And, as it turns out, we can’t do much of ANYTHING about it either. According to a new study (via Sightline), congestion correlates directly with population regardless of whether a city is sprawling or dense. Sightline’s Clark Williams-Derry writes:

Demagogues would have you believe that there’s some sort of easy solution to congestion. ((Build more roads!! Get rid of carpool lanes!!) But the evidence suggests that easy solutions are hard to come by. Geographically constrained metro areas — think New York and San Francisco — have congestion that’s roughly in line with their population size. The same is true for cities that have no real geographic limits, and where low-density sprawl & exurban highway construction has gone virtually unchecked. Dallas-Fort Worth falls in the latter category: a large, sprawling metropolis with lots of highways. It’s ranked 4th in population and…4th in the overall severity of congestion.

Congestion is a fact of urban life. Short of drastic depopulation, there just ain’t much we can do about it.

34 replies on “We Can’t Build Our Way Out of Congestion”

  5. Congestion is a fact of urban life. Short of drastic depopulation, there just ain’t much we can do about it.

    Okay. That’s surprisingly misleading for Ms. Alt Transit Evangelist.

    Congestion is a fact of urban life in that people will drive cars on the roads up to the capacity of those roads. And that’s just as true in sprawly places as it is in not-sprawly places. But the actual amount of congestion — the number of cars and the volume of pollution they produce — can be mitigated significantly. That seems to be what you were implying with, “We can’t build our way out…” but then your pullquote compared New York to Dallas. Compare the actual number of vehicles on roads on Manhattan during rush hour to the number of vehicles on a similarly sized chunk of Dallas geography, I suspect the numbers will be very different.

  8. Congestion is a way of life in our urban, car-based environments. But there are ways you can make it so people can opt out — building your massively expensive light rail system above- or below-grade (yay Vancouver! boo Sound Transit!), making bike lanes so that people can commute by bicycle, etc.

    There’s still bad congestion, but I don’t own a car and thus don’t care; my train or my bike sails right on by it all. Have fun in your cars, lemmings!

  9. When you increase capacity for car traffic you simply pull transit commuters into cars until the annoyance equilibrium is reached again. The only way to make driving less annoying is to raise the relative cost of driving versus transit, either by taxing/charging motorists more or by covering more of the cost of transit. That’s just simple economics.

  10. Seattle traffic will only get worse now that Portland has approved Major League Soccer’s expansion there by a vote of 3-2. Tons of obnoxious Portlanders will flood into Seattle during Seattle vs. Portland games, driving like idiots and parking on the sidewalk.

    And they’ll take over our precious few bike lanes with their “fixies”.

  11. Tons of obnoxious Portlanders will flood into Seattle during Seattle vs. Portland games, driving like idiots and parking on the sidewalk.

    HAHAHAHAHAHA
    Right–tons of soccer fans. Driving all the way from Portland, no less. If only!

  14. Well, soccer fans don’t weigh as much as gridiron fans, it’s true, but they’ve sold over 20,000 season tickets, which has to amount to more than a thousand tons of soccer fans. The home opener is sold out. And I’m going to the second game with a few Portlanders. They don’t add up to more than a fifth of a ton or so, but I’ll bet there are others.

    I promise to make them park correctly.

  16. We could always just tax the heck out of private vehicles and reduce parking storage for said vehicles.

    That would work.

  21. Congestion is only for US cities.

    If you look at any other first world nation, they have alternatives for commuters, ranging from large-scale transit, to intracity trains, to intercity trains.

    All of which is optimized to be faster, easier to use, and far more convenient than driving by yourself in a car and then paying an arm and a leg to park it.

  22. But there are ways you can make it so people can opt out — building your massively expensive light rail system above- or below-grade (yay Vancouver! boo Sound Transit!)

    You know, Cow, we voted for above-grade mass transit. Like, four times? Five times? I lost track. Eventually, the opponents of the plan had muddied the water so thoroughly that the plan finally died. Weirdly, nobody asked us to vote again after they finally got a no vote.

    But that’s been happening to mass transit plans in Seattle since the Bogue Plan in 1912. So, frankly, yay any kind of mass transit at this point. Eat your spinach, brush your teeth, and thank the gods we’ve finally got a system — even an at-grade system.

  24. @25: Thank you for saying this. I keep reading on Slog about all these idyllic European cities where people ride public transit and bike and breathe fresh air and…it’s all bullshit.

    The only difference, in terms of congestion, is that their cars are generally smaller than ours. They have clogged roads, they have far more pollution, they have thousands of taxis, they have sprawling suburbs, etc.

  25. At least in NYC and SF, particularly NYC, you have enough public transportation that you can opt out of car use and the congestion problems altogether. You can’t do that in Seattle because there are a lot of places that are not convenient to reach by public transportation. Taxing people more to use their cars round here won’t get them out of their cars if the public transportation alternatives aren’t as widespread as they need to be.

  26. Erica, if the correlation between population and congestion were perfect, we could throw up our hands and stop looking for fixes.

    But it’s not a perfect correlation. There is plenty of variability between cities that isn’t explained by population, particularly with the larger cities where the dots get more scattered.

    In fact, the chart shows that the best big cities have about 20% less congestion than the worst big cities. That’s a big difference.

    Interesting data – completely unfounded conclusion.

  27. Show me where you have the constitutionally protected right to have a road that will take you where you need to go in your car. Where am I required to build roads for stupid people who choose (yeah we can’t tell you where to live) to drive 30-60 miles to and from work every day. Enjoy your traffic jams. I choose to live near to work.

    The best option for all of our problems: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/index.h…

    Yeah I said it.

  28. As much as I respect Sightline’s body of work, they missed something really obvious here:

    Sightline: “nobody’s found a solution to congestion — at least, not one that clearly counteracts the pressure of a rapidly expanding population”

    http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/a…

    vs.

    Daventry Development Transport study (2007): Daventry would reduce congestion by 22-33% even while growing 60% over the next 17 years by building a PRT network that connects to the nearest transit rail station.

    http://www.wndc.co.uk/pdf/CD%203.23%20Da…

    The upshot is that more enlightened regions of the world are actually doing something about cost-effective, energy-superefficient public transport that’s fast, safe, congestion-proof, and convenient enough to entice people from their cars.

  29. That’s idiotic. First, you can build a city with lots of “no cars allowed” streets. That eliminates congestion in those blocks!

    Second, in Amsterdam, there is very little congestion. That’s because it’s 5 EURO/ hour to park. And Stockholm has congestion pricing which works too. So you can price it away to some extent.

    Thirdly, lets say congestion WAS inevitable; that’s all the more reason to have mass transit alternatives for people to opt out. With great mass transit, who cares about the idiots stuck in traffic? Granted, the noise and CO2 is nasty, but that’s a city for you.

    Finally, Sightline is a part of the same organization that promotes ‘intelligent design’ – so approach all their papers (and employees) with caution (and questions).

  33. @30: Tell you what. Once there is a PRT system up and running somewhere, once it’s had time to prove how its real-world results stack up to other transportation schemes, we can revisit this topic. Until then, you’ve got nothing.

  34. Greg @38: Two true PRT systems are scheduled to open later this year. One in London, one in the United Arab Emirates.

    One precursor PRT system has been running for more than 30 years in Morgantown, West Virginia. It has now carried more than 70 million passengers for more than 120 million passenger miles. Zero fatalities, zero serious injuries, and not even a legal claim of serious injury. I heard recently that if the Morgantown system were classified as light rail that it would have the third-highest ridership per mile of any light rail system in the United States. And even with all the cost inflation it experienced due to Nixonian meddling, in 2004 inflation-adjusted dollars it still would have cost less than $80M per mile for an entirely grade-separated system.

    This is a fairly good illustration of the enlightened view of systems like this vs. the unenlightened view: the enlightened view would look at current PRT designs and say, ‘you know, those would totally work, and they would be a total bargain. Let’s build one!’ Which is exactly what’s happening where they’re serious about addressing global warming, providing cost-effective and economically and environmentally sustainable alternatives to automobile travel, and/or creating the green economy of the future.

    The unenlightened view could of course be summed up nicely by saying “you’ve got nothing.”

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