"As the crow flies" efficiency of major cities.

[tradephoric]

#01 Detroit (96.2%)



#02 Houston (92.3%)



#03 Chicago (92.1%)



#04 Philadelphia (91.4%)



#05 Dallas (91.2%)




#06 Boston (90.3%)



#07 Atlanta (89.9%)



#08 Miami (89.0%)



#09 Los Angeles (88.9%)



#10 Washington D.C. (88.2%)




#11 Minneapolis (87.9%)



#12 Phoenix (85.3%)



#13 New York City (84.8%)



#14 Seattle (84.4%)



#15 San Francisco (74.7%)

[NE2]

More like major metro areas, from suburbs to the central city. Doing it between places in the city would probably favor planned cities with many diagonals like DC or post-Napoleon Paris.

For comparison, 71% is going along a right angle rather than a 45 degree diagonal. So anything less efficient than 71% likely has some sort of barrier (e.g. San Francisco Bay).

[Scott5114]

Would be surprised if Oklahoma City were any less than these "top 15".

[tradephoric]

Oklahoma City lacks diagonal routes to service the NE, NW, SE, SW of the city.  Same reason why Phoenix is low on the list.  Both cities have an easy to navigate grid but the lack of diagonal routes increases the distance traveled. 

[empirestate]

So what's the rationale here? How are the destinations chosen, the formula applied, etc.?

[TheStranger]

I wonder how much either proposed Southern Crossing (the connection from today's 980 to 280/Army Street considered in the 1960s, or the more recent proposal to connect 380 and 238) would aid in improving San Francisco's percentage...

[Alps]

So what's the rationale here? How are the destinations chosen, the formula applied, etc.?

I notice for Boston that the routes all avoid the freeways, so this isn't a realistic measure of whatever is trying to be measured. Should be using the fastest routes to assess how direct they are.

[tradephoric]

So what's the rationale here? How are the destinations chosen, the formula applied, etc.?

I notice for Boston that the routes all avoid the freeways, so this isn't a realistic measure of whatever is trying to be measured. Should be using the fastest routes to assess how direct they are.

The rationale is that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  The majority of the routes on the maps avoid the freeways, Boston included.  Not everyone is going to be traveling the freeways to get to their destination.  If you are taking public transportation there is a good chance the buses will be sticking to the surface streets. 

Should be using the fastest routes to assess how direct they are.

I think the shortest route should be used, not the fastest.

[empirestate]

I mean, what is the question you were asked (or asked yourself) that led to the compilation of these maps and tables? (I assume you compiled them, but perhaps they're gathered from another source?) How did you devise and apply the procedure that produced the statistics you've presented? What's the hypothesis? What, indeed, is the text that accompanies these figures?

I'm not trying to be confontational or challenging or anything like that. I seriously don't have any background here, and these figures seem to illustrate a discussion that I haven't been aware of so far, so I am simply curious what that is. :-)

[agentsteel53]

"cities with lots of spokes".

the real question is, what happens when you run those numbers not from city center to suburb, but from suburb to suburb.  the Bay Area would probably score even worse; getting from Bolinas to North Richmond is pretty ornery.

(Bolinas?  the town famous for taking down the directional signs from CA-1 so that it can remain anonymous?  how did that make it into the list of representative suburbs?)

[deathtopumpkins]

So what's the rationale here? How are the destinations chosen, the formula applied, etc.?

I notice for Boston that the routes all avoid the freeways, so this isn't a realistic measure of whatever is trying to be measured. Should be using the fastest routes to assess how direct they are.

The rationale is that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  The majority of the routes on the maps avoid the freeways, Boston included.  Not everyone is going to be traveling the freeways to get to their destination.  If you are taking public transportation there is a good chance the buses will be sticking to the surface streets. 

I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever take a local bus the distances depicted here. You'd either take another mode of transport (commuter rail/subway), or an express bus, which uses the freeway. Express buses radiate out from Boston on US 1, I-93, and I-90, and even some local routes hop onto the freeway to actually get into the city (like routes from Chelsea and Revere, which finish their journey to Haymarket/Government Center on US 1 and I-93).

And for private transport, the only people who would specifically not take the freeway to their destination if it is faster and no less direct are roadgeeks who are trying to clinch a road (or theoretically a commuter avoiding a traffic jam, or taking the scenic route).

Should be using the fastest routes to assess how direct they are.

I think the shortest route should be used, not the fastest.

Your thread title says "efficiency". There was no accompanying text explanation, but I am very curious as to your logic behind the fastest route being less efficient than the shortest. I genuinely would be interested to know what criteria you used to come to that conclusion.

[tradephoric]

I'll start by saying that I have long been interested in the INRIX Traffic Scorecard which attempts to rank the congestion levels of metropolitan areas.  While the data is interesting, it can be hard to make comparisons because every metro area is different.  INRIX puts it like this...

One of the difficulties in analyzing and comparing metropolitan area congestion is defining what a metropolitan area is. Across North America and Europe, INRIX has strived to take standard definitions of metropolitan areas rather than creating our own....In North America, we have adopted the Census Bureau definition of Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSA).

The Core-Based Statistical Areas can very widely with some cities having a condensed CBSA while other cities the CBSA spreads well outside the major city center.  For instance, freeway segments near Port St. Lucie, over 100 miles from downtown Miami, are included to analyze the congestion levels of Miami.  A very small segment of the population is going to commute from Port St. Lucie to Miami on a regular basis.  A driver stuck in gridlock traffic on the Dolphin Expressway near Miami International Airport doesn't care that I-95 near Port St. Lucie is running smoothly.

Instead of using the CBSA for each city, I choose to create my own.  My metropolitan area encompasses the 20-mile radius around the city center.  I choose 20-miles because at that point the sprawl seems to subside when you get that far out (exceptions exist but I had to pick something).  Now that I defined my metropolitan area, I picked 10 suburbs that were near the outskirts of the metropolitan area.  Ideally, I attempted to pick suburbs that were relatively populated (so the route would service a large percentage of the metro area) and picked suburbs that were spread out (so every direction of the metro area would be analyzed).   Once the 10 suburbs were chosen, I compared the shortest route distance to the "as the crow flies"  distance to get the efficiency of the route, where efficiency = (route distance) / ("as the crow flies"  distance). 

My hypothesis is that metropolitan areas with efficient surface streets help reduce the congestion levels of the metropolitan freeways.  In free-flowing conditions, it's very likely that the freeway route (which is often more indirect than taking the surface streets) is going to be faster than taking surface streets (which is often more direct than taking the freeways).  However, when drivers are stuck in gridlock on the freeway, the more direct surface streets suddenly become an attractive alternative.  Drivers stuck averaging 20 mph on the freeway can hop onto the more direct surface streets and can potentially get to their destination faster.  The more efficient the surface streets, the more incentive drivers have to get off the freeway which in turn helps relieve the congestion levels for the drivers who decide to stay on the freeway and bare it out.

[NE2]

And for private transport, the only people who would specifically not take the freeway to their destination if it is faster and no less direct are roadgeeks who are trying to clinch a road (or theoretically a commuter avoiding a traffic jam, or taking the scenic route).

Or cyclists. 10 miles is a reasonable bike commute. 20 is a bit long, but could be done one-way with transit the other way.

[Alps]

I think the shortest route should be used, not the fastest.

I guarantee you that you can do better than what you've shown, then, by taking advantage of diagonal suburban streets. It becomes an exercise in ridiculousness at some point.

[tradephoric]

Your thread title says "efficiency". There was no accompanying text explanation, but I am very curious as to your logic behind the fastest route being less efficient than the shortest. I genuinely would be interested to know what criteria you used to come to that conclusion.

Should be using the fastest routes to assess how direct they are.

Direct:  Proceeding without interruption in a straight course or line; not deviating or swerving.

Your focus seems to be on "without interruption" and my focus is on "in a straight course or line".

[empirestate]

Thanks. Now I know what we're talking about and why.

It seems important, straight away, to clarify that by "efficiency", as used in the topic header, you mean "straightness". The difference between a trip's shortest available road route and its airline distance is its "efficiency" for this context, regardless of other meanings of the word.

And indeed it is another meaning of the word "efficiency" that you're interested in with your hypothesis: that the greater a route's "efficiency" (your definition), the greater its efficiency (usual definition of quickness) when compared to the known most efficient route (i.e. the fastest, which is presumed not to be the shortest).

That being sorted out now, if indeed I have done so correctly, it may be worth renaming your concept of efficiency as something like "straightness", because if you're trying to demonstrate that straightness contributes to efficiency, it doesn't stand to reason that straightness already is efficiency.

Or something like that...

[Laura]

I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever take a local bus the distances depicted here. You'd either take another mode of transport (commuter rail/subway), or an express bus, which uses the freeway. Express buses radiate out from Boston on US 1, I-93, and I-90, and even some local routes hop onto the freeway to actually get into the city (like routes from Chelsea and Revere, which finish their journey to Haymarket/Government Center on US 1 and I-93).

In Baltimore, we have express routes and local express routes. Express routes generally take I-95 to I-395 to get to Downtown Baltimore. Local express routes are a different story. They usually follow a local line and add/remove stops along that route. There are two types: Quickbuses and X suffix routes. The quickbuses run all day and usually skip a lot of the smaller stops. The X suffix buses run during the morning and afternoon commutes and skip the stops in the middle of their routes (usually between downtown and the city edge suburbs). They can also add stops in those suburbs.

I live 12-17 miles from downtown. Most of the time, I commute to work with Mike. On the days that I don't, I take local express buses. I rarely drive to work because I do not have free parking at my job and hate the idea of paying $8 per day when I can ride public transit for $3.20-$4 per day. I'll take the 15X to work and the 19X home from work. The 15X is a 10 minute walk to the stop, 1 hour ride, 15 min walk to work. The 19X is a 5 min walk from work, 45 minute ride, 30 minute walk home (I usually run this so it takes less time). Yes, the commute is long, but it includes built-in exercise and allows me to read and do homework on the bus.

I could drive 5 minutes and catch an express bus, but they almost always get stuck in traffic, so they take longer than the 30 minute timetable that the MTA claims. In the morning, 40 minutes, in the evening, 1 hour. Because of heavy traffic they are never on time, either. Plus, I like the idea of not having to drive my car at all on those days.

(Driving to work alone takes me about 50 minutes on average, which just isn't worth it to me. I've done it twice in the past 3 months.)