Bob Liley sent me this email, requesting comment. Better yet, I thought it would be a good question for you, the PT community. Comment away!
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I have been following the traffic congestion debate with some interest. Having lived and worked across the country (Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary, and now Vancouver) and having lived and worked in New York City for four years, I am quite familiar with the problem of traffic congestion. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced the current debate is offering any outside-of-the-box solutions, nor even asking the right questions.
First, I believe we have to ask ourselves what constitutes traffic congestion, and then ask why we have it. In the City of Vancouver, this Council has shown itself to be pro-bicycle (which in itself isn’t bad but it is a little misguided) and anti-automobile. This is exemplified by the number of bike lanes that now clog our streets to the detriment of auto traffic, and the removal of one-way streets in the downtown core that used to speed traffic in and out of the City during rush hour. The decision to remove the Georgia viaduct is simply another anti-auto move. As our population ages (and it is) there will be fewer people who are interested in riding bicycles in high-traffic areas. Autos (which the industry is making great strides in reducing the pollution generated) will be the vehicle of choice for these folks, and will represent a far lower cause of pollution in the City. Public transit will never be the saviour that the current mayor and council anticipates.
As to the traffic itself, let’s examine some of the key players. First, there are commuters, travelling to and from work. Many of these people live in the suburbs and use their autos to get to/from work. Yes, many might use public transit if it were efficient, reliable, cost-effective and timely but it’s often not. There are many reasons for this, but I don’t see them getting fixed any time soon. Then there are the commercial vehicles (trucks, etc.) which currently occupy a lot of our roads. These simply cannot be replaced by public transit. I would estimate that these vehicles comprise 30-40% of our traffic today. Then there are emergency vehicles that need to be accommodated. Then we have the mothers/fathers who take their children to school, pick them up again after school, and take them to their music lessons, soccer practice, math. tutoring, etc. Maybe 50% of this traffic can be replaced by public transit, but who knows? Interestingly, this traffic coincides with the rush hour traffic of commuters heading to work. Then we have all kinds of service vehicles which deliver services unlikely to be replaced by public transit.
Then we have that random group of contributors, the shoppers, without whom our economy would grind to a standstill. What percentage of the traffic congestion is imposed by them I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone else does, either. They add to the traffic throughout the day and into the evening. These folks would generally try to avoid rush hour, but who knows? Because of the volume of merchandise purchased by these individual shoppers, a lot of folks would feel very disadvantaged to have to carry these packages on public transit. And for people who want to take advantage of the entertainment offerings provided in the City, the auto is seen as the most convenient and safe way to access this, but the City is moving to make this less convenient all the time.
However, until we can say ‘beam me up, Scotty’ and have it work, we need to come up with some modern, realistic alternatives. I don’t hear any being proposed. My background is in information management/information technology and I have been assessing the traffic problem through that lens for over 25 years. Were we able to significantly reduce the commute time for people, that would take a lot of traffic off the roads. Technology offers significant opportunities here. If people could live closer to where they work, this would have a number of advantages.
Since most of us are knowledge workers these days, we work with computer systems/technologies in the course of completing our assigned tasks. Rather than just the work-from-home option that people often leap to when this is first broached, I recommend the establishment of satellite offices across the Lower Mainland connected by information technology where people (who lived close to these offices) could go to work, socialize with their fellow workers (I believe working is a socially engaging experience), and accomplish their assigned tasks. This would take a lot of routine rush-hour traffic off the roads, reduce worker stress, improve the environment, and save money in the long run. Online shopping has already begun to affect bricks-and-mortar stores, so this ought to reduce some traffic, as well.
Mr. Liley seems to be another gentleman of a certain age who perceives urban space through the metaphor of the city as a living being. He and others like him truly and earnestly believe that vehicular traffic must “flow” unobstructed in order for the urban organism to breathe freely and thrive. ‘Congestion’ must be overcome, lest it snuff out our very economic existence (!).To employ another organic metaphor, this is pure horses***.
Cars are not red blood cells. Streets are not capillaries. Arterials are not in fact arteries. Vancouver is not a middle aged man three poutines shy of a stroke. The very notion of “congestion” as a traffic phenomenon – especially as a problem – presupposes this nonsense and like other forms of self-imposed mania, we must collectively stop it.
If you do not like being stuck in heavy urban traffic, don’t drive in it; and despite the inevitable and overly-defensive wails of ‘well, not everyone has a choice!’, most people do have a choice and they choose to drive. Why are we expected to bend over backwards to subsidize their foolish decision at such a gargantuan cost?
Hear, hear
“Engineer’s disease”
Well said, Dan.
+1
Mr Liley is also oblivious to the success that has followed Vancouver’s efforts to reduce car traffic in downtown. Improvements to walkability, the bicycle lanes, better transit but most of all much more mixed land use making it not only possible, but much more attractive, for people to both live and work in the area. Indeed this has been so successful that people are now getting very concerned about affordability. Car traffic has actually been reduced but there are many more people getting around without needing to either own a car or drive to every destination. Yes, planners and others from around the world come here to see how its done.
And one other thought. Automattic – the company that produces the software Price Tags and my blog both run on – has no offices anywhere. But they seem to do just fine.
Why is it I see Bob’s essay as fundamentally anti-urban? The city of Vancouver already has a 50% walk/transit/bike mode share. What’s his beef? We lived a decade without a car and my only beef was that being a three-minute walk door-to-desk was too close.
During the debates over twinning the Port Mann (now that’s back in the day, isn’t it?) one agency estimated that the single-occupant car traffic comprised an average of 72% of ALL traffic over the bridge. It may be marginally less appalling today, but I put that in the context of the doubling of downtown Vancouver’s population over the past 20 years and a corresponding decrease in traffic of 20% and a city-wide reduction in emissions of 17%. The two are no doubt related.
What’s that about appropriate urbanism?
I would like some kind of data that shows that 30-40% of traffic on Vancouver roads is commercial vehicles. I don’t see how that’s remotely plausible.
I’m also interested in how you say that people would use public transit if we had a better system, but your solution is to massively overhaul the way people work instead of the simpler solution of improving the public transit system.
Finally, I’m confused by “the number of bike lanes that clog up our streets”. What number are you thinking of, exactly? As far as I can tell, only the Burrard bridge and the Dunsmuir viaduct involved re-purposing a traffic lane for bikes, and the traffic impacts of both were negligible. The Hornby and Dunsmuir lanes were created by removing parking spots if I recall correctly. I guess you could add Point Grey Rd, which was only one lane in each direction and marked at 30km/h. So as far as I can tell, only 4 lanes of car traffic (in total less than 4 lane-kms) have been re-purposed for bikes in all of the city of Vancouver. This is clogging traffic?
Re: Data on # of traffic that is commercial vehicles.
In the recent study published for the viaducts, the data showed 2% light trucks and 2% heavy trucks, as a percentage of all vehicles. That does not consider passenger cars that may be being used as commercial vehicles. The Metro screenline count on Main Street showed 2% trucks (combined light and heavy). If you went back to the Boundary Road screenline it climbed to 4% for combined light and heavy trucks. If you look at the Burrard Inlet screenline (combined Lions Gate and IWMB) it climbed to 5%.
Wow, that low. All the more reason to provide increasing quality public transit, lower the number of SOVs on the road by a few points a year, free up space for those few commercial vehicles and alleviate some of the tax expenditures on asphalt for reinvestment into higher return human endeavours and public savings accounts.
Bike lanes clog our streets? I don’t see much congestion on bike lanes though it is increasing. Isn’t it the cars that clog the street?
‘As our population ages (and it is) there will be fewer people who are interested in riding bicycles….’.
If you think you’re too old to handle a 40kg bike on the road, then why would you consider yourself safe to handle a 1 tonne machine instead?
Sounds like he’s making an argument for getting rid of those nasty ‘high-traffic areas’ so we can keep walking/biking and free of those car-use generated illnesses that cost the health service so much as we age.
BTW He can pry my bike from my cold, dead (arthritic) hands.
+1 … and as to the abilities for the elderly, I bring up exhibit A for the older and can’t drive … AND can’t walk, who CAN bike … and is extremely well served by the presence of a bike lane infrastructure. How many of these people might there be?
http://blog.brainfacts.org/2013/06/can-a-parkinsons-patient-ride-a-bike/#.Vk5hI99VhBc
I think this is a bigger contributor that many may think.
I know of parents who pick up their kids from westside Vancouver school and drive them to classes/practices (i.e. at community centres like Hillcrest or Richmond Oval, depending on the time of year and day of the week). One parent I know said she spends $100 on gas every week ferrying her kids around. Much of that driving resolves the time constraints of getting to far flung locations.
I think the author entirely misses the point of why bikes are around in the first place. They provide a better alternative to the car, and a way to short circuit the traffic congestion. I can move with relative freedom through the city on a bike, in a way that I can’t in a car. We all know that congestion is a given, and it will not get any better, despite the best intentions of city planners. If we want to densify this city, it stands to reason that bike use and mass transit use must be encouraged, and car use must be discouraged. It’s simply the only way to make the city work.
+1 … a bike combined with Car2Go (or euivalent) is faster and more useful to me 90% of the time than owning a car … most of the rest of the time the choice of cars offered by Zipcar (or equivalent) is more useful than owning a single type of car, so the total number of times where I REALLY miss having my own car approaches 1% of the time, and then that is often covered quite nicely when Enterprise has $10 per day weekend (F-M) rentals, which is most of the year.
Yes, for the 20-30% of occasional car users, but not for the 70-80% of folks that the letter writer listed (trucks, service providers, kids shuttles, daily commuters from poorly served public transit areas).
What IS missing is a dynamic system of road tolls that charge higher fees when demand is high, say 7:30 to 9:30 am and 3:30 to 6:30 pm, as some folks that use that time slot today with their car would either find alternative modes (bikes, subway, bus or walk) or go later or earlier.
Gasoline surcharges are a thing of the past with more and more fuel efficient vehicles, hybrids and e-cars. We need to charge per km, per time slot, higher in high demand areas and lower in cheaper or lower demand areas. Once every bridge, every tunnel, evry major throughfare and every major intersection has a tolling system we would see more efficient car throughput, less car use and more money for rapid transit that is not bus based, such as this one on the loop through N-Van, W-Van, Lionsgate bridge, downtown, E-Van, N-Burnaby, Second Narrows, bi-directional: http://www.skytran.us
Where is the vision of Translink, city councils and the provincial government here ?
TransLink and the Mayor’s council would love to see road pricing. It is the province who gave the people a way of voting against ways of funding TransLink that is stopping road pricing. Would that we could vote for the 10 lane Massey Tunnel replacement bridge.
I have never run a business or taken an economics course but doesn’t having a single central office that your employees pay to travel to (at their own time/money expense) on taxpayer-subsidized roads/transit/bike paths have less effect on the bottom line than multiple offices, under multiple property tax regimes in multiple jurisdictions? You are not asking private business to spend extra money to help solve public problems, are you Mr. Lilley? That sounds like taxation and they don’t tend to look to kindly on that.
Also, as other people have pointed out, back of the napkin stabs at percentages don’t inform your opinion very well.
I am amused (amazed?) that this letter comes from someone who has lived in New York. Having sat in traffic jams myself in NYC I can vividly recall how much I had wished I had taken the subway. As I now sit in traffic jams on the 99 heading south out of the Vancouver I look around me at fellow drivers and think it is sheer lunacy to think that we can sustain this entitlement to be hauled across the city ever day in ten times our weight in steel and plastic.
It’s an interesting decision to put Mr. Liley’s considered letter to you up for response from your readers rather than responding yourself, Mr. Price. What drove that decision? And, what is your response to Mr. Liley?
+1
It seems to be a common refrain, facilitating commercial vehicles on their mission to bring us the latest and greatest. But is the bottleneck really our public roads in their race for efficiency? What was that recent truckers strike all about? They weren’t complaining about traffic, but of entirely fixable private bottlenecks at the port. I fail to see why that’s always held up as a priority for more roads, when it seems to be one of the least of the trucker’s problems.
Another case in point: if traffic was really the problem with our commercial economy, why do I see so many trucks lined up at the Pattullo bridge every day, when they could just breeze through the Port Mann just a few km away? Could it be that the drivers don’t actually value their time as much as the road builders do?
“…the number of bike lanes that now clog our streets to the detriment of auto traffic…”
You make me feel so guilty commuting to work by bike. I better buy a car!!
… but then you’d just be clogging HIS traffic with YOUR traffic. I think he’s just a clear trafficist – exactly like racist, just against any kind of traffic that isn’t his kind.
You could get a car, but at heart, you still wouldn’t be his people, you’ve been tainted by your association with two wheels and fail the one spoke test. Eventually we may pass beyond these antebikeum times and move beyond this fear of miscyclenation, but untill that happens, I’m afraid none of us will truly ‘pass’ as automobilists.
Commercial vehicles are much more than large bulk goods trucks or dump trucks or garbage trucks or shipping container carrying trucks.
A substantial number of vehicles are used by tradespeople and service people. Doctors and social service workers, insurance brokers and adjusters, as well as construction workers carrying tools in a multitude of trades, service people for all aspects of life, electricians, roofers, HVAC specialists, refrigeration specialists, safety and code inspectors, plumbers, surveyors, communications, elevators and police, security and fire alarm specialists, etc., etc. Most of these people carry tools and equipment and make multiple stops daily, therefore they drive.
I suppose the village vicar can take his bike to get around his parish, as do the police within the airport. Sometimes a skateboard or roller skates will do.
I get your point and don’t disagree in principle. But when waiting often lengthy times at intersections during rush hour I look at the cars and who’s in them. Most vehicles are private cars with one person in it wearing office-type clothing. Perhaps they are all real estate agents and insurance brokers, but I suspect not. During the day the picture is different with many trucks and contractor vehicles on the road. But that’s not when congestion occurs typically.
The “substantial number of vehicles used by tradespeople” you refer to as not being semi trucks are what the screen counts refer to as light trucks (2 axle).
Agree fully that vicars and insurance brokers may appear to be commuters.
But given that all trucks (including light trucks) account for around 3-4% in the counts, we need to focus on the congestion due to SOVs. Trucks are not the target of that focus, they are the beneficiaries of any reduction in SOV traffic.
Uber tries to change that, but the ” green ” mayor and ” vision ” Vancouver council is blocking it. Why ?
You want a comment on this editorial-like email? Well, it’s so full of BS that I don’t want to waste my time or draw attention to it.
The focus obviously has to be on relieving the bottlenecks by more efficient merging lanes or other facilities to improve the flow of the traffic.
Only a fool or a frustrated and sadistic engineer would forcibly impede the smooth flow of anything, whether it be a river of water, or of traffic. When traffic flows smoothly any pollutants are minmalised, mishaps are non-existent, destinations reached as planned and wellness flows through society.
This repeated and disconnected meme is that drivers must not drive and if they do alone they are obviously incorrectly commuting, that cannot be commercial business people, they are using the ‘wrong’ mode, therefore they must subsidize buses and trains because those using that mode are more virtuous and therefore should pay much less, or nothing, is altogether repugnant. It is no different than suggesting that lambs meat or wheat must be separately and heavily taxed and expensive because the social supremos have decided they want you eat more pork and barley.
Your last paragraph nails it perfectly. I’d like to know what the car haters would do if everyone stopped driving. Where would they steal money from to build multibillion dollar transit projects when fares probably don’t even cover 50% of operating costs let alone a penny of the capital costs? Where would the money come from to build bike lanes that are probably used by less than 2% of the population? The only place I can think of is from huge increases in taxes. I just don’t see that going down well at all, especially with foreign investors. Is the end goal to kill off “motordom” even if it means killing off our economy and way of life?
Not sure who is a car hater. I think that this is often an incorrect lable placed on those that enjoy riding their bike by those that enjoy driving their car. Just because one enjoys riding a bike does not make that person a car hater. Just because progressive jurisdictions that work towards making cycling safer and more convenient does not make their leaders car haters. Quite the opposite. The only way to reduce motor vehicle congestion in a large urban environment is to encourage more people to walk, cycle or take transit. One more person riding a bike or taking transit is likely one less person driving a car. I am surprised that not more drivers advocate for the construction of improved cycling infrastructure and improved transit. No need for any hatred. Let’s all rally behind walking, cycling and transit since this will show our love for those who need to drive their cars.
Eric: “Only a fool or a frustrated and sadistic engineer would forcibly impede the smooth flow of anything, whether it be a river of water, or of traffic:
So that’s a vote against all hydroelectric power? And water reservoirs? And, for that matter, kitchen faucets? Even the much loved internal combustion engine wouldn’t function without valves that impede the smooth flow of air and fuel, just for long enough to compress them with each rotation of the crankshaft.
Jeff Leigh. What do mean by this, “we need to focus on the congestion due to SOVs.”?
Who is ‘we’ and why the need to focus on them?
Eric: “Who is ‘we’ and why the need to focus on them?”
We are all of us. We are referred to in the title of this post, which reads “what causes traffic congestion and what can we do about it?”
If we want to ensure efficient commercial vehicle access to our roadways, we need to find ways to manage demand, and IMO that focus should be on single occupant vehicles, and rush hour peaks.
We do pay today, in time. We need to put a price on road use, beyond gasoline charges or annual licensing fees. And that is called a road toll, on choke points, different by time of day. Only then will demand change. Massey tunnel at 7-10 and 3-6 $5 will reduce traffic somewhat, and at $20 quite a bit, for example. Ditto on all other congested parts of the city. Going from UBC to the airport I usually drive. If they charged my $5 on the airport road is still drive, but at $10 or $15 I’d take the bus and train. etc.
Congestion is as much about inconvenience as it is about energy use. According to the EPA, an ordinary car in stop and go city traffic emits about 0.45 kg of CO2 per mile. A subway train emits about 0.17 kg per passenger mile and a city bus about 0.3 kg per passenger mile. What that means is that a car with a driver and a passenger is more efficient than a city bus, and a car with a driver and two passengers is more efficient than a subway. If there was some way to get three people into the average car we’d go a long way to solving a lot of problems at once, including congestion. As a frequent Uber Pool user, this seems like a convenient truth. As a student of human nature, I see this as a long way away. You only have to notice that the bar has been lowered on access to HOV lanes all across America from 3 to 2 people, and those lanes are still rarely full at the busiest times.
John: “According to the EPA….”
Thanks for the figures. Note thought that the EPA figures are based on a blend of all types of power generation in the US, as well as transportation fuels where applicable.
For Metro Vancouver, we have the Translink sustainability report, which shows progress on CO2 emissions over the past years (steadily decreasing). This is a blended (total fleet) figure across all Translink forms of transit, including things such as Skytrain, electric buses, diesel buses, and community shuttles. Translink reported 0.5 kg/revenue passenger km in 2012, so that would be .08 kg/mile
We’d have to get six people in each and every one of those commuter vehicles to beat that EPA result of 0.45 kg/mile.
True on a local level, for sure, given our local energy mix, but two things mitigate against that: first, electrical energy consumed here means less energy from here sold into the North American grid (to simplify the picture), which means more dirty energy produced elsewhere; and second, behaviors aren’t as locally determined as we think, in part because of decades of American car culture in which a man’s car is portrayed as his castle every bit as much as his car is (and I use “his” advisedly).
– Congestion is a measure of the use of time and space, not pollutants.
– And the flow of traffic is of a different character to the flow of water: water won’t sit politely in place, but in fact will inundate and flow around the blockage.
– “Traffic” includes all movements, not just SOVs.
– Movement of goods and services could be a lot more efficient — and thanks to the Internet of Things, change is coming, quickly.
The only slightly progressive idea in the original comment is that people should live closer to their daily commute. Such a simple solution, but so hard for people to practice. Considering that the commute occurs when most other commutes occur, and that it is the longest regular trip people make, it is worth consideration for reform. Even the efforts by transportation planners to shift commuters from SOVs to transit creates a ‘rush’-hour problem for transit, with a large % of vehicles sitting idle for most of the service day/week, and full-time drivers under-utilized.
The car promises enhanced choice. But compare the number of useful destinations a suburban driver can reach in a 10-minute drive today vs. the number available to the urbanite of 100 years ago in a 10-minute WALK.
Pollutants, however, are a measure of energy inputs and when it comes to congestion, energy inputs are not a separate issue. With relatively cheap gasoline, it is easy to choose to consume vastly more energy in a single occupancy vehicle which means more cars on the road. The only way that will change is when the price in time or money or inconvenience goes up to a point where driving a car is less easily chosen.
“If we want to ensure efficient commercial vehicle access to our roadways, we need to find ways to manage demand, and IMO that focus should be on single occupant vehicles, and rush hour peaks.
If we want to manage the demand during the morning rush, the most appropriate tool would be road pricing, with variable charges.”
Road pricing and bridge tolls would continue to increase the cost of living in Vancouver. Any and all professionals whether they be accountants visiting clients, insurance agents or property managers, IT specialists or fire suppression specialists servicing units, plumbers, even those wonderful volunteers that take groceries to the elderly that have become less mobile and those taking friends and family to doctors and clinics, etc., etc., would all be charged for traveling around in their vehicles. In the case of commercial workers these expenses would have to be passed on to their customers and prices raised for everything.
Once again drivers would be targeted and extorted instead of the users of transit paying sufficiently for their use of the system. The moral superiority of transit travel would be decided by the transit lobby and those susceptible to their entreaties, all others pay more.
Property prices within and closer to the city centre would become, again, more expensive. Vancouver would become an even more expensive ‘resort’.
The war on the car is strikingly similar to the war on drugs. It is led and forced on society by those moralists that are certain that only they are right in their belief. They need money for expanding transit but see immoral drivers as the source of their funding, rather than the users of transit.
When Andrew Coyne spoke at SFU on transit funding he specifically suggested the opposite approach, that is, that transit should be comfortable and accessible and this is the way to attract drivers to using it.
The stated targeting on what are termed, Single Occupant Vehicles, is accompanied with a negative connotation that is supposed to be understood. A given. Yet these anti-car fanatics completely ignore the multitude of uses that small vehicles are used for and who uses them.
We must be careful of these social engineers and curb them at every opportunity. The basic freedom of movement within our society and the cost of living in Vancouver is at stake. Let them go and experiment with their Disneyesque village ideas in some gated bucolic community elsewhere. Not in our city.
Eric: “Road pricing and bridge tolls would continue to increase the cost of living in Vancouver”
You are assuming that demand management via dynamic road pricing could not be revenue neutral. If it was, it would not have a direct effect on the cost of living. The topic of the post is congestion solutions, not transit funding.
Every time I see the “war on cars” meme I think of this:
“There’s something almost laughably overheated about the “war on cars” rhetoric. It’s almost as if the purveyors of the phrase have either lost their cool entirely, or else they’re trying desperately to avoid a level-headed discussion of transportation policy”
Full article here: http://www.sightline.org/2011/01/03/war-on-cars-a-history/
If you are going to quote Andrew Coyne, why focus on transit funding in a discussion of congestion? Mr Coyne supports road pricing as a demand management tool, referring to it as the only solution to traffic congestion.
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/andrew-coyne-toll-roads-the-only-solution-to-traffic-congestion
Working mothers would be most adversely affected by this dream of road pricing. Taking slow transit to a day-care, then going on to work on transit has proved to be utterly exhausting and time consuming.
The obsession with supposed Single Occupancy Vehicles, as I demonstrated before, cannot be quantified (how on earth can the roadside human counters from TransLink see if a mother is in fact transporting a child in an appropriate seat in the rear? They cannot. Neither can they see if passengers are in the rear seats of SUVs because a substantial number of them have darkened rear windows for comfort.).
Now we see the plea that road pricing could be revenue neutral. What? So, what’s the point. These jokers were pushing for a referendum which explicitly promised road pricing for funding transit. Now there’s word the money will be, what, returned as tax cuts? That’s revenue neutral.
Road pricing is a way to make it more difficult for the working poor, much more difficult and costly for working mothers, more expensive to get around for care givers and all commercial operators and therefore will cause inflation for all of us.
Make no mistake, these operators are after your money because they think they know how better than you to spend it. They also want the world to look like Disneyland where everyone scoots around on a golf cart. On transit they can feed you their media, not your choice in music but theirs. People moving 1984 version. These are the new puritans. Don’t be suckers.
Counting single occupancy vehicles is actually very simple and accurate: you go to any road at rush hour which has an HOV lane and count who’s in each. I guarantee you that the mom with the baby in the carseat isn’t sitting in the single-occupancy lanes.
Most of the screenlines are not on roads with HOV lanes, but agree that counting vehicle occupancy is not particularly complicated. There are a multitude of ways, starting with windshield counts. Windshields aren’t blacked out. If it helps on a particular road configuration, use infrared cameras, and look at the heat signatures. There are automated systems used around the world to enforce HOV lane occupancy requirements that are effective at highway speeds, and that is the sort of technology they use. Whether automated or manual, you don’t count occupancy in every vehicle all day, you use shorter representative sample periods, extrapolate, and calculate confidence levels for the data.
Claiming that the above is impossible is an argument from incredulity.
Eric: “Now we see the plea that road pricing could be revenue neutral. What? So, what’s the point?”
The point is managing demand for road space. And, as a Minister Fassbender reportedly agreed, if it is revenue neutral it isn’t necessarily a new tax and so wouldn’t be subject to a referendum. The result of such a system, properly implemented, is reduced congestion. It is the topic of the thread.
Once again you are being snowed.The TransLink survey (one wonders if a day goes by without yet another TransLink survey) that the Leigh refers to explains how the passenger counts were done and it has nothing at all to do with infra-red devices. Here:
“Classification and Occupancy Counts separated vehicle volumes into several classifications (passenger vehicles, trucks, buses, motorcycles, taxis, and other vehicles), collected occupancy data for passenger vehicles, and recorded pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Observers collected the data on one weekday for 85 stations at 46 control sites (06:00‐22:00) and 39 peak sites (06:00‐09:00, 11:00‐13:00, 15:00‐ 19:00).”
“Observers” are humanoids. Those groups we saw sitting on lawn chairs by the side of the roads.
And the reference to this study was on the story about traffic in Kenya. Talk about staying on topic!
Revenue neutral could become the new buzz word. A bit like a friend asking for a wad of cash that they promise they’ll give you back next week. It sounds so clean.
Wow!! I agreed to let Mr. Price publish this paper in the interests of stimulating some discussion around the topic. I seem to have been successful! Let me clarify a few things.
First, I have no particular axe to grind here. I am neither pro nor anti-bicycle. Up until recently I loved just riding my bike for the fun of it. Nor am I particularly pro nor anti-automobile. I have a car that I drive out of necessity when the circumstances arise. As I live near Broadway and Cambie in Vancouver, I walk or take public transit when going many places locally. I am highly skeptical of many published statistics. Like many surveys, they are often self-serving; structured to reflect a point of view that the protagonist has already enshrined. Did any of you read the Mintz Report on the HST?
My main point in this paper was to unearth a new paradigm that would reflect a contemporary/future view of how we might approach the problem of traffic congestion from a different perspective. Working locally is only one of (I’m sure) many ways to achieve this. In reading your comments, it appears to me that many of you missed that point, ascribing various attributes to me and my paper that were not stated there, and riding your own hobby horses. Interestingly, while there are fifty comments, there are only twenty-two individual commentators, with a number of perspectives being shared among yourselves. Unfortunately, I couldn’t identify any fresh perspectives here that haven’t been presented many times before. C’est la vie!
Congestion exists when a place is popular and increases when there are bottlenecks in the flow of people to and from that popular place.
So we cannot and must not eliminate all congestion because doing so would mean eliminating popular destinations. Similarly we cannot eliminate peak travel periods because popular destinations always have operating and non-operating hours.
So the goal isn’t to eliminate congestion, but to eliminate some congestion.
Some would define a crowded subway car as congested even if it travels without delay because their personal space is reduced. An opposing viewpoint might be than a crowded subway is efficient whereas one with seats available is wasteful over supply.
Roads are, for the most part, an inefficient use of valuable land because they are only fully utilized a few hours per day. Both local access roads and major highways are built for peak rather than average demand and thus cover more land than they otherwise should.
One attempt to vary the size of road to match demand is the provision of roadside parking during non-peak hours, a technique not applicable to highways.
On highways the only way to accommodate increased demand without using even more land or increasing congestion is to increase vehicle occupancy. That means shifting people to public transit and ride sharing. Both of those involve convenience tradeoffs, but sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic is certainly a convenience tradeoff too.