The local roadway network, unfortunately, does not allow them to bypass one of the country’s most congested city centers. Instead, motorists are crammed together, crosstown travelers with locals. Many become box blockers, drivers who effectively close intersections when the traffic backs up, preventing cross traffic from moving through.
Few U.S. cities pose a bigger challenge to adding physical road capacity than New York City, Manhattan in particular. Many people, including elected officials and transportation planners, simply presume that the capacity cannot be increased, so they rely exclusively on transit and law enforcement approaches to manage traffic and “tame” bad driver behavior. Despite their learned pessimism, several opportunities exist to add physical road space in Manhattan and other dense urban areas where right of way is scarce and expensive.
In many cities across the world, including Beijing, Paris, and Washington, commuters can avoid stopping at intersections by either driving over or under them using “queue jumpers”—short elevated or underground roads. In New York, the Murray Hill Tunnel already serves this function, allowing express traffic to bypass the locals. The tunnel, which carries two lanes of car traffic from East 33rd Street to East 41st Street, is a great way to avoid the congestion on Park Avenue.
Queue jumpers and tunnels often make sense in dense urban spaces and neighborhoods, as well as areas constrained by environmentally sensitive surface factors, because they operate within existing rights of way. Thus the use of eminent domain is limited, which is a major benefit in streamlining construction and honoring property rights alongside major thoroughfares.
Cities such as Paris, Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, and even Tampa, Florida, have upgraded beyond queue jumpers to provide longer underground and above-ground motorways. While much of a metropolitan area is packed with subway and train tunnels and other utilities, elevated facilities need only airspace. Furthermore, on the western edge of Manhattan, there are no serious underground obstructions from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge that would prevent building express intersection bypasses. Various east-west streets are also free of subway tunnels. And as Frank Sinatra sang, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.
WATCHING OVER YOU IN LONDON
Around 300,000 traffic signals turn red, green, and yellow every day in the United States. According to the Institute of Traffic Engineers, a leading professional association, three-quarters of these could be improved by updating equipment or improving timing. The institute surveyed 378 traffic agencies in 49 states and discovered that only a third actively monitor traffic signals for accidents, signal malfunctions, or cars having to wait more than one cycle to get through an intersection.
Traffic light optimization—timing and synchronizing lights to minimize delay at intersections—can improve traffic flow significantly, reducing stops by as much as 40 percent, gas consumption by as much as 10 percent, emissions by as much as 22 percent, and travel times by as much as 25 percent, according to the institute.
In London the regional transportation agency uses 1,200 cameras to watch over the city’s streets through a Traffic Control Centre. (These cameras, unlike others found in the English capital, are used solely for traffic and safety monitoring, and do not record anything.) If there’s an incident --anything from a fender bender to a celebration of England’s rugby team at Trafalgar Square--staffers can reset traffic lights remotely to improve flow, sometimes varying signal lengths by just a few seconds to smooth things out further along the network. As with road pricing, technical control of signals allows real-time changes to the system to help cars and trucks move more smoothly, based on the ebb and flow of traffic.
This strategy is comparatively cheap. One billion dollars allocated to the largest cities in each of the 50 states to coordinate the timing of traffic lights at intersections could significantly improve signal operations and traffic flow on arterials and other major roads. Since the early 1980s, a statewide California program has optimized more than 3,000 signals; the state estimates that the benefits of increased circulation and traffic flow—in terms of travel time, reduced delays, and reduced stops at intersections—outweighed costs by 58 to 1. A 1995 study by the Texas Transportation Institute, one of the nation’s leading research centers on congestion, traffic management, and transportation policy reform, looked at 26 similar projects in Texas. It found a signaloptimization benefit-to-cost ratio of 38 to 1. Although Texas officials spent only $1.7 million combined on the optimization projects, they were able to cut fuel consumption by 13 percent, stops by 9 percent, and delays by 19 percent.
President Obama says he wants to reduce car emissions. Few changes could have a more immediate impact on that goal than improving traffic flow, since stop-and-go traffic requires cars and trucks to burn more fuel at inefficiently slow speeds.
NIGHT SHIFT IN INDIANA
The average value of time for each person on the road is $14.60 per hour, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. So a repaving project that causes 40,000 people 15 minutes of delay each day for a week can impose $1 million in largely uncounted costs.
Performing road maintenance often means closing one or more lanes of a road, which can cause long delays during rush hour and other times of the day. Since construction work, which is mostly maintenance, causes between 8 percent and 27 percent of all delays in a typical large city, according to the Transportation Research Board, these costs are not uncommon.
There are a number of strategies to avoid or minimize congestion increases from maintenance work. The most effective is to do most of the work during low-traffic times such as nights and weekends. That can cost a bit more on the government balance sheet, since workers may demand higher pay to work night shifts, but the real-world benefits can be much greater.
A good way to encourage off-hour scheduling is making it an important part of maintenance contracts and having companies’ bids include incentives to avoid traffic delays. According to a 1998 report in Public Roads, the Indiana Department of Transportation had bidders for an Interstate 70 rehabilitation job include in their proposals the cost of traffic delays caused by the roadwork. As a result, the winning contractor finished the work almost two months ahead of schedule, with one-third fewer lane closures than expected, saving travelers between $1 million and $1.5 million in fuel, time, and other user costs.
Sam Staley is director of urban policy at the Reason Foundation. Adrian Moore is vice president of research at the Reason Foundation. They are co-authors of Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
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