Cars Are Ruining Our Cities

[cpzilliacus]

[Note that I do not agree with the authors of this but post it for discussion purposes.]

New York Times opinion column: Cars Are Ruining Our Cities

[Chris]

There are a lot of "facts" thrown around in that article that are either exaggerated, cherry-picking with incomplete data, or just anomalies to prove a point.

The Katy Freeway in Houston is really not a 26 lane freeway. It is mostly a 12-14 lane freeway, with 4-5 general purpose lanes and 2 tolled express lanes each way. You only get the "26 lane" figure by counting ramps, auxiliary lanes and the maximum width of frontage roads, all of which are not a representation for the lane count across the corridor. The Katy Freeway is a big freeway, but it's not as extreme as it is often portrayed in these urban / anti car sites like Streetsblog, Vox or CityLab.

In addition, congestion is not just measured by the travel time at the busiest hour. It is also measured in the duration of congestion. Even though the peak travel time may not have improved as much, the overall number of hours with congestion will go way down. We've seen this in the massive freeway expansion programme in the Netherlands as well, there is still peak hour congestion, but it's less intense and the duration is considerably shorter. The travel times in the expres lanes are also conveniently not mentioned in the article.


Then, the "induced demand". This factor does indeed exist, but it's often portrayed as if all traffic growth is the result of induced demand. That traffic growth would solely be a function of road capacity and has nothing to do with population growth, socio-economic shifts, economic development, job creation, housing prices, etc. Only a small portion of traffic growth is due to induced demand, in the Netherlands it was quantified at 1/8th of traffic growth between 2000 and 2012.


The London Congestion Charge is based on an anomaly; London has by far the least developed road system in Europe, with almost no motorways, a severely underdeveloped arterial network that lacks good hierarchy and highway-type traffic volumes on residential streets. The average off-peak traffic speed is only around 20 miles per hour. Traveling between boroughs of London is very time-consuming compared to major cities elsewhere in Europe, a 15 - 20 mile trip may take 1 - 1.5 hours even on a Sunday.

The mentioned 60 mile traffic jam in China has little do to with cities. It was caused by coal trucks from Inner Mongolia bound for power plants in the Beijing region. It is a poor attempt to link an anomaly to transportation policy.

Los Angeles tend to be portrayed as a city that embraced freeways and is a highway walhalla, but the amount of freeway lane miles per capita is actually on the lower end of the spectrum. Los Angeles population has grown by millions since the 1970s, with highway expansion lagging significantly. It's no wonder a single HOV lane on the 405 didn't miraculously solve all traffic congestion there. They should've built 4 or 6 tolled express lanes.