A New Congestion Paradigm in LA

I don't get why we continue to focus on congestion in cities as something we need to "fix".  Repeatedly we focus on congestion as if when it were solved our problems would be over.  But congestion is the sign of a successful city, and curing it as Detroit has doesn't seem to be the right answer either. 

But that doesn't really matter if we have created a better system of mobility and access.  Back in 2011 CNU was in Madison and Joe Cortright was having a discussion with Tim Lomax of TTI about their mobility report which measures hours of delay.  Confused by how they measured delay and thinking about my own situation, I noted out loud that I didn't count.  I never saw any of the congestion on the roads because as a BART rider, I wasn't a part of it...yet we had one of the WORST ratings.  It's because we as a society are often only talking about congestion on roads, and I wasn't on the road, but I had more reliable access to my job than anyone on the road.

This is partially why "congestion" in its current use is bad metric for deciding transportation investment.  We don't account for moving people around more efficiently, just cars.  And there are a lot of people that don't seem to count.

But this new plan being discussed in Los Angeles is going to show the benefits to thinking about mobility in a different way.  The old way of "congestion" would increase according to the environmental report.  The Level of Service Standard that has been used for environmental reporting would increase intersections receiving an E or F congestion score from 18% to 36% under this plan that includes increasing dedicated lanes for buses and bikes.  

In most places this is a red alert to widen the roads and speed up the cars. But under the newer more mobility focused measure of average vehicle miles traveled the plan would increase VMT to 35 million miles per day instead of 38 million which would come if the plan were not implemented.   

3 million miles per day means a lot when we're talking about emissions and mobility, showing that just because a few more interesections are more congested, providing mobility for more people has great benefits.

Of course the opposition still lives in the old paradigm and is upset. Richard Katz, a former member of the MTA board still worries about "congestion". 

"Taking away lanes, which creates congestion, to try and force people to choose a different method of transportation other than the car, is a horrible way to solve a congestion problem," he said. "Why? It creates more congestion … and people don't respond well to being forced to do things."

I would argue that we're forced to drive cars.  Our system should give us opportunities that don't involve driving.  But we know how that works in most places.  LA doesn't have more room to expand the roads, so there has to be another way.

Others are also upset at not being able to focus on congestion anymore.

"Cars are just going to sit there," said Don Parker, a board member with Fix the City, an advocacy group fighting the plan. "So labeling it a mobility plan is just not reflective of what the plan actually does."

Of course what he doesn't mention is that if cars just sit there, it's less likely they can hurt people in collisions at high speed.  Or that they aren't creating greenhouse gasses.  Or that people are finding more sustainable means of mobility.

While we don't know where the plan will eventually end up, this is an exciting move that we'll hopefully start to see in other cities over time.  Thinking less about "congestion" which we've been trying hard to fix since we started building freeways over 60 years ago will benefit everyone more.  Instead, let's think of how we can get the most people to the places they want to go.  Car optional.

How to Free the Market and Reduce VMT - Austin's West Campus

When I lived in Austin I ate dinner and lunch every day at a place called the University Towers. Rather than paying $10 a meal at the athletes dining hall my teammates and I could get a meal plan at the private dorms for about $4.50 a meal. For athletes that ate a lot this was an amazing deal and also good time for teammate bonding. It was such a great deal that I ate there with my old teammates all the way through grad school. I had the choice so why not take it?

To get there I had to walk through West Campus every day. I often thought that it was underdeveloped and a bit ragged and would dream about how things could change with a little development on my ride home either on the #1 or the #5. That dream seems to have come true, perhaps a bit more than even I thought possible.


In Austin if you heard West Campus in the first half of the 2000s, you might automatically think of the dense neighborhood West of the University full of frats, sororities, and kids with extra money to spend in order to live closer. If you had less cash, you lived North, South, or on Riverside. By the time I left, the city had finally upzoned the neighborhood, much to the chagrin of some neighbors that lived in the area, to allow redevelopment of properties that had fairly poor upkeep due to the captive audience of students and the very limiting height restrictions against heavy demand. I found that a post by the Old Urbanist was very informative on this point and I didn't realize it matched that until today.

Basically, the rent was high but much of the quality was horribly low. When looking for an apartment one time I remember this one place called the Sandpiper. It was one of those old motel looking complexes. For $850 a month you could get the worst two bed room in West Campus. And that was back in 2002.

As Chris Bradford at the Austin Contrarian shows, there was a lot of development that took place and the census shows that the area had really high growth rates. So high in fact that recently there have been rumblings as to whether the infrastructure could handle all the development. Well after the rezoning it seemed like there was a new crane in the sky each month. This led to around 3,700 new residents according to Chris' calculations.

At that same time, Riverside which was a popular area for students when I was in school seemed to be declining in population as a whole losing over 2,000 residents. Additionally, ridership on the West Campus bus has gone up while overall Riverside ridership has dropped.


According to numbers provided by Capital Metro, (thanks to JMVC) ridership in the fall, which has greater ridership than spring, has increased for the West Campus bus by ~1,200 students a day between 2006 and 2010 while the Riverside buses have lost about ~880. Obviously correlation is not causation but you can make a pretty good bet that there was some sort of shift happening. And it wasn't just coming from Riverside, but probably all areas of the city where students were living. Given the rise of 3,700 residents in West Campus, you would think there would be an even greater ridership bump on the West Campus Bus. But a lot of the new folks probably now just walk or bike.

But what else does the shift mean? Well for one thing I think that West Campus gives us a perfect example of how zoning close to Downtowns in major cities can stifle what the market actually wants to provide. Given the choice, I don't know of any college students that wouldn't love rolling out of bed five minutes before class (8am or otherwise) with the ability to get to class on time because they just had to walk or bike quickly. Additionally, there are a lot of people that want to live in proximity to great neighborhoods just outside of downtown in most cities.

But that's also another piece of the regional and national puzzle, if there was a shift from Riverside to West Campus of 800 former Riverside riders or so, that is likely a huge reduction in VMT. Mostly because if you live on Riverside, you own a car and have to drive everywhere. Though the grocery store is close to many of the apartments aimed at students, you couldn't just walk to the library on campus to study or go to parties in West Campus Friday nights. Driving was the only option. Not to mention that the bus passenger miles were much higher going to school.


Checking the Walkscore for Riverside and West Campus, you get an idea of what happens. As you can see below, the Walkscore for Riverside is 56 with the neighborhood the 40th best in Austin. That means lots of driving. Over in West Campus, the Walkscore is 86, second highest in the region. Imagine the VMT difference of those 3,700 new residents now living in West Campus who probably walk to Double Dave's for some pizza rolls rather than driving there.


And I didn't have a lot of time to look at it, but if those 3,700 residents moved out of housing in Riverside and other student areas, and the demographics of those areas changed. Does that mean that these areas became more affordable? Did the rents change? That would be interesting to look at as well.

Ultimately I think this is a lesson for other cities as well. Folks like Lydia DePillis in DC arguing against the height limit should not look to Austin's future plans, which looks like more skyscrapers on the way, but rather to what they've already done with changes in zoning that freed up the market in West Campus. Additionally, the Georgetown folks could learn from this as well.

Austin can learn from itself too, as Chris discussed in his post about the Suicide Pact. Not only is it about schools and kids, but its about quality of life for the region as a whole. Reductions in VMT will come when people are able to live where they want. There's a high demand for walkability and proximity to work and less time spent in cars. In that sense, people already want to do the right thing, we're just not letting them.


Capital Metro UT Shuttle Data Extra...

Not Quite Dead Yet

The VMT tax isn't quite dead and probably won't die. Something that got shot down so quickly by the president has actually gotten some legs of late thanks to government reports and legislators like Mr. Oberstar. While it probably won't be a key part of the next transportation bill, I expect to see some money going into studying the idea and perhaps pushing more pilot programs.

So any chance I get, I'll play this...

Vehicle Miles Traveled Tax

Man there was quite the firestorm on the blogs today about the idea floated on a VMT tax by Secretary LaHood. Apparently it was such a bad idea to the Obama administration that they smacked down the idea later in the day. While that was the political thing to do, I'm not sure it was the smart thing to do. I'd like to see more studies on it before we come with a verdict.

Lets take a look at all the comments we saw today from progressives on a number of different blogs...

1. It will hurt the poor
2. It will cost a lot
3. It invades my privacy
4. It was proposed by a Republican
5. Why not just raise the gas tax?
6. Why not have a complicated weight and energy efficiency tax
7. Why do we even need a GPS collector instead of just reading odometers
8. It's hard for shift workers to take transit
9. Heavy trucks do more damage
10. My Prius driving will be punished
11. Senators will vote no because they are from low density states
12. If fuel efficiency goes to zero where does money for roads come from?
13. How about better road surfaces?
14. We'll need an electricity tax in ten years
15. We're not taxing vegetable oil for carbon
16. The only house I could afford was on the periphery
17. I don't want to pay anymore money for highways
18. What do miles driven have to do with anything?
19. A mileage tax doesn't distinguish between a hybrid and a hummer
20. People in Idaho live far away from where they work
21. I prefer to pay the traditional way, gas tax
22. Cheap gas is a birthright
23. It might encourage people to live closer to work
24. Miles tax is a GOP plan to save the gas guzzler
25. I don't want to punish people who live in rural areas
26. It's a trucking industry ploy to keep freight off the rails
27. I have a libertarian streak so i don't like it

Honestly, to me a lot of these are silly, but I thought you all would get a small chuckle.

The reasons for a mileage tax would be to push people into really thinking about how far away from work and other amenities they are living. They are already paying the price for their decisions given that people in location efficient areas can spend very little on transportation costs while folks in the worst sprawl spend up to 25% or more, but with a mileage tax, they'll be thinking about it even more. As that TXDOT study said (it's subsequently been taken off their site), a heavily traveled road in Houston would need $2.22 a gallon in taxes to actually pay for it. Many of the arguments for an increased gas tax would never likely get up that high, and that is actually the low end of what is really needed according to TXDOT, and that is just for federal and state roads, not bike lanes, transit and sidewalks/city streets.

I'm not saying that we don't need to make people pay for the negative externalities of the weight of thier vehicle or the gasoline they guzzle, but people need to start connecting the dots on housing and transportation costs that are killing family budgets and they lifestyles and driving patterns that lead to them. I'm not going to toss the mileage fee out yet. It might be a good idea or a bad idea. Let's just wait and see when the trials in Oregon and other places are completed instead of just throwing it out right away. There are plenty of arguments each way, I look forward to seeing them all.

Lancaster PA, VMT Champ

I haven't been able to read the Brookings Report that just came out, but an article in the Portland DJC alerts us to something interesting. Lancaster PA is second behind New York in VMT per capita. It seems as if its partially due to its low VMT overall.

I hadn't heard much about Lancaster before the Streetcar issues that have been going on there with the FTA but the little interaction I've had is with Google Earth. The first thing you notice (if you're a nerd like me) is that the major freeways stay relatively far away from the center of town, there is a grided street pattern throughout the city, making walking, biking and transit more likely, and the Amtrak station actually serves fairly frequent trains to Philadelphia.

Eisenhower was freaked out by the idea of freeways going through our cities. It was pushed through anyways as the people who took over the Interstate program showed no mercy in cities. Perhaps this is a case study of what happens when we keep them out.

A Blank Canvas

So many people are expecting that their agendas will be possible in an Obama administration. Even folks looking to expand roadway capacity and bring tolling schemes to bear. Now tolling is not all bad, but it's not as some feel, the solution to everything. And bus rapid transit is not the solution to everything just like rail isn't the solution to everything.

Michael Replogle, transportation director for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the group that with revenue from gasoline taxes in constant flux, leaders need to start thinking about adding tolls to existing roads and opening rapid bus transit lines.

The transportation expert also suggested that technology will lead to GPS-based pay-by-the-mile taxes, or an all-toll-road system that changes fees based on real-time traffic volume.

"We're at the cusp of a new era," Replogle said, adding that President-elect Barack Obama's administration will likely embrace such changes.

Do we have any evidence that Obama or his administration would be behind these types of measures? I feel like this is something he hasn't signed on to, at least not that I have seen. But as people had said before the election season even started, folks see him as a blank canvas to project their hopes and dreams. I heard he's going to give everyone a star wars lego set. Can I expect to see that soon?

As an aside, can we stop calling freeway buses in HOV lanes bus rapid transit? We need to define what BRT really is so people understand what others mean when they say BRT.

Less Driving...Again

VMT has dropped again. Looks like we need more roads.

"The decline means Americans are consuming less fuel and emitting less CO2 (tailpipe emissions), which is a positive development," Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in an interview with Reuters. "But it is a challenge to how we fund transportation today."

Hmmm...

Two Views of CO2

Wired has two maps on CO2 emissions. One is the per capita emissions map that shows cities are actually better at dealing with CO2 than exurban areas. The other is the total CO2 map which shows cities as the main culprits when it comes to CO2 emissions. What is interesting is that they point out the west is much worse off due to its sprawlyness.

There's a lot of information you could mine from these maps, but one thing stood out to me: the West, for all of our hippie do-gooders, isn't doing well (as a whole) from a per-capita emissions perspective. We simply don't live in dense enough situations to benefit from the efficiency gains created by urban living. Lots of infrastructure serving only a few people generates high per-capita emissions.

This comes after CNT put out the same types of maps a few years ago for Chicago. Guess where the CO2 emissions are per capita, not along the Metra lines or in the transit rich core. Interesting.

Thoughts on Transit and New Urbanism

I am a member of the CNU. I've been going to congresses over the last 4 years but have noticed that a lot of other members don't really get transit or that transit should be an integral part of NU. In a session last weekend about value capture strategies, Scott Polikov showed some diagrams of communities he helped code south of San Antonio and in Leander at the end of Capital Metro's commuter rail line. While they were nice and could probably promote more walking internal of the neighborhood, he showed boutique retail and limited transit access and circulation for both projects. G.B. Arrington, former transit and TOD planner at Tri-Met in Portland who heads Parsons Brinkerhoff's place making division, raised his hand and asked a very pointed question.

"Isn't this just walkable sprawl?"

And therein lies the problem. Much of what the new urbanism is known for is their walkable sprawl which includes the Kentlands and Seaside as the projects most representative of New Urbanism from an outsiders perspective. At the end of the day all of the jobs are somewhere else and without alternative connections to those jobs and a location on the far reaches of a region, the same VMT and overall degradation of the environment will continue.

New Urbanism in principle says the right things in the Charter, but right now we're mostly neglecting the transit and mobility. This includes the understanding of bikes. I heard that Liz Moule of Moule Polyzoides who designed the Del Mar TOD stated that its silly to have showers at every place of employment to support cycling. This angered some of my colleagues who want to make the trip between neighborhoods and work accessible by bike.

If we aren't able to build places by reducing VMT, then whats the point? Building good looking internally walkable places is nice but really at the end of the day there is a reason for building it if you have to drive to get anywhere outside of the community? Without metrics or final purpose, we don't know what we're doing. Some like Andres Duany say that its all about providing happiness. But in reality there are many people out there who are happy with their freeways and huge gas guzzling SUVs.

Jan Gehl, who was responsible for bike and pedestrian renaissances in Melbourne and Copenhagen has a simple metric that destroys any argument against his improvements. Pedestrian counts. In fact he rebuked some store owners who said that they were slowly fading due to reduced auto access. He was able to prove that they were getting much increased pedestrian activity in front of the store by before and after counts.

So if we are going to build transit and build communities that reduce the autocentricity that begets sprawl, then we need to measure the effects. Else we are no better than other ideologues that state their ideas are right, without proof to back it up. I believe that we need to measure New Urbanism to make sure its working, and by working I mean reducing VMT because if we can't do that, its just walkable sprawl.