The ever-geekalicious Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute had a great take on traffic congestion a few weeks back on Planetizen.
As Litman explains, most congestion studies (such as this annual study, which always gets a lot of press) consistently overestimate the costs of congestion. But even using these relatively high estimates, the costs of congestion are pretty modest, compared with the comprehensive costs of owning and operating a car.
In fact, a quick scan of Litman's data suggests that congestion represents less than 5 percent of the total cost of car transportation.
In the chart to the right, the "All other costs" bar includes car
payments, parking gas, insurance, crash costs, air pollution, road
building, road maintenance, and the rental value of land occupied by
roads, among other factors.
Of course, some congestion "solutions" actually increase other costs of driving. Building lanes, for example, is costly in itself. Plus, more lanes means more total traffic on a region's roads, which can simultaneously (a) increase congestion elsewhere in the road system, (b) increase overall parking costs, and (c) increase crash and pollution costs. Taking all costs into account, "curing" congestion by expanding capacity can be more expensive than the disease itself. And as the graph shows, you don't have to increase the other costs by much, in percentage terms, before the extra costs overwhelm the modest, temporary benefits of congestion relief.
Is there anything left for America to manufacture?
U.S. feeds one quarter of its grain to cars while hunger is on the rise
Comments
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Gar Lipow Posted 11:25 am
15 Oct 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 11:34 am
15 Oct 2007
America needs to redisperse into hamlets.
The whole unbridled growth of the city is the real problem.
We now have the infrastructure to go back to the town and country model of pre-industrial America.
Towns of 1000, 5000, and cities of 10,000.
Hooked up by rail.
John Bailo
Sutext:
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nedruod Posted 2:09 pm
15 Oct 2007
One, the effects of a more rural population is less visible, even if each individuals contribution is greater because the observation is made by square foot.
Second, there are better known, and more extreme examples of people living in the country who choose a life which eschew many contributing elements.
Third, those examples wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for quantities of land which I'm not sure are available if divided by 5 billion.
Now, what might work is not hamlets, but dense micro-cities. If you keep density high, more dispersal might work, might even be good. But hordes of one story, single family homes dispersed of a larger land area will not help, and is entirely unrealistic.
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LandMan Posted 10:04 pm
15 Oct 2007
Does anyone have an example of one that has actually maintained the halo of countryside? Everywhere that I have seen this concept employed the "micro-city" is placed just beyond the fringe of an existing metropolitan area. This acts as an impulse to have all the nice agricultural land in-between developed into new public/private services (schools, affordable housing, hospitals, executive airports, malls, and big box stores to name a few) for the new micro-city in one direction and the existing metro area in the other. In ortherwords these micro-cities make sprawl much worse than it otherwise would have been had the density variance not been granted for it.
I think the most realistic way to significantly reduce congestion is to reduce the number of people looking for space to live. The only reason we are facing a growth problem is because of excessive immigration, and that can be shut down any time we choose to. Americans aren't having enough babies anymore to replace ourselves and our population would start dropping within three decades if it weren't for our immigration problem.
If our country is going to go from 300 Million now to 400 Million by 2050, then we will need a lot more land and energy to accomodate that size of a population than we currently use.
Land_Man
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:16 am
16 Oct 2007
And of course the only problems we need to concern ourselves with are land-use and resource-use issues here in the good old US of A. So if we close our borders, we can stop having to share our 25% of the world's resource pie with an ever growing mass of unwashed immigrants.
Right.
And the rest of the world, most especially China, will just go about their business.
Right.
We are facing a global problem, and its going to have to be solved on a global scale. The specific solutions will be particular to place, of course, but suggesting that it's any kind of solution at all to circle the wagons and try to shut out the world's problems is extremely foolish and shortsighted. It's also immoral, given the damage we've done to the rest of the world in the process of enriching ourselves and defending our (perception of our) national interests.
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LandMan Posted 5:44 am
16 Oct 2007
Any headway we can possibly make over the next four decades in reducing our per-capita resource footprint will be meaningless when we are adding another 100 Million people simultaneously with our conservation efforts.
Land_Man
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nedruod Posted 4:48 pm
16 Oct 2007
Stamping down immigration would have little impact on global pollution. There's just as good an argument supporting the theory that it would raise pollution as that it would lower pollution. Sure, by coming to the US the immigrants might become more wealthy or cause American consumption to become cheaper and thus even greater. However, it might also be that immigrants will make labor intensive organic farming more viable and widespread and practiced. They may also work installing solar panels, or such. Some may even go to college and study sciences and produce important new inventions.
It is pretty hard to say which of these possibilities will have a greater impact.
Postscript: As far as I know, nothing like what I would call a "micro-city" exists. I used that term to describe a city (urban) like setting, but with a more modest population. A town does not classify. Picture a green belted area of about 1 square mile with 10,000 residents.
I'm not sure it's entirely feasible. It was more of a thought than an idea. Greenbelting would be important or it would never have a chance. Another important thing to remember is you can't take a town (1,000 people per sq/mi) and gradually convert it to a micro-city. Once people place large land consuming buildings, it's almost impossible to upsize them unless land prices go up dramatically.
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