It was Tom-Tom week in the media, when the Amsterdam-based GPS makers released their biannual survey on the most congested cities.
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Typical story: Vancouver, Worst Traffic Congestion In North America: TomTom
Hey, we’re No. 1!
It’s a smart strategy for Tom-Tom. No wonder it’s their Director of Marketing who does the media interviews. But perhaps because the congestion list comes out so often, the media are taking other angles – namely examining the methodology behind the survey.
The CBC, for instance, which did some digging: Is Vancouver the most gridlocked city in North America?
Joe Cortright, president and principal economist for Impresa, a consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, has studied the question of traffic congestion and sees real problems with the TomTom study.
‘A lot of the cities that do well in these surveys – sprawling cities like Birmingham, Richmond and Oklahoma City – people drive twice as far as people do in the average city’– Joe Cortright, president and principal economist, Impresa
“If you live in Vancouver and have an average 15-minute commute and it takes an extra five or six minutes longer — that’s your 36% increase. If you live in Los Angeles and have a 45-minute commute and it takes you 10 minutes longer, that’s only a 20 percent or so increase.”
Cortright says that the index doesn’t look at the distance people actually travel, or even the total amount of time they travel.
I got my share of comment too: On Global BC, Sun News Network, 24 Hours Vancouver.
I was questioning the basic assumption behind ‘congestion’ – that the default condition of our transportation system should be vehicles travelling in free flow at the posted speed limit. Anything less – which is what Tom-Tom is measuring – counts as congestion.
The danger is that listeners (and decision-makers) assumed congestion is so bad that we should be planning and building a road network where traffic need never slow down.
That, after all, is how congestion’ is defined:
[If traffic actually has to stop because of friction, that is something else: a traffic jam. “As demand approaches the capacity of a road (or of the intersections along the road), extreme traffic congestion sets in. When vehicles are fully stopped for periods of time, this is colloquially known as a traffic jam or traffic snarl-up.]When traffic demand is great enough that the interaction between vehicles slows the speed of the traffic stream …
But that’s the difference between Vancouver and most other places: we don’t assume that traffic should always be able to freeflow at the posted speed limit. In fact, in some cases (Denman and Georgia, for instance), the intersection is designed to congest as traffic demand builds so we can meter traffic on to the downtown grid. We deliberately back-up the excess volumes on the Causeway and Georgia to avoid worse congestion in the Central Business District – the place you least want to overload.
We need another word to replace the pejorative label of congestion, which is assumed to always be bad – and then used to justify the staggering amounts of money spent on wider roads and bigger bridges (which then shifts the congestion elsewhere in the system, justifying more road ‘investment.’ Et cetera.).
So how about ‘crowding’? Crowding is what cities are for: the places where people come together to exchange things, whether goods, services, ideas or DNA. It’s the whole point of cities – and to de-congest them is to destroy the idea of the city. The result: one big sprawling suburb, and, as Charles Marohn has so effectively documented, unaffordable amounts of waste.
However, it’s also essential to keep things moving, albeit not always at maximum speed. That means offering alternatives to those who can take them: commuters need to have a choices, whether transit, or walking, or cycling, or technology substitutes, or time of day, or a shorter trip, or no need to travel at all. But Tom-Tom doesn’t measure that.
Yet it’s why the central area of Vancouver is successful. Even as we accommodate growth, we reduce car traffic – as shown here – and increase the practicality of other modes of transport.
The ideal juxtaposition for the Tom-Tom report would have been a shot of Georgia Street, where the city has taken out two lanes in order to build a water line. Normally the story would have been ‘Carmageddon,’ given that this arterial has to handle all the traffic from the northwest part of the region in and out of the downtown peninsula. And yet, the back-ups, according to my reliable source – North Shore bus drivers – haven’t been much worse than normal.
But since that dog didn’t bark and disaster didn’t happen, it hasn’t been news. Instead of bark-bark, we get Tom-Tom.
My slightly satirical attempt to decipher the solution to Vancouver’s Congestion Problem: http://257vancouver.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/congestion/ “6 methods to solve Vancouver’s congestion Problem”
Very good analysis of why the Tom Tom index is useless
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/17/the-problems-with-measuring-traffic-congestion/
Only 785 miles? I guess they are only considering Vancouver city. What about the entire Metro Vancouver. The study is very misleading as that is what most people will think when they see the study.
There were 9,574 km of road in Metro Vancouver in 2007 (more have been added since) http://2007.vancouverfoundationvitalsigns.ca/?q=node/17. Vancouver only has 1263 km or 13% of the regions roads.
The study only looks at the City of Vancouver and not the region. So if our region is so congested why is our average commutes dropping? This was even before the massive freeway building seige of late, or even the Canada Line:
Average travel time (minutes) for making the round trip between home and workplace
Census metropolitan areas
1992 1998 2005
Toronto 68 76 79
Montreal 62 65 76
Vancouver 70 68 67
Ottawa-Gatineau 57 62 65
Calgary 52 64 66
Edmonton 50 58 62
Canada total 54 59 63
Gordon, what would we do without you? Thank you for correctly citing how and why these statistics are voodoo. Sigh. A congested city is a happy city that can be experienced at a more comfortable pace for walkers, bikers and those cars.
Yes, “crowding” is a better term. It is the result of more drivers trying to use a section of road than the road was designed for. The slowing down is the result of the reduced lane space for each driver, and therefore less buffer space in front, and thus a lower speed is dictated as a result for safety’s sake. All drivers note this situation over time and will adjust their a) route, b) time of travel, and/or c) their mode.
Whether road engineers react by increasing lanes or adjusting intersection flow-through capacities is partly dictated by the space and money available, and also by the local culture and municipal council’s attitude.
Vancouver, by not responding, is simply saying to citizens, “You’re on your own. We advise making adjustments in your trip planning.” All cities should do more of that, including, “why not live closer to your job?”
I deal with this a bit in my comments today to City of Ottawa’s Planning Committee on the new Official Plan, dubbed, “The Official Plan’s Fatal Flaw,” in which I suggest the same thing: congestion is somewhat ethereal, since most of the cars causing it are far from being congested inside. http://www.hearthhealth.wordpress.com.
I love what the reporter says at the end of the Global BC piece, “Tom-Tom says the way to do this is to educate drivers…..” Oh, what technology could I use to help me with this? Coincidently McDonalds just today issued a study ranking Langley as the most day time hungry city in Canada.
Before we congratulate ourselves too much over revealing Tom-Tom’s erroneous methods, I think it should still be said that traffic in this region – not Downtown (necessarily) – is still very, very congested. Try getting off the North Shore almost anytime.
Goods movement in particular moves very sluggishly and noisily through the residential communities, adversely affecting the economy as well as neighbourhood livability.
We have been systematically removing traffic-moving capacity through many means – road diets, traffic diversion and calming and … bike facililities and possible viaduct removal, all socially desirable but perhaps cumulatively adding time to vehicular travel and, yes, at least one’s sense of congestion and distress.
There haven’t been any road diets, traffic calming or street removals on arterials on the North Shore. Vehicle lanes have been added in a few places, e.g. a section of Low Level Rd, Dollarton, Fern and Marine Dr off Lions Gate bridge. The overall number of cars on both bridges to Vancouver is lower than 10 or 20 years ago. In fact I remember that the morning rush hour congestion to the Second Narrows bridge used to be far worse 10 years ago.
Road capacity hasn’t been reduced either on the Vancouver side of the bridges, and much of Highway 1 through Vancouver and Burnaby has been widened.
I’m not saying there is no congestion on the North Shore from time to time (not much of the day though), but it’s not related to any removal of road capacity.
There have been almost no general purpose traffic lanes which have been upgraded to bike facilities. Most of them have been painted bike lanes on wider roads or upgrade of street parking. Where general traffic lanes have been upgraded to bike lanes – Burrard Bridge for example – there has been zero to negligible effect on traffic trip times.
On the other hand, many people are now riding bikes and this must be a boon for those driving In CoV, 10% of commute trips by CoV residents are now done by bike This has got to be good for those who choose to drive or take transit. More cycling is good for everyone.
We speak of congestion, but I never see this when riding my bike. So, if you don’t like motor vehicle suggestion, you should either ride a bike or encourage decision makers to add more cycling infrastructure.
Sigh. Anyone who is seriously interested in reducing emissions should be against congestion. As any cyclist can tell you, the most energy is expended starting from a stop. When a car is expending that additional energy it is producing more emissions. I suppose the dreamer might belive that will get people out of cars. It doesn’t. Only good transit alternatives will do that.
As to deliberately creating congestion to ease pressure on the CBD, why is that even necessary? One reason is the Lions Gate Bridge, which should have been replaced years ago with a tunnel from downtown,to North Vancouver thereby healing the park from its road scar. Another reason is the systematic debasing of alternatives to Georgia. Dunsmuir? We all know what happened there. Robson? A yearly pop-up park kills that idea. Smithe? recently neutered by reducing one right turn late at Hornby and the failure to install an advanced left turn at Burrard.
Clearly we need to remove more road capacity…After all we know for a “fact” that removing lanes of traffic results in a magical adjustment and redistribution of traffic. Now thanks to tom-tom we know what that crucial magical part is – taking more time to get to places…
This is real data folks…not CoV fantasy numbers based on splicing data from various years, road segments and wishful thinking…We have congestion problems. And the only way out of them is investment in rapid mass transit…Which is not coming…
Check the town of Portland Oregon they have Ariel lift transportation.. PART of the mix. Brilliant…have you read the WEST END COMMUNITY PLAN!! get ready for the ultra dense ultra so called diversity plan. Give me a break and this is Green
Understanding their methodology, then I suppose one could consider Vancouver the most congested city. For example, if I drive from my home off Commercial Drive to the office downtown, when there is no traffic, it takes 12 minutes door to door. But, at more typical driving times, it takes 25-30 minutes, and with Telus Garden construction closures, it’s sometimes 40 minutes. That is a greater than 100% increase in travel time “because of congestion” (or wanting to go at the same time as everyone else).
For that reason and because I like the walk, I usually walk to Broadway Skytrain station (12-15 minutes), and then catch a 6 minute Skytrain ride. My door-to-door time is 25-30 minutes regardless of when I travel. This is the point about mode choice. With no congestion, I’d probably drive more often–in fact I did for a few years. Between the new bike lane, construction, and more people driving in from points East, it no longer makes sense from an efficiency perspective, so I walk and skytrain.
Using Google Maps, I see that travel times between Commercial Drive and Downtown are:
Car 14 min (with usual traffic)
Transit 20min
Bike 22 min.
With bike travel, there is no congestion, crowding or delays. Note that 15% of your neighbours are already commuting by bike. You can go the whole way on bike routes/paths. No parking fees, no gas, insurance, etc, no transit fee, no delays.
Why not give it a try?
Some months ago I provided TransLink a copy of peer reviewed study that included the methodology, and undertook an assessment of Tom-Tom which found the approach fully in keeping with best-practice and was found to be scientifically/statistically valid. One of the parallel approaches that is also considered valid is Bluetooth/cell tracking, which by coincidence (or not) TransLink/Province have just announced they will pursue for undertaking better traffic management in the region, which of course will benefit transit that operates on the region’s network.
Moreover, is the analysis that the quantifiable time itself is a more valid measure than the % variance is simply a weighted JUDGEMENT CALL by the party doing the interpretation, consequently to suggest as above that Tom-Tom is “useless” reflects a perspective not supported either by scientific methods or even the practical decision by TransLink to adopt a parallel technique to assist in its legislated responsibilities to manage both ROADS and TRANSIT – a fundamental notion pretty much forgotten everywhere.
Unfortunately, Tom-Tom has exposed herein and elsewhere the age old political phenomena of “Don’t confuse the debate with the FACTS”.