Moving forward, MassDOT plans to target certain bottlenecks while taking a more active role in managing how the roads operate, clearing crashes more quickly, and working to improve people’s travel options throughout the state. New construction and technological solutions will help, but the agency will also evaluate smart pricing strategies in the most congested areas. Rail, bus, and other commuter options, including incentives for shared travel, will play a critical role. While outside of MassDOT’s control, the report also notes how important future growth patterns will be in preventing worse problems. It points specifically to less congested Gateway Cities along major transit lines as ripe areas for growth, noting the fundamental need for concentrating affordable housing in places like these.
More highways, more congestion
Posted on September 3rd, 2019 in NewsTags: congestion, induced traffic
By Eric Sundquist
In pursuit of congestion relief, the United States added 63 percent more urban freeway lane-miles between 1990 and 2017. That rate far outstripped the 46 percent growth in urban population.
It didn’t work. As widely reported last month, the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Reporthas returned after a five-year hiatus. It finds that:
Congestion, by every measure, has increased substantially over the 36 years covered in this report. Almost all regions have worse congestion than before the 2008 economic recession that caused a drop in traffic problems. Traffic problems as measured by per-commuter measures are worse than a decade ago, and because there are so many more commuters, and more congestion during off-peak hours, total delay has increased by two billion hours. The total congestion cost has also risen with more wasted hours, greater fuel consumption and more trucks stuck in stop-and-go traffic.
Critics point to conceptual and methodological issues in the Urban Mobility Report, not the least of which is that a congestion-delay calculation assumes that a 50-minute trip to a destination at free-flow is better than a 5-minute trip to a destination.
Still, congestion is clearly still with us, despite a Herculean effort to fix the problem with new lane-miles (as well as smaller efforts around transit, operations, and policy). The failure of new capacity to reduce congestion—or its arguably worsening effect—is consistent with the decades of research around induced demand, which suggests we should look to solutions other than highway capacity, an approach taken in MassDOT’s recent report on the topic.
**
New mindset needed to address congestion, says MassDOT
Posted on August 19th, 2019 in NewsTags: commute time, congestion, MA, multimodal
By Chris McCahill
A new report from the Massachusetts DOT dives into the state’s growing traffic congestion to understand the causes and potential solutions. It points to the rapid outward growth around Boston as one of the main causes, and suggests the current situation calls for bold new solutions aimed at connecting people and places while managing demand, rather than simply keeping roads moving.
According to the report, congestion has gotten considerably worse since 2013, especially in Greater Boston. Commute trips by driving have gotten 10 percent longer and, consequently, about six percent longer by bus. Travel times on many roads have increased by more than 50 percent and stay this way for longer periods throughout the day.
Improving accessibility and reliability throughout the state while balancing sustainability and equity goals will require changes in MassDOT’s approach, according to the report. According to DOT Secretary Stephanie Pollack, the agency, like other DOTs, has focused historically on building and maintaining the network. “But if we are to make the overall system more reliable in the face of mounting congestion,” she explains, “we must expand this mindset. We must not only build and maintain the network, we must actively monitor and manage it every day.”
Today’s gridlock, according to the report, was caused by “direct, micro-level factors, such as poor signal operations and crashes, as well as in indirect macro-level phenomena.” Boston’s economy has grown, while housing prices pushed residential growth farther from job centers. That evolving landscape, paired with lower gas prices, has forced more people into cars for longer distances and longer periods of time. Crashes often push the already-crowded system to its breaking point.
Moving forward, MassDOT plans to target certain bottlenecks while taking a more active role in managing how the roads operate, clearing crashes more quickly, and working to improve people’s travel options throughout the state. New construction and technological solutions will help, but the agency will also evaluate smart pricing strategies in the most congested areas. Rail, bus, and other commuter options, including incentives for shared travel, will play a critical role. While outside of MassDOT’s control, the report also notes how important future growth patterns will be in preventing worse problems. It points specifically to less congested Gateway Cities along major transit lines as ripe areas for growth, noting the fundamental need for concentrating affordable housing in places like these.
Chris McCahill is the Deputy Director at SSTI.
**
Growth near transit is key to connecting smaller cities, SSTI finds
Posted on September 3rd, 2019 in NewsTags: accessibility, land use, transit
By Chris McCahill
A new study by SSTI and the Traffic Operations and Safety Lab at UW-Madison provides a partial roadmap to the future for transit in smaller cities. The study gave Eau Claire, Wisconsin—a city nearing 70,000 people—a look into emerging transit technologies and insight on their residents’ perspectives toward transit. SSTI also laid out a dozen future scenarios, evaluating each one using accessibility metrics.
Working with the city staff, Eau Claire Transit, and other local stakeholders, our team first mapped out two possible future transit lines, then evaluated how each one would improve access to jobs across the region. Our accessibility metrics, estimated using Citilabs’ Sugar Access, represent the total number of jobs reachable by transit or walking, with more weight given to closer jobs. The results showed trade-offs between adding new service to outlying areas (shown below) and bolstering downtown service with new circulators.
Figure 1. Increased access to jobs from new transit service
The greatest overall benefit, however, could be achieved through strategic growth near transit, according to our analysis. Under a dense infill scenario, for instance, the average resident could reach 16 percent more jobs in 2030 than if growth took place mainly around the city’s edges, and 6 percent more than under a random growth scenario. Paired with transit-oriented development, relatively small transit investments could increase the average resident’s access to jobs by nearly 22 percent over the next two decades.
We also surveyed Eau Claire residents and workers as part of the study to learn more about their attitudes toward transit and the possibility of self-driving transit vehicles. They generally welcome more transit improvements, even though relatively few respondents currently use the system, and they are open to new vehicle technologies, but lukewarm on fully driverless vehicles.
The information will inform the city’s new transit plan, which is now being updated.
