A LOCAL POLITICIAN'S
GUIDE TO
URBAN TRANSPORTATION
by
Gordon Price
Councillor, City of Vancouver
Director, TransLink
gordon_price@city.vancouver.bc.ca
This paper is posted at the
Victoria Transport Policy Institute
_______________________________________
DRAFT
5.2
(February, 2001)
_______________________________________
A Local Politician’s Guide to Urban
Transportation is a P3 project: it's
personal, political and (possibly) provocative.
It is still in draft. I do reserve the right to say at some future point that what I
wrote in the past was wrong or just plain dumb. (You can advise me on which
particular parts you think those might be.)
It certainly is missing things, particularly
Canadian content. Much of the history
of transportation on this continent is an American story - or at least most of
what has been written is American.
References and original material about Canada would be greatly
appreciated. Nonetheless, we find
ourselves in much the same predicament as the U.S., for many of the same
reasons. The lessons, I think, are
mutually relevant.
There is also a distinct Vancouver focus, not
surprisingly, that I hope to broaden over time. Unavoidably, this analysis is largely about big cities,
particularly big growing cities. If the
population (both of people and cars) of a place is not significantly
increasing, then the pressure and speed of change will not be as great as it is
in a place like Vancouver. But if a
region continues to sprawl, even without population growth, it will likely
experience similar dilemmas.
I have focused primarily on the problem of
vehicle congestion; there isn't a lot about the particular problems of transit,
cycling and other alternatives. That's
because the primary political problem of transportation (both of reality and
perception) is vehicle congestion.
A LOCAL POLITICIAN'S
GUIDE TO
URBAN TRANSPORTATION
Gordon
Price
Councillor, City of Vancouver, B.C.
Director, TransLink
_______________________________________
"Careful, you may run out of planet."
- ad for a sport-utility vehicle
Pity the politician who promises to fix the urban transportation problem. Traffic congestion may be their constituents' No. 1 frustration, but given the resources and policy levers available to local government, there's only so much that can be done, and it's not nearly enough.
We know we can't just build our way out of congestion, and so we speak highly of alternative transportation options and better land-use policies. But these take time, and meanwhile drivers demand action. Their conclusion: someone do something!
Voters, however, want their infrastructure carrots before the fiscal sticks. But even the nature of our vehicle-based transportation system, with continually expanding demand, concrete solutions are often temporary or ineffectual - and staggeringly expensive. A billion dollars isn't much in the transportation game.
Politicians intuitively appreciate that transportation policy is rooted in feelings. Feelings about our cars, feelings about our homes and neighbourhoods (places made possible by the car), and feelings (often guilt or frustration) about the consequences of our choices.
Politicians must appreciate that individuals can hold completely contradictory views about the automobile, depending on whether their point of view at the time is personal or collective.
Individually, people may view attempts to reduce car use as hopeless or misguided - when it applies to them. Their lives may be unimaginable without unlimited access to the car. Lifestyles, communities and cultures have been shaped by the car for as long as anyone can remember. Alternatives are believed to be unrealistic or unacceptable. People may be physically unable to cope without an engine to aid mobility, obesity being partly a consequence of the extravagant use of hydrocarbons.
However, these same people can also be heartily in favour of drastic actions to reduce car use - when it applies to others. Through traffic racing down their residential street must be curtailed. Air quality cannot be allowed to further deteriorate. Restrictions on buses and trucks should be rigorously enforced.
Nothing so well represents the contradiction as the rise of the SUV. At a time when society is supposedly concerned about air quality, traffic congestion and road safety, why did we suddenly start buying bigger, more polluting and more dangerous cars?
Possibly because the decision to buy was made by individuals, pursuing their own self interest, with no constraints or considerations at the time of sale as to the collective consequences. (Here, as well, advertising played a critical role: it positioned the SUV as an 'environmental' vehicle, able to get people closer to the outdoors and natural environment.) (1)
Locally, the response to a vehicle levy proposed by TransLink (the regional transportation agency) for improved transportation also reflected this individual/collective dichotomy. Most of the discussion at the initial stages of TransLink's strategic plan was about the infrastructure we needed collectively for our community to function. People understood the need to jointly pay for what we wanted. The plan passed unanimously. But the consensus fell apart when it became clear that the car would have to be individually taxed. (2) (Raising transit fares passed almost without comment.)
Without an appreciation of the assumptions inherent in our auto-centric society (often unrecognized), we won't understand the real nature of the problem.
Politicians are faced with a paradox: the pursuit
of self-interest leads to unfortunate collective consequences that threaten the
individual benefits achieved. Simply
put: As more people want to drive the open road, less likely is the road to be
open.
Vehicle miles traveled around the U.S. have
increased by 70 percent over the last 20 years, compared with a two percent
increase in new highway construction. The U.S. General Accounting Office predicts that
road congestion in the U.S. will triple in 15 years even if capacity is
increased by 20 percent. (3)
In the Greater Vancouver Regional District, peak
traffic volume is estimated to rise 60 percent in the next two decades - and
that's after we've made substantial improvements and added capacity to both our
road and transit systems. (4)
Yet advertising, that most powerful of
influences, markets mobility and freedom.
We see the most beautiful images of the car on the open road. Those ads sell many things - freedom, power,
individuality, success and youth - but every
ad reinforces one big idea: the car is never constrained by an excess number of
other cars. You never see the car
caught in congestion. (5)
The freely moving car on the open road is one of
our society's most hallowed images, synonymous with success, reinforced over
many generations, marketed to the world - and yet increasingly frustrated at
every turn. Cars and trucks are getting
bigger and more powerful, engineered to be capable of speeds well beyond any
legal limit, even as the roads become more clogged and average speeds
decrease. This disconnect between
promise and reality has produced responses of both rage and passivity, with an
underlying sense of betrayal. (6) This
is not the way it was supposed to be.
People have always assumed that as we buy more
cars, we will build more roads. Each
purchaser takes for granted that there will always be room for one more. Always
room for one more - an assumption that there will be essentially
unlimited capacity.
That is what traffic engineers have been trained
for: to provide enough capacity to meet demand, which, if there is always room
for one more, must be theoretically infinite.
Their job is to translate infinity into reality.
In fact, engineers are never asked to determine
what the upper limit on capacity should be -and how we could maintain that
limit - so that the vehicles which do use a properly managed system could
function efficiently. To do so would
imply a limit on the number of cars that can be served, and hence destroy the
illusion on which the car industry and our planning is based.
Constituents expect problems of congestion to be
solved, but not at their individual expense.
People want carrots, not sticks - but don't want to pay for expensive
carrots and don't want the sticks to hurt.
Each wants the other to use transit.
The politician is caught between the expectation
that enough room needs to be provided for an ever-increasing number of vehicles
and the reality that there is not enough space, tax dollars or community
support to do so.
Consider, for instance, the growth in vehicles in
the Greater Vancouver Regional District.
Currently, there are 1.1 million motor-vehicles. Each year that number increases by about
23,000 - 63 more vehicles per day, about three per hour, another car or truck
every 20 minutes.
The average car length is about 15 feet. We'd need another 65 miles of asphalt just
to park a year's worth of cars, and about 260 miles of single-lane roadway if
they were all to drive safely at 30 mph (or about 105 km to park, and about 420
km to drive at 50 kph).
To be conservative, let's cut the demand to a
tenth of that. If we wanted to build
only 26 miles (42 km) of new roadway by widening existing roads by one lane
each (say, five arterials in Vancouver), we would have to spend (very
conservatively) about $20 million in construction costs.
But the real expense is land, particularly along
the routes on which the traffic concentrates - those that lead to the town
centre. Since almost all roads leading
into Downtown Vancouver have residential zoning along them (and the average
house price in Vancouver is $343,000), a billion dollars might get us most of
the way if we were to purchase the houses on one side of five arterials running
through the city (say, First, Renfrew, Knight/Clark, Oak and Granville - equal
to about one year's demand for road space) to widen them by one lane. (7)
The political prospects of that scenario are
something less than zero. Even trying
to acquire a few feet of property for a left-hand-turn bay at a major
intersection can take years. If
expropriation is required, the City would certainly end up paying massive legal
fees - and the prospect of forcibly evicting thousands of people to widen roads
is out of the question.
Even after the roads are widened, the real need
for space remains largely unmet. The
car must be parked, usually many times a day, and there must be a piece of
asphalt waiting at every destination.
If underground, the cost of a single parking space easily exceeds
$15,000. If surface, then the land must
be cheap and the densities low in order to provide sufficient space.
Parking standards have increasingly driven urban
design for most of the century. The
need for wide roads and abundant parking is the reason why the endless strips
of commercial frontage now appear everywhere and why the dominant form of
commerce is the decorated box in the midst of the asphalt parking lot, with the
big sign out front to attract the speeding passer-by.
Unfortunately, the result is a kind of
placelessness, unfriendly to every mode save the car and truck. The corollary, of course, is that most places
worth going to have parking problems.
(Notice that advertisements for automobiles frequently show the car in
places where there are narrow streets, abundant landscaping, historic
architecture and often no visible parking - all impossible or unlikely under
most cities’ zoning codes.)
Given the limits to road expansion, it's no
surprise, then, that every car added to the road means less remaining space for
those already there. That makes the
space more valuable as it becomes scarcer.
So what do we do?
We give it away for free. There's no cost to use the road no matter
how much space is used or how often - unlike the per-trip cost of transit and
taxis. Consequently, there's an
incentive to take advantage of unfilled road space. And so it is.
Take, for example, the Ford Excursion, the
biggest sport-utility vehicle ever, over 19 feet long. Ford makes more than C$20,000 pre-tax profit
with each sale, significantly more than the profit on smaller cars. But Ford does not pay a cent to any municipality
to build the additional space its product requires, save for the property tax
on its dealerships. (8) If Ford had
to pay for the marginal cost of the space the Excursion will take up, the
vehicle would cost $60,000 but the marginal cost of the new space could be
$106,000.
It is the local taxpayer who will pay, not the
automobile company - the same local taxpayer who, though willing to spend tens
of thousands of dollars for a new car, would be distressed at the prospect of
paying hundreds of dollars in new taxes for more road space if charged directly
at the time of sale.
So the cars and trucks keep coming, they keep
getting bigger, and the expectation remains that government will build and
maintain the needed road space, and it will get the money largely from local
property taxpayers. And it can't be
done.
From the individual's point of view, driving more
and driving longer continues to make sense.
Why? Because the roadway is seen
to be 'free' - and so, typically, is the next trip. The marginal cost of the car is practically zero, at least when
measured by the amount of money taken out of pocket. Except for the occasional cost of parking (over 90 percent of
parking is free for most people), everything else has been covered - purchase
price, insurance, gas - regardless of how much may be owed. The next trip appears to cost nothing ...
and we tend to use a lot of something that seems to be free.
Because the price of highway space is so low, we
pay by other means. Just as cheap land
leads to sprawl and cheap energy to pollution, cheap road space has led to
congestion. Congestion is the means by
which we price the value of the space.
It works, but we hate it.
Many economists and environmentalists have
suggested 'road pricing' as a more rational way to allocate a scarce
resource. But pricing the road is a
touchy political problem. The road is
our commons. No matter who you are, you
have the same right to the road. Rich
or poor, powerful or weak, you are equal, even if you're caught in the same
congestion. Especially when you're
caught in the same congestion. To price
the road on a per-trip or distance basis would change the status of road
users. People would no longer feel
equal.
Both the rich and poor feel they have a stake in
the free roadway and the cheap car. To
maintain the auto as a low-cost form of transportation means the poor meet the
rich on common ground, while the de-facto subsidy for the rich remains disproportionately
large. The left defends the free road
so the poor can drive farther for cheaper housing and needed work. The right opposes the tax grab that road
pricing would entail. The politician
has little ground on which to stand. (9)
We are confronted with a dilemma of our own
making: limited resources, infinite demand.
The only realistic tool we have - congestion - is seen as the problem,
not as a necessary consequence. Those
who benefit don't proportionately pay, and don't want to. We look for rational solutions for a problem
largely emotional in character. We talk
limits but we avoid action.
So how did we get into this in the first place?
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T. His genius was evident not only in the
development of the assembly line but also in the creation of the mass
market. By paying his workers $5 a day,
they could afford the $850 car.
Personal, affordable transportation for the average man (and freedom
from the transportation monopolies) became a reality.
"I will build a motor car for the great
multitude," said Ford, "so low in price that no man making a good
salary will be unable to own one and enjoy with his family the blessings of
hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces." (10)
Of course, never again would the spaces be quite
so open. The building of roads and the
conquest of a continent were synonymous.
In 1919, an army convoy struggled to cross America. Among the officers was a young lieutenant
named Dwight D. Eisenhower. The army discovered, not surprisingly, that
the trip was almost impossible.
When asked about the lack of good roads, Henry
Ford was said to have replied: If we build the cars, they'll build the
roads.
Road-building soon became the greatest
public-private partnership in history.
For most of this century, our auto-based transportation system has been
built on this understanding: the Private Sector will produce the vehicles
and the Public Sector will build the pathways.
There is no real constraint on the number of vehicles
the private sector can produce.
Government, however, undertakes to build the roads and bridges
necessary. For most of the 20th
century, government has devoted huge resources to constructing road capacity,
to the point where people believe it is an entitlement.
Consider the irony: at the turn of the century,
good roads were first promoted by cyclists.
In the U.S., roads were frequently built to give vehicles access to the
first national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite and Rainier) and to scenic wilderness
(the Columbia Gorge Highway). Consider
the image: roads were wide-open highways to wide-open spaces.
The first problems were elsewhere.
Rather quickly, it became apparent that there
wasn't enough space for everyone downtown.
The streetcar and the motor-vehicle just couldn't get along. The streetcar lost. Throughout the inter-war period, transit
systems lost revenues, capital and the political support needed to grow. "Strangulation" was the word used
to describe traffic conditions in the city.
Consequently, cities were redesigned to serve the
automobile. In Los Angeles, for
instance, the Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924 led to the widening of arterial
roads in a crosstown grid. Little
attention or money was paid to the transit system. Vancouver in 1928 undertook a similar treatment - another
"City Functional" plan authored by Harland Bartholomew (who helped
author the 1924 L.A. plan) that became the basis for street improvements
through to the 1980s.
The success achieved by the expenditure of many
millions on public works was short-lived: increasing the traffic capacity of
major roads eventually made the existing problem worse. Wider streets eased
congestion and encouraged more residents to leave public transportation for
their automobiles, leading to more congestion. By 1930, the Traffic Commission
of Los Angeles once again despaired that "traffic conditions ... are
becoming chaotic."
The congestion in the city made the desire to
escape all the stronger. Among the
first major urban roads in North American cities were parkways. Frederick Law Olmsted designed
1,400-foot-wide swaths of green through Brooklyn in the early 1860s, modelled
after the verdant avenues of Paris.
In 1936, Robert Moses's improvements to Riverside
Park on the west side of Manhattan allowed the creation of a curving parkway
through upper Manhattan. The Henry
Hudson Parkway needed only to be connected to the Bronx River Parkway, the
first grade-separated road in America, to provide a useful commuter route out
of Manhattan.
The consequences on land development were
initially unforeseen. In the late
1920s, the parkways connected the city (still served mainly by mass transit) to
lower densities and to the amenities of the countryside - at least for the
prosperous middle-class. After World
War II, the mass-production of suburban houses pioneered at Levittown on Long
Island and at Lakewood in Los Angeles realized the possibilities of a new way
of life for more and more people - one increasingly dependent on the car.
Automobile
industrialists such as Carl Fisher had been pushing for national routes like
the Packard-sponsored Lincoln Highway since before World War I. The Bureau of Public Roads under 'Chief' Tom
MacDonald assembled the coalition needed to drive a public-roads agenda. Federal-aid highway acts, beginning as early
as 1916, gave the federal government a role in promoting the creation of state
highway departments and in providing matching funding for a coordinated system
of national roads.
The New York Regional Plan of 1929 had proposed a
comprehensive motorway system connecting 22 counties across three states. An auto-centric vision of the future was
unveiled in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, portraying an
urban region of separated uses with unparalleled mobility, made possible by
sweeping, infinite arterials of freely flowing traffic. Frank Lloyd Wright contributed his Utopian
vision in Broadacre City.
With the Depression and War, pressure on road
space eased even as thousands of new miles were constructed. In the 1930s, planning was already underway
for freeways, styled after the German autobahn system and pioneered in
California along the Arroyo Seco, connecting Pasadena and Downtown L.A. But the money needed for such vast visions
was insufficient.
As Allied military leader in World War II, Dwight
Eisenhower had seen the German autobahn network first-hand (contrasting it, no
doubt, with what he seen on his cross-continent expedition of 1919). In 1956, as President, he signed the
Federal-Aid Highway Act, unleashing billions of dollars through the Highway
Trust Fund to build the interstate freeway system: the largest public works
project in human history.
The Interstates are the single biggest
engineering projects of any town or city they go through. They changed the economy and culture of
America. The system - over 40,000 miles
criss-crossing a continent - was largely built out in two decades. Towns and cities hardly knew what hit
them.
Unlike the German autobahn system, the
Interstates go to and through the centres of urban regions, built to the same
standards as those that pass through open country. This required vast amounts of land and the expropriation and
destruction of any pre-existing urban fabric in the way.
Freeways were thrust into downtown cores in an
attempt to give easy access to and from the burgeoning suburbs. In the end, those same central areas were
weakened or destroyed by the roads on which the middle-class fled. Retail services, businesses and jobs
withdrew to the new main streets of suburbia - the belt freeways.
At the time, mostly good things seemed to
happen. Suburbia was the fulfillment of
an American (and Canadian) Dream built on insured mortgages, technically
magnificent infrastructure for water and roads, cheap land and even cheaper
energy. The lifestyle made possible was
broadly shared, optimistic, ebullient.
And Government was now ahead of its obligation to
build sufficient road capacity to meet a rapidly expanding need.
If good roads were good for business, it seemed
reasonable that more roads would mean more prosperity, thereby justifying a
no-charge philosophy for the pathway. (11)
Before the 1950s, bridges and freeways weren’t necessarily free: users paid
tolls. But thanks to an aggressive
lobby by truckers and road builders, Government created a continent-spanning
system of highways that would, with the exception of older roads and bridges in
the east, seem to the casual driver to be unlimited and free.
Just as in the United States, Canadians also
undertook to build massive new and 'free' infrastructure. Indeed, Canada was ahead of the Americans in
authorizing federal funding for the Trans-Canada Highway in 1949.
Vancouver, the country's most modern city, hired
consultants direct from Los Angeles, who like Bartholomew suggested that
Vancouver should build something rather like the Los Angeles system. What they proposed for Vancouver would have
laid concrete on elevated decks, in tunnels and trenches over and through much
of the lands now sprouting residential towers.
In an historic turning point, Vancouver refused
to build any freeways at all. It was
the most important thing that never happened.
The City had broken the agreement: no more roads, no matter how many
more cars.
By the early 1970s, in almost every major city,
citizens and councils rejected freeways that meant the destruction of the
city's fabric. But it was the lack of
sufficient financial resources that effectively ended the freeway era. Instead, vehicle growth would have to be
absorbed on existing streets, the heritage of the street improvements of the
1920s.
However, by not building more road space,
Government was violating an essential condition of the partnership. Since car buyers couldn't individually
purchase the space on which to run the cars they bought, there wouldn't be as
much room for each new car on the road.
Driving conditions would noticeably worsen. So too would the cost of insurance, accidents and the quality of
life. The dream of the car - flowing
freely along beautifully engineered roads - ran into the reality of congestion,
faster even than in the 1920s.
As it turned out, it wouldn't have mattered even
if Vancouver had built the freeways. As
people consumed the road space at ever-faster rates (a consequence of an urban
form dependent on cars and a distribution system dependent on trucks), the
freeways filled up. Cities with good
rapid-transit systems faced road congestion; cities with great freeway networks
faced congestion; cities with neither faced congestion.
Congestion, it turns out, is an inevitable
consequence when the private sector produces an unlimited number of vehicles
and expects the public sector to spend limited resources to build an unlimited
amount of space for them to run on.
Alternative transportation options may help accommodate growth beyond
congestion, but they cannot prevent congestion.
So what, then, do we do?
This is tough to say. There's little gain in spending money just to solve congestion problems
by building more road space. Going into
debt and raising taxes won't help much in the long run.
Building more roads has had virtually no impact
on the growth of traffic congestion in major urban areas in the U.S. in the
last 15 years. Data from the Texas
Transportation Institute revealed that urban areas which added more lanes spent
roughly $30.8 billion more than those that didn't. Yet the average of TTI’s Roadway Congestion Index for the two
groups is almost identical, at .93 and .92.
As the saying goes, widening roads to ease traffic congestion is like
trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.
For thirty years now the City of Vancouver has
built little new capacity for the car.
Yet the result of limited capacity and expensive
parking has been by general agreement one of the most livable cities on the
continent. This is not a coincidence.
Since congestion is inevitable, given the current
circumstances, we might as well figure out how it can help us.
If the car and truck are to move freely on a road
system with limited capacity, somewhere there has to be a constraint on the
number of vehicles that can be accommodated.
It makes more sense to decide where congestion is best located, rather
than allowing unlimited demand to erode the integrity of the entire network.
Example: Lions Gate Bridge. The bridge reached its design capacity
sometime in the late 1950s, and the cars have been backing up ever since. This
grand-daddy of all choke points in the Lower Mainland is now a North Shore
tradition. (The politeness of the
zipper, where several lanes of cars merge together, is actually a source of
community pride.)
The bridge and causeway through Stanley Park have
provided excellent storage, allowing vehicles to be filtered onto the downtown
peninsula in manageable quantities by the signal system. Otherwise, cars would congest where the
damage would be maximized - on the complex grid of downtown streets. The decision to maintain the bridge to its
existing three-lane capacity was a key transportation decision in the
1990s. In return, the experience for
the driver has been improved with the widening of the lanes.
Some would give no ground to the car; others
would take no ground away. The
challenge is to find a limit on capacity that ultimately benefits the users of
the transportation system and the communities affected, without gratuitously
punishing those who accept the limits.
[And what about the argument that free-flowing
traffic is better because it reduces pollution; hence widening roads to reduce
congestion is justified because it's good for the environment? Simply put, it isn't true. In fact, the higher speeds that vehicles
drive at on freeways is generating pollution at higher rates than previously
assumed, and traffic calming results in lower emissions that conventional wisdom
has assumed. (12)]
Once it's accepted that capacity will be limited,
the question immediately arises: how much is enough? What level of traffic do we want to achieve?
Engineers can determine the level of service for
any particular road: Level of service 'A', for example, is where the volume of
traffic is so low that the design of the highway actually dictates the maximum
safe speed for the vehicles. Level of
service 'F' is capacity failure: a very long parking lot with only occasional
movement. The assumption, of course, is
that in an ideal world the 'F's should be 'A's, even if in reality things are
heading the other way.
It would be more helpful to know what the
'desirable' capacity should be, given the need for freely moving traffic with
the least negative effects, controlled by 'metering' points that allow the rest
of the system to function. Metering is
already used at many freeway on-ramps to prevent saturation of the roadway. Bridges, likewise, provide points where
flows can be regulated. Traffic should
be stopped or slowed at certain places so the system as a whole can function,
with feedback mechanisms that both explain and reassure the driver that
short-term delay will provide eventual benefit.
Once we decide what we want and why we want it
(which is a political decision, not a technical one), we can then ask engineers
and planners, in co-operation with the communities affected, to design a system
which has a reasonable chance of providing it.
We have to accept that this is a subjective process, art as much as
science. These are issues of quality,
not quantity. We may wish, in some
instances, slower moving traffic because it's quieter and safer. Hence the "desirable" in MDC.
We also need to know what the most desirable
combination of vehicles is: how many buses, trucks, cars and bikes generate the
best results, given the stated desires of the community. Those will vary, of course, and so should
the nature of the traffic.
Even if MDC can be agreed on, can it be
achieved? Perhaps not - but at least we
should know when we've passed it.
Tomorrow, perhaps, the goal can be met, given the new tools that
technology will provide us. Intelligent
Transportation Systems can be used to manage the system within the limits we've
agreed to, and to provide better information on the alternatives.
Intelligent Transportation Systems take the
latest communications technologies and apply them to the transportation network
(highways, bridges, transit systems and intermodal points), including the cars,
buses, trucks and trains on them, to achieve better management through
integration and information.
Examples: traffic-signal synchronization,
real-time transit scheduling, electronic toll collection and fare payment,
faster emergency responses, and extensive traveler information delivery. Freeway management systems, primarily
through ramp metering, have reduced crashes by a quarter to a half. Electronic fare payment for transit systems
have resulted in increased revenues up to a third. ITS has huge implications for commercial vehicles, providing
opportunities for electronic clearance at borders and ports, as well as
automated roadside safety inspections.
Too often, unfortunately, ITS is sold as a way to
raise capacities, shoving more vehicles more efficiently onto the road. It's the same old illusion. (13)
Truckers can measure the cost of congestion quite
specifically, and they aggressively lobby for more road space to reduce
congestion. But they don't want to pay
directly for the additional benefit.
Historically, they've been the strongest advocates for the free road. Car drivers have gone along, even though
they've disproportionately paid, because they get the free road too - leading
to the congestion that frustrates the trucker.
The more difficult but more effective solution is
to charge appropriately for special-purpose facilities where justified - say,
to port facilities and intermodal exchanges.
The price of the road space could (and in fact should) be appropriately
included in the cost of the goods delivered.
Since we pay one way or the other, the fairer way is user pay.
Here's one recipe: Free up existing space by charging for priority use. If trucks and car pools are caught in
congestion, allocate a HOT lane - a High Occupancy Toll lane - for their
use. Then use the money for alternatives,
such as transit.
Again, technology will help. Intelligent Transportation Systems provide
us with the opportunity to both increase the utility of the road and to charge
for the value received without having to stop traffic or impose highly visible
and resented tolls. (14)
Environmental concerns, particularly climate
change, will help justify action. When
the majority of greenhouse gases come out of the tailpipe, and every push of
the accelerator may be moving us more quickly towards the vagaries of climate
change and the disruption of our environment, is not some individual sacrifice
worth the price?
And shouldn't vehicle users be paying directly
for the pollution they generate?
Industry does. Why not cars?
Pricing the road and freeing up existing space
for those who really need the room is a far better way to grow for everyone. It has a better chance of succeeding than
the pretense that we will build our way out of congestion without having to pay
for it or trying to apply general-purposes taxes. (15)
But, remember, public opinion may well be hostile
because the price is very visible and the 'commons' is less equitably
shared. There must be a demonstrable
benefit for those who are charged, and it must be visible.
In the Central Area of Vancouver, we have
traffic-calmed neighbourhoods and eliminated vast amounts of free parking. (In the West End, 85 percent of street and
lane parking is assigned to residents, for which they pay a yearly fee.) Meter parking runs to 8 pm, even on Sundays.
Parking must be paid for in parks.
Charging for parking is perhaps the only 'TDM'
(Transportation Demand Management) measure that has really worked. (16) One result: the number of vehicles
flowing in and out of the core has levelled off and is actually beginning to
drop, even as the residential population doubles and tourism significantly
increases.
People have a huge incentive to stay in cars when
they get free parking. But to get the
benefit of "free parking" they have to spend over $7,000 a year on
paying for and operating their vehicles (according to the Canadian Automobile
Association). (17) By getting that
parking benefit as cash on their paycheque, they'd be free to choose other
means, potentially saving $7,000 and still collecting the $150 per month for
transportation costs that 'free' parking actually costs.
The challenge is to market that concept to
employers who need to see the savings on their bottom line. Since a single space of structured parking
can easily cost $15,000, a reduction in need has enormous impacts on the cost
of building and subsequent lease rates.
However, unless parking is universally costed,
those who offer it for 'free' have a competitive advantage over those who
charge. They also escape, so far, the
scrutiny of Revenue Canada. Though a
transit pass provided by an employer is considered a taxable benefit, free
parking is not, so long as it unassigned.
In order to avoid the difficult choices,
community leaders and politicians champion increased public transit. And since such systems are massively
expensive, they are sold with the promise that they will reduce congestion on
the roadways.
Such promises load transit with unrealistic
expectations. There are few cities in
the world with excellent mass transit systems that don't also have traffic
congestion. The presence of the former
does not guarantee the absence of the latter, so long as more vehicles continue
to be sold than for road space available.
Transit may help handle additional growth when road capacity is limited,
but given 'free' use of the roadway drivers won't likely see any fewer cars in
front of them.
Transit investments are still justified,
particularly to handle transportation demand in a more efficient and
environmentally benign way - but, to repeat, it won't solve the congestion
problem if growth in vehicles saturates the capacity available. Transit is best at helping to shape the
city, directing growth to places that can be designed to be less car dependent,
and to accommodate growth in transportation demand once congestion has limited
the road space.
Most people, in truth, have wanted the kind of
city best served by car: low-density, single-family, single-use. Ironically, in order for that city to
function without debilitating congestion, it needs a good transit system, one
appropriately scaled to the kind of city where the automobile retains a
significant role. The car cannot
function efficiently without transportation alternatives, and transit must be
integrated into a transportation system where the car is still considered
essential. (18)
The good news: there is a huge latent
supply. There are a lot of unneeded
trips in cars. If we get even some of
those trips off the road, we will have solved a good portion (not all) of the
problem - at a very low price.
People have considerable discretion - more than
they believe. For people to give up the
occasional car trip and find a substitute can be surprisingly easy to do when
people so desire, and the pay-off is big.
Often the impediment to using other options is
that people no longer are conversant or comfortable with them. They don't know how to use a bus - what
it costs, how to transfer, what time to allocate - and they are not comfortable
with the social implications.
Increasingly, they have never had a 'learning' experience.
The most significant rite of passage in a young
person's life is the day they get a driver's licence. By the time they've reached 16, they must already be familiar and
comfortable with a broad range of transportation choices so that automobile is
not seen as the only option for every trip.
Such programs as 'Way To Go,' which encourages children to walk and
cycle to school, are critical to future success. (19)
It has taken almost a century of building for the
car to get us to our current dilemma.
It will take some considerable time to achieve long-term solutions. Ultimately, they can only be found in the
way we build our cities. We will have
to establish virtuous cycles to offset the vicious ones, where success leads to
more success. Fortunately, we can see
places where it's beginning to happen.
Take, for instance, Vancouver - or at least its
Central Area, where growth is concentrated. The megaprojects that now dominate
the skyline occupy those lands once slated for freeways. Instead of paying for the capital costs of a
freeway system, on which we would now be spending millions to maintain,
Vancouver is using its capital dollars to build alternative ways of moving
about the city - on transit, bike and foot.
As these alternatives are developed, we are noticing a stabilization of
vehicles coming in and out of the core.
In fact, throughout the City of Vancouver people
are creating new mental maps. The bikeway and greenway system - our legacy to
future generations - is a hub-and-spoke system, too, only it gives people who
have only perceived urban space through their windshields, timed out in
kilometres per hour, a whole new experience.
As they navigate the bikeway and greenway system, they learn anew how
their neighbourhoods feel and how they in turn connect with other communities
in new and pleasurable ways. And the
system itself is cost-effective, mixed in use, flexible, beautiful and safe.
Given enough choice, people adapt and the city
reflects the changes. Here's a small
but indicative one. At Sunset Beach at
the entrance to False Creek, parking is no longer free. Since the number of stalls needed is less,
the freed-up space was barricaded off for roller hockey and blade
training. It's a win-win-win: Parks Board
gets revenues, skaters get play space, drivers get sufficient parking.
There is no single solution. Top-down planning can never be comprehensive
enough or flexible enough. Give people
enough transportation options and they can by and large work out their own
solutions. That in turn is dependent on
the design and integration of land-use and transportation choices.
Ideally, people should have at least five choices
- feet, bike, transit, taxi and vehicle - and the ability to mix and match them
appropriate to the kind of trip and the circumstances faced. The combinations and the mix make it all
work.
The trip is only a few blocks? Walking is best. It's raining? Grab a
taxi. The trip is around five
kilometres? Cycling may be the faster
alternative. Going to a town centre in
the suburbs? Try transit. Heading to Whistler? Train, perhaps - or car. Yes, the car is perfectly appropriate for
many trips, but not all. Once the car
is used less frequently, needs may be met more affordably by a car co-op or the
occasional rental, with considerable savings.
Of course, the provision of alternatives assumes
a city designed around more than the car - and a citizenry comfortable with the
choices. In the end, the answers are
found in the plans we have to implement.
Concentrate growth. Build
complete communities. Provide
transportation choice.
But to do so, we will first have to be aware of
the impediments to success, rooted in the unrealistic beliefs and assumptions
we have associated with the success of the car. (20)
_________________________________________________
When it comes to the car, always remember that
much of the media make substantial revenues from automobile advertising.
Unapologetic promotion is most apparent in the
auto sections of newspapers, but assumptions of the auto-centric society can be
found in the editorial content as well.
Often, it is a case of what is not discussed as what is. [For instance, when AirCare charges were
recently raised (the fee required to cover the costs of emissions testing), the
media generally positioned the story as another tax grab by government. Air quality in some reports was never even
mentioned.]
In the case of opinion shapers, particularly AM
radio open-line shows, remember that much of their audience is in
cars, and that talk radio's economic viability and influence would be in
serious doubt without this market. Any
suggestion of tolls or road pricing - indeed, any marginal cost applied to that
which is currently seen to be free - will be met with hostility. There will not necessarily be a nuanced
discussions of options or alternatives.
The greatest danger, when a story is initially
covered, is if the car-driving public perceives that someone is trying to take
their cars away. Or trying to make them
feel guilty for doing something for which there is little or no choice. Or punishing them unfairly when others are
not paying their way. Any dialogue will
end quickly if it starts with these assumptions.
Pete McMartin
On Tuesday, I wrote a
column complaining about TransLink's plan to have every car owner pay, on
average, $75 a year for transit improvements.
Today, my suggestions
to TransLink's politicians and planners in lieu of implementing the transit
levy:
1. Do nothing.
Spend no more money.
Extract no more tax dollars from voters.
Give taxpayers some
wriggle room.
Taxed to the limit,
they have no more money for savings, retirement, their vacations and, least of
all, your vision of the future.
Maybe you don't
believe this. Maybe you'd like to look at my line of credit.
2. Live with the
traffic jams -- minor by major urban North American standards, anyway -- and
come to grips with the reality that we live in an imperfect world that cannot
be massaged into a Utopia immediately, or over a five-year period, no matter
how much money you apply.
Take griping about
traffic for what it is: the mutterings of an aggrieved, overworked citizenry
distracted by the pace of modern life.
3. Pay less heed, for
a change, to the preachings of well-intentioned, but ultimately privileged and
out-of-touch ideologues who espouse the joys of bicycling to work and the
health dangers of car exhaust (with which no sane person would argue), and come
and live for a while with people who drive minivans -- people who drive
minivans not because they want to, or enjoy doing so, but because both parents
work to pay for an obscenely large mortgage and their kids' education, and they
must leave home at 8 a.m. and don't get home until 6 p.m. (if they are lucky).
And they have to get home as quickly as possible because dinner has to be made
and their kids have come home to an empty house.
Maybe things
shouldn't be that way, but they are.
So they drive because
a car shaves minutes off their fully booked days, and every minute they can
spend with their kids or working in their gardens or sitting in front of the
tube with a glass of wine is precious to them.
They drive because
they are driven by lives that are too hectic, too burdened with debt, too
jammed with obligations that require they be in three places at once, and two
of those three places aren't serviced by bus routes.
4. Give your constituents
more credit. Do not talk down to them.
Do not tell
suburbanites they have "chosen" to live in the suburbs (thus
characterizing them as a secondary species who must pay for their mistake) when
they would gladly live closer to the city centre if only they had the means to
do so.
Do not lecture them
on the evils of the internal combustion engine, of which they are well aware,
and do not brand car commuters (who make up 90 per cent of commuting traffic,
and a big whack of the electorate) as the agents of a hydra-headed monster
whose heads must be lopped off for the good of mankind.
Do not ask them to
cut their own throats.
Recognize, for once,
that the automobile is integral -- nay, central -- to modern society. Nothing
will change this, and besides, the usual cant about its evils is just so
tiresome.
Also this: For those
politicians and urban engineers who publicly espouse increased taxes for
improvements in public transit, make the use of public transit compulsory for
them.
If they complain that
their busy schedules make the use of public transit impossible, well, duh!
5. Do not brand car
commuters as freeloaders on your roads.
They were always
under the impression that they were driving on their roads.
Why else were they
paying exorbitant federal and provincial taxes on gas, tires, batteries,
AirCare inspections? Where has that money been going, or not going?
6. Stop the new
SkyTrain expansion now. We cannot afford it.
Wait until we can. No
more shiny baubles.
7. Lobby the federal
government -- the real culprit in this -- for a greater return of our gas- and
auto-related tax dollars on transit improvement.
8. Take on, tame, or
discipline the transit union, which too often acts as if it
were running transit.
9. Give us a
government we can elect.
10. Give us a
government which -- intent on railroading us -- we can drive -- pun intended --
out of office.
Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute publishes its traffic-congestion index. Every year, the report is bleak: "Ten year study shows most cities losing the battle with gridlock" – http://tti.tamu.edu/researcher/v34n1/congestion.stm
Here is an analysis from Policy.com – http://policy.com/news/dbrief/dbriefarc404.asp
by April Pedersen
Nov.
17, 1999 -- Los Angeles drivers spend the most time on the road, totaling about
82 hours a year -- two full weeks of work -- the Texas Transportation Institute
says in its annual report on traffic congestion around the country. In some
areas, traffic congestion has become a daily topic as officials and citizens
seek ways out of the jams.