Monthly Archives: November 2007

Transportation policy should aim to reduce congestion, says Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America. Yet too often it is actually aimed at “making things get worse — slower!”

“We can’t make it faster but we can try for reliably slower,” Pisarski quotes one transportation planner as saying. “These should be embarrassing if not pathetic goals,” he commented at the Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose last week.
“Imagine if such goals were applied to schools or hospitals.”

In much of the U.S., notes Pisarski, more than 25 percent of workers commute across county lines to get to work. Click chart to see a larger image.

Pisarski argued that the appropriate goal for transportation should be “to reduce the effects of distance as an inhibiting force in our society’s ability to realize its economic and social aspirations.” You can download his PowerPoint presentation (850KB); if you would like a copy of the DVD of his presentation, email the American Dream Coalition.

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British auto drivers pay something like $4 in auto-related taxes for every dollar that the government spends on highways. The surplus goes for transit, intercity rail, and other government operations.

Meanwhile, the government is doing much to discourage auto driving, including installing speed humps, red-light cameras, and the famous cordon charge for entering inner London.

All of this rankles Malcolm Heymer, a civil engineer and member of the Association of British Drivers. Heymer gave a presentation (10MB) at the San Jose Preserving the American Dream conference last weekend. You can also download the text of his presentation, which is only 248-kilobytes.

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Last week the Antiplanner failed to note that Seattle voted down a massively expensive light-rail plan. Sound Transit, the agency that is at least 100 percent overbudget and several years late on its initial light-rail project, somehow thought it could persuade voters to fund the most expensive light-rail system in the universe.

The proposed system was going to cost anywhere from $10.6 billion to $150 billion depending on who you believed. The lower figure was the capital cost in 2002 dollars; the higher was the total tax that Seattlelites were expected to fork over before the system would be completely paid off.

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Montgomery Alabama is the latest to replace its one-way streets with two way. Studies have shown that one-way streets are safer and, because they move more traffic, are actually good for the businesses on the streets.

Both one-way and two-way streets are visible in this view of downtown Montgomery. Click to see a larger view.
Flickr photo by Brian Esquire.

One-way streets were a huge success in reducing traffic accidents when cities installed them in the 1950s. Those cities that have restored two-way operation that have bothered to check found that the number of accidents increased on two-way streets. So why are cities changing them back?

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