Province columnist Jon Ferry does a pretty even-handed job of covering the TomTom report on traffic congestion:
Vancouver may no longer be eligible for inclusion among the world’s top 10 best places to live. But it can claim one distinction: It has the worst traffic congestion in Canada — and the second worst in North America, with only car-mad Los Angeles leaving it in its rear mirror. …
Gordon Price, director of Simon Fraser University’s city program, suggests that the geography of Vancouver may be a factor.
“But then, San Francisco has more or less the same conditions we do.”*
Price said the basic reason why North American cities such as Vancouver have become congested is because people still rely too heavily on cars.
“The thing is, they don’t have a lot of choice,” he added.
Price said the new Port Mann Bridge, which is to open next year, may cut congestion for a while. So may the South Fraser Perimeter Road and other road improvements in the area.
“But it just locks people into car dependence, and overall traffic congestion will just get worse again over time,” he said.
In other words, we may well soon find ourselves playing congestion catch-up again.
* The TomTom Congestion Index compares travel time during non-congested periods (free flow) with travel times in peak hours. The difference is expressed as a percentage increase in travel time, representing the congestion level. The top ten most congested cities, ranked by overall congestion level, between January and March 2012 were:
Los Angeles, 33%
Vancouver, 30%
Miami, 26%
Seattle, 25%
Tampa, 25%
San Francisco, 25%
Washington, 24%
Houston, 23%
Toronto, 22%
Ottawa, 22%
What I found interesting is that San Francisco (the region, I assume) has about the same level of vehicle congestion as Tampa and Houston, suggesting that neither regional transit nor the extent of the freeway system has a significant impact on vehicle congestion.
But that isn’t the whole picture.
TomTom is measuring the impacts of congestion of those in cars with TomTom boxes; it is not a measure of mobility. So it’s not surprising that in Vancouver the car-dependent part of our region, stuck with only one choice, is severely impacted by our geography – notably the river crossings.
I would, however, expect that in the short term, congestion levels will drop, given the dramatic increase in road capacity coming on stream (Gateway, etc.). It had better. Otherwise, what did we spend those billions of dollars for?
The problem, to be clear, will not be more congestion on the Port Mann Bridge. At 10 lanes with tolls, the widest bridge in Canada will be the least of the problem. Indeed, tolls will likely discourage travel across the river, while South of the Fraser residents can take advantage of the newly widened (and free) section of Highway 1 to drive more within and between Delta, Surrey, Langley and parts east.
Given the effective evisceration of TransLink, there will be no new transit sufficient to offset these impacts. The Fraser Valley will be further locked into car dependence. And it will be the local municipalities that will suffer the consequences.
The new interchanges will facilitate the flow of traffic onto 152, 160, 176 and 200 Streets and into the grid of one-mile arterials that will then get overloaded at their intersections, already some of the most dangerous in B.C.
The future will look a lot more like 88th and King George Boulevard. Which is the kind of congestion that TomTom measures.
But that’s a municipal and regional problem; not the provincial Ministry of Transportation’s territory. It will no doubt move on to rebuilding the Massey Tunnel, adding freeway interchanges and widening highways to ‘keep the traffic and our economy moving.’ Because that always works.
The problem is that the data is not “measuring the impacts of congestion of those in cars” it is measuring the impacts of congestion of those in cars that are fitted with TomTom and consented to data collection from it. This skews matters – but we have no dataset that would allow any measurement of the extent of that skew.
As far as I know TomTom is an after market accessory and is probably quite expensive to install and operate in a mode that measures real time congestion – if in fact that is an option. If it just a GIS map – that is used with a source like AM730 to avoid incidents, then it may be very unreliable indeed. Traffic reports that rely on people calling in “Hands Free of course” tend to be a bit off real time.
In any event, much congestion is predictable by time of day and can be avoided by changing departure times. The fact that those people in the traffic do not do that shows that they value their time differently to those who find ways to time shift, route shift, mode switch and so on. Thus congestion has a long term equilibrium – and the only way we have found to change that is road pricing. Tolls and cordon charges are a poor surrogate for prices which vary by time of day/ day of week/ volume of traffic flow.
Stephen raises some good questions about the reliability of TomTom’s data. What I would like to know is why congestion is being ranked solely on the % difference in travel times between free-flow and peak traffic. Do they measure which cities have the longest periods of congestion? Is this relevant? And their metric seems a little strange for evaluating congestion on local roads. “Free flow” on local roads usually means speeding too fast in a neighborhood, so wouldn’t there will be a big difference during the peak traffic periods, when people are driving at sane speeds?
In any case, isn’t it possible for City A to have a better overall flow of traffic than City B, but still have a greater RELATIVE difference between its “free flow” and “peak traffic” periods? I’m a complete neophyte on this stuff, but surely there are more comprehensive ways to measure congestion.
I agree with Gordon that Ferry was rather even-handed in his article – certainly more than he usually is. Much of this comes from quoting Gordon. I’ve found that his columns often lack subtlety when it comes to discussing transportation. His assumptions are usually “bikes and transit are bad for business” and “more roads will solve our problems”. That’s basically the view of the Province newspaper, which is not exactly aimed at the young, transit-friendly urban crowd.
Ah, but he did still conclude “more roads will solve our problems” without any shred of evidence to back it up beyond a conservative think tank pundit’s musings!
it seems to me that a study result which shows the City with the most freeways and the City with the least freeways are neck and neck on the congestion scale suggests that there is no correlation between amount of freeways and congestion.
I would also think these relative numbers are essentially useless since they lack a quality factor such as how many people are actually driving (if most people are taking transit, walking or cycling the impact is less than a City where 98% of trips are by car), and how far the commutes are. (I’m sure people with a 10 minute commute don’t sweat it if their commute takes 13 minutes during rush hour…)
I don’t think that this data means anything at all. A city with travel times of 60 minutes during rush hour and 30 minutes during off peak would seem to rank worse that a city with travel times of 120 minutes all day long. Vancouver’s bad score might simply be because this city is actually relatively easy to get around off peak. One way to improve the score may be to wreck travel times at night so as to even things out.
This might explain some of the anomalies in the data. I always thought that the worst congestion was Friday afternoon and early evening. But this day might appear better because the peak is so broad and therefore more even. And this study shows a major improvement in the traffic in Toronto over the last year. I think that this will be news to them.
See also http://daily.sightline.org/2012/07/11/measuring-congestion-wrong-version-3-0/
The South of Fraser Blog has a good review of the study with some great comparisons with Stats Can data as well.
rico – if you are going to post a comment like that, you really ought to provide the link
http://www.southfraser.net/2012/07/tomtom-congestion-index-useless-for.html
Oops, brain fart.