Michael Alexander, the chair of Simon Fraser University’s City Conversations sends this link which promises to change how the U.S. Department of Transportation analyzes car travel. As reported on the T4 America website, “At long last, USDOT has finalized new requirements for how states and metro areas will have to measure traffic congestion and in the final rule — responding to the outpouring of comments they received — they backed away from most of the outdated measures of congestion that were proposed.”
There are four main changes:
- Vehicular delay paints an incredibly one-dimensional picture of congestion. Focusing on average delay by simply measuring the difference between rush hour speeds compared to free-flow 3 a.m. traffic fails to count everyone else commuting by other modes, rewards places with fast travel speeds at the expense of places with shorter commutes and less time spent behind the wheel overall, and completely ignores how many people are actually moving through the corridor.”
This indicator will no longer be used, and the Canadian Automobile Association and the B.C Government should take note.
2. The addition of “person-hours” measure of delay, which will consider how many people are using the road instead of just how many vehicles are delayed… If one corridor moves three times the amount of people as another corridor because of a carpool requirement or a lane dedicated to high-capacity transit, it shouldn’t score the same for congestion just because the travel speed or average delay is the same.”
3. Tracking carbon dioxide emissions and the change in CO2 emissions generated by on-road mobile sources on most bigger roadways.
4. A new multimodal measure — the portion of non-single occupant vehicle travel.” “Because transportation in urbanized areas is inherently multimodal, it is important to account as much as possible for the options that are available to travelers in those urbanized areas.”
Michael Alexander asks:
Q: Does Canada follow U.S. statistical models? Do we have our own standards? If so, how do they compare to the new U.S?
And he also notes: Under these new guidelines Vancouver is no longer “the most congested city in Canada.”
After seven and a half decades and three generations, and after stratospheric expenditures on the most vast public infrastructure ever built, it’s about time the conversation changed.
No need for any conversation change here. Back in the mid 90’s when we developed the Major Road Network (an integral part of a new transport governance model being planned at the time), the fundamental principle was “person trips”, not vehicle trips. And any capacity increase was to be based on the merit and measure of person capacity, allowing for road and transit projects to compete equally. This was based on the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority’s (now TransLink) foundational mandate as a multi-modal agency. The key word being “Transportation” and not “Transit” or “Road”
So how do we get the concept of counting people movements, and not vehicle movements, into MoTI planning work for new projects?
All of the province’s professionals know it’s about moving people and goods, not just vehicles. I personally know the traffic engineering students at UBC all have been taught this at least for the past dozen years and I would say our Province has transportation engineers with one of the highest SQ (sustainability quotient) in the world.
But our designs and methods are still mostly vehicular-based, whether it’s automobiles, trucks, or buses. And it is not easy changing standards. However, research over the past decades and best practices have changed the situation dramatically with almost a majority emphasis on active modes in many conferences. The only problem is that nice ideas can sometimes be implemented before thorough design principles are established, of which safety is the main tenet. Rushed policies almost always produce unintended consequences. So I have concerns with some of the local examples where we may have rushed to be sustainable for the sake of safety. Luckily we now have technologies to better investigate human behaviour on foot, bikes, and in vehicles. But the same technology is distracting us (both on foot, bikes and in vehicles) into more unsafe situations.
And so the issue continues to be a few steps forward…and a few steps backwards. Net progress is what we should be monitoring.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.