Expect to hear a lot more of this: ‘Transit is contagious. Cars are clean. Gas is cheap. Density is dangerous. Let’s drive!’
So let’s try to get drivers on side in supporting transit with this message: ‘The more people who switch from transit to the car, the worse it is for you and everyone.’
Therefore, it will be very useful to know how many ‘switchers’ – from transit to the car – it would take for the road system to start to ‘fail’.
Given that we have accommodated growth in the region though the expansion of transit, and we already have a heavily used road system for motor vehicles, it likely won’t take many to switch from transit to driving to create significant problems overall for transportation.
Just imagine a worsening problem for goods movement and deliveries as we do more online consumption and the roads become increasingly full – beyond the pre-covid use. We actually need more people to switch the other way – from cars to transit – just to accommodate the additional impact of home delivery.
Unfortunately, ‘switchers’ will assume that the per-trip cost of using the road will be the same as pre-covid – i.e. free – and will do what people did with the ‘free parking’ that became available at hospitals and in zones with meters or resident-only parking. They will fill it up almost immediately, they abuse it.
We know that the ‘freeway’ is not free, even if the marginal cost for use is zero. We’ve seen that ‘free’ is almost always abused, quickly making the real cost apparent. Congestion, pollution and injuries beyond what a balanced transportation system would provide are just others ways of paying.
Therefore, road pricing that helps pay for maintaining transit, given that it relieves the pressure on the overall road system and accommodates economic growth at lower cost, is a bargain. Curb pricing too.
So this is what we need now from the modelers: Give us a sense of what the cost (in terms of congestion and loss of options) will be if switching occurs from transit to car. How much, how many and how fast will it take for our transportation system to get viscerally and objectively worse? It may not be a single number, but we need some relatively simple way to covey it.
What is it?
Once the model will be out, you will have the public to buy it…considering the recent experience regarding the covid 19 model: I will not bet on it…
Don’t waste time on shaky model. just act:
-Take inspiration by following the Paris’ mayor; Anne Hidalgo; which plan to fully close key avenues to car, such as rue de Rivoli (once a 5 cars lane street), …and just do it…
but where is the Vancouver city council?
I heard its new seat is a cottage on a island from which it is lazying telling us to stay at home…
Do we need a model? Reality is more believable than any effort to convince people. We had plenty of congestion before the lockdown, if it gets worse in the future then some people will try to avoid it by either switching to transit or starting to use alternatives like car pooling, trip consolidation, etc. The worse the roads get, the more people will do this. It’s a self-regulating system that’s always led to outcomes like: (a) closing a road for construction doesn’t cause the road system to “fail”, and (b) building a new bridge or adding lanes to a highway causes new traffic to magically appear from nowhere. I’m pretty skeptical that you could alter that behaviour very much with persuasion.
Models are ecosystems of bias. They assign value to whatever the modelers want to promote and ignore or downplay everything else. Compounding this, the values themselves only convey the significance the modellers want them to convey. One can assign a cost of GHG emissions, for example, to compare ‘current’ and ‘post-COVID-transit-shunning’, but this same metric can be easily construed as justification for widening highways and intersections (Less idling = less emissions! Yeay!). Likewise, “travel time savings” for commuters is a time-honoured cost metric used by highway agencies to forever expand their budgets.
I understand it’s tempting to think that being rational will help; that if only we can clearly compare the costs, governments will change their minds. From the very bottom of their hearts, traffic engineers and highway designers believe they are making the world a better place. It’s a sticky problem to overcome, but it ain’t going to be accomplished with a competing model.
When either the cost of parking or the frustration at waiting in traffic become unbearable, people will switch to ‘something else’.
No need to study it to death trying to quantify something that is so variable depending on the personality of the individual (and certainly not spending money on studying it).
You can take solace in the knowledge that cost is an overriding factor for many (see bridge toll avoidance) and that the cost of parking is far, far higher than the cost of gas.
It’s important to consider that the primary goal shouldn’t be to get transit ridership up. It’s to keep car driving down.
Or likewise it shouldn’t be to keep car driving down but to minimize the negative externalities of cars. Or even better make the best cities for people possible.
Pushing back against motordom is like battling the tobacco industry: people vs venal profit-driven corporations.
Our streets are littered with parked ego cages; our air is polluted by carbon black and brake dust; our lives are crippled and taken away.
The air is sweeter and cleaner now, thanks to Covid. But many drivers still drive like arrogant holes. In hock to their eyeballs for their stupid machines.