Traffic

One evacuee’s tale is the subject of this blog post:

The six hours before dawn took us into the gridlock. Once we hit I-59, traffic was reduced to an average of one to three miles per hour. With no available gas in sight, the option of AC rapidly became too fuel-intensive to embrace. In heat close to 90 degrees we watched people around us start to wilt. With each hour, the situation became more unpleasant.[…]

As my cats came closer and closer to fatal heatstroke, we poured water over their heads to cool them off. Two almost died. People around us were obviously suffering in the temperature, including many elderly and infants. The various cars stalled out on the side of the road stood like scarecrows striking the fear of being left behind into our hearts. The worst place to be in a hurricane, bar none, is in a car stuck in traffic.[…]

In Mississippi, police blocked the off ramps, several cars at each. it seems we were not wanted or allowed to leave the parking lot that was Contraflow. Fear of the situation warred with rage at those whose panic was substituted for leadership. All the while, the radio spewed forth reports of how well Contraflow was working, alternating with self-congratulatory proclamations by the mayor.

I think it’s safe to say that government efforts in advance of “what might have been” as regards Gustav is far, far superior than what we witnessed for Katrina.  Disasters are messy, things will go wrong or take longer than we would like to resolve…but at least there seemed to be a plan and some level of competence to adapt the plan as circumstances developed.

However, that doesn’t mean that everything was perfect.

Like a few folks I am interested in why Mississippi prohibited evacuees from exiting the interstate (although my interest is that of a roadgeek, rather than a survivor).   I thought standards strongly encouraged emergency management folks to allow traffic to exit at least at a few points, in long contraflow situations.   I can imagine state troopers not wanting traffic to use ramps to bypass a bit of congestion….but evacuees do need to be able to access food, fuel, and facilities.

For folks interested in how planners think of handling hurricane evacuations, you might be interested in this document from Texas A&M.    Chapter 3 of the document discusses contraflow, including the recommendation that evacuees be permitted to exit at intermediate points from long contraflow stretches, and an observation that the merge at Hattiesburg on I-59 is really an suboptimal way to terminate contraflow.

And for potential future evacuees – remember, there are highways out there that are not necessarily interstates.  A bit of advance planning for alternate routes, and familiarity with map-reading would likely go a long way towards dodging interstate evacuation traffic jams.

Seen in the New York Times:

Democratic members of the State Assembly held one final meeting to debate the merits of Mr. Bloomberg’s plan and found overwhelming and persistent opposition. The plan would have charged drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone in Manhattan south of 60th Street during peak hours.[...]

“The congestion pricing bill did not have anywhere near a majority of the Democratic conference, and will not be on the floor of the Assembly,” Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, said after the meeting.

The plan’s collapse was a severe blow to Mr. Bloomberg’s environmental agenda and political legacy. The mayor introduced his plan a year ago as the signature proposal of a 127-item program for sustainable city growth that helped raise his national profile. Without approval from Albany, the city now stands to lose about $354 million worth of federal money that would have financed the system for collecting the fee and helped to pay for new bus routes and other traffic mitigation measures.

I realize that the congestion plan pricing was extremely unpopular among non-Manhattanites who regularly drive into the city…but wasn’t that part of the point? Traffic in the City is mind-boggling, and one can get high just thinking of the level of emissions spewed by vehicles sitting in city traffic.

In short, folks heading into the City need to make greater use of public transportation…and public transportation needs to be able to support that level of demand.

If a few folks would have been obliged to pay a few bucks for the privilege of driving into the city (to avoid associating with the hoi-polloi on the trains), to help fund those enhancements…well so be it.

(And before anyone asks, yes, I do go into the City rather frequently. Normally I take the train in, unless my wife is coming with for some reason. Then we drive, since public transit isn’t particularly friendly towards mobility-limited folks….another squeaky wheel that gobs of financial grease could be used to address.)

From Think Spain:

Guardia Civil traffic patrol cars are being fitted with new licence-plate recognition technology that will enable officers to identify car insurance evaders instantly.

The kit scans a suspect’s licence plate and sends the information directly to a national database developed by the Insurance Compensation Consortium to ascertain whether the vehicle is insured and whether payments are up to date.

I remember reading recently that in the U.S. police in at least one metro area were getting similar technology to automagically identify stolen cars while on patrol. If we were to hook in states’ insurance compliance databases….

Granted, my inner privacy advocate is screaming over the idea, but it’s still an interesting thought, if one perceives uninsured drivers as a problem.

I think I’ve come across one possible enhancement to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to toll all of Manhattan below 86th Street—an outright ban on vehicles not meeting emissions standards. Via Treehugger:

Since the start of the year, drivers to the inner city of Berlin - the 88-square kilometer area inside the subway ‘ring’ - must display badges to show their cars meet new rules for particulate and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions. Cars without badges are subject to the not-too hefty ticket price of 40 Euros (US$58) and a penalty point on the errant driver’s license.[...]

In 2010 the emissions law will be further tightened, and only ‘green badge’ cars will be able to go into the inner city zones.

I also wonder if this might be a possible workaround for California’s new squabble with the EPA over competing emissions standards. I’d bet it would more likely pass judicial muster if California tolerated the sale of vehicles passing federal CO² standards, but kept them out of parts of the Bay Area and Southern California.

Currently, there’s a little bit of a buzz in my neighborhood. You see, I live on a windy, narrow two lane road, which receives a fair amount of traffic due to its being the only through surface street in this part of town, plus the various forces of inertia from this road having existed since at least the early 1700’s.

At one end of the street is a developing industrial park, which is being bolstered due to its proximity to the airport (and the regional hub cargo services there) and its location near the end of a freeway spur connecting the industrial zone and airport to I-91.

However, if you plot the shortest route from locations in the southern 2/3rds of the industrial park to I-91, you’re sent down our windy, narrow, poor-sight-line street, despite the presence of a major thoroughfare designed in part to handle heavy truck traffic. Since so many commercial drivers rely on GPS nav systems now…well, let’s just say that pulling out of my driveway or checking the mail can be mighty “fun”.

We had a town-sponsored neighborhood meeting just before the holiday to discuss this. And, once you got through the warm-and-fuzzy meeting-facilitation crap and the political doubletalk, the message to folks listening carefully was that the town is somewhat limited in what it can do, due to state laws and regulations implemented to protect citizens from capricious, arbitrary, or blatant-revenue-generating tricks that could potentially be pulled by municipalities.

So, it was with some interest that I read this article in the Courant:

An ordinance banning large trucks on Spring Street is being studied by the State Traffic Commission before it’s presented to residents at a town meeting.

Selectmen voted in September to approve the ordinance and forwarded it to the traffic commission for approval. The police department received a letter from the traffic commission last week notifying the town that the ordinance is now under review, First Selectman Steve Wawruck said.

The ban, which prohibits all trucks weighing 10,000 pounds or more from traveling on Spring Street, has already been approved by the town’s police commission. And as required by the state, Wawruck said, Police Chief John Suchocki has submitted a letter in support of the ban.[...]

The proposed ordinance is in response to complaints from residents who say the trucks are noisy and rattle their homes. Officials say the trucks are also taking a toll on a residential road that was never planned for such heavy truck volume.

“We feel we have alternative routes available in lieu of Spring Street,” Wawruck said.

So, the folks in Windsor Locks have been trying for months to get trucks off Spring Street (a state highway is just one block south, of course), and the state is just now starting to think about it.

My, how swiftly the wheels of bureaucracy move.

Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg expressed a desire to institute congestion-zone tolling for Manhattan below 86th Street. The plan didn’t play all that well in Albany, so as a compromise to keep access to federal traffic-alleviation funds alive, a plan was hatched to assemble a commission to look at alternatives.

The New York Times has a report up on what the Commission’s thinking:

One proposal could be nearly as controversial as the mayor’s congestion pricing plan: the establishment of a No Hail Zone in the area below 86th Street.

Under such a plan, yellow cabs could pick up people only at designated taxi stands. The stands, up to 1,200 of them, would be set up on each block in busy areas and every few blocks in other parts of the zone. [...]

The commission is also studying a proposal known as license plate rationing, under which cars would be barred from the area below 86th Street on certain days, depending on their license plate.

One possibility would be to ban cars on the days of the month that end in the same digit as their license plates. That would mean that if a person’s plates end in a 5, for example, they could not drive on the 5th, the 15th or the 25th of each month. If the person’s plate ended in a 4, the vehicle would be banned on a different three days: the 4th, the 14th, and the 24th. In another version, license plates would come in five colors, with each color barred from the congestion zone one day a week. [...]

One solution that could cut traffic and raise money involves increasing the cost of on-street parking. Currently, Mr. Schaller said, most metered parking spaces in Manhattan charge $1 or $1.50 an hour. If those rates were increased to up to $4 an hour, he said, parking on the street for eight hours would cost about the same as the daily rate at many garages.

Personally, I think that tolling/congestion pricing the area is probably the simplest idea.

Via NE Republican I found this interesting story from AOL via CNN:

Well, if a test administered by GMAC Insurance is any indication, one in six people cruising our highways and byways—roughly 36 million licensed drivers—would flunk their driver’s test if they had to take it today. Not only that, but based on the 2007 GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test data the state with the most road-going dummies is New York, while the most knowledgeable ones are out West to Idaho.[...]

According to GMAC Insurance, 18 percent of respondents failed its National Driving Test in 2007, compared with 9 percent in 2006. The test can be taken online at www.gmacinsurance.com.

The following state rankings were released for the 2007 GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test:

Idaho
Alaska
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Kansas
Washington
South Dakota
Montana
Oregon
Iowa
Nebraska
Wyoming
Oklahoma
Indiana
North Carolina
New Mexico
North Dakota
Missouri
Delaware
Nevada
Vermont
California
Hawaii
Texas
Maryland
Alabama
Arkansas
Michigan
Kentucky
Utah
Ohio
Colorado
South Carolina
Arizona
Florida
Maine
New Hampshire
Mississippi
Tennessee
Connecticut
Virginia
Louisiana
West Virginia
Georgia
Illinois
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Massachusetts
District of Columbia
New Jersey
New York

I can’t attest to the soundness of GMAC’s methodology…but I do find it amusing that Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York are all that far down on the list.

I’ve written previously about plans to toll Manhattan city streets below 84th Street. The New York Times points out one potential hitch to getting folks out of their cars and onto mass transit

What is revealed [in an MTA study] is both predictable and eye-opening. Many subway lines are simply maxed out, meaning there is no room on the tracks they use to add trains that could carry the swelling numbers of riders. And that has implications that range from day-to-day decisions about how trains travel through the system to long-term planning on how to best move people around a growing city.

OK. The idea of incenting folks to use mass transit rather than their cars, to free up strain on the street network and reduce pollution is a good idea.  However, if there’s no marginal capacity in the mass transit system, it might not work so well.

Of course, it should be noted that according to the NYT article, it’s only the old IRT lines that are operating at capacity.  Lines primarily purposed to bring folks in from the other boroughs, or the A/C/E trains (which have a less favorable routing) still have some margin.   So, we can get more folks into the city by train…but once in Manhattan, the extra transit folks will have to turn to cabs, busses, or pack the IRT trains like sardine cans.

There are projects underway to alleviate the crunch, including extending platforms to handle longer trains, upgrading the signaling systems to support shorter headways, and resurrecting the long-delayed plans for the Second Avenue subway…but they’ll all take time.

Perhaps it’s just as well that the congestion tolling plan met with a cool reception when presented in Albany.

One of the sticking points in the enactment of NAFTA has been that of Mexican truck-drivers. Technically, the US-Mexican border was to have been opened up to cross-border trucking quite a while ago, but the reality of Mexican trucks being subject to less stringent maintenance and operating requirements and cross-border insurance issues.

According to the New York Times it sounds like those issues are being worked out:

According to the Transportation Department, inspectors will examine every truck and interview drivers to ensure they can read and speak English. They will examine trucks and check the licenses, insurance and driving records of the Mexican drivers, and they will verify that their employers are insured by companies licensed in the United States.

Needless to say, the teamsters union is not amused.

One passage in an article in today’s Nashville Tennesseean caught my eye.

The article discusses an ongoing study in Nashville/Davidson County to resynchronize traffic lights on major arterial roads in the area. One of the benefits:

Travel time was cut 37 percent on Nolensville Road and Harding Place after the first phase of synchronization was completed last year, according to a Metro study. Fuel consumption on all the retimed streets was reduced by 6 percent overall, the study found.