Traffic.
After receding for years during the global
pandemic, it is returning to cities small and large
around the United States.
Debates over what to do about it never ended.
The average American driver lost 51 hours and
$869 in valued time by sitting in traffic in
2022. In 2019, before the pandemic, it cost the
average American nearly 100 hours and nearly
$1,400. Proposed solutions often include
widening roads, adding public transit, building
denser cities and charging people to drive
at certain times.
That last is currently on the table in places such
as New York, and it has met with fierce opposition
from both sides of the political spectrum.
Despite this, some say congestion pricing is the
only way to directly reduce traffic in the long
run in crowded, expensive cities like New York,
where building just a mile of road or subway
track can easily cost billions of dollars.
In the long run, widening roads doesn't work.
At some point, it will become expensive enough to
pursue these strategies of adding capacity that
don't actually address the problem that I think
people will be forced to consider congestion
pricing. And in fact, that's what's happening.
In 2011, two economists published this paper
basically providing evidence of something
called the Fundamental Law of Highway Congestion,
a term that was first proposed by economist
Anthony Downs in 1962.
That law basically says if you build it, they will
come. The Sepulveda Pass stretch of Interstate 405
in Los Angeles is one example.
After a $1 billion widening project, a USC
affiliated news group found traffic actually
worsened.
If you think about the history of Los Angeles
will be obvious, which is Los Angeles has been
adding roads in an effort to combat traffic
congestion for generations without much
success. It turns out that that pattern is not a
peculiar one.
Turner and Duranton found that when cities add 1% of
lane miles to major roads or highways, they soon see
a 1% increase in the total miles driven in the
city. They saw that when they looked at road
capacity and traffic data in a single city over time
and when they compared cities to each other.
They also simulated a randomized controlled
trial too impractical to run in real life.
Using what Turner calls statistical tricks.
The team added a 1% increase in lane miles to
a model of half of the cities and metropolitan
areas in the US and not the other.
They saw the same 1% vehicle miles traveled
increase they found elsewhere.
That suggested expanding roads caused people to
drive more.
The reason the paper was influential was because
it's hard to do and we were pretty successful at
it.
This phenomenon is sometimes called induced
demand, and today few dispute it exists.
This fundamental law holds that building more
transit, building denser, more walkable cities or
adding bike lanes doesn't really solve the problem
either, since those things are also subject to
induced demand.
The solution is simple: use pricing to divert
drivers away from using roads at times when they
are busiest and toward times when demand is
lower.
This is something that has been done many times in
many places in the world - Singapore, for example.
It is fantastically effective, that in
response to, if it costs a marginal $2 to do your
commute at 7:30 instead of 7:15, there are many
people who are willing to shift their commute by 15
minutes, by 30 minutes in order to avoid these sorts
of small tolls.
New York's plan to price congestion is a cordon
plan, meaning there is a line or cordon that runs
from the bottom of Manhattan to 60th Street.
Any car entering this zone on the island would
have to pay a toll.
For cars entering the district during peak
hours, the fees could range from $9 to $23,
depending on which plan under consideration the
city chooses to adopt.
Prices would be lower during off peak hours and
overnight. There also would be a 100% tax credit
for people who live in Manhattan and who make
less than $60,000 per year.
I think New York can get this done and there'll be
a lot of lessons that come out of that that will
apply to other places.
But pricing the system to make sure that people are
actually paying for the system that they're using
and then using those funds that goes back into
the transportation system that either addresses the
challenges for low income drivers or expands the
transit system and then providing other modes for
people to get around.
Over time, added lanes may once again fill up with
traffic. But the picture is nuanced.
Just like congestion doesn't have a single
cause, there isn't a single solution.
And for the most part, we recommend more of
everything in growing regions, especially where
there's high population growth and high job
growth, we almost have to look at capacity
improvements.
Bill Eisele works at the Texas Transportation
Institute at Texas A&M University.
The institute puts out a widely cited annual urban
mobility report.
Capacity improvements really do help.
Adding lanes sometimes gets a bad rap because
people will look out there and they say, Well,
that road is filled up again.
Perhaps you've wasted our money on this.
But as we look at that a little bit closer, that
traffic that's been generated by the road or
that suddenly appears to be created was actually on
the transportation system already.
They could have been travelers that were on a
different route, taking a different mode or perhaps
traveling at a different time of the day.
Traffic can be caused by several factors.
It can be temporary or occasional, like when it
is caused by a vehicle accident, road
construction or bad weather. Recurring
congestion is the congestion drivers
encounter during rush hour or on roads that
always seem clogged, like this one in Los Angeles or
this one in Atlanta.
It's a supply demand imbalance.
The demand for road travel exceeds the supply
of roads, essentially.
But accidents, road construction bottlenecks
and traffic signals can also worsen that recurring
congestion. Addressing those factors can make a
difference, at least in the short term.
The debate is does adding a lane to a freeway work?
Well, it depends on what you mean by work.
Does it reduce congestion? Pretty much.
There's agreement that yes, in the short term at
least. Where it differs though, is in the long
term, and that is where things like induced demand
come in.
And though public transit, bike lanes and sidewalks
are also subject to induced demand, they still
make a difference in the kinds of challenges a city
faces.
You could put 500 people into a subway car.
Right. Versus 500 people driving here on K Street.
And the magnitude of the impact is completely
different. You say the same thing for a bike
lane, for example. Build a bike lane out here, you
have a lot of people using it because there's a
lot of demand for that. But the impact of that is
not going to be anything that's going to be a major
public policy concern like it's going to be when
we think about single occupant vehicles or a
bunch of trucks that are clogging up the roadways.
One issue all these solutions do have in
common, they cost money, all of them.
You know, in New York, How much is building an
additional rail line?
Billions. How much is building an additional
freeway? Billions.
Building an interstate bridge.
That's one of the things in Washington state that
connects Portland, Oregon, to Washington
state. I mean, that's like $4.5 billion.
I mean, that's not cheap.
The COVID 19 pandemic kind of messed up everything.
Before 2020, the conversation around
traffic was mostly dominated by the topic of
congestion. When the pandemic hit, the roads
cleared. Safety took the place of congestion as
cars sped down empty roads and freeways.
Now traffic is back.
Inrix provides transportation data to a
broad range of clients.
It publishes the widely known Traffic Scorecard,
ranking cities around the world.
Of American cities, Chicago, Illinois had the
worst traffic delays in 2022.
The average driver spent 155 hours in traffic.
It's the second worst record in the world.
Just one hour less than London's.
US cities saw the return of the morning commute in
2022. But some features are totally new.
The trick now is people are leaving perhaps later
in the day. We're seeing that there's traffic sort
of all day now.
There are the peaks, but it's not necessarily
always quite as peaky, if you will.
In general, it's certainly changed our
travel behavior.
Trips to downtown areas increased in 2021, still
below 2019 levels.
At least some of New York's key real estate
sectors continue to underperform relative to
pre-pandemic levels.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, Manhattan office
leases fell 8% from the third quarter and were 25%
lower than the five-year average.
Across the US, telecommuting has now
become the second most common form of commuting
after driving a car.
This presents a whole new set of traffic problems.
For example, some data show that when people work
from home, particularly for longer stretches, they
generate more trips than they would if they were
making a traditional commute.
Even though you may intuitively think, well,
if you're working from home, you're not
commuting, therefore it's better.
But it actually is more trips, more frequent,
maybe shorter trips, maybe in suburban areas.
So how does that all play?
I don't think we have a good handle on that yet.