An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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MAKING IT UP
This is devastating:
As Clark Williams Derry of the Sightline Institute says:
I wish I were making this up. The Washington State Department of Transportation continues to insist that traffic volumes on the SR-520 bridge across Lake Washington are going up up up—even though actual traffic volumes have been flat or declining for more than a decade!
By 2011, it should have been perfectly obvious that the old predictions were proving inaccurate. Yet WSDOT just kept doubling down on their mistakes—insisting that their vision of the future remained clear, even as their track record was looking worse and worse. …
It would be funny—if the state weren’t planning billions in new highway investments in greater Seattle, based largely on the perceived “need” to accommodate all the new traffic that the models are predicting will show up, any day now.
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VIADUCT UPDATE
City Council dealt with the report on the Dunsmuir and Georgia Viaducts – and approved further study. Some of the media covered the story as though the demolition was imminent (it isn’t), and interviewed drivers who predicted traffic chaos (there won’t be).
Peter Ladner did a good summary of the issue for Seattle’s Crosscut, where the issue of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and replacement with a bored tunnel has been occupying the town for years.
As it turns out, the Law of Disappearing Traffic rules. That “law” states, simply, that when streets are blocked to cars, traffic will find another way. It was proven in Vancouver when the viaducts were closed for 22 days during the Olympics. “Nothing fell apart. There was congestion but the system functioned,” Vancouver city engineer Peter Judd told The Tyee.com. “We always over-estimate the negative impacts and underestimate the resilience and intelligence of our residents.”
The city’s traffic engineer Jerry Dobrovolny is equally confident about removing the viaducts: “We can mitigate traffic,” he says. “There’s no reason they have to stay.”
And he captures my comments accurately:
As former city councilor Gordon Price says, “Every time we reduced traffic in Vancouver, the city got better.” Car traffic in and out of downtown has been steadily decreasing since the mid-1990s, while the number of overall trips is up by 25 percent. People have shifted to walking, transit, and cycling.
“But there’s one big issue,” he cautions. “You’ve got to have some transit to take up the difference if you’re going to take down the full viaduct.”
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THE MARCHETTI WALL
If you’re not familiar with the Marchetti Wall (or Marchetti Constant), here’s a definition from the Transport Newsletter 210:
Marchetti’s Constant is a term for the average amount of time spent travelling each day, which is approximately one and a half hours. Developed by Venetian physicist Cesare Marchetti, it posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant. Even since Neolithic times, people have kept the time at which they travel per day the same, even though the distance may increase.
Peter Newman thinks it’s a crticial concept to understand what’s happening with Peak Car, as he explains in this excerpt from the Transport Newsletter 210:
Robyn Williams: Your paper cites six main reasons that car ownership is going down. What are those?
Peter Newman: Well, we talk about hitting the Marchetti wall, and in many ways that’s the key to it. Marchetti was the first to define that every city has a one-hour travel time budget, and if you can’t get to most destinations in one hour over an average for your travel time for the day, then you either move or you get very angry and the road rage settles into a political movement that defines elections, like has just happened in Sydney. And that has been the limit, because we built cities around the car, which could go quicker and be more flexible, and for a while there we were keeping well within the Marchetti travel time budget, but we have gone over now.
And most cities have hit the wall on freeways. They don’t work any more. They’re absolutely jampacked at peak time, so it really needs a different sort of economic approach. And the reality is, and I have been looking at this in quite a bit of detail through my Infrastructure Australia hat, it costs about $50 million to build a lane of freeway today and pretty much the same to build a rail line, except the rail line will carry 8 to 20 times more people than that road will. So it doesn’t take long to recognise that the cities are going to fill very quickly with cars, and the only way around it is to get public transport going.
So at the same time as this peak car use is happening, we are seeing dramatic increases in public transport. In Melbourne and Perth in the decade ’99 to 2009, 70% increase. In Brisbane, 50%. Sydney had just a few percent because it didn’t build anything new, every other city has been building it. And as soon as you build it, they come, because it’s a better way to get around, it’s quicker, and you are not stuck all day in the traffic.
