The latest draft of the Evaluation of the Transportation Effects of the I-35W Collapse paper is now online.

Comments are welcome.

I will be on Don Shelby's WCCO radio show today at 3:00 pm or so to discuss the traffic effects of the I-35 W bridge collapse.

I will be on KSTP's talk show Twin Cities Live on Friday, August 1, at 3 pm, to discuss the traffic effects of the I-35W Bridge Collapse on a special issue talking about the collapse on its 1 year anniversary.

august 1

This morning's MPR interview about the traffic effects of the I-35W Bridge collapse is now online: Drivers flexible in choosing routes after bridge collapse

From AP Bridge failure a possible cause in Houston County train derailment

Brownsville, Minn. (AP) — A train derailment in southeastern Minnesota near Reno could be related to the failure of a wooden railroad bridge.

The derailed train is owned by the Iowa, Chicago & Eastern Railroad, but it's also unclear if that railroad also owns the bridge.

I should be on Minnesota Public Radio Wed. morning at 8 am Central or so discussing the traffic effects of the I-35 W Bridge Collapse.

At 9:10 am today I will be on WCCO am: Mondale and Jones show

Talking about the transportation effects of the
I-35W Bridge Collapse

Wikipedia's article List of transport topics gives a list of a variety of modes largely defined by their technology (are they powered by animals or engines, are the engines on the vehicle or is the vehicle powered by a cable, do the vehicles travel on land, sea, or water, etc. While this is a reasonably comprehensive list and a reasonable organization of the subject for wikipedia, it does not really get at the transportation aspect of modes, focusing instead on their mechanical aspects.

I propose a schema that classifies passenger modes according to how they operate, not how they are paid for or what technology is employed:

The key attributes are:
* Availability (can you travel on demand, is a vehicle easily hailed, or is a reservation required?),
* Accompaniment (can your party travel alone, or is the ride shared with others?),
* Fixity of route ends (are the origin and destination of the route fixed?),
* Fixity of route stops (are the stops fixed, or does the vehicle stop anywhere between the origin and destination?),
* Fixity of schedule (does the vehicle adhere to a schedule?),
* Driver (does the party drive itself or rely on others?).

In this way, we can see the similarity or differences of seemingly different or similar modes.

I should be on kare11 tonight on the 10 pm news talking about Nearly 10 Billion Fewer Miles Driven in May 2008 than May 2007 and the depleted Highway Trust Fund.

I appear on a U of M University News Service Expert Alert talking about the traffic effects of the I-35W Bridge Collapse.

(The movie is in Flash format.)

The Nexus group webpage bringing together our ongoing and completed research on the I-35W Bridge collapse is available here. Evaluation of the Transportation Effects of the I-35W Collapse

Note in particular, several reports (links near the bottom of the page) which document the effects of the bridge collapse, reproduced here:

Zhu, S, D. Levinson, H. Liu, and K. Harder (2008) The traffic and behavioral effects of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse (under review)

Xie, F. and D. Levinson (2008) Evaluating the Effects of I-35W Bridge Collapse on Road-Users in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Region (under review)

He, Xiaozheng, Saif Jabari, and Henry X. Liu (2008) Modeling Day-to-day Trip Choice Evolution under Network Disruption (under review)

AASHTO, the organization of state DOTs, released a report on the "restoring and rebuilding the nation's bridges": Bridging the Gap (pdf)

HTML version here

One week ago we announced to the world the availability of the first issue of Journal of Transport and Land Use.

In that week (July 20-26) we had 1929 visits to the site, including 6121 page views. Of those visitors, 75% were new, meaning the other 25% had visited the site previously.

Visitors came to the site from 56 different countries and every US state except Wyoming, Alabama, and Rhode Island.

Just to see how quickly people read email, the vast majority of announcement emails were sent last Monday (though after work Monday in about half the world). Most people visited on Monday or Tuesday

July 21, 712
July 22, 629
July 23, 310
July 24, 161
July 25, 83
July 26, 15
July 27, 22

which forms a very nice survival curve.

Prior to the announcement, the site was averaging 10 to 20 hits per day at random (about half of which were University of Minnesota staff futzing with the site).

Even more interesting, 613 people are now registered on http://www.jtlu.org, up from just over 200 before we launched, so another 400 people decided JTLU was interesting enough to be notified of future issues.

From Strib: Weather, age eroded 35E bridge

"The 6-foot-by-9-foot-by-1-inch patch that peeled off could be described as a veneer for the underside of the steel beams that span the length of the bridge and support it, Dorgan said. Those beams are structurally unaffected by the loss of concrete, he said."

If the aesthetics (i.e. veneer) distract from function (that is, it falls on cars), perhaps bridges should be strictly functional.

From Metro: Cameron reuinted with stolen bike

In The Washington Monthly, an interesting question about how highways are referred to by region: Highway Linguistics. A case for the Dictionary of American Regional English

A nice post on: Why Airline Travel Sux: Big Air Responds! by Christopher Hayes

Why Airline Travel Sux: Big Air Responds!

Via Boing-Boing: From News4Jax: Police: Man Stole Miami-Dade Buses, Drove Them On Routes

No reason was given why.

We have posted some preliminary results from the traffic analysis of the I-35W Bridge collapse here: Evaluation of the Transportation Effects of the I-35W Collapse. The reports are near the bottom of the page. These are currently under review and comments are welcome.

Buses can increase property values, so says this article in SFGate The Google Effect: How the company's shuttle line affects San Francisco real estate

Apparently Googlers will pay a premium to live in San Francisco and elsewhere near the Google Transit system. Will these rent price increases be capitalized in land is an outstanding question. (Anyone with Bay Area data want to run a Hedonic model?)

I would say, "welcome to America" (my wife has had 3 or 4 bikes stolen since I've known her), but this happened in London on Portobello Road to David Cameron, leader of the Tories and likely the next Prime Minister of the UK: 'Hacked off' Cameron has his bike stolen

It reminds me of the story about George Bush having his watch stolen while shaking hands in Albania (which may or may not have happened) "At 0.50 minutes into the clip, Bush has a watch. At 1.04 minutes into the clip, he had a watch."

A proposal to shut Market Street to cars is re-emerging, according to this from SFGate: Fight brews over plan to shut Market Street

The evidence on pedestrian and transit malls is not uniform, but it is important to distinguish causation and correlation. Which pedestrian malls failed because of lack of cars, and which malls were pedestrianized because there was already a decline underway this technique was hoping, but failed, to correct.

Via Kottke, from Preservation Magazine:
A Cautionary Tale

"Embodied energy. Another term unlovely to the ear, it's one with which preservationists need to get comfortable. In two words, it neatly encapsulates a persuasive rationale for sustaining old buildings rather than building from scratch. When people talk about energy use and buildings, they invariably mean operating energy: how much energy a building—whether new or old—will use from today forward for heating, cooling, and illumination. Starting at this point of analysis—the present—new will often trump old. But the analysis takes into account neither the energy that's already bound up in preexisting buildings nor the energy used to construct a new green building instead of reusing an old one. "Old buildings are a fossil fuel repository," as Jackson put it, "places where we've saved energy.""

Think about this applied to transportation, and the logic for the construction of new highway and transit facilities. Often the claim is made the new facility will reduce energy consumption or carbon emissions, which may be true on an operating basis, either because it switches people away from the internal combustion engine or it allows this engine to be operated more efficiently on a less congested facility. However, those analyses exclude the energy and environmental cost of construction, which is often quite large, a point which has been known for a long time, see e.g.

Lave, Charles. 1976. The Negative Energy Impact of Modern Rail-Transit Systems. Science, February 11, 1977. Vol. 195, pp. 595-596.

though the argument is not without controversy.

A similar point is the delay imposed by construction of a facility designed to reduce delay. Rarely if ever is the construction delay compared with the long-term reduction in delay. I suspect many projects would no longer be beneficial if that were included, especially if we consider the time value of money, and that current delay is worth more than downstream delay.

From AASHTO Journal: House to Consider $8 Billion Highway Trust Fund Shortfall Remedy

"The House of Representatives is reportedly prepared to consider legislation Wednesday to transfer $8.017 billion to the Highway Trust Fund to offset a projected shortfall in Fiscal Year 2009.

Sources indicate that the House leadership plans to expedite the bill, introduced last Thursday, to a floor vote using a procedure known as suspension of the rules. Under such a maneuver, the bill can bypass a committee hearing and gain House passage if at least two-thirds of representatives vote "yes." The procedure is commonly used in the House to pass noncontroversial legislation."

How good a modeler are you?

The Technion Prediction Tournament seeks to find out ...

"Motivation and the basic idea

Classical behavioral decision research focuses on counter-examples to rational decision theory (like the Allais’ paradox), and simple models of sufficient conditions to these counter-examples (like original prospect theory, Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). We believe that this focus was highly effective in establishing the importance of behavioral decision research; yet, the future of our discipline depends on our ability to advance beyond counter-examples (see Budescu et al., 1998.

The current set of competitions tries to take one step beyond counter-examples by focusing on well defined spaces of choice problems. The set includes three independent competitions that will focus on three distinct choice tasks:

One shot decisions under risk (like the situations studied by Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) - Condition Description

One shot decisions from experience (like the situations studied by Hertwig et al., 2004) - Condition E-sampling

Repeated decisions from experience (like the situations studied by Barron and Erev, 2003) - Condition E-repeated

We ran one set of experimental studies (the estimation set) and will soon run a second set (the competition set). Both sets focus on choice between two alternatives, a safe choice and a risky choice:

Safe: Medium with certainty;

Risk: Low with probability p; High otherwise"

The foreclosure crisis hits Australia ... Fuel prices hit homeowners, with record Brisbane defaults

"National Shelter chairman Adrian Pisarski said the figures demonstrated the compounding effect of high petrol prices on already financially stressed homebuyers.

"It always seems to be in areas poorly serviced by public transport," he said.

"People there are double-whammied. Their housing costs are going up and their transport costs are very high because they are car dependent.

"I think many households would cope with one or the other, but not both.""

Via Ken Jennings, former quizbowler, A Shortage at the Pump - Not of Gas, but of 4s

From the Pioneer Press: Asphalt shortage raises the price of roadwork

Not only cannot we not afford new roads because DOT revenue is down, we cannot afford them because prices are up.

Asphalt, which is made from petroleum byproducts, is seeing its material costs go up, as well as the costs of transporting the stuff.

"Tom Ravn, acting state construction engineer for MnDOT, said the asphalt supply issue affects six to eight highway projects under way around the state and could force a monthlong delay on one of them. Ravn wouldn't say which one. He said he's fielding calls from concerned contractors and studying the state's options, from granting delays to possibly lowering the asphalt grade it requires, among other things."

Lowering the grade presumably means the road will have to be repaired more frequently or replaced sooner.

Still, as the websites say:

http://concreteisbetter.com
http://asphaltisbest.com

(Grammatically if there are only two choices, concrete may be better, especially since no one has registered http://gravelisgood.com )

From the LA Times U.S. highway trust fund veers toward crisis

"As motorists cut back on their driving and buy more fuel-efficient cars, the government is taking in less money from the federal gasoline tax.

The result: The principal source of funding for highway projects will soon hit a big financial pothole. The federal highway trust fund could be in the red by $3.2 billion or more next year."

This was not unpredictable, and the response is likely to be an increase in the gas tax at the next surface transportation authorization, which will further drive motorists from gasoline.

New method measures emotional quality of daily experience

"Some of the findings confirm what we already know while others are counter-intuitive. The researchers assessed how people felt during 28 types of activities and found that intimate relations were the most enjoyable, while commuting was the least enjoyable." Full article here (requires registration)

This observation contrasts with Redmond, Lothlorien S. and Patricia L. Mokhtarian (2001) The Positive Utility of the Commute: Modeling Ideal Commute Time and Relative Desired Commute Amount. Transportation 28 (2), 179 - 205 and fails to explain why if people hate commuting so much, they do so much of it. While I suspect few would suggest commuting to be the most enjoyable activity, it really depends on your commute.

Despite Kahneman's Nobel Prize, I think their methods were far more primitive than what is found in the transport and regional science literature (and if not for the NP, unlikely to have been published in Science), and they should have cited some of the prior transportation literature on this.

This issue arises of course because articles in emph>Science are noted widely, and cited broadly, this has emerged in a recent claim by Richard Florida about why cities are better than suburbs and "The Days of Urban Sprawl Are Over".

Announcing the
Journal of Transport and Land Use

www.jtlu.org – ISSN 1938-7849

The Journal of Transport and Land Use is a new open-access, peer-reviewed online journal publishing original inter-disciplinary papers on the interaction of transport and land use. Domains include: engineering, planning, modeling, behavior, economics, geography, regional science, sociology, architecture and design, network science, and complex systems.

Summer 2008 issue available: www.jtlu.org

Contents:

Sprawl and Accessibility

Martin Bruegmann, Professor of Art History, Architecture, and Urban Planning, University of Illinois at Chicago

(Author of Sprawl: A Compact History)

Counterpoint: Sprawl and Accessibility

Randall Crane, UCLA Department of Urban Planning

(Co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning)

Cities as Organisms: Allometric Scaling of Urban Road Networks

Horacio Samaniego and Melanie E. Moses, Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

A Use-Based Measure of Accessibility to Linear Features to Predict Urban Trail Use

John R. Ottensmann and Greg Lindsey, Center for Urban Policy and the Environment, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Integral Cost-Benefit Analysis of Maglev Rail Projects Under Market Imperfections

J. Paul Elhorst and Jan Oosterhaven, Department of Regional Economics, University of Groningen (Netherlands)

To learn more about the Journal of Transport and Land Use, visit www.jtlu.org or contact:

David Levinson, General Editor: dlevinson@umn.edu

Kevin Krizek, Editor (Americas): krizek@colorado.edu

The Journal is housed at the University of Minnesota and sponsored by the Center for Transportation Studies.

From WaPo Cosmic Markdown: EPA Says Life Is Worth Less

"Last week, it was revealed that an Environmental Protection Agency office had lowered its official estimate of life's value, from about $8.04 million to about $7.22 million. That decision has put a spotlight on the concept of the "Value of a Statistical Life," in which the Washington bureaucracy takes on a question usually left to preachers and poets."

What interest me is that this value is still much higher than in the transportation community. USDOT in an official report recently raised its value to $5.8 million from $3 million previously (set in 2002)

So saving me from dying from pollution is more important than saving me from dying in a car crash. While some deaths are more horrible than others, this doesn't make much sense, especially when you recognize that pollution reduces life at the end, while a car crash takes you out in the middle. I would much rather lose a day or week or month of life when I am already old than 30 or 40 years.

Apparently University of Hawaii Transportation Professor Panos Prevedouros (co-author of a well known undergraduate engineering textbook) is running for mayor of Honolulu: Panos for Mayor

He is an opponent of the ~$4 Billion Honolulu rail project, to the extent there is a blog entitled Fire Dr. Panos Prevedouros: UH Please fire him NOW!, clearly a very focused theme.

If he succeeds, he will join President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as transportation Ph.Ds in politics.

From Ars:
Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus, forgotten ideas

Summary of article in Science about citation rates in this modern world. The lesson, get cited quickly or fade into obscurity.

Via Andrew Sullivan ... The Frontal Cortex : Buying the Wrong House

The post reports on a study that argues people overweight rare events (e.g. visitors to home) and underweight common ones (like commuting) and so buy larger houses farther away than they should.

The key paragraph from the original paper:
"Recently, one of us read a newspaper article that documented an interesting
example of what we may call a “weighting error�. When buying a house, one trade-off
people have to make is between the size of the house and the length of the daily commute
to work. Most people (note that the example comes from a Dutch newspaper) work in
city centers. As city centers are expensive, a preference for a short commute by necessity
means one is forced to buy a small house or apartment. Large houses are affordable, but
only for those who are willing to live in the countryside and to face a long commute. It
seems that many people think about this trade-off, and many eventually choose the large
house. After all, a third bathroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come
over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad. Anecdotal
evidence has it that a lot of these people come to regret their choice. A third bathroom is
a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long
commute does become a burden after a while. Recent evidence (Stutzer & Frey, 2007)
shows that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective
well-being. "

Kenny Bellew complains about Late Merging on the highway

From one point of view this is simply cheating or queue jumping. From another, this is an efficient use of highway space.

Imagine we have a scenario where 2 lanes merge into 1 (i.e. left lane closed ahead, merge right, or vice versa). What privileges the drivers of either lane to have first dibs on the scarce road space downstream.

Further, if the drivers can move through the queue at the same rate (vehicles per hour) independent of where the merge occurs, why should the queue be longer rather than wider?

If in fact the queue is longer, it may create more unsafe driving conditions (differential speeds in the two lanes), and block exit ramps, thereby delaying people who are using the road but want to exit upstream of the bottleneck.

I suspect a zipper merge (one from each lane) is more efficient, and what we need to do is to retrain drivers to take turns when merging into a queue, rather than play games as is common now about trying to jump queues, or not letting cheaters in.

In fact, this is MnDOT's current preferred strategy Motorists reminded to use zipper method to merge during single-lane traffic on Highway 61 bridge at Hastings

From BBC: Road tax increase 'will hit 9.4m'

In the UK, where they are serious about carbon and taxing cars, "An estimated 9.4 million motorists will have to pay more road tax under reforms aimed at punishing "gas-guzzling" vehicles, the government has admitted."

Whether this will be retained after Labour is voted out is unclear.

From T. Boone Pickens, in the WSJ My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil

In brief:
"My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. ... We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. "

In the news,

Toyota to add solar panels to Prius hybrid, or at least is thinking about it, this follows a story about a 100 mpg plug-in solar hybrid being developed at NREL I mentioned a few weeks ago.

We now also see some stories about solar powered roads (or rather solar power from roads) in Ode Magazine:
Solar power from road surfaces

One such idea: "Dutch firm Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV has developed a way to siphon solar heat from asphalt road surfaces" ... which was a notion I had when I was in 5th grade or so and still had some imagination. Since blacktop asphalt absorbs heat, we should be able to use it for energy I reasoned. Of course I never implemented it, but I did write my Congresswoman (Beverly Byron, MD 6th District) about the idea and some others, to which I got a perfunctory response, though admittedly a better response than I get nowadays when I write to my federal legislators.

Another idea is solar powered road stud lights, which seem reasonable (just like my garden lights) unless you have snowplows tearing up the road.

But the main idea, turning the road into a solar panel may not withstand the heavy loads of trucks, though a company says it is testing the idea in Idaho.

From AP: Senator asks if nation's drivers should slow down

"Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to look into what speed limit would provide optimum gasoline efficiency given current technology. He said he wants to know if the administration might support efforts in Congress to require a lower speed limit."

The more important issue, while Congress obsesses about gas prices, is the safety effect. The results on this are complex.

Lowering speed limits on freeways, with enforcement, will encourage fast drivers to drive on rural roads with less enforcement and with less safety features, and likely drive up crash and fatality rates systemwide (though perhaps lower it on freeways).

Important research on this is by Charles Lave and Patrick Elias (1994) Accident Analysis and Prevention 26(1) 49-62 who studied the effect of raising the 55 MPH speed limit to 65 MPH in 1987.

In the Pioneer Press Officials close bridge that jolted riders in Maple Grove

"Officials close bridge that jolted riders in Maple Grove
Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 07/03/2008 07:02:51 AM CDT

MAPLE GROVE -- Officials in Maple Grove have closed a new pedestrian/bike bridge that was delivering an electric shock to some people who crossed it.

One local bicyclist tells KARE-TV that he rode his bike across it last spring and felt a sensation like a swarm of bees flying into his shorts. The same sensation occurred on a second trip, and he contacted the local park district.

He says one of the park directors told him that at least two other riders had reported the same experience, as had the park director.

The park district consulted the Minnesota Department of Transportation, which built the bridge, and Xcel Energy, which has powerlines nearby. They decided to close it.

An Xcel spokesman says the powerlines are likely generating an electrical field that's causing the bridge to develop a charge and deliver low voltage jolts to the bicyclists.

A MnDOT spokesman says authorities are looking into how the bridge was built and grounded and plan to correct the problem so they can reopen the bridge."

An interesting article on elevators:
Taken for a Ride

From the article:
"According to statistical findings attached to the Energy Efficiency Act, which became law in 2006, 90 billion people each year ascend and descend on escalators, making it a more popular form of transportation than commercial airliners. The national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses; its cost is roughly $260 million."

Well, $260M is less than $1/person in the US per year, not too bad all things considered.

I saw intermittent escalators deployed at the Zurich airport. Its a bit unnerving at first, you think the elevator isn't working, and then it starts just as you step on. Of course, in Switzerland, everything does just work, so why I would think it wasn't working is beyond me.

The article implies we should just climb stairs, which seems a bit hair-shirt wearing to me, given for less than 1/3 of a cent a day in variable cost, I get unlimited escalator rides. (My son insists on riding every escalator he sees, regardless of where it is going).

The number of escalators in the US = 30,000 ..., just over 2 for every McDonald's restaurant in the US (or one for every 10,000 people).

A nice article on container shipping by Stewart Taggart in 1999. Wired 7.10: The 20-Ton Packet

Instead of transportation being the metaphor for communications (the information superhighway, e.g.), here communication is the metaphor for transportation.

Another good source on container shipping is Marc Levinson's The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger , reviewed here.

The topic is summarized in The Transportation Experience in Chapter 16.

From CNN Optical illusion helps create fake speed bumps

This is the third in a continuing series asking deep questions about the nature of transportation analysis. Previous episodes include:

1. Why do commute distances and times rise with income

2. The Transportationist: Are sunk costs sunk, is salvage value salvageable? A paradox in engineering economics analysis

So,

3. Can small units of time be given the same value of time as larger units of time. In other words, do 60 improvements each saving a traveler 1 minute equal 1 improvement saving a traveler 60 minutes? Similarly, does 1 improvement saving a 1000 travelers 1 minute equal the value of time of a single traveler of 1000 minutes. These are different problems, one is intra-traveler and one is inter-traveler, but related.

Several issues arise.

A. Is value of time linear or non-linear? To this we must conclude the value of time is surely non-linear. I am much more agitated waiting 3 minutes at a red light than 2, and I begin to suspect the light is broken. Studies of ramp meters show a similar phenomena, as in our paper Weighting Waiting:
Evaluating Perception of In-Vehicle Travel Time Under Moving and Stopped Conditions .

B. How do we apply this in a benefit-cost analysis? If we break one project into 60 smaller projects, each with a smaller value of travel time saved, and then we added the gains, we would get a different result than the what obtains with a single large project. For analytical convenience, we would like our analyses to be additive, not sub-additive, otherwise arbitrarily dividing the project changes the result. In particular many smaller projects will produce an undercount that is quite significant, and result in a much lower benefit than if the projects were bundled.

As a practical matter, every Benefit/Cost Analysis I have seen assumes a single value of time, rather than assuming non-linear value of time. (Alert me if you have a counter-example).

On the other hand, mode choice analyses do however weight different components of travel time differently, especially transit time (i.e. in-vehicle time is less onerous than waiting time). The implicit value of time for travelers does depend on the type of time (though generally not the amount of time). Using the log-sum of the mode choice model as a measure of benefit would implicitly account for this.

There are too many Starbucks, and Starbucks agrees ... Starbucks closing 600 stores in U.S. .

From SFGate: KCBS traffic reporter's plane crash-lands; no serious injuries

"(06-30) 16:15 PDT OAKLAND -- A small airplane carrying a traffic reporter for KCBS radio was forced to crash land in an Oakland rock quarry just south of the Interstate 80 approach to the Bay Bridge this afternoon, authorities said.

The pilot of the Cessna 172 suffered minor injuries and the reporter was unharmed when the plane touched down hard just before 1 p.m. at 2020 Wake Ave., near the East Bay Municipal Utility District's wastewater treatment plant, said Oakland fire Capt. Melinda Drayton.

The 35-year-old pilot was treated at a hospital for a cut to his forehead. His name was not released. KCBS identified the reporter as Alan Brooks.

Motorists using a nearby off-ramp were delayed briefly."