[sustran] Re: a very short list of very bad practices

[Todd Edelman]

Carmageddon: LA's Billion-Dollar Car-Pool Lane

[Note: "HOV lanes" in Los Angeles require only two people per vehicle - 
http://www.metro.net/projects/hov/hov_faq/ . Also, most electric and 
hybrid cars are exempt from the two-person rule! - 
http://www.ehow.com/list_6943042_rules-carpool-lanes-california.html ]

Midnight tonight [15 July] marks the beginning of Carmageddon in Los 
Angeles: For two days and five hours, Interstate 405 between I-10 and US 
101 will be completely shut down. Since the 405—and yes, we always use 
"the" in front of our freeway numbers in Southern California—is the main 
artery between Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, everyone expects 
total chaos as drivers jam up every available alternate route into the 
city (and into LAX, which is, inconveniently, located right on the 405). 
City and transit officials are treating this about the same way they'd 
treat a tsunami warning, telling residents in increasingly apocalyptic 
tones to either leave town or else just stay inside for the duration. 
Their message, broadcast across every medium known to science for the 
past two months, is pretty simple: Don't even think about taking your 
car anywhere if you live within a 30-mile radius of the construction.

So what's the reason for this mind-boggling closure? Answer: Caltrans is 
adding a 10-mile northbound car-pool lane to the freeway. The Los 
Angeles Times' architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, has some 
questions about this:

To begin with: Is widening the 405 (to add one solitary carpool lane on 
the freeway's northbound side) really something that we should be 
spending $1 billion on? Will it actually make traffic through the pass 
better? And if so, for how long?

After all, study after study has shown the ineffectiveness of this 
approach. As soon as you open up new lanes, drivers adjust: A few more 
decide to take the newly widened route each day, and before long the 
congestion is just as bad as before.

In this case, because an HOV lane is being added, some of the change in 
behavior will be virtuous, turning drivers into passengers. It's still 
tough to think of a less cost-efficient way to spend a billion dollars 
of public money.

Actually, it might be even worse than Hawthorne thinks. For the past two 
decades Los Angeles has gone on a binge of increasingly expensive 
car-pool construction, but the benefits of these new lanes are 
surprisingly equivocal. The lanes are always additions to freeways (no 
previously existing lane has been converted for car-pool use since the 
Santa Monica diamond lane debacle of 1976, which set back car-pool lanes 
by a decade), so they always ease traffic for a while. But as Hawthorne 
points out, the phenomenon of "traffic generation" has been known for 
decades. More lanes just attract more drivers and more congestion.

What's more, although it's true that car-pool lanes carry more 
passengers than general purpose lanes, this is a meaningless statistic. 
If all of a freeway's existing car-pools move into a newly constructed 
HOV lane, all you've done is juggle the traffic around. In fact, since 
HOV lanes generally have lower capacities than multiuse lanes (thanks to 
the "snail" effect, which is exactly what it sounds like), you actually 
lose some overall traffic capacity.

But here's the worst news. What we really want to know is how many 
drivers are motivated by HOV lanes to form new car pools. Surprisingly, 
though, considering the thousands of miles of HOV lanes constructed in 
the United States over the past two decades, this is a hard number to 
get a handle on. There have been a few studies of new car-pool 
formation, however, and here's one of them from Caltrans showing the 
number of car pools on LA freeways over the past 20 years:

The good news is that HOV lane construction during the '90s appears to 
have genuinely spurred more carpooling. True, adding 25,000 new car 
pools doesn't seem like much for a region the size of the LA basin with 
hundreds of miles of freeways, but at least it's measurable progress. 
The bad news is that despite the billions of dollars spent since then, 
new car-pool formation during the past decade has been...zero. All that 
money seems to have had no effect on car-pool behavior at all. Nor is 
this limited just to Los Angeles. Pravin Varaiya of the University of 
California's PATH program came to the same conclusion for the Bay Area's 
HOV lanes in a 2007 study. Over both the near and long term, the shorter 
commute times of HOV lanes apparently has almost no effect on the 
willingness of drivers to form car pools. What's more, census data 
suggests this is a nationwide phenomenon. "Over time the attraction of 
HOV travel appears to be weakening," Varaiya concludes.

None of this should be taken as a definitive takedown of car-pool lanes. 
The data on their effectiveness is murky, to say the least, and a lot 
depends on where the lanes are built and how well they support bus 
traffic. But that murkiness is surprising all by itself considering the 
HOV spree the country has been on over the past two decades. Even after 
20 years of nonstop construction, we still don't really know how 
effective HOV lanes are at promoting car pools.

For Angelenos, however, the news is almost certainly bad. For starters, 
the I-405 shutdown is going to produce two rounds of chaos (the second 
one coming at the end of the project). And the project is sucking up a 
billion dollars that could almost certainly be used more efficiently on 
other transit projects. But that's the least of it. If Caltrans' own 
chart is to be believed, LA's willingness to carpool was saturated over 
a decade ago. Adding another billion dollars in new HOV lanes won't 
produce even a single new car pool. Now that's Carmageddon.

Plus even Hitler [in "Downfall" movie parody] doesn't like it. And he's 
the guy who built the autobahns.

(To see chart about HOV use and parody of "Carmageddon" based on the 
movie "Downfall", see 
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/07/billion-dollar-carpool-lane. I 
also blogged about this last week: See 
http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/2011/07/carmageddon.html ]

On 07/18/2011 06:55 AM, Pradip Raj Pant wrote:
> Hi All
>
> "Carmageddon" apparently is for adding extra lane; but the $1 Billion may not be totally wasted since news coverage report that the added lane is exclusively for HOV. I believe investing in infrastructure for supporting transportation other than POV shouldn't be petrifying. Somebody with more knowledge about the project should chime in.
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Pradip Raj Pant
> email: pantpr at yahoo.com
>
>
> From: eric britton<eric.britton at ecoplan.org>
> To: sustran-discuss at list.jca.apc.org; NewMobilityCafe at yahoogroups.com; WorldTransport at yahoogroups.com; Cities-for-Mobility at yahoogroups.com; UTSG at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2011 6:43 AM
> Subject: [sustran] a very short list of very bad practices
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
>
>
> For a new book just getting underway here, and which is attempting to make a
> significant contribution as a useful guide for better informed policy and
> investment in the field of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and
> sustainable lives, I am attempting to develop by way of introduction a small
> page showing some of the more typical examples of egregious thoughtlessness
> in our sector by way of setting the stage for better alternative approaches.
>
>
>
> I think it would be effective to have a selection of examples from different
> parts of the world, all of them short and to the point, and all of them
> firmly reality-based.  It would be great if you could offer a few howlingly
> good examples from your own experience for our readers.
>
>
>
> Here the first handful that come to mind from here, which may or may not
> make the final cut:
>
>
>
> .        Mexico: The decision, come hell or high water, of the mayor of
> Mexico City to create a public bicycle system for his city, or rather to
> impose a public bicycle system on his city, ready or not.
>
>
>
> .        France: The decades-long practice of closing of local train
> stations in many smaller communities across France, (a practice of course in
> many other parts of the world as well), with all of the social, economic,
> and mobility implications that somehow never  entered into the calculus of
> the decision-makers.
>
>
>
> .        Bangladesh The decision of the authorities in Dhaka, in cahoots
> with the Council of international consultants, to progressively extend a ban
> on the use of rickshaws, despite the fact that these wheeled vehicles are
> offering every day and at low cost massively important mobility services to
> people who need another willing to pay for them.  And further that the
> rickshaws offer a large number of economically and socially useful jobs many
> of which would disappear if they were replaced by more institutionalized
> forms of public transport.
>
>
>
> .        United States: And finally to cap it all with something of all too
> horrible familiarity, the latest "Carmageddon" episode in Los Angeles as a
> result of the decision of the authorities there to spend an additional $1
> billion to increase the capacity of an already huge urban highway network,
> further locking in the car and making alternative solutions all the less
> possible.  (Proving once again that forecast and build transportation
> planning is not dead, despite all of the abundant proofs to the contrary.)
>
>
>
> .        China:  Continuing to plan and build additional infrastructure to
> serve private cars despite the fact that virtually everything that they have
> done thus far has led to increasingly poorer service for the great majority
> of all citizens.
>
>
>
> What is to my mind most interesting about many of these bad practices, is
> that if you scratch a bit you will find that they have a number of things in
> common. And that already is very useful. And this is what we are hoping to
> point up.
>
>
>
> The results of this work will be periodically posted and shared in a form
> that will make it available to all. As always
>
>
>
> Thanks for your examples. And in fact maybe even more useful if you might
> post them to the group, since bad practices are, in my book at least, every
> bit as important as all those best practices inventories. And quite possibly
> even more so.
>
>
>
> Eric Britton
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
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>
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> SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South').
>


-- 

Todd Edelman
Green Idea Factory,
a member of the OPENbike team

Mobile: ++49(0)162 814 4081

edelman at greenidea.eu
www.greenidea.eu
todd at openbike.se
www.openbike.se

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