Traffic plateau clouds planning
By Elisa Crouch
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/18/2008

Traffic in the St. Louis area has plateaued this decade, ending years of fast growth that fueled demand for more and wider roads.

A recent analysis by East-West Gateway Council of Governments shows traffic growth in the eight-county region slowed to an average annual rate of less than 1 percent between 2000 and 2006.

That's down from 2.3 percent average growth in the 1990s, and 4.3 percent growth in the 1980s.

The reasons behind the phenomenon have to do with the area's demographics: The region's population is aging, households are getting smaller and the percentage of women in the work force has stabilized. The price of gasoline had little, if any, effect on traffic, the analysis shows.

Title: Spatial Mismatch or Automobile Mismatch? An Examination of Race, Residence and Commuting in US Metropolitan Areas

 

With congestion continuing to grow despite valiant efforts to curtail it, and as the cost of congestion both in terms of lost personal time and reduced economic productivity continues to rise, the U.S. Department of Transportation decided to rethink the approaches the nation is taking to addressing congestion and to redirect efforts to improve results. The Department developed a bold, aggressive strategy, outlined in its May 2006 multi-prong National Strategy to Reduce Congestion on America's Transportation Network (PDF), which is often referred to as the Congestion Initiative. The first of the Congestion Initiative's tenets is to "relieve urban congestion," which further calls for the Department to enter into Urban Partnership Agreements with model cities, pursuant to their commitment to, among other things, implement "broad congestion pricing." To educate the public about the congestion problem and how broad congestion pricing is key to addressing it, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed a Congestion Pricing Primer....

Overview

Transportation system congestion is one of the single largest threats to our nation's economic prosperity and way of life. Whether it takes the form of trucks stalled in traffic, cargo stuck at overwhelmed seaports, or airplanes circling over crowded airports, congestion costs America an estimated $200 billion a year. In 2003, Americans lost 3.7 billion hours and 2.3 billion gallons of fuel sitting in traffic jams and wasted $9.4 billion as a result of airline delays. Congestion is also affecting the quality of life in America by robbing us of time that could be spent with families and friends and in participation in civic activities.

We don't believe that this is an inevitable fate. In May 2006 the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a major initiative to reduce transportation system congestion. This plan, the National Strategy to Reduce Congestion on America's Transportation Network (often referred to as the "Congestion Initiative"), provides a blueprint for Federal, State, and local officials to consider as we work together to reverse the alarming trends of congestion. It includes six major components: (1) Urban Partnership Agreements; (2) Public Private Partnerships; (3) Corridors of the Future; (4) Reducing Southern California Freight Congestion; (5) Reducing Border Congestion; and (6) Increasing Aviation Capacity. This webpage provides an overview of each of the components, as well as selected documents and links regarding either specific components or the Congestion Initiative as a whole. For additional information on a specific component (e.g., Urban Partnership Agreements), click on the link located either under the component's thumbnail image or at the top of this page.

Abstract

UrbanSim simulates the development of urban areas, including land use, transportation, and environmental impacts, over periods of 20 or more years. Its purpose is to aid urban planners, residents, and elected officials in evaluating the long-term results of alternate plans, particularly as they relate to such issues as housing, business and economic development, sprawl, open space, traffic congestion, and resource consumption. From a software perspective, it is a large, complex, system, with heavy demands for excellent space efficiency and support for software evolution. It consists of a collection of models that represent different urban actors and processes, an object store that holds the state of the simulated urban environment, a model coordinator that schedules models to run and notifies them when data of interest has changed, and a translation and aggregation layer that performs a range of data conversions to mediate between the object store and the models. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned regarding software architecture to support rapid evolution within the field of urban simulation.

Author Keywords: Urban simulation; Software architecture; Land use and transportation; UrbanSim; Java; Open source

Spatio-temporal patterns of subjectively reported congestion in Tel Aviv metropolitan area

Eliahu Stern
Department of Geography and Environmental Development, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel

Journal of Transport Geography
Volume 12, Issue 1, March 2004, Pages 63-71

Available online 19 November 2003.

Abstract

Traffic congestion is still one of the major problems of urban transportation. It is the aggregate outcome of individual, subjective, decisions in a changing traffic environment.The individual's decision making is affected, among other factors, by experience and direct information from the surrounding environment, or indirectly from the media. The subjective map created from this information provides the cognitive environment within which the driver makes decisions. This study examines the spatio-temporal changes in the subjective map of reported congestion as formed by radio broadcasts in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. It aims to evaluate the spatio-temporal stability of the emerged congestion patterns as a basis for subjective decision making, and to explain its variability as a necessary base for any effort to relieve congestion. Results show that non-recurrent heavy congestion is likely to be unstable. The spatio-temporal fluctuations of congestion were found to associate with traffic volumes caused mainly by weekly-based commuters which include university students, soldiers, and government employees. Reported information was found suitable for longitudinal research, the only kind which enables a broad understanding of the spatio-temporal pattern and dynamics of traffic congestion.

Author Keywords: Reported congestion; Spatio-temporal patterns; Congestion stability; Weekly-based commuters; Tel Aviv

Journal of Planning History, Vol. 5, No. 1, 3-34 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1538513205284628
© 2006 SAGE Publications
From Traffic Regulation to Limited Ways: The Effort to Build a Science of Transportation Planning
Jeffrey Brown

Florida State University

During the 1920s, millions of Americans embraced the automobile as their primary means of transportation, and traffic quickly congested city streets. Local officials turned to the experts for aid. These men approached the problem as one whose solution might be identified through the application of scientific techniques. Through their efforts, they transformed transportation planning from a broad, multidisciplinary exercise into a narrow, technical one, and introduced principles and procedures that continue to guide practitioners. Their development of a science based on traffic data and premised on the desirability of facilitating high-speed automobile movement also served to blind later professionals to the often-negative consequences of their own planning prescriptions.

Key Words: urban history • transportation planning • scientific methods