The Texas Transportation Institute has published its 2011 urban mobility report, and this year it is based on real measurements of actual congestion rather than formulas. According to the report, in 2010 the nation’s worst congestion was in Washington, DC, where the average commuter wastes 74 hours a year sitting in traffic compared with only 64 hours in Los Angeles, which long was rated as having the worst congestion.
While that’s great news for pundits who want to write about how the nation’s capital is thriving while the rest of the country is miserable, it doesn’t ring true to the Antiplanner. According to 2008 data published by the Federal Highway Administration, the nation’s most productive highways are in Los Angeles.
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This productivity boost would be possible if Los Angeles had congestion pricing on all of its freeways. As the Antiplanner has noted before, congestion pricing actually increases highway capacities during rush hour because capacities are lower when roads are congested. But Los Angeles doesn’t have congestion pricing, so there must be some other explanation for increased throughput.
The Antiplanner has always suspected that this explanation is that Los Angeles highways are congested for more hours of the day than highways in other cities. In other words, instead of having a rush hour in the morning and one in the evening, Los Angeles has four or more rush hours in the morning and four or more in the evening. One reason why Los Angeles freeways are so heavily used is that it has the fewest miles of freeways per capita of any major urban area.
So, with all due respect to TTI, this report’s numbers, even with on-the-ground verification, should still be viewed skeptically. On the other hand, the report rates Los Angeles as having the worst “travel time index,” which is the amount of extra time you have to budget to get anywhere over what it should take in free-flowing traffic. If the travel time index is the best measure of congestion, it is interesting to note that the nation’s third-worst congestion is in “keep it weird” Austin, Texas (which is tied with New York and San Francisco by this measure).
More Slug lines will up that highway capacity!!
Travel Time Index is a waaaaaaaaaay better measure of congestion because not everybody takes a freeway to work. Here’s a clue as to why… Austin is not a big city. Austin has 6 relatively (give or take a lane or traffic light) high capacity highways, 2 extremely high capacity toll roads and 2 other limited access toll roads. Highway capacity is not the issue here.
With TxDOT running the show you can count that highway/toll road capacity will be increased, but don’t expect travel times to get much better. The main problem is that of the 10 highways/freeways mentioned only 3 go east/west and those are on the periphery of urban area. The other problem is street capacity, or rather, street connectivity. The lack of street connectivity is due in part to geography in west Austin, NIMBY’s who are beside themselves at the thought of somebody driving or parking on “their” street, and suburban subdivisions that are home to 10k-20k residents whose access to the network is only via 1 arterial creating an insane traffic burden on that road (not to mention the emergency access problems that were highlighted in the recent fires).
Finally, Austin is a “desirable” location and many businesses have moved to the area in the last couple of decades. Austin, however, has not been willing to shell out the insane tax incentives to lure these businesses like many of the suburban communities in the area. As a result we have many large employment centers (10k+ employees) on the outskirts of the urbanized area creating a bi-directional rush hour like I’ve never seen before.
Oh yeah, don’t get me started on frontage roads and the bottle neck multiplier.
Bottom line, the focus on nothing but highways is a big problem in Austin, as the rest of the roadway network has been on the back burner, well, since the 50’s. We need to remember that highways will not function well without a good integrated transportation network to support them.
The Antiplanner wrote:
The Antiplanner has always suspected that this explanation is that Los Angeles highways are congested for more hours of the day than highways in other cities. In other words, instead of having a rush hour in the morning and one in the evening, Los Angeles has four or more rush hours in the morning and four or more in the evening. One reason why Los Angeles freeways are so heavily used is that it has the fewest miles of freeways per capita of any major urban area.
There can be more than two “rush hours” on sections of the Capital Beltway on weekdays, and incredibly bad congestion on weekends and holidays as well.
Los Angeles, even though its freeways get heavy use, still has something of a grid system of freeways, and the “surface streets” (as they call them in L.A.) are pretty good as well. So if there is a freeway incident in L.A., there are usually other routes that can be used (though they will be congested).
For the most part, the D.C. region lacks network redundancy on its freeway system, so incidents can have “ripple” effects very far away.
CPZ raises an interesting point. DC is the only place I have seen that has terrible congestion on weekends, and not just the highways. Everywhere else I have lived has substantially less congestion on weekends (other than returning vacation traffic on Sunday nights).
Are there any studies about weekend congestion?
Los Angeles has an extensive system of ramp metering that could explain some of the increased productivity; I don’t know if Washington, D.C. roads have that to the same extent. But it’s definitely true that the better the economy, the more trips that are taken. Visit Detroit to see how relatively empty the roads are, even at peak periods.
Sandy Teal wrote:
CPZ raises an interesting point. DC is the only place I have seen that has terrible congestion on weekends, and not just the highways. Everywhere else I have lived has substantially less congestion on weekends (other than returning vacation traffic on Sunday nights).
Are there any studies about weekend congestion?
Now I have seen some pretty bad weekend congestion on certain Los Angeles-area freeways, notably I-405, though I do not drive there enough to know if the congestion is recurring or not.
There has been some examination of weekend/holiday congestion in the D.C. region, but not especially recently.
transitboy wrote:
Los Angeles has an extensive system of ramp metering that could explain some of the increased productivity; I don’t know if Washington, D.C. roads have that to the same extent.
I strongly agree that the Caltrans ramp meters could be one of the reasons that the L.A. freeway network is more productive than others. It’s the only place where I have seen freeway-to-freeway ramps metered.
There are currently ramp meters on some sections of freeway in the Northern Virginia part of the D.C. region, mostly inside the Capital Beltway.
The new Maryland Route 200 (InterCounty Connector) toll road will have its tolls set high enough to prevent recurring congestion (I suppose we can call that a variation on the theme of “ramp metering”).
But it’s definitely true that the better the economy, the more trips that are taken. Visit Detroit to see how relatively empty the roads are, even at peak periods.
Absolutely correct.
In the UK, the general formula is that daily trips = 10 x peak hour trips. We have two peaks, AM and PM, plus some more peaks at school quitting time.
To get to 23,500 trips per day per lane, on a lane which cannot handle much more that 2000 trips per hour, the travel peaks have to be very wide.
In case of congestion, you could always try to remove people who shouldn’t be there. Like the person who appears to be turning onto the on ramp, on the left of the photo in the article.
“Great news for pundits who want to write about how the nation’s capital is thriving” Government employment on the federal level accounted for about 27 percent of the jobs in Washington, D.C. This mass of people working is thought to immunize Washington to national economic downturns because the federal government continues to operate even during recession. Many organizations such as law firms, independent contractors (both defense and civilian), non-profit organizations, lobbying firms, trade unions, industry trade groups, and professional associations headquarter in the city too, to be close to the federal government nursing themselves off federal dollars.
DC was never designed for automobiles, L’Enfant designed the city with those inspired European eccentricities in mind. DC is much like Paris, short buildings, diagonal streets that create weird intersections and circles. It’s an urban landscape with restricted development opportunities so development in the large part must take place in the suburbs. A lot of its streets (apart from K, Constitution, and Independence and Pennsylvania Ave. and a few others) are narrow. When looking at the amount of traffic per lane or road space, DC might surpass LA and NYC as it too has tons of out of state drivers. I wouldn’t be surprised if D.C. had poor signal coordination as well. I-95 and 495 have similar traffic counts to many California roads but have fewer lanes because the expected demand is lower. There are several major suburban job centers that cause traffic throughout this area. Tysons Corner being one of the biggest. Over 100,000 people work there but few live there. With a daytime population greater than 100,000 and a nighttime population of less than 20,000. And I don’t blame them for not living there, aesthetically, Tysons Corner is a dump. Now the new urbanists want to reimagine Tysons Corner. Growing from it’s now 105,000 jobs to 200,000 to an area where apparentley they won’t have to commute by cars. The expectations they won’t drive so much. Where have we heard that before.
http://www.travel-studies.com/blogs/transforming-tysons-corner
I have a difficult time believing LA had fewer Highway miles per capita than Philadelphia or Boston. I’d love to see the calculation.
I bet the disparity is even greater if we consider lane miles. Boston and Philly highways are 2-3 lanes in each direction, LA ones are generally much wider.
Places like Boston and Philadelphia have half the number of freeways and twice the population of many other major cities. Chicago doesn’t really have much either given its size.
Re: off-peak congestion.
I’ve seen and experienced off-peak/weekend highway congestion in most major cities – Boston, New York, Philly, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.
Sometimes, a lot of people just want to go somewhere just like you.
Ramp meters are not everywhere but they’re not uncommon. Speaking of them reminded me of awhile back when the MDOT turned them off in the Twin Towns to see what happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter
Minneapolis-Saint Paul ramp meter experiment
In 2000, a $650,000 experiment was mandated by the Minnesota State Legislature in response to citizen complaints and the efforts of State Senator Dick Day [3]. The study involved shutting off all 433 ramp meters in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for eight weeks to test their effectiveness. The study was conducted by Cambridge Systematics and concluded that when the ramp meters were turned off freeway capacity decreased by 9%, travel times increased by 22%, freeway speeds dropped by 7% and crashes increased by 26%. However, ramp meters remain controversial, and the Minnesota State Department of Transportation has developed new ramp control strategies. Fewer meters are activated during the course of a normal day than prior to the 2000 study, some meters have been removed, timing has been altered so that no driver waits more than four minutes in ramp queue, and vehicles are not allowed to back up onto city streets.