Streetsblog New York City

Gary Toth is director of transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces. This post first appeared on PPS’s Placemaking Blog.

Would you use a rototiller to get rid of weeds in a flowerbed? Of course not. You might solve your immediate goal of uprooting the weeds — but oh, my, the collateral damage that you would do.

Yet when we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.

Image: Andy Singer

Image: Andy Singer

First, an explanation of what I call the “deadly duo”: travel projection models and Levels of Service (LOS) performance metrics.Travel projection models are computer programs that use assumptions about future growth in population, employment, and recreation to estimate how many new cars will be on roads 20 or 30 years into the future.

Models range from quite simplistic to incredibly complex and expensive. Simple models deal primarily with coarse movements of vehicles between cities, while complex models deal with the intricacies of what happens on the fine grid of urban areas. To be truly accurate, growth projection modeling can be expensive. Therefore, absent compelling reason to do otherwise, most growth projections tend to be done using less expensive techniques, which usually lead to overestimates.

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Transportation analyst and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff is out with a piece in Reuters today that examines the traffic impacts of adding 2,000 new yellow taxis to Manhattan streets, and it’s not pretty.

As part of the grand bargain struck between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo that will create a new class of hail-able livery cabs, NYC will auction off 2,000 new yellow taxi medallions. The city is expected to haul in a billion dollars from the auction, but Komanoff calculates that in the bargain, central Manhattan streets will be overrun with even more traffic:

No one mentioned traffic when the taxi deal was rolled out last month at City Hall and in Albany. After all, with 800,000 motor vehicles already entering the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) each weekday, what difference could a mere 2,000 additional yellow cabs possibly make?

Plenty, it turns out. Yellow cabs spend three-fourths of each shift, around seven hours, plying CBD streets and avenues. (And of course some are active for two shifts a day.) Most private cars driven in Manhattan don’t do so for long. Even at the CBD’s notoriously labored traffic pace — now averaging 9.5 mph, up from 8 mph before the recession — the two to three miles per day logged by the average car below 60th Street occupy 15 to 20 minutes.

Adding one new medallion is thus equivalent to adding 40 private cars. Adding 2,000 of them — as the City now intends to do during the next three years — would be the traffic equivalent of adding 80,000 cars, a 10% increase in volume.

Some form of congestion pricing would be just about the only way to mitigate the impact of all this additional traffic, Komanoff writes. You can see the analysis underlying his conclusions in this PDF.

Last year, the D.C. region ran away with the dubious honor of Most Congested Metro Area. D.C. area drivers wasted 74 hours and 37 gallons of fuel sitting in traffic last year, which would have cost about $100 over the course of the year. But the gasoline cost is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, released today by the Texas Transportation Institute, this delay cost the average D.C. driver $1,495 once you factor in lost productivity and increased trucking times. In Chicago, it’s $1,568. L.A., $1,334.

Every year, TTI puts out their Urban Mobility Report, and every year we criticize it for its autocentrism. After all, its sole measure is how fast a vehicle can speed down a given mile of roadway. Maybe your city is dense and friendly to pedestrians and bikes, so that it’s easy to glide past the automobile gridlock on your short commute to work. Or maybe transit provides an excellent and affordable alternative to traffic jams. None of that matters to TTI. If someone, somewhere, is sitting in traffic, that’s all that matters. All other measures and modes of urban mobility are ignored.

TTI doesn’t bother to figure out how much time is saved if one avoids that congestion by taking transit, but they do examine how much time transit riders save drivers by taking vehicles off the road.

How public transportation reduces delays for drivers, 2010. Source: 2011 Urban Mobility Report, via APTA.

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Can you spot the flaw in this excerpt from the New York Times’ Saturday backgrounder on MTA chief Jay Walder’s pending departure for Hong Kong?

[T]he future of New York’s cash-poor transit system, depended on by millions of riders a day, has now fallen directly to Mr. Cuomo, who must pick a successor.

The passage is spot on, but for this missing note: The city and region’s 8 million train, bus and subway riders aren’t the only people who depend on public transit. So do a million or more daily motor vehicle users, who will find themselves in ever-worse gridlock if fare hikes and under-investment lead even a small fraction of transit passengers to switch to automobiles.

How much worse will traffic congestion get if transit deteriorates? A lot, potentially. Consider a combination of higher fares and reduced service sufficient to bring about a 5 percent decline in subway use, so that weekday trips by subway to the Manhattan Central Business District, currently averaging 2,160,000 a day, shrink by 110,000. My modeling suggests that while a majority of those trips will relocate or simply disappear, an estimated 35,000 of them will continue to be made, in cars.

Auto trips to the CBD will increase in this scenario by nearly 30,000, allowing for cars with more than one person. While numerically that increase is much smaller than the drop in subway use, the increased volume of traffic will depress already abysmal travel speeds in the Manhattan core by more than 4 percent and slow traffic on the CBD approaches by an average of 1-2 percent. The estimated “time costs” of these new delays: nearly $600 million a year.

Is this scenario realistic? Sadly, yes. According to my travel-and-traffic modeling, it wouldn’t take much in the way of fare hikes and service cuts to bring about a 5 percent cut in subway trips. Here’s one way it could happen:

Raise fares (generates $230 million)

• Raise price of unlimited-fare Metrocards by 10 percent
• Eliminate current 7 percent bonus on $10 or higher pay-per-ride Metrocards

Cut service and investment (saves $440 million total)

• Cut $40 million from subway operations
• Cut $400 million a year from MTA capital program

The above combination is all it would take for 5 percent of subway riders to bail and collectively put 30,000 more CBD-bound car trips on the road. Now let’s add up this scenario’s pluses and minuses.

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The Chamber of Commerce report states that American transportation performance has been through the roof lately, a finding that should lead the Chamber to question some of its assumptions. Source: U.S. Chamber TPI 2011 Update

The Chamber of Commerce released its annual Transportation Performance Index (TPI) last week [PDF], and you can tell it’s due for a total overhaul, because according to the Index, recession-battered 2009 was a banner year for transportation performance.

Using 2009 data, the Chamber, a powerful lobbying group that represents millions of American businesses, determined that the performance of the nation’s transportation infrastructure is improving. However, even the Chamber dismisses the significance of its own results, saying the “improvement” is illusory — due to the decline in driving, and thus congestion, during the recession. But there’s another good reason to dismiss the results: The Chamber is measuring the wrong things.

The Chamber uses the TPI “to track the performance of transportation infrastructure over time… and demonstrate the connection between infrastructure performance, rather than spending, and the economy.” It claims to be the first organization to ever measure the correlation between the quality of transportation systems and economic growth.

But the Chamber’s metrics produce some truly baffling results. During the economic torpor of 2009, the index experienced its greatest improvement in a single year since 1990. Despite the nonsensical figures, the Chamber uses the report release as an opportunity to call for renewed infrastructure investment.

“By all accounts, the nation’s transportation networks continue to languish.” said Janet Kavinoky, head lobbyist for the Chamber’s infrastructure program. “The improvement of the TPI is not sustainable and does not represent a long-term trend… It is due to the economic downturn, rather than strategic policy and regulatory reforms or new investment.”

That’s all true, but that’s not the only reason to question the results of the TPI.

Of the 21 indicators the Chamber uses in its complex formulas, none deal with emissions. Of all of the ways the Chamber chooses to evaluate the U.S. transportation system, none investigates the effect on air and water quality. They certainly don’t take public health into account, ignoring the effect of our transportation choices on our waistlines or our lungs. In fact, the Chamber completely glosses over non-motorized transportation. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure doesn’t count as one of the “fixed facilities” the Chamber examines.

Here’s all you need to know to be convinced that the Chamber’s measurements of transportation performance don’t add up: Though it didn’t name the top states for transportation performance this year (that listing only comes out every other year), these were the top winners last year:

Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce TPI 2010

Maybe that’s what you get when you evaluate performance on congestion based on “route-miles per 10,000 population” — the higher the better. That’s right. The Chamber judges congestion using a simple formula: asphalt divided by people.

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As it is, the NYC DOT “Midtown in Motion” initiative is a bit of a head-scratcher. To learn that the city is devoting well over a million dollars in addition to staff resources to speed up car traffic in Midtown, which the mayor has declared the “lifeblood” of the CBD — is it 2006 again?

Here’s another jaw-dropping facet of the program, as reported in the Times:

[City engineers] also plan to offer this data to software developers so that drivers and passengers can gain access to this detailed information on their iPads or iPhones.

Distracted driving is a known killer, an epidemic so widespread and pernicious that it even has Albany’s attention. You’ve got to wonder about the logic behind encouraging drivers to pilot their two-ton missiles through streets teeming with pedestrians while not looking where they’re going.

From inside DOT's traffic control center, engineers will now be able to tweak Midtown traffic lights in response to real-time conditions. They'll only be getting information about automobiles, however. Photo: Jill Colvin/DNAinfo.

The Department of Transportation is rolling out a response to Midtown traffic congestion that is as high-tech as it is intellectually outdated. Microwave sensors, video cameras, and E-ZPass readers will gather traffic information in real-time and beam the information to the DOT’s Queens command center, where engineers will instantly adjust the traffic lights as needed in an attempt to fine-tune the workings of the traffic grid.

All that technology, however, will only measure the movement of automobiles through Midtown. Moreover, new turn signals and turning lanes are being added to dozens of intersections in the affected area, between Second and Sixth Avenues and 42nd and 57th Streets. That could mean time and space taken away from other modes and given to automobiles, counter to the city’s transportation goals under PlaNYC.

According to a DOT spokesperson, there is no mechanism currently in place to measure pedestrian volumes in the “Midtown in Motion” area, despite the huge number of people on Midtown sidewalks. Neither is there any transit signal priority, a system that grants a few extra seconds of green light to buses, each of which carries far more people than a few automobiles. Both of those features could theoretically be added to the system at a later date, said the DOT spokesperson.

In the meantime, however, DOT’s highly capable engineers will be told to solve a problem based only on information about motor vehicles. If they wanted to balance the needs of drivers against pedestrians or bus riders in real time, much less prioritize the latter two, they wouldn’t have the tools. Bus riders might benefit incidentally from a bump in overall traffic speeds, but couldn’t be given the extra priority they deserve.

More permanent changes also prioritize traffic capacity over all else. At 53 intersections, turning lanes will be added to the cross-town street, replacing on-street parking, loading zones, and no standing areas. In some cases, what’s being replaced might be important for pedestrian safety, whether by protecting pedestrians on the sidewalk or maintaining visibility at intersections, or needed by local businesses. Notably, the media’s same hyped-up fears about any loss of parking for a bicycle or pedestrian project have not appeared when the space remains dedicated for the automobile.

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Fast Company is the latest media outlet to trumpet the decline of driving, with a look at the phenomenon dubbed “peak car use.”

Are non-automotive modes squeezing out driving? The jury's still out. Photo: GizMag

In an article titled “We Are Approaching Peak Car Use,” the magazine examines an Australian study [PDF] which found driving rates are falling in a number of cities in Europe, North America and Australia.

Explanations include rising fuel prices, the increasing appeal of urbanism, and another interesting theory: that many urban areas have reached the limit people are willing to drive as part of their daily commute (about one hour).

The study authors conclude that traffic engineers need to change their models and rethink the assumption that traffic will increase annually.

Meanwhile, new data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics adds to the body of research about the decline in driving — but whether that amounts to “peak car use” is worth further consideration. The report shows a leveling off in vehicle miles traveled, beginning at the end of 2007.

Between 1980 and 2007, urban vehicle miles traveled increased 133 percent, or almost five percent annually. But from 2007 to 2009, urban driving held steady. The change in driving in rural areas was more impressive. Rural vehicle miles traveled declined four percent from 2007 to 2009 after increasing at an average rate of two percent annually between 1980 and 2007.

These numbers don’t point to a cause. But the decline in driving aligns pretty well with the greatest period of economic contraction in a generation. And driving declines have long been linked recessions. Which leaves us wondering, is the decline part of a lasting trend, or does it just reflect a cyclical pattern tied to the economy?

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Surveys show how few people in Jackson Heights got there by driving. In every neighborhood DOT studied, a substantial majority of people arrived by means other than driving.

NYCDOT’s annual scorecard, the Sustainable Streets Index, adds more information about how New Yorkers get around every year. In addition to regular statistical snapshots of the city’s transportation system, like transit ridership or traffic speeds culled from GPS devices in taxis, this year’s version adds neighborhood travel profiles. Compiled from interviews in eight neighborhoods, these profiles to show just how little New Yorkers rely on cars to get around.

The recent news is not good, however. In 2009, the decade-long trend toward greater transit use reversed slightly, according to the report. Motor vehicle traffic increased by 0.3 percent while transit ridership fell 2.5 percent. DOT attributed the change to the effects of the recession, increased transit fares, and lower gas prices.

The number of transit riders declined in 2009, while traffic rose slightly. Preliminary numbers show subway ridership rebounded in 2010 while bus ridership continued to fall.

Preliminary 2010 numbers show what appear to be the joint effect of the uneven economic recovery and last year’s devastating fare hikes and service cuts. Subway ridership bounced back by one or two percent through October, but bus ridership continued to fall.

While the report is almost entirely a data-driven look backward, with regards to transit ridership it offers a dark warning about future trends:

The big if, however, lies in the area of overall bus and subway service. Given continued State budget shortfalls and pressures on the MTA budget, it is unclear whether the recent pattern of MTA service cuts and fare increases can be broken. In addition, the current MTA Capital Program remains only partially funded. Without firmer financing of the city’s transit system, the gains of the past decade are clearly at risk.

A new feature of the Sustainable Streets Index, the neighborhood travel profiles, offers in-depth looks at how people arrived at eight city neighborhoods and why they went there. In Union Square, for example, only four percent arrived by driving, along with another five percent in taxis. In contrast, roughly half of all people walked there and a third took the subway. Another four percent rode the bus and two percent biked.

Given that 70 percent of the people surveyed were there to shop or eat out, it’s safe to say that making parking more abundant isn’t the key to helping businesses in Union Square prosper. Similar data compiled on other commercial strips could help assuage many merchant concerns about re-appropriating parking spaces for busways, bike lanes, or pedestrian improvements.

In neighborhoods across the city, only a small share of people drive to their destinations. In Jackson Heights, only six percent of interview subjects had driven there, while 65 percent walked. At Fordham, only eight percent had driven, while the largest number — 42 percent — had taken the bus.

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Graph: Office of the mayor

A new study commissioned by the city finds that air quality in Times Square has notably improved since the 2009 installation of pedestrian plazas on Broadway.

Street-level readings taken by the New York City Community Air Survey, a city-wide air quality monitoring program created as part of PlaNYC, show that “concentrations of traffic-related pollutants were substantially lower than measurements from the year before and were less than in other midtown locations.” From a media statement announcing the findings:

The report confirms that major sources of air pollution generated in New York City are vehicle traffic and buildings burning high-sulfur heating oils. Additionally, in Times Square, concentrations of nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), two pollutants closely associated with traffic, were among the highest in the city. After the conversion to a pedestrian plaza, NO pollution levels in Times Square went down by 63 percent, while NO2 levels went down by 41 percent.

“The new Times Square is a showcase for New York’s vitality and energy, rather than for congestion and pollution,” said NYCDOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan. “The changes here have been big wins for safety, mobility and business. Now we can see that they have delivered great environmental gains as well.”

The city says that some 250,000 pedestrians enter Times Square every day.

Data from the survey were released ahead of the next edition of PlaNYC and will be used to “inform” unspecified new air quality initiatives. The PlaNYC reboot is set for April 21.

Among the fans of the new Times Square are former President Bill Clinton, who joined Mayor Bloomberg today in announcing a merger of their climate groups, the Clinton Global Initiative and C40. Regaling reporters with tales of the Times Square of old, writes City Room:

Mr. Clinton concluded by recalling that when he was a college student, he was agile — and reckless — enough to dodge the cars zipping through Times Square.

Today, thanks to the pedestrian mall, he said, there is no need. “Now you can be my age and walk in Times Square and not get run down. That is pretty cool, too.”