1) Each trip has an economic purpose
2) Thus each trip has an economic value
3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)
4) Ergo the trips that will be added by reducing congestion must be the trips of the lowest economic value.
> 3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)
This is true, but doesn't really account for the fact that most categories of trips fall into this bucket in the aggregate. That is, people could skip any one of them, but skipping all trips in a category due to persistent traffic would extract a very real cost. (So in general, people bias toward taking all the trips in that category instead.)
Examples: commutes to work, where the cost of not going could be losing one's job. People will sit in a lot of traffic to keep a roof over their heads. That doesn't make it a good civic planning choice.
Others: lots of trips will involve healthcare, which is ~20% of the economy. Those have potentially high costs to skipping. Education-related trips are the same, as long as people are generally required to be physically present at their classes. After-school congestion is filled with children going to swim classes & track meets.
For many of these classes, the cost should be measured in terms of how many people would just leave the area if they couldn't afford the traffic cost of e.g. taking their kid to piano class.
Then if you improve congestion, people move to <exurb>, creating trips from <exurb>. Thus it would be an example of a trip that was of low economic value.
Fixing those problems would fix the traffic problems.
On the topic of traffic cost in congested areas, distance is only loosely related to travel times. If we reword using 1 mile = 1.5 minute
> because traffic is bad, "commutes from <location> ninety minutes away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <location> fifteen minutes away" happen.
This is obviously false for congested metro areas. As another commenter notes, people live where they can afford to do so.
Bringing it back to schools etc. For excellent teachers, it may be lower economic value for them to live in a congested area versus one where they can live closer to school. But the metro area lost an excellent teacher, presumably in favor of one with fewer other employment options.
Congestion, like air quality, is a tax on every activity. It's not useful to only model it at the individual trip level.
And, there is definitely a distribution of commute times. Some very long. But your average commute is not two hours one way; the center of the distribution normalizes around some level of bearability, around 50 minutes in the US. Which, with bad congestion, might allow you to go 10 miles. But with no congestion, might allow you to go 60.
The reason I quoted distance is because commute times are relatively stable, the product of travel speed (congestion) times distance. And that's the point; if travel speed is increased, many people will choose to live further away, e.g. for a bigger house.
In Manhattan, there are 4-5 lines across a strip 2.5 miles wide. Half a mile is about the most people will walk to the subway at each end. You could cover the core of most of the South Bay cities with 5-6 lines. That’s 240 miles of track for the South Bay. At a billion dollars per mile for the subway, that’s a quarter trillion.
That gets you the physical infrastructure to make transit feasible. On top of that you need to topple the local governments so you can massively upzone the strip around the subway lines.
I've been to a number of cities in Europe and Japan with the population density of the Bay Area. They don't have subways. They have a couple of train stations that link them to major cities. Most people who live in these places drive cars, ride bicycles, or take the bus.
The kind of public transit you want is only sustainable in very dense cities. Outside of downtown San Francisco and Oakland, the Bay Area is a suburb. The amount of money it would take to subsidize a reasonable subway system would bankrupt the state.
I'm all for increasing mass transit speeds and convenience. We need to think really hard about SUVs, and freeways, and commuters, (and commercial trucks). Heck, even a pure electric Tesla Model X is MASSIVE: its gross vehicle weight is 6,500 lbs, and can go up to 130 mph! Good for climate change, not so good for commuting on crowded roads.
But I'm also optimistic: batteries and electronics are improving rapidly, and I expect a $10,000, battery-powered, 2-person, 45mph, 1000 lb, 100-mile runabout coming along in the next 5-10 years. A (much nicer) Renault Twizy-like vehicle would make a dandy Richmond to SF commuter, ASSUMING you could maintain 45mph the whole way.
How to maintain 45mph in these small commuters? Well, each would be shorter and narrower, and slower (assume design top speed 45mph). Thus we could simply restripe a new lane or two onto our freeways. Better yet: electronics/radio (V2V) will allow semi-autonomous platooning (and crash detection/avoidance), thus increasing vehicle density and allowing drivers to relax more on their commute.
What to do with the SUVs and trucks? Not much, other than tax them at 1/2 m v^2.
Weight does not take up space. The Model X may be heavy, but it is only about 6 inches longer and 7 inches wider than a Toyota Camry. I'm not going to mention height because it does not matter within a reasonable range. The Camry can carry 5 people and the Model X can carry 7, plus a lot more stuff, for only a small increase in total size. It also uses no gas. How is that not a net positive?
Maybe, freeway should add tolls, with discount for no. of passengers.
But I think a difference is that since car traffic tends to get inefficient when congestion increases (traffic jams, etc) its a pretty inefficient way to handle large amounts of traffic. You can just fit so many more people onto a train than into personal cars, and they don’t gum up in the same way. Plus, it’s conceivable that mass transit capacity can be expanded to match demand, with sufficient investment, whereas we already devote like 60% of the land in our cities to cars and it’s still not enough.
IMO people will use any method of transportation up to the point where the pain of using it overcomes the value the person gets out of making the trip. The pain can come from operational issues like frequency of delays, fare cost, proximity of stations to destinations, ease of transferring - but can also come from overcrowding
I think that there ought to be increased transit but also much much better utilization of the land that transit goes to. It makes no sense that if you ride BART, you’ll notice that for all of the stops except for those in the most central parts of SF, they shuttle millions of people into giant parking lot wastelands with no shopping and few apartments. Make the stops worth going to and living in! You’re already sending people there and having people live nearby work reduces their transit usage.
If you like that idea, tell state senators to call for a vote on SB50 today. It got blocked undemocratically but that’s the best shot we have for well utilized transit stops in the foreseeable future.
https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/1130497688581967872?...
The problem is that some trips -- like getting to work -- have effectively "infinite" value. Most people can't opt out of that trip.
Electric self driving vehicles are right around the corner, and will greatly reduce the environmental and parking issues that come with freeways.
If widening roads leads to more cars, that’s a sign that an inadequate transit network is holding the region’s economy back.
At this point, the bay area has comically underbuilt the road and the transit network, and is also intentionally blocking high density construction near public transit.
All three of those problems need to be fixed.
You can never build "enough" roads, it just encourages more people to travel from further away. See induced demand: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...