Peter Newman Presentation at Houston Tomorrow
I attended Peter Newman’s presentation at Houston Tomorrow last night. It was an interesting talk; I didn’t find any of it to be shockingly original information, but it was a great overview of the situation we’re in right now and how the city can be made better.
There are two critical points Newman illustrated. These are things that I’ve discussed before, and will discuss many more times, and that I believe everyone in the US needs to know and understand:
1. Traffic Engineers think of traffic as equivalent to water.
This seems inconspicuous at first, but it’s quite sinister in reality. To a civil engineer the flow of traffic on a freeway is like the flow of water in a pipe, if you increase the volume of the pipe the capacity will increase proportionately. This doesn’t happen. They believe that if a road goes away that the traffic will flood the surrounding area like water would if a river was blocked. This doesn’t happen.
The original engineering teams that came up with the specs for the modern freeway system believed in this completely. They believed that every driver would drive carefully and responsibly, that people would obey the posted speed limit, that they would yield, that merging would be smooth and painless. They didn’t take HUMANS into consideration. This is the folley of the entire modern movement, it completely misunderstands (and mostly ignores) the nature of PEOPLE.
People don’t obey the rules, people cheat, people swerve and speed, people don’t yield, and most of all, people drive dangerously. Roads never reach their ‘theoretical’ carrying capacity for that reason. People make bad driving decisions all the time.
People also make good travel decisions. They go places that are the easiest to get to. When congestion occurs people avoid it, they go someplace else or don’t go at all. The people who put up with congestion are usually people who got ‘stuck’ in it, or occasionally are people who don’t care. There are a lot of people who moved someplace when traffic wasn’t a problem, and now are heavily invested in where they live, but traffic has become a problem. Some people move, some people deal with it. Some people are used to congestion, don’t mind sitting in traffic, and just deal.
The point is, traffic engineers are wrong about as often as the weatherman. They’re trying to predict human behavior, but their models aren’t based on human psychology, they’re based on physics. We’ll come to this idea over and over again, and it’s continually a problem.
2. Americans are pissing their money away on transportation.
The average American household spends more than 20% of its total wealth on automobiles. More than 20%! In places like Houston and Atlanta the numbers are much higher. Why do we do this? In large part because we have no choice.
Statistics overwhelmingly show that in places where more transit options are available a large percentage of households use them and significantly reduce their transport costs.
Compare the pictures below (from the Center for Neighborhood Technology), Houston and Washington DC. The areas in dark red are areas more than 28% of monthly household income is spent on transportation, the lighter shades show less monthly transport spending.
Which is the path to economic health and wealth creation: burning your money on transportation, or having more money to invest in real property that gains value?
So, in summary, a worthwhile presentation, even if it wasn’t a shocker. This is the second Houston Tomorrow “Distinguished Speaker Series” that I’ve been to. They’re worth the food for thought, and entertaining to boot. If you haven’t made it to one yet, I’d recommend it.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: affordability, Australia, autmobiles, housing, Houston, Houston Tomorrow, oil, Peter Newman, traffic, Urbanism
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So do these traffic engineers know their methedology is flawed, or someone from the outside who is not one saying this?
If they know themselves it’s flawed, are they trying to change their thinking. If so, what?
Also, I don’t think we need to make “a” pipe bigger. We need more mediium sized pipes.
Just look at a google map of Houston. Many streets inside the loop. The further from downtown you get, the less major thoroughfares, or road options.
Out in the Spring area, I can take 45, hardy, beltway, 2920 etc. Look at my options. There are a few more, but not much. The Grand Parkway would really help though.
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I think some of the engineers get this. I talked to some traffic guys from Glatting Jackson in Florida, they are big believers in the Institute for Transportation Engineers context-sensitive approach instead of the more conventional AASHTO green book. They would tell you that the stuff they learned in engineering college didn’t prove accurate in real life.
You’re EXACTLY right about needing more ‘medium’ pipes. That’s street network connectivity, and it’s the absolute, undeniable, single most important element in an efficient transportation system.
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Jessie M said “Just look at a google map of Houston. Many streets inside the loop. The further from downtown you get, the less major thoroughfares, or road options.Out in the Spring area, I can take 45, hardy, beltway, 2920 etc. Look at my options. There are a few more, but not much. The Grand Parkway would really help though.”
Your observation is correct, but the solution (Grand Parkway) would only add to the problem. First, you have to understand that the majority of traffic on a freeway at rush hour is not people commuting; it’s people basically running errands. They do this on the freeway because they have no other choice.
It’s the lack of smaller streets, the degree of connectivity, the causes this. This comes from a process in which the state pays for highways and local communities have to pay for their own roads. Ergo, not many roads post World War II. The highly connected old streetcar communities in the core don’t have this problem.
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s Sustainable Networks project has identified the lack of density in the street network as the biggest problem we face in terms of congestion, energy waste, and expense for fire departments and all the others.
The Grand Parkway, at least in the next segments E and C, essentially would have no customers because no one lives along them. But if we build them, the land will suddenly be covered with – highly disconnected cul de sac streets. Voila, more congestion, more people using freeways to go to the store.
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