TomTom, the GPS device manufacturer, has again published a traffic congestion report. Vancouver is, apparently, as bad as it gets. Worse than Toronto and lots of other cities.
But Charlie Smith in the Straight has some problems with the TomTom Traffic Index.
Is Vancouver’s traffic congestion really as bad as TomTom claims?
. . . . In 2012, the Seattle-based Sightline Institute’s Alex Broner and Clark Williams-Derry wrote that TomTom’s congestion measure “looks only at car speeds, not at total travel time for people“.
“In fact, compact cities with short commutes can actually get penalized in these rankings!” Broner and Williams-Derry declared.
This year, TomTom has ranked Vancouver’s traffic as worse than that in New York, Toronto, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas–Fort Worth. Last year, Vancouver’s congestion was rated worse than what drivers experience in Los Angeles.
These types of reports are great news for Premier Christy Clark, who’s eager to justify a $3.5-billion, 10-lane bridge to replace the George Massey Tunnel. They’re also wonderful weapons to wield against promoters of more cycling infrastructure.
But seriously, anyone who thinks that driving around Vancouver is tougher than taking the Gardiner Expressway from Toronto to Mississauga really needs to have their head examined.
Big thanks to Chris Keam (frequent PT commenter) for this on how to answer headlines that end with a question mark:
Betteridges Law Of Headlines (Wikipedia)
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older. Like all similar “laws” (e.g., Murphy’s Law), Betteridge’s law of headlines is intended as a humorous adage rather than always being literally true.
It is obviously just a clever PR campaign. People need to stop rewarding them by mentioning their name and giving them free advertising. Call them a GPS company.
Great cities share a common feature – namely motor vehicle congestion.
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/10/31/great-cities-dont-have-much-traffic-but-they-do-have-congestion/
Not that I would want Vancouver to be compared to Los Angeles, but Canadian cities are just entering the realm of great cities like Vienna and Paris. I am so thankful that Vancouver is not at all like Dallas.
Without getting into methodology issues and going right to the heart of what matters, the congestion index for the Canadian cities TomTom reports data for seems to have little to do with actual commute durations.
TomTom congestion index order (worst to best): Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary.
Canada 2011 NHS median commute duration (longest to shortest): Toronto: 30.4m, Montreal: 30.1m, Calgary: 25.1m, Ottawa:20.9m, Vancouver 20.9m, Edmonton: 20.7m.
Probably not worth the time, but if someone wants to do this properly one would need to look up the TomTom data based on 2011 to compare properly. Here is a link to easily digestible commute durations from census data. http://censusmapper.ca/maps/301
This is similar to studies they done in the past and it’s flawed. They look at the ratio of congested vs uncongested times and it paints a distorted picture.
Let me give an example: let’s say Vancouver has an average commute of 20 minutes and it is 30 minutes during rush hour and in Toronto the average commute is 45 minutes and during rush hours it is 1 hour. By their measure Vancouver is worse because it is a 50% increase whereas for Toronto it is only 33%. But really, what city would rather live in, the one with the 30 min commute or 1 hr commute.
Be wary when you take studies like this at first glance, often times the methodology and conclusions are flawed. As someone who has done research in the past, it pisses me off when ‘facts’ without context are lazily published and people draw the wrong conclusions.
Wasn’t it Gordon Price himself who use to state, Congestion is our friend?
Meaning trying to build your way out of it as demonstrated by a half century of documented evidence will only lead to far more congestion. Also meaning that many jurisdictions and transportation planning research now points to the opposite, that is, building more efficient alternatives like frequent transit and designing our communities around the alternatives, and spending less on roads than the traditional huge public budget line item.
Everything is relative.
A friend of mine who lived in Orange County would typically drive 50 km each way to work on the freeway – but because it was a freeway – even with slowdowns, the overall speed would be much, much faster than driving on Vancouver’s local arterial roads.
i.e. his 50 km may have taken 30-45 minutes.
In Vancouver, it probably takes 30 minutes to cross the city – and that’s certainly not 50 km across.
So “congestion” is relative – and it likely a result of the inherently “slow” speeds of surface arterial streets – i.e. not having freeways
(and not necessarily sitting in stop and go traffic like at the tunnel).