
Tackling congestion as an economic, not engineering, problem - nkurz
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2015/09/tackling-congestion-as-economic-not.html?m=1
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Mz
I rather like this line of thought:

 _On a tangent, many cities currently limit population and job densities in
areas to keep vehicle traffic at a manageable levels. Except that is based on
the supposition that, no matter what. people are going to travel by cars, or
maybe that being able to own a car and to use it is a basic right. In fact,
people have different ways of getting around, and those without cars are even
forced to find other ways of getting around. So if you want to limit vehicle
trips to avoid congesting the road network, instead of restricting population
/job density, why not restrict vehicle density by restricting the number of
parking spots available? That way, you can restrict vehicle trips without
actually restricting development unduly._

At one time, I was pursuing an Environmental Resource Management degree with
intent to later get a Master's in Urban Planning. I gave up my car some years
ago. I think we do need to start questioning our autocentric assumptions in
the U.S. in order to make other options more viable for people who don't want
to be joined at the hip to car culture.

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hugh4
How about instead we start to question our city-centric culture?

It's no problem getting around by car in a town of ten thousand, or even sixty
thousand. But in a city of six million, transport is inevitably going to be a
huge issue.

There's no really good reason, especially in the internet age, why we should
be trying to cram into ever-larger cities rather than trying to spread people
out a bit more into medium-sized cities which don't suffer from so many
problems.

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simval
In a city of ten thousand, there is no reason why 20 to 40% of trips shouldn't
be done on foot or on a bike. A bus network can easily provide mobility in a
city of 50 to 100 thousand. In Sweden, some mid-sized cities have lower car
use per capita than Stockholm, the capital.

Anyway, I think you've got it all wrong. There's no good reason NOT to cram
into large cities. In the past, people had one job and they did it till the
day they died. Most small towns of the size you describe were built around one
employer.

In the modern economy, having one job only during one's life is next to
unheard of, at least, in the private sector. What replaces job security is the
ability to find another employer in close proximity, so you don't need to
uproot yourself and your family when you change job. It also means that you
can have a few big companies working the same sector, then have a lot of small
companies specializing in providing professional services for these big
companies, which creates a very dynamic industry where the contractors acquire
expertise working with the big companies and can share that expertise with
startups and smaller companies. That's why Silicon Valley exists and why even
IT companies, the most liable to transfer to telecommuting, tend to gather
around a few hubs rather than spreading far apart.

Telecommuting is also not applicable for a lot of industries, even when it is,
being physically present in one office can be quite beneficial for expertise
sharing through casual contacts rather than relying on formal internet
communication.

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hiram112
10 years ago I never paid a toll except when travelling interstate over long
distances. Voyaging through the DC-NY Megalopolis would cost about $15.

It now costs about $70.

What's worse, most intra-city travel is or will eventually be pay-per-use.
This is already happening in DC and other large US cities, as major
throughways are first converted to HOA lanes (2 or three users/auto), and then
fully transitioned to completely tolled. Pay up or sit in traffic.

For example, within about a 15 mile radius of DC's Beltway, I get charged
about $35 / week for my basic commute and one or two trips into the District.
This is using only about 8 gallons of gas. Coworkers that must take certain
costly routes (on privatized tolls no less) pay easily triple that.

Essentially, this is just another 'tax' or wealth transfer between young and
old, IMO, that governments have added to cover up the collapsing local
financial pyramids.

~~~
imgabe
It's not a wealth transfer, it's just internalizing some externalities. The
decisions of millions of people to live far away from where they work has
created this situation where they all have to spend hours sitting in traffic.
Maybe individually it's worthwhile to each person, but collectively it's
wasting billions of hours and countless gallons of gas. The tolls are merely
trying to align the financial incentives with reality. In other words, move so
you don't have to sit in traffic or pay the toll.

~~~
refurb
I think the problem is that such tolls are hitting the lower income class
hard. Unless you make a lot of money, you can't live in a city center where
you work. You have no choice but to live in the 'burbs where a car is your
only option.

Think about it this way: raise the tolls to something really high, say
$50/day. The very rich won't stop driving, they don't care. So now we convert
all of our roads from public to only for the very wealthy.

~~~
imgabe
People say nobody can afford to live in a city, and yet "inner city" is
synonymous with poverty. There are plenty of places to live in most cities
that are within the reach of middle class folks, but they might entail living
next to some people with a different skin color, and that frightens people.

Other alleged problems like crime, bad schools, etc would clear up easily if
some people who cared about making a community moved in and took some
responsibility, but nobody seems to want to do that.

~~~
refurb
_There are plenty of places to live in most cities that are within the reach
of middle class folks, but they might entail living next to some people with a
different skin color, and that frightens people._

Or living in a neighborhood with gun violence and rampant drug abuse.

I don't blame them for not wanting to live there.

~~~
imgabe
Yes, that is an impression that is held by people who don't live in such
places. In reality, it's not the wild west with daily gunfights in the streets
and junkies passed out on the sidewalk. Like the vast majority of human
beings, even poor people mostly just want to go about their business and not
be hassled.

~~~
pyre
Changing your location can also change your (car) insurance rates. Mine
_doubled_ just to to changing my address to where I currently live (from a
more gentrified area).

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0xcde4c3db
I don't think this post accurately represents traffic engineering or the
nature of congestion. As far as I know, traffic engineers have been doing
sophisticated dynamic simulations for decades. Likewise congestion is
naturally more _likely_ when a road is heavily utilized, but it's primarily a
coordination problem rather than a capacity problem (cf. ALOHA vs. slotted
ALOHA).

~~~
simval
I'm the author of that piece. Just pointing out that I am a traffic engineer,
I have seen, analyzed and criticized traffic studies. Believe me, your faith
in traffic engineering is quite misplaced.

Most cities do not have the resources to do complex dynamic simulations. In
Québec, the Transport Ministry has a model (EMME) supposed to take into
account trip choices and modal choices, but I haven't heard any confirmation
of its prediction capabilities. The big issue with such simulations is the
amount of input data you would need to adequately model reality. A
metropolitan area has hundreds of thousands of workers, or even millions, to
have a reliable model, you would need to know where everyone lives, where they
work, what is their work schedule, their income level, etc... Obviously,
collecting that data is essentially impossible, after you add up the
uncertainty of the inputs, you often realize that the uncertainty makes the
results completely unreliable, almost no better than an educated guess.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Fair enough. My thinking was that you'd use probabilistic methods and run many
trials to see where the failures are, but I guess that's likely to fail if the
real-world patterns are too cross-correlated, which they undoubtedly are (rush
hour, etc.).

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lkfewnf
In what way is rationing transportation a valid way to solve congestion
problems?

Here in the Seattle area they're converting lanes on already heavily congested
roads like I-405 into toll lanes with a maximum fee of over ten dollars a
trip, effectively reducing it from three lanes each way to two lanes each way.
Traffic has only become more congested since then.

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jsprogrammer
What about the traffic in the toll lanes? Surely the traffic is much better
there.

In Southern California, a similar thing happened to CA-91. Immediately after
construction, traffic in the toll lanes moved at the speed limit or faster,
while traffic in the non-toll lanes appears stopped during the heaviest
commute periods.

It seems like requiring an economic solution almost guarantees congestion
problems (and is perhaps, arguably, the point -- to extract a toll (ie. easy
profit) from a carefully designed scarcity).

Why not try solutions that directly address the causes of the congestion (lots
of vehicles trying to move through the same small area at the same time)?

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Simulacra
For a brief moment there I thought this was going to say "make the poor walk.
"

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wnoise
It's more "make the poor use public transportation."

~~~
imgabe
The poor already use public transportation. The ones clogging up the highways
are the middle class.

~~~
wnoise
To the rich, the middle class is poor; they just haven't finished making them
quite as destitute yet.

