Measure VMT, not LOS

With the passage of Senate Bill 743 and official adoption of the measures into the 2018 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Guidelines, transportation impacts will no longer be determined using level of service (LOS), a measure of traffic congestion. Rather, projects will be required to determine transportation impacts based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This standard goes into effect July 1, 2020, though some jurisdictions may adopt VMT analysis sooner.

-https://dudek.com/measuring-transportation-impacts-using-vehicle-miles-traveled/

There is a saying: As goes California, so goes the nation. And in this case, I do urgently hope it to be tree. VMT is an excellent measure: of energy consumption, to pollution produced, to exposure to automobile accident. Combined with a road capacity metric, it is also a good way of measuring congestion. 

Level of Service is a garbage measure. Contrary to the school grading system it implies, LOS C indicates a road/intersection is actually at maximum efficiency: carrying all the capacity it is designed to carry. LOS A means an under-used road. And LOS F almost never happens: when LOS E hits, people divert to other routes, other times, and other modes. (My friend leaves his house at 515a to avoid traffic). The 'peak hour' is no longer an hour long. Reaching LOS A would mean doubling the width of every road out there, at a cost in billions, to ensure free-flowing traffic, everywhere, at once. And thanks to induced demand, it would last about a year. As the free-flowing traffic induced developers to build in ever more distant locations, where land is cheaper.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair.

I think it's time we recognized that most traffic engineering is deeply unethical. And that there is a whole structure built up, bureaucratically, to facilitate the construction of roads, and make efficient the movement of cars, regardless of the costs. Automobile travel both kills and sickens people. Why is we want more of it?

Monorails

There is a Facebook Group called "Greenway and Futuristic Railway Systems" I belong to. Both the quality and amount of content are such that I can keep up with it, and I'm generally glad that I do.

Intermittently, monorails come up, and I generally have harsh words for them. Human Transit covers their flaws well.

One is being proposed for Costa Rica. It's foolish. There is a 'SkyRail' in Yinchuan, China, in operation. Which says something--after the 'car-eating bus', I'm skeptical of transportation improvements coming out of China. Innovations run on hype, and the combination of distance and language barrier means that there are minimal checks on it.

My first thought was that Yinchuan was a far wealthier place than Costa Rica--not so:  the GDP per capita for Costs Rica and Yinchuan are similar (about $10k).

Then I recalled the appalling currently operating in Costa Rica.  I have been to Costa Rica.


I still think it's insane. Costa Rice has a (donated) commuter rail system  ('Tren Urbano' ) running on badly worn 100 year old railroad track. (They have neither the capacity nor the the money to maintain it). I have pictures of the rail. It is in unsafe condition. A monorail would be a white elephant.

Matt Miller Efforts to build monorails (or any kind of elevated rail) is a tacit admission that a country can't muster the political capital necessary to provide ground-level rapid transit guide way, and that its easier to spend millions of dollars. However, lacking that political commitment, how well do you think they will be able to maintain it?

"Everyone wants to build, but no one wants to maintain". And maintenance is where all the cost is.

It's easy for engineers to be seduced by the 'technological sublime', of pushing the limits of what can be done. I can't deny the results have been great -- Isambard Kingdom Brunel certainly stands the test of time. There is something about pushing the limits of structural engineering, be it the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Familia. But those things are intended to be both beautiful and monumental.  But I fear there is something about elevated structures that seduces engineers. I'm not sure whether it's the raw triumph of structure over gravity, or the belief that because something is maximal, at the limits of the possible, awesome, that it becomes beautiful. 

Elevated transit is great. But it is stinking expensive!

It says something that there is a whole sub-discipline of engineering, known as 'value engineering'. Because (structural) engineers aren't bean counters, but rather the 'can-do' spirits of attempting to make something possible. So if you ask an engineer to do something, they can probably do it. What they can't do is tell you if it's a good idea or not. It's a domain-knowledge problem. Expertise doesn't transfer. 

Could Costa Rica build the monorail? Certainly. Seattle Built one in 1962, when the US GDP was 1/33rd it's present size, with a GDP per capita of about $3,000. But the monorail has not really worked out for Seattle. Or for anyone, really. A monorail is not London Bridge, it's not Brooklyn Bridge, it's not San Francisco bridge. It's a freeway viaduct with a train on top.

And whatever Le Corbusier thought, concrete pillars are not beautiful the way the arches of a Roman aquaduct are beautiful. The land underneath elevated roadwars and railways are unpleasant, hence unvisited, and hence occupied by the undesirable. They become homeless campsites for a reason.

On hitting 500 - retrospective.

Not 500 posts per se (46 draft posts), but still a good point for a retrospective.

I've been running this blog since 2011 (with various degrees of seriousness/attention/dedication). No (active) promotion on my part. While Google+ was active, things I posted here got picked up there--I know of at least one person who began to follow the blog that way. A couple of years back, I added a link to my email signature, and this year I started using Twitter, and using IFTTT (If This Then That) to post things from blogger to Twitter. I would say that has made the most noticeable difference--On the traffic sources, Twitter is the second largest river, behind only google.uk (where people seem to find the site searching for details about the original Outlook Tower, which is this blogs namesake.

Twitter ha been a big deal.  For years, my two biggest sources of 'traffic' were 'bait' sites like referrer, and some SEO-generated porn-site links. Only in the past year have sources of actual traffic replaced that, all of it referred from Twitter. One of the nice things about Twitter is that I'm getting immediate response to how many views I'm getting. And I'm learning (re-learning) the importance of good titles (as that's all IFTTT posts on Twitter).

The two most popular entries remain two early posts: Public Lounge Chair and Skyscraper Forum. I don' think they are actually that great of posts--but I tend to think that people were clicking on the blog and then clicking on posts from the 'Most popular posts' gadget. Which then reinforced their popularity, such that they never left the top category. I've changed that today, so we will see what that brings.

The original inspiration for the blog was Jarrett Walker's 'Human Transit'. I'd quit my job, and was working hard at making a serious effort at the blog (daily updates, etc), both as a way to develop my own consulting business, but also as a means to clarify my own thinking on things.

Watching Human Transit change over the years, I've seen Jarrett Walker doing increasing amount of internal linking, to past blog posts. Likely drives interest more than the blogger 'popular posts' gadgets, and it's a nice way to get a lot of content across, in bite-sized pieces, without overwhelming the reader. (Screens are small these days, creating 'pages' is simple, and the is no need for the long-format Geocities wall of text). But I've also come to realize that the ability to link to a specific article on a point is a great way to provide a counter-argument in the middle of a debate. There is no need to retype something already written, when there is a clean, clear, well thought out and well-articulated vision of it.

That said, being able to articulate a point on demand is helpful, but I don't think writing things down is necessarily antithetical to that. Writing it down in longform essay format, perhaps. But it's easy to draw good 'talking points' from a well-written essay.

I'm spending a lot of time interacting with Cap'n Transit on Twitter these days, often re-posting, sometimes replying (and sometimes clashing). He's very very active. (I don't know how he manages to find the time--perhaps he's Patreon funded?  I tip my hat to him regardless.

Transportation For America (commentary)

Beth Osborne on the  T4America Blog writes: 

For as long as I’ve been working in transportation and probably longer, the debate surrounding the federal transportation program has been a one-note affair: a never-ending fight over who gets money and how much money they get. Those who get money want more flexibility to spend it however they want. Those who get a little money want a bigger piece of the pie. And then both political parties come together in a “bipartisan” way to grow the pie and keep everyone happy.

This two-dimensional debate always leaves out an urgently needed conversation about the purpose of this federal transportation program. What are we doing? Why are we spending $50 billion a year? What is it supposed to accomplish? Does anyone know anymore?

Nearly seven decades ago we set out with a clear purpose: connect our cities and rural areas and states with high-speed interstates and highways for cars and trucks and make travel all about speed. These brand new highways made things like cross-country and inter-state travel easier than we ever imagined possible. We connected places that weren’t well-connected before and reaped the economic benefits (while also dividing and obliterating some communities along the way).

We’ve never really updated those broad goals from 1956 in a meaningful way. We’ve moved from the exponential returns of building brand new connections where they didn’t exist to the diminishing, marginal returns of spending billions to add a new lane of road here and there, which promptly fills up with new traffic.

Why in the world would we just pour more money into a program that is “devoid of any broad, ambitious vision for the future, and [in which] more spending has only led to more roads, more traffic, more pollution, more inequality, and a lack of transportation options,” as I wrote in the Washington Post during Infrastructure Week?

What the program should be about is accountability to the American taxpayer—making a few clear, concrete, measurable promises and then delivering on them. The program should focus on what we’re getting for the funds we’re spending—not simply whether or not money gets spent and how much there was.

Does anyone doubt Congress’s ability to successfully spend money? We all have supreme confidence in their ability to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. Our question is whether that money can be spent in a way that accomplishes something tangible and measurable for the American people.

Taxpayers deserve to know what they’re getting for their spending. Today, they don’t, and nothing about the debate so far in 2019 with Congress has indicated that will change. So we’ve scrapped “provide real funding” from our core principles. T4America has concluded that more money devoted to this same flawed system will just do more damage.

Re-read that bit in bold: Seven decades ago, there was a real need for national investment in a nation-wide network of highways, a network that the states would never have built on their own. That need is gone.

Sales tax dependence makes transit investment cyclical, rather than counter-cyclical

As a consultant, I worry less than average about financial crashes, as the industry is allied with infrastructure, the classic 'counter-cyclical' investment. But the sad part is that while the industry may be counter-cyclical, it's only the road-building part. Most transit systems in America are reliant on sales-tax funding (which crashes during recessions), which means no capital funding for transit infrastructure, or transit operations.

Maybe the Feds should do something about that, and actually fund transit in a reasonable/reliable way, to the tune of 80%, like they do for highways...