Tag: driving

• 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:

  

  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.

  2015.10.26

• We are all selfish bastards

  

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  We are all selfish bastards when it comes to sharing road space and public space.

  When we drive, we complain about pedestrians jumping out in front of us, crazy cyclists who get in our way, and under-utilized bike lanes that are taking away valuable driving space and creating traffic jams.

  When we take surface transit (such as buses and streetcars), we want all the cars out of the way so that we can move more efficiently. And we complain about drivers who don’t stop to let us off and on when the streetcar doors open. (Toronto specific reference.)

  When we cycle, we complain about cars parked in the bike lanes, people who don’t look before changing lanes or opening their car doors, and drivers who honk at you because they just want you off the road and onto the sidewalk.

  And when we walk, we complain about cyclists who ride on the sidewalk (they should be on the road!), cars that don’t stop to let us go, and slow walking groups who linearly block the entire sidewalk so you can’t pass.

  We are never happy. And we automatically assume that we could do it better. (I know I’m guilty of this.)

  But here are a few things to consider the next time you’re flipping the bird to someone on the streets. Here are a few things that we do know about urban mobility.

  There is an unprecedented number of condominiums in the development pipeline right now in Toronto. For argument’s sake, let’s assume 75,000 condominium suites – many of which will be built in central areas of the city.

  At a parking ratio of 0.6 stalls per unit, which isn’t an unreasonable assumption today, that’s 45,000 new parking spots and potentially 45,000 new cars in the city. 

  If you think that 45,000 new cars will be able to get fully absorbed into the core and somehow move around in an unfettered way, then I believe you are mistaken. 

  If you think that there’s something that can be done to magically expand road capacity to handle all of these additional cars in the city, then I believe you are mistaken.

  And if you think that adding a bike lane is the only reason you are currently stuck in traffic, then I believe you are missing the bigger picture.

  Over a decade ago, we made a decision in this region to encourage building up, instead of building out. And along with that decision came a necessary rethink of how we get around. That transition is what we are living through right now.

  The other thing we know is that the 4 modes of mobility that I started this post with are ordered from least sustainable to most sustainable. 

  Electric self-driving vehicles will reduce the impacts of driving, but it will also transform it into something that feels more like transit and less like the driving we know today. That will be a very good thing.

  But I’m not yet convinced that it will solve all of our problems. To do that I think we will need to adopt a much more balanced and unselfish view of what it takes to move around a city. That, of course, isn’t always easy.

  2015.10.04

• From map books to Google Maps

  When I was a kid I remember my parents having something called a “Perly’s” in their car. It was basically a map book and it was the best thing around. 

  You would start by looking at a big grid of the city and then you’d find the specific area you were looking for and then flip to that page. If you were on the road a lot for work, a Perly’s was a mandatory addition to your car.

  Things have obviously come a long way since then. It could take you a long time to find the street you were looking for in a Perly’s. I remember doing that from the passenger seat. Now our phones do that for us and if the connection makes us wait for more than few seconds, we get irritated.

  But we’ve also moved beyond just static maps. 

  The other morning I was driving out to the suburbs and I saw this road sign telling me that – given current traffic conditions – it was going to take me 15 minutes to get to HWY 427. 

  

  Have you ever wondered how they come up with those time estimates?

  There are a few ways to do it. But here in Toronto along the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Shore Boulevard it’s done using your mobile phone. Phones have unique network identifiers called MAC addresses. And when they try and connect via Bluetooth or Wifi they actually send out their MAC address.

  So what happens as you’re driving along is that your phone’s MAC address is being picked up at various locations. And since the distance between these various reception points is known, it’s pretty easy to determine how fast you’re traveling. That’s how they come up with those time/traffic estimates. 

  This data is anonymous but, in theory, the city also knows if people are speeding when the traffic is light.

  This same technology is being used by many retailers and shopping malls to track how people move through their spaces. It’s used to see, among other things, which merchandising strategies are working and what synergies one might be creating (or not creating) with the tenant mix.

  But getting back to traffic, there are obviously ways to collect traffic data without any additional physical infrastructure.

  As I was about to leave the suburbs and head back downtown, my phone somehow knew I was about to do that (perhaps because I was stopped at a Starbucks near the highway) and so it decided to tell me this:

  

  It wasn’t the best notification to receive on my phone, but I was impressed nonetheless. This traffic data is collected using GPS data transmitted from mobile phones using Google Maps, Apple Maps, and so on. Clearly we’ve come a long way since the days of manually leafing through a thick Perly’s.

  At the same time, it feels like we are still pretty far away from solving the problem of urban congestion. Every big city in the world is grappling with this issue. 

  Part of the problem, I think, is the belief that there’s some sort of silver bullet – more highways, a magic smartphone app, and so on – that will enable everyone to be able to drive around in their own car by themselves. I don’t believe that’s possible in big cities. And the sooner we get away from that toxic thinking, the quicker we’ll solve this problem.

  2015.09.19

• Uber, commuting, car ownership, and the future of urban mobility

  Earlier this week I wrote a “Tech Tuesday” post talking about Uber’s new Smart Routes functionality, which it is currently testing out in San Francisco. At the end of the post I ended by saying that it’s not just the taxi industry that should be thinking about Uber, it’s also public transit authorities. 

  And that’s because many people in cities rely on multi-modal forms of transportation (I know I do) and in my mind it is clear that Uber is trending away from just “Everyone’s Private Driver” to a service that is starting to look and feel a lot like urban mass transit.

  Then today my good friend Evgeny sent me a post called, “Public Transit Should Be Uber’s New Best Friend.” And it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read on Uber and its impact on urban mobility. I highly recommend you give it a read, particularly if you’re in the city building arena.

  The article does a deep dive into how New Yorkers commute. Here’s how they broke it down.

  

  It then talks about what it will take for a company like Uber to make a meaningful dent in car ownership (which is one of the company’s goals) and how the truly big opportunity for Uber is to go more mass market and tap into the public transit market – either by interfacing with or by building its own version of it.

  Here’s their concluding paragraph:

  But there’s a much wider potential audience if Uber can also reach middle-class customers who want to save money. Perhaps in the distant (or even the not-so-distant) future, Uber can build its own version of “public” transit, making rides so cheap that they cost less than the $4 or $5 that Americans now pay, on average, to make a trip in their personal cars. In the meantime, it might have more success among “car-cutting” customers who can use Uber along with public transit. That might mean Uber’s growth is concentrated more in cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago — and in Europe and Asia — that already have reasonably strong public transit networks.

  It’s definitely worth a full read. Thanks again for sending this over Evgeny.

  2015.08.29

• The second coming of the car

  

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  As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I remember when getting my driver’s licence and getting a car were some of my biggest priorities. 

  As soon as I turned 16, I went immediately to get my learner’s permit and then enrolled in a driving school so that I could shorten the time required until I could drive on my own. Every month counted at that age.

  It was such an important milestone that people born earlier in the year were seen as lucky. Because someone born in January, for example, could gain their driving independence before someone born at the end of the year even got their learner’s permit. As silly as it sounds to me right now, that spread was huge back then.

  But the world has changed and we are at the dawn of a new era: driverless cars. 

  Sooner than most people think, we are no longer going to drive ourselves around cities. I absolutely believe this. That means no more steering wheels. No more traffic calming measures on quiet residential streets. Safer streets. Perfect traffic information because all the cars will be networked. And a dramatic increase in urban efficiency. (Relevant post: The tragedy of the commons.)

  I can’t wait for this happen.

  Reid Hoffman, who is the co-founder of LinkedIn, recently wrote a fascinating article on autonomous vehicles called, Driving in the Networked Age. And in it he argues that cities should be starting to look at banning human-driven cars and generally putting in place policies to support networked autonomous cars. In fact, he sees it as an opportunity for Detroit to reestablish itself as the 21st century motor city.

  Again, I don’t doubt that this transition will happen. I think it’s a question of when, not if. But I also think that it’s going to be incredibly important to think about what driverless vehicles will mean for our cities and the built environment. 

  It’s once again an example of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase: The medium is the message. 

  Cars as a medium have had a profound impact on the way we live and the way we build our cities. We know this. But the medium is now changing. And while simply taking out the driver may seem like a small change, it is not. Have a read of Hoffman’s article.

  I’m excited about the possibilities. I don’t really like driving anymore. But let’s make this second coming of the car more positive for cities than the first. Deal?

  2015.07.25

• The taxi cartel

  

  Taxi by Roland R. on 500px

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  Early this morning Peter Cheney of the Globe and Mail published an article called: How Uber is ending the dirty dealings behind Toronto’s cab business.

  And I highly recommend you read it. He’s been investigating this industry for decades.

  Though the article is specific to Toronto, I know that there are middle people and archaic policies governing the taxi industries in many other cities around the world.

  Here it revolves around taxi licenses issued by the city (known as “plates”), which are expensive and almost impossible to get. Last year the average price of a plate was $118,235 (2014).

  The way it works is that people – typically non-drivers – buy/inherit/get these plates and then charge rent on them to drivers who want to use them. The result is a taxi cartel:

  In fact, Toronto’s taxi plate system is anything but free enterprise. Instead, it is based on the artificial restriction of a natural market, and the granting of licences to a fixed number of participants. Even those who paid top dollar for a plate used to enjoy an annual return of more than 12 per cent. And for those who inherited plates, the return was manna from heaven.

  So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the taxi industry is grouchy about companies like Uber. But the cost structure of the incumbents is going to need to change if they want to stay in business.

  Jeff Bezos of Amazon is famous for saying, “Your margin is my opportunity.” And that’s exactly what is happening here. A bloated legacy cost structure is being quickly supplanted by better/cheaper.

  2015.07.16

• The tragedy of the commons

  

  the traffic jam by Phoebe Eve on 500px

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  In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an article where he coined the term: the tragedy of the commons. Hardin was an American ecologist who was obsessed and concerned with the prospect of human overpopulation.

  In his article, the term tragedy of the commons was used to describe a situation where individuals – all acting independently and in their own self-interest – actually end up behaving in a way that is detrimental to the larger group and that negatively impacts some sort of common resource.

  Just in case, here’s another definition via Investopedia:

  An economic problem in which every individual tries to reap the greatest benefit from a given resource. As the demand for the resource overwhelms the supply, every individual who consumes an additional unit directly harms others who can no longer enjoy the benefits. Generally, the resource of interest is easily available to all individuals.

  So what would be an example of a tragedy of the commons?

  You may not have thought of it in these terms, but I bet you that everybody reading this blog has experienced one.

  I will give you two examples.

  1. The first is that of electricity consumption. 

  In most condominiums, there are two types of ways that electricity gets billed and paid. Either the whole building gets one bill (master metering) or each individual resident gets a bill (submetering). 

  In the case of master mastering, each resident’s consumption isn’t tracked and so nobody knows who is consuming what. But in the case of submetering, each individual resident only pays for the electricity that they use.

  Not surprisingly, the data shows that submetering can cut electricity consumption by 10 to 30%. That’s because it creates a 1:1 relationship between usage and cost. There’s now a strong incentive to conserve.

  With master metering, there isn’t a 1:1 relationship between usage and cost. The additional burden/cost of consumption actually gets shared by everyone else in the building. And since each individual is looking to maximize their own benefit, they lose the incentive to conserve. As a whole, this makes the entire group worse off.

  2. The second example is that of congestion on public, un-tolled roads.

  In most cities, public roads are a resource that is “easily available to all individuals” (to use Investopedia’s terminology). They are basically free. The marginal cost of driving another kilometer to work on a road is basically nothing (other than a bit of gas and some time).

  What this does is create a situation where individuals – in their pursuit of maximum individual benefit – start to overload the road. Everybody just wants to get where they need to go and there’s no incentive to conserve the resource (i.e. the road). Once again, the result is that the entire group becomes worse off.

  That’s why building more road rarely/never works. You’re simply increasing a resource that is easily available to all individuals. What we should instead be doing is looking at submetering our roads (i.e. pricing our roads). It’s been proven time and time again to reduce road congestion basically overnight.

  I had never heard of the term tragedy of the commons before today, but I like it a lot. So the next time you’re stuck somewhere in traffic, you can now scream to yourself: What a tragedy of the commons!

  2015.07.14

• Teaming up to fix Toronto’s traffic troubles

  

  “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.

  2015.06.30

• 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.

  2015.06.02

• Driverless cars, urban mobility, and Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway

  

  About a week ago I wrote a post questioning what driverless cars will mean for cities. I ended by saying that that it feels as if we’re going to see increasing tension between private and public transport.

  What I meant by that was simply that conventional notions around private car use are going to change. And ultimately that is going to mean that we need to rethink public transport and how that fits into a broader urban mobility framework.

  What do I mean by this?

  The International Transport Forum at the OECD recently published a fascinating report called, Urban Mobility System Upgrade: How shared self-driving cars could change city traffic. And it deals with exactly the sorts of things I am thinking about.

  The study looked of what might happen when all cars become self-driving in a mid-sized European city (specifically Lisbon, Portugal). They leveraged existing transportation data from the city, but replaced 100% of the human powered cars with two types of self-driving cars: TaxiBots and AutoVots.

  TaxiBots were driverless cars that would be shared with multiple people at the same time. In other words, they were a kind of pseudo-public transit. And AutoVots we’re your more conventional private taxi. They picked up one person at a time.

  So, what did they find?

  In the first scenario, they combined their TaxiBots and AutoVots with public transit (light rail) and discovered that the same number of people could be moved around with only 10% of the cars currently on the road. That’s a 90% reduction!

  They also found that the city needed 20% less on-street parking and 80% less off-street parking since driverless cars don’t need to sit idle waiting for a driver.

  In the second scenario, they removed mass transit from the equation. And in this instance they found that the city was still able to get around, but with an 80% reduction in the number of cars on the road. Remarkably, it also led to a 10% reduction in rush hour commute times.

  These are pretty profound changes. Reducing the number of cars on the road by 80-90% is a significant change. 

  But it’s also why I’ve been thinking about the tension between private and public transport. As we get better at optimizing “cars” (their definition will change), what becomes the role of true public transit?

  Ultimately, I think what will happen is a blurring of the two. In the example above, the TaxiBots served basically as small scale public transit. But that does not necessarily mean that true mass transit will become irrelevant. We’re just going to need to rethink how the entire mobility network fits together.

  I’d now like to bring this discussion back to Toronto for a minute.

  As many of you probably know from this blog, Toronto is on the cusp of deciding what to do with the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway (an elevated highway that runs across the downtown waterfront). It will go to City Council next month. 

  I firmly believe that we should remove it, but there many people who believe we shouldn’t. The main objection seems to be that the traffic projections indicate that removing it could make commuting into downtown – by car – 3 to 5 minutes longer by 2031. 

  By today’s standards, I believe this concern represents an outdated way of thinking about cities and urban mobility. Adding more lanes is like loosening your belt to deal with obesity. However, it gets even worse when you think about urban mobility in the context of this post.

  Given the profound transportation changes that are currently underway, I think there’s a strong likelihood that the Gardiner projections we have today will be completely wrong by 2031. I don’t know know for sure, but I’m guessing the models don’t account for the efficiencies being created by driverless cars and peer-to-peer networks.

  In other words, I am suggesting that those 3 to 5 minutes could prove to be a red herring. The relevant question should be: Which decision will allow Toronto to build the absolute best waterfront in the world? And in my opinion that leads to removing the Gardiner East.

  If you feel similarly, I would encourage you to write your local City Councillor.

  2015.05.05