An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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GRADING THE GRADING: LOS EXPLAINED
Michael Alexander writes: “I finally, happily, discovered a clearly written article on Level of Service (LOS) that provides just the right amount of detail for policy-making and advocacy. It’s by Eric Jaffe in Atlantic Cities:
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco’s transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called “level of service,” or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. If the change produces too much congestion, then a great deal of time, money, and additional analysis must go toward the project’s consideration.
The weight of this hidden hand doesn’t fall on San Francisco alone. “Intersection LOS is one of the most widely-used traffic analysis tools in the U.S. and has a profound impact on how street space is allocated in U.S. cities,” writes Jason Henderson, geography professor at San Francisco State University, in the November issue of the Journal of Transport Geography. …
“There was an assumption that there’s always going to be driving everywhere, and it’s always going to increase, and there needs to be a rational decision-making process to decide where limited transportation dollars should go,” says Henderson. “It made sense if you’re just assuming there always is going to be driving and in the future there’s going to be more cars, and another fuel source, and it’s superior to everything else.” (Can’t get a much more precise description of the assumption behind Motordom that that – PT.)
An alternative is proposed.
Now Michael would like “a similarly detailed and clear piece on zoning.” Any suggestions?
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BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Big Roads
At least on the topic of Motordom, The Big Roads, a history of the Interstate freeway system, is a must read. Reviewer Alex Marshall in Governing captures one of its great insights:
The book explains why bureaucracy matters. While Ford and General Motors were getting the headlines in the 1920s, it was local, state and federal officials that were substantially shaping the country’s road network.
One of the best of these public officials was Thomas H. MacDonald, the head of the Bureau of Public Roads — today’s U.S. Department of Transportation — from 1919 to 1953. MacDonald was an engineer and a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. He was modest, self-effacing and amazingly competent.
He let politicians take the credit even while his accurate and comprehensive research led them by the nose to particular conclusions, such as with his agency’s landmark 1939 study discouraging pay-per-use roads. In MacDonald’s opinion, says Swift, free roads “were a birthright akin to free public schooling.”
But what does this have to do with train travel? In the last century, local, state and federal governments not only built roads, they built up departments of transportation to plan, construct and manage those roads. This took a long time, and was more important really than the asphalt and pathways of the roads themselves, because without this policy infrastructure, the physical infrastructure could not have happened
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WHY PEDESTRIAN MALLS FAIL
A lot of them in the States are being torn up and returned to traffic. In this article in Governing, Yonah Freemark describes the condition where they can work:
“I don’t think the idea of separating people from cars in cities is a failed concept,” says Yonah Freemark, who has written extensively about pedestrian malls for various publications. Cities that have growing residential populations in downtown areas as well as hubs of activities can generate the kind of traffic that makes a mall thrive. Cities that lack downtown populations have also found that creating temporary pedestrian places can bring a buzz and excitement that people expect to find when they visit a city. Malls can work, if done the right way, explains Freemark. Just don’t take the cookie-cutter approach to building malls as so many cities have — with disappointing results.
“Cities that are taking out malls now will rethink their decision 30 years from now,” predicts Freemark. “We have to learn that having cars on all streets is not the right idea for cities.”
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Kinda cool that there’s a rail line down the median of the highway on the Big Roads cover.