According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the costs of congestion have quadrupled since 1982. The Antiplanner has often argued that cities have deliberately allowed congestion to increase in the erroneous belief that more congestion would lead people to stop driving and start riding transit or use other modes of travel. However, the evidence for this is merely anecdotal; it’s hard to imagine city officials admitting even in private memos that congestion was their goal.
An article in last Friday’s New York Post, however, makes the case that congestion is deliberate. “City officials have intentionally ground Midtown to a halt with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles,” reports the newspaper that was founded by Alexander Hamilton. The article specifically blames “today’s gridlock” on the “Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.”
Sensational news, perhaps, but not necessarily persuasive. The article attributes this information to “high-level sources,” later saying it comes from “a former top NYPD official.” While the article offered specific examples of ways the city has increased congestion, including the conversion of auto lanes to bicycle lanes and restrictions on the ability of drivers to make turns at many intersections, it offers no documentation that these things were done specifically to make auto drivers miserable.
There are other, equally plausible, reasons to explain growing congestion. Since Bloomberg took office in 2002, Manhattan’s population has grown by more than 100,000 people, or about 6.5 percent. New York City employment has grown by nearly 600,000 (see page 7), and roughly half that growth has been in Manhattan (page 19). Yet, unlike most other cities, there’s really no place in Manhattan to put new streets to accommodate the traffic that accompanies such growth.
I can easily imagine planners telling Bloomberg and de Blasio, “the best way to deal with congestion is to provide people with alternatives such as bike paths and reduce delays at intersections by discouraging right and left turns.” The planners may actually have believed it, and in some respects they might even be right. Does that mean they are deliberately trying to make drivers miserable? Not necessarily. With the growth in jobs, congestion would have increased no matter what they did.
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In 2014, New York City adopted a Vision Zero plan that proposes to eliminate pedestrian and other traffic fatalities by reducing posted speed limits. But with average speeds in Manhattan of 8.4 miles per hour, reducing speed limits is not going to make a lot of difference to travelers.
The Antiplanner’s former hometown, Portland, has adopted a similar plan but hasn’t yet received authority from the state legislature to reduce posted speed limits. Since average speeds in Portland are around 30 mph today, reducing limits there could have a bigger impact.
Before concluding that congestion is deliberate, I’d want to find out what is happening with traffic signal coordination. Most of Manhattan’s 2,800 signals were coordinated in 1998, but new technologies since then could improve traffic flows even more. I can’t find any evidence that New York City has implemented these technologies, but I don’t know if they have let their existing coordination systems decline.
Portland coordinated some traffic signals in 2008, but it seemed to do it solely to earn revenues from reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The city’s claims for emission reductions appeared to be exaggerated, and I haven’t heard that they have coordinated any other signals since then.
So I was already convinced that growing congestion is, at the very least, a side effect of other transportation policies and quite possibly an intentional result of those policies. Unfortunately, the article in the Post fails to provide any solid evidence that this is true.
Yeah, the Portland area’s lights are synchronized all right. As in, they are synchronized to ensure drivers go from red light to red light. Same in the Seattle area. Don’t expect us to believe that planners dd not deliberately do this, when I’ve been to other major cities like Las Vegas or Phoenix where this doesn’t happen nearly as often. They may have synchronized the lights in downtown according to some fixed schedule that may help move traffic, but nowhere else.
I don’t think congestion is a good measurement for most transportation issues.
If a highway has high demand and high congestion, you could double the capacity and double the throughput without reducing congestion much because of all the unmet demand. You didn’t reduce the congestion, but you did double the number of people who got where they wanted to go.
I think it was the late Herb Caen (beloved SF journalist) who once observed that people would rather sit in traffic, bumper to bumper, than in a bus, shoulder to shoulder. Even during the Arab oil embargo, when people had to wait in long lines for hours to buy rationed quantities of gas, there was not much of a mode shift from cars to transit. Planners who are ignorant of human nature will continue to try to force change. And they will continue to fail.
inb4 the village idiot spews some gibberish about the roads in front of your house not having to make a profit.
Good to see you back, metrosucks!
An article in last Friday’s New York Post, however, makes the case that congestion is deliberate. “City officials have intentionally ground Midtown to a halt with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles,” reports the newspaper that was founded by Alexander Hamilton. . . . Unfortunately, the article in the Post fails to provide any solid evidence that this is true.
I don’t think that city officials could really do much to actually help improve Midtown Manhattan traffic. The average speed is reported at 8.2 mph down a whopping 1.25 mph from an average of 9.5 mph in 2008-2009. Hmm. Could traffic have increased over the last decade as employment rates have increased? Hmm.
Oh, and the Post? Seriously? It’s a rag, and being founded by the statist father of big government shouldn’t give it ANY cred on a libertarian site.
Look somewhere else, where density isn’t 67,000 people per square mile. There is no solution for congestion in a place that dense.
Careful, Antiplanner. Singing the praises of bike lanes risks alienating your fans and patrons.
Boulder politicians, to their credit (and probably their survival), scrapped a jumbo size bike lane that had eliminated a car lane after complaints from motorists and cyclists alike. That lane definitely slowed traffic and I don’t doubt that was the city planners’ intent all along.
Score one for sanity.
Hey Frank.
Take care tomorrow; I think you live on Queen Anne? The tools that normally drive under the speed limit in the left lane on sunny days magically transform to raging tailgaters when there’s ice or snow on the menu.
Lol! So true!
I escaped socialist Seattle two months ago for a small mountain town, and life is terrific!
We’ve got snow here, but people know how to drive in it.
Hey Frank,
I guess I missed that. Where’d you move to?
A small town on the east side/foothills of the Cascades somewhere between Mt. Baker and Mt. Lassen.
Frank, even those socialists in Seattle are anti-rail. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2014/09/22/2000-join-seattles-peoples-climate-march-unprecedented-united-action-environmental-groups-labor/
The regressive left are just as bad as the teabaggers.
Socialism for roads is ok, but bad for railroads? :$