Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (and one of our instructor / moderators for Next Generation Transportation) nicely skewers another tedious report that claims to measure the cost of congestion, here in Planetizen.
He leads off with the fundamental flaw:
INRIX just released a report, Counting the Future Costs of Gridlock: The Economic Impacts of Congestion in Europe and the US: 2013-2030, which like other congestion costing studies, uses analysis methods which tend to overestimate congestion costs: free-flow baseline speeds that are far higher than what is economically optimal or legal (by my estimate, a quarter to half of congestion costs in estimated in the Urban Mobility Report consist of motorists reducing their travel speed to legal limits), values of travel time that are higher than what most motorists are actually willing to pay to avoid delay, and unrealistically high estimates of future traffic growth.
In other words, ‘congestion’ is simply the difference between free-flowing traffic and reduced speeds – even when that reduction is to the legal speed limit. Hardly what anyone would consider gridlock, which, as Todd notes, almost never happens.
But he makes another essential point typically missed in all the media coverage which accompanies these reports:
The report also claims inaccurately that congestion delays “rob the economy.” Most congestion costs are increases in personal travel time – they do not reduce economic productivity, and to the degree that individuals have alternatives, those motorists are choosing to bear these costs.
In fact, there is virtually no evidence that traffic congestion actually reduces economic development, on the contrary, more compact, multi-modal, congested cities tend to be more productive overall, apparently because increased costs of peak-period driving are more than offset by improvements in overall accessibility, which reduces the total time people must spend travelling, and therefore their total transportation costs.
And yet these reports issued every year – always with the same results, always using the same flawed methodology – become the justification for billions of dollars in road expenditures, rationalized by decision-makers who never have to justify the misappropriation once they use the phrase ‘it will help reduce congestion,’ even when it never does and never needed to.
Speaking of congestion metrics (and how they can be used to justify road expansion), the BC government has a survey up on their 10-year transportation plan web site. If you have an opinion on how the government should spend its transportation money over the next 10 years, you should definitely take it. Go to: http://engage.gov.bc.ca/transportationplan/regionalinfo/ and click the “Take the Digital Survey” button just above and to the right of the map.
Just look at Boxing Day – it’s crazy congested – from both the pedestrian and driver perspective – but it produces some of the biggest economic activity of the year for retailers.
Every day could be like Boxing Day – think of the benefits.
If all the time lost to congestion was actually worth what groups like INRIX claim it is then drivers wouldn’t voluntarily drive miles out of their way to avoid a $3 bridge toll.
Maybe consider that adding 45,000 people a year to the lower mainland adds to congestion? This is never mentioned, by anyone, ever.