and try to document the procedure by which that number is derived.
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Another way to look at it is that there is an ideal level of congestion and that in all successful cities it “costs $1.5 billion.”
Then let’s look at number for failing cities. What is the cost of congestion in (sorry to pick on it) Detroit? or ABC City? or XYZ City?
Hmmm… presumably the cost of congestion is a combination of time costs and fuel costs (sitting, burning more fossil fuels than one otherwise would). So, when gas prices go up, shouldn’t the cost of congestion? (if one were really calculating it?).
Transport Canada completed a study in 2006 which estimated congestion costs in Vancouver to be in the range of $403 to $629 million. Added up across the nine major cities in Canada the total came to between $2.3 billion and $3.7 billion
More than 90 per cent of this cost represents the value of the time lost to auto travellers (drivers and their passengers) in congestion.
Where the $1.5 billion figure for Vancouver is coming from, I don’t know.
Thanks for finding a more reasonable figure, Rod.
You can certainly argue about causes, costs, and solutions, but it’s really hard to look at a street backed up wall-to-wall with cars during rush hour, all moving at a stop-and-go pace, and think anything but a massive waste of money, brains, and time is happening.
(One way or another, I do what I can to minimize my expenditure of time driving in congestion).
My preferred solutions are congestion charges and other road tolls, but I’ll admit this is cynical, since I don’t work downtown, I don’t drive to work, and I’m comfortable enough to gladly pay extra so my roughly-weekly drives downtown aren’t stop-and-go sufferfests.