TEN steps to [Traffic] Congestion Relief

Ten Step to [Traffic] Congestion Relief

A condensed version of the Balaker & Staley Book. Talking points to oppose rail transit for Dane Cty as a solution for traffic congestion. Most are exact quotes from the book.

Dane Cty. Exec. Kathleen Falk specifically mentioned building a rail system to “reduce congestion” in her press conference with Madison Mayor Dave on June 28 2007. Since about only 2% of commuters use transit, bus and rail additions have not reduced traffic congestion.

Adding 6-13 train stops per hour blocking all lanes of traffic in both directions, even if only for 45 seconds to a minute (as stated on 8/8/07 in the Dane Cty. Towns Assoc. meeting by Mr Trowbridge of Transport 2020) will cause a massive and sudden increase in congestion and travel time in the Madison area. Do we want to spend 800 million dollars to prove that?

FROM: The Road more traveled; Why the congestion crisis matters more than you think, and what we can do about it. By Ted Balaker & Sam Staley. Rowman & Littlefield Pub. 2006. $24.95. Available in new and used editions at http://amazon.com/ and at the Madison Public Library.

Traffic congestion is a top quality of life issue in America. Because congestion in Madison area is “not nearly as bad as Chicago, Minneapolis or St. Louis” does not mean we should accept deteriorating traffic flow, poor highway and intersection design, increasing commuting times and an underperforming bus system. Accept it, and eventually you will have that level of congestion as the cities mentioned above.

From page 177 “final thought” – The notion that we cannot build our way out of traffic congestion is wrong. Wrong historically, wrong technically.

Projects in U.S. and worldwide show us that we have the engineering skills to build new capacity and manage existing networks more effectively. High levels of congestion are due to our failure to make reducing it a local and national priority.

Mobility must be established at the local, county, state and national level as a high priority.

What has been lacking is leadership. “America has never had permanent shortages, except in one thing: transportation. Many Americans think congestion is inevitable; it is not. It is a breadline, it is un-American, and we should not tolerate it” (Texas legislator Mike Krusee who ramrodded the change of legislation in Texas to change the laws to allow public-private projects.)

Pages 168-176 Ten Steps to [traffic] congestion relief.

1. Step one: Admit that mobility is Good

Many urban planners and other “experts” believe congestion is a good thing. It is considered a tool to force commuters out of their cars by making congestion intolerable enough that they will spend more time, energy, money, give up personal privacy and choices to conform to the trolley/train/bus schedule.

Accepting the “congestion is good mantra” means surrendering to a lower quality of life and a lower standard of living.

Congestion is the effect of a failure to keep road capacity and the transportation network on the same pace as economic growth - an indication of a shortage. When one blocks market forces to supply a demand-free flowing, efficient transportation- the result is a Cuba/Soviet style acceptance of shortages and a lower standard and quality of living.

We don’t accept this in any other area of our lives, why would we accept it here?

In Dane Cty. and Madison, we have had in place for years an anti-car moratorium on building better, highways that are more efficient and parking facilities. When was the last major highway built in Dane County or Madison? Road construction is nearly all for maintenance only.

Even Hwy 12 & 18 Middleton to Sauk city took far too many years to approve and rebuild into a modern (1970’s) highway. It handles traffic much better today, but is a study in compromise with stoplights and cross traffic major roads that are an invitation to an accident.

At the very least, roads need to be built to keep up with growth and usage. At best, in a progressive community, transportation networks should be built ahead of demand. Dane county has road capacities that should have been dealt with 15-20 years ago. They have been intentionally ignored. Adding road capacity needs to be a fundamental and defining component of a modern transportation network.

2. Step Two: Recognize that sound transportation Policy should Increase Mobility. (Amazingly enough, this obvious statement needs to be emphasized.)

Local, county and state efforts to force people to change their commuting habits do not work. Nearly 98% of commuters CHOOSE to drive because it is comfortable, convenient, efficient, and flexible, utilizes state of the art technology and is safe and private.

52% of drivers make stops before and after work to run errands, pick up kids, do myriad after work activities that a transit system simply cannot do. 78% of Europeans drive to work and that rate is growing faster than America’s driving rate even though their rail/bus system is firmly established as top notch, more advanced and efficient than ours is and gas is much more expensive there.

Level of wealth of the individual is the single most reliable indicator of choice using a private auto or using public transit. Even 80% of our “poor” have autos.

Madison’s bus system costs $40 million a year in federal, state and local tax subsidies ($9 million from Madison) with only 20% coming from rider fares. In the Transport 2020 report (which could be renamed “Transport 1920” for its championing of trolley/rail and ignoring upgrading the bus system, the least expensive method recommended for improving mobility was streamlining the bus system, not a rail system. The trolley/rail proponents have ignored this recommendation.

Forcing higher housing densities, using zoning to restrict housing choices and growth diminishes both our quality of life and our standard of living. New county motto: “Dane County: We will tell you where to live, where to work, how and when you will move between them and how much it will cost you”

3. Step Three: Recognize there is No Free Lunch

Roads and transportation systems are not a free lunch. We have built roads that are not the right roads in the right places at the right capacities and we have allowed capacities to be grossly exceeded instead of increasing capacities with usage. We need to use fees to tie costs to benefits more directly. Public/private alliances to rebuild and build new capacities in mobility and the wider use of user fees- tolls, gas taxes are needed to pay for the lunch.

4. Step Four: Choose tools that make sense.

Would road tunnels or elevated double Decker quadruple one way reversible express or bus lanes relieve congestion? Would a relatively small investment in computerized and controllable traffic light coordination relieve congestion and speed a free flowing pattern?

Would widening bottlenecked roads, improving intersection design, adding bus and express lanes, brand new toll roads with variable tolls, private sector building and running of toll roads work? (Chicago now leases the Skyway to two companies recently rec'd $1.83 Billion, Indiana has approved leasing out their Toll way to private concerns and rec'd $3.85 billion)

Would upgrading local and arterial roads improve overall mobility? Would faster response times to traffic incident removals increase mobility?

From Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) database find bottlenecks, where most congestion occurs most frequently and determine if it is lack of capacity- road lanes- or poor management of existing infrastructure- traffic lights, turn signals, poorly designed intersections, on/off ramps, lighting etc.

5. Step Five: Identify Leaders and Champions

No one will address congestion unless there is leadership. Identifying the right people to take charge is critical to success. Only a highly visible pro-mobility campaign will identify them. In Dane County and Madison not only do we lack this leadership, the leaders are firmly in the anti-automobile camp.


Business community must be involved. High or rising levels of congestion or higher taxation than surrounding communities for transportation systems that do not relieve congestion is simply a waste of their money and will heavily affect their bottom line.

Measure the number of hours of delays removed per millions of dollars spent to prioritize congestion reduction funding. (Most bang for the buck is NOT a rail system, but higher capacity and better-designed highways/toll ways for bus/car mobility in nearly all cases in U.S. is.)

6. Step Six: Enable Real Solutions

Must have the right legislation locally and statewide to encourage innovation and creativity.

Rule of thumb: New services should be allowed if they make money when users pay for them. This applies to transit as well as new roads. Dismantle government monopolies and controls on transit, taxicabs, and roads and let market forces pay for transportation options rather than only tax dollars.

Provide an environment where different approaches can be tried over a reasonable timeline is critical to transportation policy. Congestion reduction strategies need to embrace the most effective tools for local area- queue jumpers, ramp meters, signal optimization, High Occupancy Toll way (HOT) lanes or express busways.

7. Step Seven: Cut off Ineffective programs

Transit, while popular among the elite, simply has too limited a role in most places to be a major player in congestion reduction.

Transit investments need to focus on maximizing mobility for the transit dependent. Since this segment is normally less than 2% of the commuting population, transit has too limited a ridership to influence regional congestion and mobility for the other 98%.Similarily, roads that do not significantly add to mobility in a region should not be built.

All transportation projects should be subject rigorous cost-benefit analysis that gives a more prominent role to congestion reduction.

Applying cost-benefit analysis to all transportation projects that will reduce congestion will eliminate inefficient projects.

8. Step Eight: Adopt performance measures

Performance measures must be tied to congestion reduction to maintain accountability transparency. Texas and Houston specifically adopted standards that measure the hours of delay and average travel times that became benchmarks to measure effectiveness of congestion reduction and became the benchmarks for measuring other transportation projects, which limited patronage and pet projects appeals.

Performance standards will force policy makers to make commitments to specific goals and standards. Example: a 1:10 travel time index- where peak-hour travel is 10 % longer than free flow travel time on average for the typical commuter. Highway redesign, traffic signal optimization, turn signal coordination can all be evaluated with this tool.

9. Step nine: Require Accountability

Measurable congestion reduction, travel time reduction can be built into the institutional accountability. Congestion fighting is not a one-time event. It is ever changing and must be measured regularly to meet the challenges in a variety of ways. Having congestion travel time triggers in place that automatically start congestion reduction projects must be long term and ongoing goals. Waiting until congestion cripples the local economy and lowers the standard and quality of living is waiting too long and is too expensive to repair.

Accountability should include:

Transitioning to new effective policies as the region changes
Terminating ineffective programs based on performance measures
Expanding effective programs in a timely manner

10. Step Ten: Take the long View

Use hard data and evidence to determine congestion and mobility problems. Local regional planning agencies may be helpful, though some must be forced through the Freedom of Information Act to provide the needed data.

Meet with groups, individuals that have vested interests in seeing mobility improve-business community, community organizations.

Consult experts who have a record of accomplishment for designing and implementing successful congestion relief strategies in U.S. Dane Counties' RTA consultants are the same ones that did Boston’s “Big Dig” Tunnel that is running about ten times its estimated cost. Are these the experts we should be talking to?

Develop long range strategic planning for improving mobility, with measurable targets for routes and corridors (travel speeds not falling below 10% of free-flow travel) specific strategies (variable rate toll roads, HOT (High Occupancy Toll way) lanes, traffic signal optimization) and a timetable for implementation

Develop a ten-year implementation plan, which includes public education, marketing for moving the project forward, with benchmarks for achieving specific elements of the plan