An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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OBSESSION
Researcher Clark Derry-Williams at the Sightline Institute has a self-confessed obsession: traffic trends – and why per capita car traffic volumes are falling. As they are in Vancouver – and now, as evidence shows, they are in Seattle too.
Most of that decline took place during 2008, when gas prices spiked and the economy tanked. But even as gas prices plummeted and Seattle’s economy picked itself up a bit, driving ticked upwards only a hair.
The total traffic volumes tell a similar story — rapid decline during 2008, and ending 2010 only a wee bit below where they stood at the end of 2005.
Clark has done a great series on this subject – Dude, Where Are My Cars – and for good reason:
… so many of the Northwest’s highway projects are being touted as the solution to our ever-worsening traffic woes. If we don’t build new roads, we’re told, the traffic models predict that we’ll be mired in gridlock.
But the gridlock isn’t actually a prediction. It’s more of an assumption, built into the structure of the models themselves: the models take it as a given that as the region grows and becomes more prosperous, people will drive more. That’s what they did last century, right? But over the last decade, we’ve seen a very different — and very surprising — pattern: in case after case after case, traffic volumes are flattening out. They’re growing slower than the models predicted — or they aren’t growing at all.
All of which raises the question: should we really be spending so much money expanding our road network if the demand isn’t actually there anymore? Couldn’t we be doing something a little smarter with our limited dollars?
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