Tag: "Transit"

Stranded on “3-Mile Island”

It is 7am in the morning, and the second cup of coffee is just not cutting it. However, traffic congestion has been relatively smooth along the tollway and work is not too far away. Then, suddenly, traffic bottlenecks from several lanes down to two, and the quality of the road declines considerably. Essentially, a parking lot has been formed between one stretch of the toll road and another. In the Dallas Fort-Worth gridlock between the two George Bush Tollways is a daily occurrence for thousands who commute to work every morning.

Bottleneck Traffic

States around the country are looking for better ways to build roads, without taxpayer funds. Thus, a market for tollways has been created that has been able to keep up with the growing demand of growing metropolises. There are drawbacks to this growth as federal law from 1965 prohibits the removal of Interstate Highways in order to build tollways. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (D-Texas) authored a federal amendment to the same law in order to broaden the ban to include exist such as; turning an auxiliary lane, HOV lane into a toll lane or building a toll lane alongside the existing Interstate or State Highway. None of these are taxpayer friendly as the auxiliary and HOV lanes were originally paid for with tax dollars, and for them to become toll lanes would be an inexpensive way for toll companies to collect revenue at the hands of the taxpayers.

SH 161 in particular creates many problems for the taxpayers, toll associations, and the government to deal with. Because the stretch of road only is 3 miles, and is already a connector between two tollways it would be common sense to transform it into a tollway in order to improve traffic congestion and road safety. The road has minimal lighting and there are only two lanes in each direction which are severely deteriorated. One proposal that exists is sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDot) which claims that for 3.7 million dollars it can open the shoulder as another lane to ease bottle necking. The loss of the shoulder would create many hazards for accidents along the road so TxDot would build dead end driveways along the road and increase the amount of tow trucks on call to move stalled vehicles quickly. This however is and can only be a short term solution. This does not repair the roads, or increase the amount of lighting, and without a shoulder the danger of the road could increase as drivers can no longer safely pull off at any given time. One long term solution is to build a lane alongside the free lanes in order to add lanes while giving the benefit of the freeway.

The budget is not what it once was because the funds supplied from the federal government relies directly on the gas tax which has not been raised from 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. Due to inflation, more fuel efficient cars, and now electric cars the fund is getting smaller and smaller. The population of the DFW metroplex increases 1 person every 4 minutes and needs proper highway infrastructure in order to support the continued growth. These issues are not specific to Texas, and every state with a fast growing metroplex is suffering similar growing pains. In order to support this growth a comprehensive federal plan must be created soon or else the amount of goods and services being transported will continue to slow down.

Mar 17, 2014 | 5 comments | by

The Urban Transportation Issue: Minimizing Travel Times

The Atlanta metropolitan region is plagued with some of the nation’s worst traffic congestion. The principal problem is that the roadway system is not sufficient to handle the traffic. Part of the problem is that the area is poorly served by a sparse network of freeways. However, the lack of a viable arterial street system is probably an even more significant barrier, as indicated in our report with Alan Pisarski (Blueprint 2030: Better Transportation for Atlanta).

A campaign is now underway to improve transportation in Atlanta. The plan, however, would provide disproportionately large amounts of funding to transit projects that would simply do nothing to reduce traffic congestion, while failing to provide for the added roadway capacity required to handle the traffic demand.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution invited me to author a commentary piece, which was published on November 21. It is republished here, because the transportation problems in Atlanta are similar to those in other large metropolitan areas both in the United States and Canada.

The Real Issue is Travel Times

Those joining the chorus of criticism of the roundtable’s transportation plan have plenty of reason to be disappointed. At a time when metro Atlanta needs economic growth more than ever, the plan would spend little of the proposed higher taxes on programs that would better position the area competitively.

The principal benefits of transportation in an urban economy occur from minimizing travel times. Atlanta is one of only four major metropolitan areas with a one-way work trip travel time of more than 30 minutes. This is primarily the result of metro Atlanta’s less-than-robust freeway system and a low-capacity arterial street system. If Atlanta is to become more competitive, it will be necessary to speed up car travel.
Yet, transit has an important role, especially in providing mobility to the downtown area. Transit also provides mobility for low-income households, though most of their travel is by car. However, transit is incapable of providing competitive travel times to most of the metro area, which is why people travel by car. Few places make the case better than Atlanta.

For more than 30 years, Atlanta has been expanding its transit system and has built one of the largest new rail systems in the world. What’s more, MARTA is a world-class metro (subway) similar in design and capacity to the Paris Metro or the London Underground, rather than the lower-capacity trolley systems built in Portland, Dallas and elsewhere, using the catchy marketing name “light rail.” Yet, since 1970, transit’s share of travel to work has fallen nearly two-thirds in the metro area and by nearly one-half in the city of Atlanta.

A recent Brookings Institution report highlights the scarcity of competitive service. Only 3.4 percent of metropolitan area jobs can be reached by transit in 45 minutes by the average employee. “This is an astounding figure, since the average single occupant automobile commuter spends one-third less time traveling to work.”

Even the most effective transit systems — New York, San Francisco and Boston — provide access to only around 10 percent of jobs. And, unless transit agencies are permitted to print money, there never will be enough to do much more.

In Europe, where cars carry the largest share of commuting in major urban areas, the European Conference of Ministers of Transport has characterized attracting people out of cars to transit as comparatively ineffective. If it were possible to reduce travel times with transit, local planners would have long ago proposed such a system; they haven’t anywhere. The reality is that transit, on average, takes 70 percent longer than commuting by car in the metro area and the roundtable plan will not change that.

Transit accounts for barely 1 percent of metropolitan travel. Yet the roundtable plan would commit more than 30 times that on transit. Nearly a quarter of this would be spent on repairing the MARTA system which, if it were sustainable, would have no need of new taxes.
Metro Atlanta needs a vision that focuses on objectives. This means one that reduces peak-hour travel delays as much as possible per million dollars of new taxation. How much is spent on transit or highways is not the issue. The issue is reducing metro Atlanta’s travel times to encourage greater economic growth, job creation and poverty elimination.

Dec 01, 2011 | 1 comment | by
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