This weekend marks the unofficial start of America's summer holiday season, which is a time that many Americans hit the road and the age old cry of "are we there yet?" rings across the land. In that spirit, here's a couple of interesting traffic related articles.
From the New York Times -
Do we tolerate too many traffic deaths?. The NYT asks several prominent writers & thinkers The national road-toll in the USA is astoundingly high - over the last decade it's averaged about 42,000 deaths per year, with about 35,000 of them being vehicle occupants, and the remainder other road users. 2008 was a markedly better year (about 37,000 deaths), but then it was an anomalous year for many things -- Tom Vanderbilt points out "[w]hen 1 in 10 Americans don’t have a job to drive to, there are going to be fewer fatal crashes". When you think about that number, that's like a small-town's worth of people dying every month.
From Wired magazine -
The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic. It's a looong article, so I'll post a couple of excerpts
When he finally gets back to his office, Komanoff will use this interview to inform his magnum opus, the Balanced Transportation Analyzer (.xls), an enormous Excel spreadsheet that he’s been building for the past three years. Over the course of about 50 worksheets, the BTA breaks down every aspect of New York City transportation—subway revenues, traffic jams, noise pollution—in an attempt to discover which mix of tolls and surcharges would create the greatest benefit for the largest number of people.
Komanoff’s spreadsheet, which he has posted online, calculates how new fees and changes to existing tolls affect traffic at different times of day. It calculates which costs are borne by city dwellers and which by suburbanites. It calculates how long it takes passengers to dig for change and board buses. And it allows any user to adjust dozens of different variables—from taxi surcharges to truck tolls—and measure their impact. The result is a kind of statistical SimCity, an opportunity to play God (or at least Robert Moses) and devise the perfect traffic policy.
Komanoff is a dyed-in-the-wool stats geek, and the BTA demonstrates his faith in data. By measuring the problem—the amount of time and money lost in traffic every year—we can begin to solve it, he says. We can turn the knobs on the entire transportation system to maximize efficiency. Komanoff’s model suggests a world in which everything from subway fares to bridge tolls can be precisely tuned throughout the day, allowing city planners to steer traffic flow as quickly and smoothly as a taxi driver tooling his cab down Broadway on a quiet Sunday morning.
...
[T]he BTA, Komanoff says, will finally allow engineers to model the effects of proposed transportation policies in realistic detail. He translates all traffic impacts—delays, collisions, injuries, air pollution—into dollars and cents; that way, it’s easy for users to compare the benefits and costs of different plans. He has even come up with a plan of his own that would, according to his calculations, collect $1.3 billion in motorist tolls per year—all of which would be spent on improving public transit—and save $2.5 billion in time costs by reducing delays. To that, add $190 million from decreased mortality as a result of making streets more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, $83 million in collision damage reduction, and $34 million in lower CO2 emissions.
But there’s one aspect of Komanoff’s plan that his spreadsheet can’t help with: how to put it into practice. Americans hate the idea of paying to drive on public roads. No US city has succeeded at passing any plan remotely like Komanoff’s. And the response from New York City’s Department of Transportation has been tepid at best. Komanoff may have created a vision of the traffic system of the future, but he’s still stuck with the government and politics of the present.
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Still, for all of its sophistication, Komanoff’s plan remains imperfect. Komanoff himself admits that an ideal system would track drivers wherever they went, charging by the mile and the minute, with rates determined by location. He calls this “the holy grail of congestion pricing.”
Someday, technology will probably help fulfill this promise. Skymeter, a Toronto-based company, has developed a GPS-based metering system that can track and bill cars in even the densest urban areas. With such a system, Komanoff says, he could adjust congestion prices on a block-by-block basis. Cities could do away with parking meters and simply track how long cars sat at a curb. Insurance premiums could reflect the habits of individual drivers instead of relying on crude proxies like age. Drivers could be rewarded for taking the roads less traveled—not having to pay, and sometimes even getting paid, if they chose to commute on less congested routes on particularly busy days. “It’s going to happen,” Komanoff says. “Cities will charge per mile or per minute according to your exact location and the type of vehicle you’re driving.”
(Yes, I know it was to do with Federal funding, but come on...)
