Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: congestion

  • NYC’s congestion relief zone is now on indefinite pause

    Boy, congestion charges are a pain to implement. Back in 2018, I wrote that New York City was considering a congestion charge for drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street. Then in 2019, about a year later, I followed up with this post saying that the plan could be adopted as early as April of that year!

    That didn’t exactly happen. But I followed up again with a post in 2022 saying that New York City was still considering a congestion charge. And ultimately, it did finally get approved, even if it did take much longer than expected. It was rebranded a congestion relief zone (“relief” sounds a lot less offensive than “pricing”), and it was set to come into effect on June 30, 2024.

    This remained the situation until the first week of this month, which is when NY Governor Kathy Hochul held a surprise press conference and announced that the congestion relief zone would be placed on “indefinite pause.” I think that means cancelled. And it happened less than a month before the state was finally set to start collecting money.

    There is a legal question around whether she actually had the authority to intervene in this way, but let’s put that aside for now. Irrespective of that, this is a disappointing outcome precisely because we know that road pricing works. If you have a traffic congestion problem, price it, and then you will have less of it.

    What’s even more disappointing about this particular instance, though, is that many of us were looking to New York City to show us the way. We were looking for the most walkable and transit-rich city in the US to show people that, hey, road pricing works, and it won’t decimate your CBD.

    It is shocking to me that traffic congestion is allowed persist in the way that it does in our cities, and that there remains zero political will to actually address it. Instead of action, we like to preoccupy ourselves with red herrings. If only we didn’t have streetcars, Ubers, and so many bike lanes, then there wouldn’t be congestion.

    So what hope do we have now that even New York won’t do what is bold and right? Lots, as always. Cities, now is your chance to do what New York was too scared to do. Who will lead?

  • Escalator etiquette

    image

    I am one of those people that gets annoyed when people don’t follow proper escalator etiquette. The etiquette being: stand on the right; walk on the left. Some cities – London and Tokyo come to mind – are draconian about this.

    But it turns out that this is not always the best way to optimize throughput. A recent study conducted in London found that during peak periods – such as the morning rush hour – it is actually better for everyone to stand still.

    What they found was that when 40-60% of people chose to walk up on the left, maximum throughput was 115 passengers per minute. But when everyone stood still maximum throughput increased to 151 passengers per minute.

    The reason for this is that walking takes up more space than staying put on one step. When demand is low, this has no impact on capacity. But as soon as people start slowing down to avoid the set of legs in front of them, a bottleneck occurs and capacity starts to drop. 

    This is not dissimilar to what happens in traffic jams. Imagine if during peak periods all of the cars could separate themselves by only a few inches and travel at exactly the same (slow) speed. That’s not going to happen until self-driving cars hit the road, but it would be more efficient than the current chaos of distracted drivers starting and stopping.

    All of this being said, since this finding only applies during very busy times, I plan to continue being annoyed when proper escalator etiquette is not followed.

  • We’re still on road pricing

    The New York Times recently argued that self-driving cars can’t cure traffic, but that economics can. Here is the key soundbite:

    “Maybe autonomous cars will be different from other capacity expansions,” Mr. Turner said. “But of the things we have observed so far, the only thing that really drives down travel times is pricing.”

    The argument here is that capacity expansions – such as additional lanes – never solve the problem of gridlock. Yes lane widening projects increase capacity, but the latent demand is so strong that the problem never gets solved. Even in places like Houston.

    We talked a lot about this phenomenon on the blog a few years ago when Toronto was embroiled in debate over the Gardiner Expressway East. But it’s interesting to think about self-driving cars as simply another incremental capacity expansion.

    I have no doubt that this technology will make more efficient use of our roads. Carpooling will be a lot easier – as is already the case. Cars will be able to drive closer together. We’ll be able to stop abrupt breaking and swift land changes, which actually create systemic traffic problems for everybody else.  And the list goes on.

    But there will still be limits to how many people can be efficiently moved on a particular strip of road. Exactly how there are limits to how many people can be efficiently moved via a particular subway tunnel, streetcar line, and so on.

    So if latent demand continues to outstrip available capacity, which has historically been the case, then we are once again back to the politically unpopular idea of pricing away congestion. As much as people criticize it as regressive, I believe that’s where we’re headed.

  • Province rejects Toronto’s proposed road toll plan

    Earlier this week I was in an Uber heading up to Charles Street and the driver made a comment to me. He said that since he moved to Toronto in the 90′s, traffic has gotten progressively worse every single year. He continued on to say: and yet we continue to build, build, build.

    My response won’t surprise anyone who reads this blog. I said that Toronto has become a far more exciting city since the 90′s because of intensification (though 1992 and 1993 were pretty awesome) and that the problem is our mental model. We haven’t moved beyond the car as the perceived solution to urban mobility.

    A perfect example of this is what just happened with the province vetoing Toronto’s proposed road toll plan. 

    Firstly, I fully agree with Marcus Gee of the Globe and Mail that this is both an act of cowardice (the province gave every indication that they initially supported the plan) and an act of arrogance (we are talking about roads owned by the city, not the province).

    I also find it incredibly frustrating that Toronto cannot control its own destiny. This is a mistake and it needs to change if we – and the rest of the cities in this great country – are to continue competing at a high level in this urban century.

    But to my initial point, the problem with this move is that it signals a status quo mental model. It is a clear reluctance to make any sort of bold moves to move Toronto in a new direction. I guess we are happy with the current trend line. More traffic.

    We shouldn’t be.

  • Rethinking downtowns to improve urban mobility

    Jarrett Walker of Human Transit recently published an interesting post talking about downtowns. His argument is that we shouldn’t be planning our transit networks around the traditional notion of a single-centered city.

    Here’s a snippet:

    So growing a single downtown isn’t the key to becoming a great transit city. Quite the opposite, it’s best to have a pattern of many centers, all generating high demand, and supporting balanced two-way flows between them that let us move more people on less infrastructure.  This is the great advantage of Paris or Los Angeles or the Dutch Randstad over Chicago or Manhattan.

    Now, there are many cases where a singular economic center still dominates an urban region. See downtown Toronto. And many will argue that the current economic environment is creating more, rather than less, concentrated urban spikiness.

    But at the same time it is quite clear that many of our cities have shifted away from a monocentric model to a polycentric one. 

    I mean, just look at all employment nodes that have developed across the Toronto region. The idea that everyone comes downtown in the morning and then leaves in the evening has become an anachronism for many. Early in my career I spent 4 years commuting from downtown to the suburbs.

    So what is happening is that our cities need to start performing more like point-to-point networks. This isn’t a new thought. But it’s a lot harder to execute on compared to what many cities have been used to. 

    You need a critical density of both residents and employers and the right kind of connectivity to create a true “mobility hub.” In Toronto, you could argue that we really only have one of those and it’s centered around Union Station.

    But I think that will change for many cities. And when we do get it right, we will be doing a lot to improve the crippling traffic congestion that so many of our cities are suffering from.

  • How to encourage traffic congestion in your city

    City
    Observatory recently republished their
    commentary     on a report (released earlier this year) called Who Pays
    for Roads    . I missed their original post, so this is new to me.

    The report
    and commentary are all about the mispricing of roads/driving and the fallacy
    that “user fees” (gas taxes, tolls, and so on) are enough to completely cover
    the costs associated with driving.

    I have been
    a vocal supporter of road pricing and/or congestion charges here in Toronto, and
    so I’d like to share two pieces from their commentary.

    The first
    is this paragraph, which talks about how mispricing leads to demand issues
    (i.e. traffic congestion):  

    The conventional
    wisdom of road finance is that we have a shortfall of revenue: we “need” more
    money to pay for maintenance and repair and for new construction. But the huge
    subsidy to car use has another equally important implication: because user fees
    are set too low, and because, in essence, we are paying people to drive more,
    we have excess demand for the road system. If we priced the use of our roads to
    recover even the cost of maintenance, driving would be noticeably more
    expensive, and people would have much stronger incentives to drive less, and to
    use other forms of transportation, like transit and cycling. The fact that user
    fees are too low not only means that there isn’t enough revenue, but that there
    is too much demand. One value of user fees would be that they would discourage
    excessive use of the roads, lessen wear and tear, and in many cases obviate the
    need for costly new capacity.

    And the second is this chart, which shows the cumulative net
    subsidy to highways in the US from the late 1940’s:

    image

    The point of all this is that when you subsidize something
    it’s because you’d like to see more, not less of it. So why then are we even surprised by the crippling traffic that plagues our
    cities? We are doing a lot to encourage exactly that.

  • Teaming up to fix Toronto’s traffic troubles

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    “This will be a game changer and will establish Toronto as a leader in running a truly smart city.”
    – John Tory, Mayor of the City of Toronto

    Yesterday I registered for a hackathon called TrafficJam that’s taking place this October 2 – 4, 2015 here in Toronto. It’s being organized by Evergreen CityWorks and the City of Toronto, with the goal of fixing Toronto’s traffic troubles.

    Tickets are free, but going fast. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I would encourage you to sign up today. And if you do register or are already registered, drop me on a line so we can connect. I’m excited to see what kind of solutions we’re all able to come up with over the course of a weekend.

    But as I was registering and reading through the website, I couldn’t help but think about some of the traffic problems that we won’t be solving over the hackathon weekend, namely the politicization of transportation planning in this city.

    As an example of that check out a post by transit blogger Steve Munro called, The Vanishing Relevance of SmartTrack. 

    SmartTrack is the transit platform that Mayor John Tory ran on last year. And this post explains why it is unlikely to achieve its pitch promises.

  • Guest Post: Three minutes that rule the world – Will demolishing the Gardiner East actually make traffic worse?

    Today on Architect This City, we have a guest post by Darren Davis, who is a transport planner in Auckland, New Zealand. He’s a regular commenter on this blog, and I know he’s been following the Gardiner East debate quite closely – as many urbanists around the world are. I appreciate him offering and taking the time to write this piece. Thank you.

    ——————————–

    The decision this month on whether to demolish the Gardiner East Expressway and replace it with a surface boulevard or to rebuild it with a similar elevated structure will be a watershed moment for Toronto, akin to the decision not to have freeways in the urban core of Vancouver in the late 1970s.

    There are numerous good reasons why removing the Gardiner East elevated structure is the right move for Toronto, covered previously by The Globe and Mail and in the Council for Canadian Urbanism’s open letter to Toronto City Council. If you aren’t aware of these, I strongly recommend reading them. 

    Also of note are two things:

    1. Just 3% of Downtown commuters drive on the Gardiner Expressway East, a tiny fraction of the 68% who arrive Downtown on public transit.
    2. The “remove” option does not reduce traffic capacity over the “hybrid” option but could reduce travel speeds in uncongested conditions (read on for why I don’t think that this will happen in real life).

    However, one element of this debate that has not got much airtime is the transportation modelling that claims an additional two to three minutes travel time with the “remove” option over the “hybrid” option which retains the elevated expressway in a slightly modified form. 

    Toronto Mayor John Tory has stated that "I didn’t get elected to make traffic worse. And let’s be clear, removing that piece of the Gardiner will almost certainly make traffic worse.” But is it in fact true that demolishing the Gardiner Expressway East will make traffic worse as the transportation modelling claims?

    The key thing to understand is that transportation modelling, which tries to predict future travel times, is the product of a bunch of assumptions which may not in fact be borne out in real life. 

    For example, the effect of induced traffic, where additional traffic capacity leads to additional traffic being attracted to the route, is reasonably well known but generally not factored into transportation modelling. Induced traffic happens because increased travel speeds attracts traffic that would have otherwise avoided the route at congested times; attracts people to drive where they previously used other modes and encourages trips that would not otherwise have taken place. The effect of induced traffic is to quickly nullify the benefits of adding traffic capacity.

    However, what is less well known is that the reverse happens where there is either a reduction in traffic capacity (not the case in Toronto as the “remove” option retains the same traffic capacity) or speed.

    This is because in this situation, four things happen:

    1. Some travel re-routes. The “remove” option with a widened Lakeshore Boulevard as part of the street grid simply gives more ability for traffic to re-route away from congestion over an elevated expressway structure where drivers are literally trapped until they reach their exit.
    2. Some travel re-times. Some people will retime trips to avoid congested travel times, such as starting and/or finishing work at less congested times.
    3. Some travel changes mode. Some people will be encouraged to change mode by the perceived worsening in traffic conditions.
    4. Some travel is avoided entirely. Some people will choose not to travel at all in the peak of the peak. For example, this could take the form of working from home or shopping on the internet instead of by car.

    Transportation models only take into account the first item but not the others. The modelling is also sensitive to traffic growth assumptions and assumed mode split and trip distribution. Often transportation models assume continued growth in car travel even though per capita kilometres travelled peaked about a decade ago.

    While this may all sound well and good theory, does this actually happen in practice?

    In Auckland city centre, we have extensive experience with the reallocation of road space away from general traffic. Many busy key city centre approach routes have had general vehicle lanes reduced to make way for bus lanes (which generally carry around 65-70% of the people moving capacity of the street). 

    This has involved up to a 50% reduction in private vehicle capacity (whereas in Toronto, the “remove” option retains the same traffic capacity but may slow throughput). Auckland has done two of these in the past twelve months – both involved converting a general traffic lane to a bus lane. 

    Don’t get me wrong: There is sometimes pain at implementation with about a three week period of congestion as car drivers adapt to the new reality – and most likely negative media coverage will accompany this. But after about a month, equilibrium will be restored and life will continue much as it did prior to the change. 

    Part of this is that there will be various “optimisations” during this introductory period where signal timings are adjusted and other tweaks made – the sort of tweaks that can only be fine-tuned in a real world situation. But a bigger part of this is that the four factors above – re–routing, re-timing, mode change and avoided travel – come into play.

    I cannot overemphasise enough that life will return to normal surprisingly soon if the Gardiner East Expressway is demolished and replaced by a widened Lakeshore Boulevard.

    My advice

    When people talk about two to three minutes of extra travel time, take the foregoing into account and take those claims with the very big grains of salt that they deserve. If Toronto makes the right choice and chooses the “remove” option, my bet is that the biggest surprise of all will be how little difference it makes to peak travel times for the 3% of Downtown commuters who used to use the Gardiner Expressway East.

    Disclaimer

    The author of the above post is an employee of Auckland Transport, however, the views, or opinions expressed in this post are personal to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Auckland Transport, its management or employees. Auckland Transport is not responsible for, and disclaims any and all liability for the content of the article.

  • How much should a ride on the Union Pearson Express cost?

    When I was in Chicago a few weekends ago, one of the things we did was take the train from Midway Airport to downtown. We were a large group, but since it was only $2.25 and we figured it would be easier and faster than contending with traffic, we decided to take it.

    Since it was their local transit service (as opposed to a dedicated airport rail line), the train came within a few minutes and it took us about 25 minutes to get to the Loop. It was a great experience. And I would take it again the next time I go to Chicago.

    I mention this because there’s been a lot of debate in Toronto recently about the potential ticket price for the new Union Pearson Express train to the airport. Some are suggesting that it could cost upwards of $30 for a one way ride, which would also take 25 minutes and would leave every 15 minutes.

    The concern is that at this price, the train will only serve the business community and the rich. And indeed, it’s a lot more than the $2.25 I paid when I landed in Chicago earlier this month. But at the same time the Union Pearson Express promises to offer a more refined travel experience than your regular old subway train. So how should it be priced?

    Pricing exercises are really interesting because, as David Fitzpatrick pointed out in a recent tweet, increasing the price of the ticket will lower ridership. And at a certain point, this will cause overall revenues to also decline (the loss in ridership stops being made up by the higher ticket price). So, in theory at least, there exists a magic, profit maximizing number.  

    Of course, profit may not be the only goal. One might also be interested in reducing the number of vehicles on the road, promoting sustainability, and generally providing people with a convenient way to get to and from the city’s biggest airport. And should this be case, then those factors also need to be worked into the pricing model.

    Now, I don’t know what that magic number should be off hand, but I do think we need to be clear on our goals as that decision is made.

    I personally believe that we underprice roads in this city, which is why we have such a supply and demand imbalance (i.e. gridlock). And so if we decide that rail travel should be a premium service, then I don’t think it’ll do much to correct that imbalance.