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Moving People or Vehicles: How Do We Grade our Roads?
Whose streets work better: Atlanta or Chicago? According to the most common assessment tool for congestion — the Travel Time Index (TTI) — the answer is Atlanta.
The average trip to work in Atlanta takes 57.4 minutes, while the typical commuter in Chicago spends 35.6 minutes getting to the office. So it seems like the Windy City would be rated higher, right? Well, no. The TTI gives more credit to speed than travel time and destination proximity. Atlanta looks better because their commuters drive faster over a farther distance, even though their trips take longer on average. This example, highlighted in a recent memo from Transportation for America, reveals the challenges and limitations of our current thinking about transportation performance. And, unfortunately, this isn’t just an academic problem.
The new federal transportation bill, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), does two things that bring urgency to getting this right:
- Under the law, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) will set up Performance Measures for its largest program, the $22 billion National Highway Performance Program, that will ultimately reward and penalize states for reaching or failing to meet these targets, and
- The law expands the scope of the National Highway System by 60,000 new lane miles; now it will include many roads (primary arterials) that don’t feel like highways at all.
So, unless the performance measures are set appropriately, state DOTs will treat many roads that cut through neighborhoods essentially the same way they treat interstate highways: prioritizing speed over other factors. Which roads will that affect in your state? You can find the primary arterial routes that will be added to the NHS in here.
Should the performance of this road…
…be measured like this one?
Under the new National Highway Performance Program, the performance of these two roads could be measured the same way. One is a bustling business district, the other is an Interstate highway. (Example provided by Transportation for America.)
Fortunately, the USDOT appears to recognize the challenge before it. In September, the DOT solicited input through an online dialogue, where the public contributed and voted on ideas for these performance measures.
The number one ranked idea for Highway System Performance: “Performance measures should be defined and measured in ways that reflect all of the benefits of an integrated, comprehensive system based on the movement of people, not vehicles.” One of the most popular ideas for Congestion Mitigation: “Performance measures should emphasize spatial and temporal dimensions of congestion” (translation: the measure should consider trip time, as well as distance traveled). Both suggestions would encourage communities to build infrastructure that helps people get where they are going rather than travel the greatest distance possible at the highest speeds possible.
In fact, the DOT received so much feedback that it hosted a listening session late last month. During the session, officials acknowledged the need to address issues like “vehicle vs. passenger movement,” and there was considerable discussion about how to measure people on foot and on bicycle. In the League’s recommendations to DOT, we identified Regional Household Travel Surveys, infrared counters, and traditional bike/ped counts, as possible tools, and pointed to states like Massachusetts, which is setting mode-shift goals as part of its transportation performance measures. We also passed along some of the on-going research into bicycling and walking measurement.
It is good that this dialog is taking place, but we’ll be watching carefully to see what comes out these discussions. Whatever gets put into place now will likely influence transportation decision-making for years to come, so it’s critically important to keep the focus on moving people, not vehicles.
To learn more about what bicycling and walking advocates are doing to get the most out of the new transportation bill, check out our “Navigating MAP-21” resources. And please join us for our webinar on the recently-released interim guidance on the Transportation Alternatives program on Wednesday.
Darren Flusche
League Policy Director
Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.
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November 27th, 2012 at 11:02 am
AR approved a 1/4 cent sales tax to make 4 lane roads everywhere. I have mixed feelings on this.
On one hand an extra outside lane would facilitate cars passing me on roads that now are more difficult to pass me on with a 2 lane road.
Where there is a shoulder, the shoulder is usually debris littered and there is bound to be a rumble strip. Together, the two make the shoulder completely unusable.
On the other hand, the extra lane invites faster traffic.
November 27th, 2012 at 11:31 am
4 lanes also usually means more speeding and more traffic encouraged to drive during peak hours since allegedly, the carrying capacity goes up. I’ve seen enough “urban at grade freeways” cutting through urban Albuquerque to put any notion that adding lanes provides more comfort to cyclists to rest and frankly, the way people drive down there, I’m tempted to trade in my Impreza for an M1A1 Abrams tank (I guess one could make good use of that 120 mm gun on reckless drivers). I’ve yet to see any cyclists in Albuquerque extoll the virtue of its big four and six lane arterials.
League has this one right. Smearing more asphalt on our cities and calling it transportation is stupid.
November 27th, 2012 at 10:05 pm
Recent history has shown, over and over again, that “build it and they will come” for cars is a loss-leader, as new roads soon become as congested as the old.
Efficiency is about more than speed; it’s doing the most with the least. I’ve heard some people talk about how much their time is worth — that’s all crap, everyone’s time is worth the same, because no one can get it back. So time is a constant. COST PER MILE is every bit as effective a measure of efficiency as speed.
November 28th, 2012 at 11:09 am
Time, in the context of this discussion, is often measured as hours of productivity lost to traffic congestion, so its a bit of a circular argument to build more roads. If you only build more motor vehicle capacity in order to reduce congestion and reduce “time lost to congestion”, then people will only be able to use motor vehicles as transportation, since all we will have will be more motorways, hence you will rapidly eat up any additional capacity and your time lost to congestion will ramp back up again.
One has to look at ways of moving more people with less space in a congested environment, which pretty much defines urban space. Hence the need for diversified, higher density transportation rather than looking only to the single occupant car.
People outside the bicycle-centric world have looked at this too. Suggestions such as tollways, buslanes, and rush hour tolls could be implemented. Buslanes sometimes have an advantage over trains in that you don’t need to add expensive infrastructure that cannot be re-routed if needed; once you put down a track, there it sits. Plus, I would rather rob traffic lanes for buslanes than add more transportation right of way that involves condemning people’s homes and businesses. Tollways put the onus on the commuter to sport the cost of roads rather than the general taxpayer. Bikeways, either on existing roads or adding specialized, separate facilities (gasp!) are a good idea. Its often much easier to add a bikeway to a restricted corridor than to add more general purpose lanes because a bike is narrow and light, meaning it doesn’t have to be built to handle trucks and cars. You can shoe-horn a bikeway along a riverbank, streambed, old rail ROW, or through a park or preserved open area with minimal impact.
We need to think our way out of congestion, because we can’t drive our way out.