Most congested city in the U.S.?
Seattle, apparently. According to global positioning system (GPS) company TomTom of Concord, Mass., the Evergreen City beats out perennial favourite, Los Angeles.
But there’s something more fascinating to note when you check out the complete list of all 30 cities. Portland, OR (the poster child of smart-growth planning, where the bicycle and the Birkenstock achieve iconic status) is ranked next to Houston, TX (fabled for its absence of zoning, its celebration of sprawl and billion-dollar budgets for road expansion). Both have identical rates of road congestion: 23 percent.
And what do we conclude? Um, I’m not entirely sure.
We can conclude that smart growth doesn’t relieve congestion. Indeed, it is not intended to. Congestion is a result of limiting road capacity, just as it is a result of the sprawl caused by un-restrained road construction.
In smart growth communities it is actually a tool that can be used to get people into other modes of transportation.
As my statistics teacher used to say, you make stats say anything you want.
We are missing a lot of data here. Number of cars, size of roads, number of highways, percentage of population with cars, percentage use of transit system…..
I’m sure if you add Vancouver into the mix it would fall somewhere into the mix because we have no large highways….which certainly don’t always help, but they can temporarily relieve congestion.
More data, stronger conclusions.
We can conclude that smart growth doesn’t relieve congestion.
i basically agree with that.
Congestion is a result of limiting road capacity
adding that this is limited road capacity during one or more peak periods per day.
we need congestion pricing for roads, transit, etc. — every mode, that is, except for the human-powered modes, which don’t really seem to congest that easily.
One thing we can conclude is that congestion, in and of itself, bears almost no relationship to health outcomes. In which city do you think people are healthier and live longer – Portland or Houston?
Why is congestion used as a measure?
I view congestion as an indication of the inability of infrastructure to provide an easy (undelayed) means of travel.
The fact that both Portland and Houston are ranked roughly the same means that they are each addressing the need for infrastructure to speed travellers on their way to the same degree. Houston may have more freeways than Portland – not really sure (downtown Portland IS ringed by two Interstate freeways and Houston DOES have its own new-ish snazzy light rail system).
The rankings on the list at No. 18 and No. 19 out of 30 for Portland and Houston respectively show that they are both middle of the pack.
I would have thought that you would have zeroed in on another Texas city – Dallas – having less congestion that either Portland of Houston – 20%, No. 28 out of 30 on the list. (Note that Dallas also has an LRT as well).
Minneapolis/St. Paul has the least congestion out of the 30 cities – 17%. Does that make it the best city?
It really is information starved for context, as Mike said. It doesn’t tell us a whole lot. It doesn’t tell us how many trips are made, for instance, which is a huge thing, or total road capacity – nothing really to compare it to. Otherwise, it might be interesting.
But on another note, Seattle winning gold here doesn’t surprise me much.
And regardless of where you are on the list, I bet congestion still costs them $1.5 billion.
Houston is basically a prairie city, with no major geographic obstacles to movement or constuction in any direction.
Seattle, like Vancouver, has more mountainous terrain, an oceanside location, and other waterbodies that need to be crossed.
I was amused by the repitition of the line from Transport 2021/LRSP that Vancouver will show the world how to use congestion to get people out of their cars. Vancouver will also talk about road pricing, … pricing the freeway system it refuses to build and objects violenty if anyone else does.
The truth is that if Translink actually proposes to DO any of these things all the favoured, closer-in munipcalities, where the most affluent chose to live (Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and the North Shore) immediately go into an explosive rage, contact their people in Victoria and Ottawa, and that’s the end of it.