February 2013 Archives

Christian Wolmar writes: Innovation ignored at our peril :

"One of the reasons for my scepticism about HS2 is on the basis that it does not take into account future development of technology. Just look at how technology has changed since 1993 when mobile phones had barely taken root, Google, Facebook and Twitter were but twinkles in their founders’ eye and digital TV was just starting. Will there really be enough people wanting to pile into what are likely to be expensive trains in 20 years time to justify the huge expenditure on this project?

And here’s where I stick my neck out. The next big technology, one with such huge implications that it is impossible to being to predict them, is driverless cars. Google, which is investing billions in the project, announced back in August that its fleet of more than a dozen driverless cars had completed 300,000 miles – ten times round the world – without an accident. The cars have driven through San Francisco and through various parts of California and Nevada – where a law has been passed allowing them – and while there are no plans to produce them commercially yet, their time will inevitably come.

Perhaps they will start by being driven only on motorways but even that would have enormous consequences. It would combine many of the advantages of train travel with the flexibility of car use. Think trucks, too. The economics of transport would change as radically as they did when the railways were first developed. The time frame may be a decade or two, but the consequences will be much more far reaching than, say, the much talked about electric cars. The driverless car – or rather motor vehicle – is the innovation that we ought all to be taking into account in our future thinking."

Global Warming needs an advertising campaign. While those trying to stop it are well-funded, and many organizations try to deny it or minimize its effects, almost no one is selling us on its merits. Global warming opponents make is seem like the earth is going to become a dried up desert-like husk. One of my friends insists it's too late, the Earth is Toast.

Embrace that idea. Instead of the "Earth is toast", we need to say It's Toasted, giving the new and improved earth a warm and cozy feel, like a hot breakfast on a Winter's Day. And every day, we are slightly more and more toasted.

Now at streets.mn: Just-in-time consumption: Does the `pint of milk test’ hold water?:

"As with stores, houses too are getting larger over the long run. New suburban homes have more space to store goods in-house. While urban residents export storage to common stores, suburban residents more likely to have second freezers, have more space to store stuff."

This is an update from a post first published in 2007.

Jessica Schoner @ Network Distance on: StarTrib on Gender and Driving, and the Oh-so-timely Death of "Woman Driver" Jokes

She writes

"Given all these external forces that influence travel needs and choices, my conclusion is that there is likely no inherent physiological difference causing the difference in travel behavior; or if a biological difference exists, it is marginal and unmeasurable relative to these larger forces. These social, economic, and cultural forces shape the stereotypes of male and female drivers that we are so familiar with."

I agree culture is important. I disagree that physiological differences don't have effects. In particular, I think culture has a large biological component (culture and biology are mutually co-evolving systems). Risk taking has clear biological elements to it, and obviously drives a lot of traffic safety issues.

At streets.mn I note that the Twin Cities is Fastest Metropolitan Area in the United States (outside of California)

Aimee Blanchette @ Strib: With more total driver's licenses, women passing men on the roads :

The jokes about dreadful female drivers can officially take a back seat.

For the first time ever, more women than men have driver’s licenses nationwide. This gender gap reversal means safer roads and less pollution.

That’s according to the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute, which says that in 2010, 105 million women held licenses, compared with 104 million men. Women are more likely to purchase “smaller, safer and more fuel-efficient vehicles” and “drive less and tend to have a lower fatality rate per distance driven,” said Michael Sivak, the study’s co-author.

The stereotype, however, has been a joke as long as women have been driving.

“It wasn’t true and I don’t think people find it funny anymore,” said David Levinson, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota.“Statistics have long shown that the average woman is a slightly safer driver than the average man.”

The Webcast for Accessibility Now and in the Future is now available. (Andrew Owen presented it at CTS yesterday). The presentation is also available for download.

The full research reports are:

• Annual Accessibility Measure for the Twin Cities Metropolitan Region, and
• Using Twin Cities Destinations and their Accessibility as a Multimodal Planning Tool

Brendon writes in:

Heating a sidewalk section has climate change implications. I calculate the 26-year cost of your section at $8,722 at the low end and $9,708 at the high end (depending on the discount rate you assign to the future impacts of climate change. I tend to lean towards the higher end). This means your break-even point is 8% to 20% higher, meaning maybe 173 to 192 pedestrians per day. Of course with a carbon tax in place, there would likely be more walkers in some places, meaning heating the sidewalks become feasible in more places.

Now, if you could use waste heat that hasn't been previously captured to heat sidewalks, as they are proposing to do with the new "interchange" plaza and HERC steam, the carbon footprint becomes effectively zero additional. Much less per kWh/BTU.

Other interesting facts, heating all the sidewalks in Minneapolis with electricity from the grid for one year would produce more greenhouse gases than the disposal of all our solid waste and wastewater does over the same time period. The additional energy consumption would be equal to about 1/3 of the current annual consumption in all residential properties in the city. It would increase the city's annual electricity consumption by 8%.

He nicely identifies a feedback effect, heating up sidewalks will create more emissions, which will heat the atmosphere, which will eventually negate the need for heating up sidewalks. There must be an equilibrium point here.

More seriously, the use of waste heat is a great idea, especially near the HERC. The problem would be building infrastructure to distribute that more broadly. There might also be waste heat from wastewater (which is still liquid in the winter, and thus warmer than the ground around it) which we don't capture, or let go to roads, by running sewers under the streets rather than the sidewalks.

In the absence of significant global warming, Minnesotans still need to contend with ice on the sidewalks (to be clear, in the presence of significant global warming, we would have other problems; and in the presence of significant global cooling, we would face snow and glaciers rather than freezing rain and ice).

My own house suffers this problem, despite (or because of) snow clearance, ice re-forms on the sidewalks and steps, or freezing rain falls on the cleared sidewalks, making them slick, rather than on snow-covered sidewalks, making them crunchy. Further, water drips from the house and gutters because of ice dams, and then freezes on the ground.

My alma mater, Georgia Tech, while not typically subject to much snow or ice, has many sidewalks just above steam-heat pipes, which would clear those sidewalks pretty readily in most conditions. The University of Minnesota does a pretty good job with snow clearance, all things considered, using a lot of labor and snow clearance machines in the process.

Ice clearance is hard in this freeze-melt cycle, especially when the water has no where to drain because (1) the sidewalks are convex (along either width or length), (2) the boulevards are covered in snow creating no place for run off to go and creating a source for new melted water, (3) the storm drains are covered in snow, and (4) the ground is still frozen and/or the soil above the freeze line is super-saturated.

I see a lot of attention to ice-free roads, and very little for ice-free sidewalks. This would greatly enhance walkability, reduce the likelihood of severe injury, and increase the number of pedestrians.

There are a variety of ways to address icy sidewalks:

• Mechanical: clearing sidewalks with shovels and pick-axes and snow-bots.
• Friction: Sand, Grit, Gravel make the ice more walkable (by increasing friction);
• Chemical: Salt (reduces ice via melting);
• Radiant: heated sidewalks (using a variety of techniques);
• Protection: covered sidewalks; and

If we consider the cost of an icy sidewalk equal to the probability of a fall multiplied by the cost of a fall, multiplied by the number of people who face that probability per day, times the number of days the sidewalk is icy, we can get a sense of the amount we should invest to avoid the ice.

Let's say I fall once a year on the ice (typical), after traveling 2.6 km * 2 times a day * 10 ice days = 52 km. My fall rate: is 1 fall per 52 km of ice.

For a house with 10 m of frontage, with 100 pedestrians a day, it gets 1 km of pedestrian traffic per day. Once every 52 icy days, it will see someone fall.

The cost of a fall is unclear, since most falls are unreported. For reported falls which require medical care, the estimate is on the order of $10,000. Let's assume 10% of falls require medical attention, meaning the average cost per fall is $1,000.

This implies that every 52 icy days (once every 5.2 years if there are 10 icy days per year), each house with icy sidewalks imposes $1,000 in costs. In that case, if we want to minimize social costs, we should be willing to invest $19 day in effective ice clearance. This is about an hour of labor (or two hours of undergraduate labor) to operate simple machines plus some cheap (Friction or Chemical based) treatments). Unfortunately, I am unclear whether $19/day is effective.

We could add delay costs, due to people walking slower on ice, which I estimate to be about a 10% reduction in walking speed. With a travel speed typically of 1.44 m/s, we might decrease that to 1.3 m/s. So instead of the 100 pedestrians taking 7 seconds each to walk in front of the house, they are taking 7.7 seconds. That is 70 person-seconds per day, which has an economic value of (@ $15/hour) of $0.30 per day, two orders of magnitude lower than the fall costs, and so not really worth discussing further.

But can we prevent the ice from forming?

For $1000 every 5.2 years, we get $5000 for a 26 year expected life of a capital investment. If we can make a capital investment of less than $5000 to eliminate falls on our public sidewalk, it would be socially worthwhile.

The cost of heating sidewalks is about $20 per square foot (or about $215 per square meter). A 10 meter by 2 meter sidewalk is 20 meters square, giving us a cost of $4305.

We must consider operating costs, which are estimated at $.60/hour. If it is operating 240 hours per year (this is a guess, I don't know how long it needs to operate to keep the sidewalk ice free), this is $144 year. (You might run it to melt snow, but that has fewer benefits, just avoiding shoveling, not reduced falling in this simple model, so I don't consider that). $144 per year is $3744 over 26 years (no discounting), so is a large fraction of the capital costs.

Unfortunately, $4305+$3744 > $5000, so 100 pedestrians is not enough to justify heating. However 160 pedestrians would be a break-even point.

Covering the sidewalks (200m of roofing) could cost $80/square foot ($860/square meter). This lasts 15 years. For 20 square meters, this costs $17,200, well out of range for our residential sidewalk if the only objective is ice reduction, especially since it only lasts 15 years. It might have other benefits, such as reducing our exposure to nature and street-life though.

Policy recommendation: Use student labor to clear sidewalks with low pedestrian flows. Heat sidewalks which have high pedestrian flows. Cover sidewalks with very high pedestrian flows.

Yes, I did fall this year. This post was written between my vertical and horizontal positions, so I apologize in advance for its rushed nature.

Brendon Slotterback responds to Andrew Owen's post yesterday at Street.MN at Net Density on a Department of Accessibility :

"What if instead of a Department of Transportation we had a Department of Accessibility and it’s mission was to improve accessibility while meeting environmental standards, building resilient systems, and being economically viable? I bet it would look at lot different than our current DOTs (hint: it would do a lot more with land use)."

I think this compares favorably against Richard Florida's proposal for a Department of Cities.

The Department of Accessibility is conceived of as at the state (or metropolitan) level, where the decision making for transportation does (and should) occur and where decision making for land use might occur (now it is mostly local). In contrast, the Department of Cities is a federal initiative, without a clear reason as to why Cities (or any specific places) are a federal responsibility (since the benefits of improving any given city are almost all local).

In the text of the 2013 State of the Union (via MinnPost), transportation gets an important shout-out, with special attention to Fix-It-First:

"America’s energy sector is just one part of an aging infrastructure badly in need of repair. Ask any CEO where they’d rather locate and hire: a country with deteriorating roads and bridges, or one with high-speed rail and internet; high-tech schools and self-healing power grids. The CEO of Siemens America – a company that brought hundreds of new jobs to North Carolina – has said that if we upgrade our infrastructure, they’ll bring even more jobs. And I know that you want these job-creating projects in your districts. I’ve seen you all at the ribbon-cuttings.

Tonight, I propose a “Fix-It-First” program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country. And to make sure taxpayers don’t shoulder the whole burden, I’m also proposing a Partnership to Rebuild America that attracts private capital to upgrade what our businesses need most: modern ports to move our goods; modern pipelines to withstand a storm; modern schools worthy of our children. Let’s prove that there is no better place to do business than the United States of America. And let’s start right away."

We have talked about Fix-it-first here before. In fact, Matt Kahn and I wrote a white paper on it: Fix It First, Expand It Second, Reward It Third: A New Strategy for America’s Highways for Brookings. For full details, read the report, the abstract is here:

The roads and bridges that make up our nation’s highway infrastructure are in disrepair as a result of insufficient maintenance—a maintenance deficit that increases travel times, damages vehicles, and can lead to accidents that cause injuries or even fatalities. This deficit is in part due to a prioritization of new projects over care for existing infrastructure and contributes to a higher-cost, lower-return system of investment. This paper proposes a reorganization of our national highway infrastructure priorities to “Fix It First, Expand It Second, and Reward It Third.” First, all revenues from the existing federal gasoline tax would be devoted to repair, maintain, rehabilitate, reconstruct, and enhance existing roads and bridges on the National Highway System. Second, funding for states to build new and expand existing roads would come from a newly created Federal Highway Bank, which would require benefit-cost analysis to demonstrate the efficacy of a new build. Third, new and expanded transportation infrastructure that meets or exceeds projected benefits would receive an interest rate subsidy from a Highway Performance Fund to be financed by net revenues from the Federal Highway Bank.

The Federal Highway Bank does not exist in that name, but there is the related, and recently expanded $1 billion per year TIFIA program housed within US DOT, which has similar loan and line-of-credit powers (for all of transportation, not just roads). The claim is that "each dollar of budget authority can leverage approximately $10 in lending capacity, " since banks can print money in the US. But policy is not as crisp as we would like, loans can be repaid from any approved source, including non-project related revenue (though project revenue is preferred), no Benefit/Cost test is required, and current policy still permits federal grants for new construction. Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog discusses some of the other distinctions between a bank and TIFIA. See Congressional Research Service's Surface Transportation Funding and Programs Under MAP-21: Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (P.L. 112-141) for an intelligible summary of MAP-21.

Some takes on the President's call from

• The Hill: ‘Fix It First’ program takes aim at road repair
• Matthew Yglesias at Slate: Fix It First

Some local news sources got into the act, along the lines of "Deficient Infrastructure: Can it happen here", which of course it can and does, thus giving a nice local angle to a national speech:

• Elmhurst Patch: Obama's 'Fix it First' Program Would Mend 'Deficient' Elmhurst Bridges
• New Lenox Patch: Obama's 'Fix it First' Program Would Mend 'Deficient' Will County Bridges

Matt Kahn and I didn't invent the slogan, it's been around for a while, though our take is a bit more than a slogan, and more hard core than what was adopted in Map-21 (which does move in the right direction, but not far enough).

Still, not everyone likes the idea, the Public Works Finance, e.g.

Andrew Owen writes at Streets.MN : I Love Accessibility :

"That, in a nutshell, is accessibility. It combines the value that we get from travel with the cost of making the trip. I love accessibility because it neatly encapsulates what I consider to be the fundamental purpose of transportation systems: providing ways for people to get to places they want to reach, at costs they are willing to pay."

Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities asked via Twitter last week: Should We Replace the Term 'Congestion Pricing'? :

"Two favorites in my mind come from transport scholar David Levinson, who suggests road fees for general road pricing (and peak road fees for road pricing aimed at heavy congestion), and urban planner Laurence Lui, who recommends road fares. What's nice about road fare is that it parallels mass transit, has an intuitive purpose, and offers flexibility. You can alter it to suit a specific situation — peak road fare, midtown road fare, etc. — without obscuring the basic meaning."

The term "fare" definitely has a public transit connotation, its definition is: "The price of conveyance or passage in a bus, train, airplane, or other vehicle."

The etymology is more general though:

fare (n.) Old English fær "journey, road, passage, expedition," strong neuter of faran "to journey" (see fare (v.)); merged with faru "journey, expedition, companions, baggage," strong fem. of faran. Original sense is obsolete, except in compounds (wayfarer, sea-faring, etc.) Meaning "food provided" is c.1200; that of "conveyance" appears in Scottish early 15c. and led to sense of "payment for passage" (1510s).

On the other-hand fee comes from

fee (n.) late 13c., from Old French fieu, fief "fief, possession, holding, domain; feudal duties, payment," from Medieval Latin feodum "land or other property whose use is granted in return for service," widely said to be from Frankish *fehu-od "payment-estate," or a similar Germanic compound, in which the first element is cognate with Old English feoh "money, movable property, cattle" (also German Vieh "cattle," Gothic faihu "money, fortune"), from PIE *peku- "cattle" (cf. Sanskrit pasu, Lithuanian pekus "cattle;" Latin pecu "cattle," pecunia "money, property"); second element similar to Old English ead "wealth."

OED rejects this, and suggests a simple adaptation of Germanic fehu, leaving the Medieval Latin -d- unexplained. Sense of "payment for services" first recorded late 14c. Fee-simple is "absolute ownership," as opposed to fee-tail "entailed ownership," inheritance limited to some particular class of heirs (second element from Old French taillir "to cut, to limit").

I could go either way, but I think "fee" is better established and more likely to be adopted.

BI reprints my HSR article from last week: Why Covering The US In High-Speed Rail Makes No Sense At All:

"When we study successful technologies and networks (e.g. The Internet, the London Underground), we see they grow from a seed, and expand outward - not from the top down. This is natural, it is risk-averse, it allows learning to occur before over-building. Not all technologies or networks will succeed, it is best to learn that early than after building a giant White Elephant."

Now at streets.mn, my "Valentine's Week" entry: I Love My Commute :

"Further, the shortest path route allows me to see the traffic on I-94 twice, so I can check on the status of bottlenecks (which I realize is a highly idiosyncratic reason to like one’s commute, but it’s a professional hazard)."

And notice (you cannot fail) the new (temporary) background.

David King too praises Canadian Transport Policy: Transport Finance without the Feds: The Canadian Model:

"There are certainly problems with the decentralized system. Some Canadians want a national transit agency. Fragmented governance in regions makes coordination difficult, and perhaps a stronger regional agency is needed. Most difficult, perhaps, is that many cities forego transit service all together. The city of Guelph, for instance, has 120,000 people but no bus service. However, eliminating unproductive transit so that resources can be used elsewhere is actually good policy. But by nearly every measure Canadian transport policy outcomes are superior to US outcomes. Whether US transport finance and policy devolves to the states remains to be seen, but it certainly isn’t something that should be dismissed as inferior to what we have now. It may well be better."

Maps are powerful ideas. A map once drawn can be viewed as a contract, a promise to build something. We live with the ghosts of maps drawn long ago. Unbuilt highways queue-up to get built, even when their rationale has disappeared. But lines remain unbuilt for a reason, people perceived the benefit did not outweigh the cost. Of course, conditions can change, a line which once failed a benefit-cost test may now pass it, or vice versa.

High-speed rail advocates have long assembled maps of proposed routes. I have a collection of them here. These all present different visions of the future, and they can't all come to pass. But does that mean none of them should?

A private firm would build high-speed rail if the expected profits exceeded the expected costs. Clearly that is not generally the case in the United States, otherwise we would see more evidence of this. There are certainly proposals, some farther along than others. The most likely right now appears to be the All Aboard Florida project. I hope it succeeds.

The public sector remains uninterested in profit, but instead should favor the more ambiguous general welfare. High-speed rail makes sense when the full economic benefits outweigh the full economic costs. The potential benefits include time savings for travelers, increased reliability, improved quality of service, reduced congestion on roadways and at airports, reduced pollution from automobiles and airplanes, and more economic activity as a result of the improved accessibility. The potential costs are those of constructing the system, operating it, the pollution costs associated with construction and operations, and so on. The evidence is that the capital costs of the new system do not outweigh potential reductions in pollution.

The first map nicely draws with bright colors a possible United States High Speed Rail System. The second map, from Streets.mn blogger Mike Hicks, shows actual Amtrak ridership today. Actual ridership is highest in the Northeast corridor, where the Acela service, along with other conventional passenger rail runs today. The other big Amtrak markets are between San Diego and Los Angeles, between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area, between Seattle and Portland, and between Chicago and a variety of midwestern cities, in particular St. Louis.

Corridors that get traffic now with relatively slow service are more likely to get higher levels of demand when upgraded (made faster and more frequent) than corridors that get almost no ridership now. This argues for (1) incremental upgrades where the benefits outweigh the costs, (2) focusing on specific proven markets rather than trying to connect random large cities.

We should be looking for routes where train is more cost-effective than either driving or taking an airplane. This distance is certainly less than 600 miles for most of the US, under current costs of travel. (Once we have proven we can connect large places closer than 100 miles, we should connect large places less than 200 miles, and then expand outward. We should not start with a grand vision which will simply collapse of its own weight). We should also be looking for routes with large trip generators at either end.

Examining the first map shows a lot of non-sensical routes. I can't rate them in order of nonsensicalness, some are just too problematic.

This is not to say there are not segments which could productively be (and are) served by rail. The Northeast corridor is one. Chicago to Milwaukee is one. Los Angeles to San Diego is one. There are a few others. The key point is they are local serving, and should be locally supported. There is no need for US federal involvement. If the projects are worthwhile, the states and cities and private railroads should fund them. Almost all the benefits are local, the costs should be borne by those who benefit.

These segments can grow into systems that should be (1) separately organized, managed, governed, and operated to improve local responsiveness and reliability, and (2) allowed to evolve organically based on incremental changes and extensions. We do not ask San Francisco's BART to interline with Washington DC's Metro, nor should we expect a useful local service from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana to interline with a potentially useful route from Richmond to Washington, DC. By doing so you create dependencies (a blizzard in the Northeast holds up train service in Illinois) without any advantages.

High-speed rail is a difficult proposition to begin with in the United States. In the 50 years after it was opened in Japan, it has yet to come to pass in the US. There are reasons for this, beyond simple political obstinacy. The markets are different, the conditions are different (when HSR was opened in Japan, its airlines were highly regulated, e.g. Further, Japan has a much higher overall population density.) The US has been unimpressed with its passenger rail service for many decades (since well before Amtrak was formed to pick up the pieces of private passenger rail service), and has lost its rail-building and train-building skill-base.

When we study successful technologies and networks (e.g. The Internet, the London Underground), we see they grow from a seed, and expand outward - not from the top down. This is natural, it is risk-averse, it allows learning to occur before over-building. Not all technologies or networks will succeed, it is best to learn that early than after building a giant White Elephant.

The Buzzer blog has a nice link: » TransLink 101: What is TransLink, anyway?

TransLink is the multi-modal transportation organization for Greater Vancouver, BC, and it is unlike what we see in the States. It is in fact, closer to the idea described in Enterprising Roads, a transportation utility with autonomy constrained by oversight.

One of the key points to consider is that metropolitan Vancouver has a transit mode share of 21%, comparable with much larger Toronto and Montreal (though behind metro New York's 30%, it is well ahead of Seattle's 9%), despite ranking 34th in population. Some of that has to do with institutional factors and governance.

TransLink describe's its organization in a long, though well-done and readable, report:

The province agreed to provide six cents of tax room from the provincial fuel tax, which would be a major funding source, and also give the GVTA the parking sales tax revenue. The GVTA would have the ability to generate a steady stream of revenue through levying taxes; however, any increase in taxes would have to first be approved by the GVRD board. The only increase the GVTA could implement on its own was to transit fares.

...

“You can look at it as if it’s no different from water or sewers, or any other kind of utility,” Cameron said. “So what are the financing principles behind those utilities? They’re user pay, essentially. You use water and sewer revenues to pay for water and sewer services, and the aim was to get transportation services to be autonomous, self-financing, self-constructing utilities.”

Canada should consider exporting this model of governance to the US.

Recently published:

• Iacono, Michael and Levinson, David (2013) Case Studies of Transportation Investment to Identify the Impacts on the Local and State Economy, Minnesota Department of Transportation, MN/RC 2013-03

Abstract:

"This project provides case studies of the impact of transportation investments on local economies. We use multiple approaches to measure impacts since the effects of transportation projects can vary according to the size of a project and the size of the area under study, as well as other exogenous factors such as existing economic and demographic conditions. We measure effects on economic output and employment to estimate impacts of specific investments, and address issues of generative versus redistributive effects of investments, as well as identify specific economic sectors that might be disproportionately affected by such investments."

Executive Summary:

There remains a large amount of interest at state and local levels in using transportation investment as a means to promote economic development. Cities and regions that are growing slowly or not at all view improvements to infrastructure networks, especially transportation networks, as a potential way to stimulate growth by lowering the costs of local firms and making their location a more attractive place for private investment and expansion. Transportation investment programs often become more attractive when coupled with the offer of grants from higher levels of government. They also benefit from the reputation of infrastructure projects as a “safe” type of investment during periods of lower growth. This has been seen most recently with the United States government’s promotion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, where infrastructure spending became emblematic of the bill’s efforts to promote employment, despite being a relatively small portion of the overall spending. Yet, as fewer resources have become available for such projects at the state and local levels in recent years, state departments of transportation and other public works organizations have begun to sharpen their focus to determine where and how such resources should be deployed to yield the greatest returns. This study evaluates the potential of transportation investment to generate increases in private economic activity by empirically examining a recent set of case studies of highway improvement projects in Minnesota.

Transportation investment is but one of the competing factors influencing patterns of economic development, and so as a first step in our study we examine the empirical literature on a number of factors, including transportation, that have been cited previously as affecting development. The factors reviewed include things like human capital and education, taxation and regulatory regimes, quality of life factors, and other types of non-transportation infrastructure such as sewer and water systems, schools and telecommunication systems. Broadly speaking, the factors centering around human capital and labor quality seem to be most important. Taxation and regulation levels are fairly important as well, though they seem to matter less at the national level than at the boundaries between state and local jurisdictions. Quality of life factors remain fairly prominent as well. The most cited factors in this category include things like favorable climates, which have accounted for a great deal of variation in regional population growth in the U.S. over the past several decades, as well as environmental quality and other natural amenities. Since some of these factors (e.g. environmental quality) are under the purview of state and local governments, they tend to complicate the analysis of factors such as taxation and regulation, as a full accounting these factors requires an analysis of their outcomes (e.g. how tax revenues are spent). Many types of non-transportation infrastructure have been found to correlate with economic development, though the direction of causality between them has not always been clearly identified. Finally, much of the evidence on the relationship between transportation investment and economic development suggests that there could be some moderately positive growth effects from improvements to transportation networks, but that the returns to transportation investment have been generally declining over time as many types of networks have matured.

How do transportation improvements translate into effects on economic growth? Theory suggests that different forces are at work depending on where the improvements are being made. Within urban areas, the primary contribution of transportation improvements for many types of industries is their ability to facilitate agglomeration effects. Firms in the same industry within a city may benefit from the use of certain shared inputs, such as specialized pools of skilled labor. A highly developed transportation network could increase firms’ access to these types of inputs and thus make them more productive. Outside of large urban areas, several other types of effects might dominate. These include the ability to expand the use of existing resources such as labor and capital (a scale effect), increases in the productivity of existing inputs, and the attraction of new resources and productive inputs (people and new firms) to an area. Several of these effects can take place simultaneously in response to a transportation improvement, thus making it difficult to disentangle their relative contributions.

These processes are not often observed directly due to the lack of quality data at the level of an individual firm. Thus, many analyses of transportation and economic activity rely on data collected at a geographically more aggregate level. In this study we focus on private sector earnings and employment data, collected at the county and city level, respectively, as appropriate measures of economic activity. Both data sources are used to construct panel data sets, which can be used to estimate the effects of the completion of the projects over time.

The first part of our analysis focuses on the case studies of the expansion of US 71/TH 23 (including the Willmar Bypass) near Willmar, Minnesota and the expansion of TH 371 (including the Brainerd Bypass) between Little Falls and the Brainerd/Baxter area. In both cases, county-level earnings by industry are used as the unit of observation. The analysis focuses on the construction, manufacturing, retail and wholesale industries as these have been identified in previous studies as “transportation-intensive” industries. Earnings data from 1991 to 2009 are collected for the county (or counties, as is the case for the TH 371 project) in which the project is located, along with neighboring counties, forming a panel data set. These data are used to fit an earnings regression with controls for population, state-level earnings in the industry of interest, and national output. The model is estimated using a panel correction technique that accounts for correlation across panels in the data as well as serial correlation. The effect of the improvement is estimated via a series of interaction variables that identify the county in which the improved highway is located, along with the time period of the observation (pre-, post- or during construction). Results indicate that none of the industries studied in either of the case study locations show evidence of statistically significant increases in earnings following completion of the respective improvements, once population and macroeconomic trends are controlled for.

The second part of the analysis examines in greater detail the spatial effects on development that might be expected from the case study highway projects. While the analysis of county-level industry earnings did not indicate any significant growth effects, it is possible that the projects might have induced changes in growth rates at the sub-county level. To test this possibility, we use city-level data on total employment for municipalities within the county where the project is located. Total employment data is used to ensure that smaller towns in the sample are not frequently excluded due to data suppression, a problem that would become more pronounced with further disaggregation. The employment data, which are available from 2000 through 2010, are again assembled to form a panel data set which is used to fit employment regressions. The employment
regressions have a similar structure to the models used in the analysis of industry earnings, except that the “treatment” effect of the highway expansions are specified differently. Cities in the sample are stratified according to their location relative to the improved highway. Cities are identified as being located along the improved highway segment, upstream or downstream from the improved highway (and thus likely to still receive some benefit), or neither. Again, these location attributes are interacted with variables identifying when the observation took place. Due to the shorter time series element in this data set, only pre- and post-construction periods are considered – the “construction” period is combined with the period prior to the commencement of construction. The results of the employment regressions indicate similar findings to those provided by the analysis of industry earnings, with little evidence of statistically significant impacts of the highway expansion projects on employment in the towns most directly affected by them.

The results of the analyses of industry earnings and employment for the various case studies appear to be strikingly consistent across locations, an important finding considering the different growth rates and industrial composition of the various case study locations. We cannot completely rule out the possibility that the projects did have some positive effect on employment, but that it was not distinguishable due the underlying amount of variance in the data. Were this the case though, the effects in question would still be quite small, in most cases on the order of a couple of percentage points. We also note the effect of the recent recession on our results, especially those using the employment data. Despite our efforts to control for macroeconomic trends, the recession undoubtedly had profound effects on private investment and business formation, both of which coincide with the latter years of our data. These years would also be the period when we would expect to see any growth effects from the improved highways.

With these caveats in mind, we may be able to draw some conclusions about the relative role of transportation investment in economic development. First, the lack of evidence of statistically significant effects on economic growth from the types of projects considered here are not unprecedented. Indeed, as our review of the empirical literature on transportation infrastructure and economic development revealed, a number of recent studies have indicated lower, if still positive, overall returns to transportation infrastructure. This seems plausible. While the introduction the of the Interstate highways often provided order of magnitude-type improvements in travel times between large cities, most contemporary projects are generally smaller in scope and involve modifying a relatively mature network. In a similar vein, our review of the factors affecting economic development seemed to indicate a continuing, non-trivial role for several non-transportation factors, some of which may be amenable to economic development policy.

We are certain that there will continue to be significant amounts of transportation investment in highways and other networks in the years to come, whether justified explicitly by economic development criteria or not. An important consideration for the evaluation of these investments should continue to be whether or not these projects generate net social benefits. Evaluations focusing on the user (and to a certain extent, nonuser) benefits that flow from a given transportation project will naturally be able to account for benefits like travel time savings, which are valued by users but which may not show up in conventional economic accounts. Under this type of evaluation, projects that might be justified on economic development grounds (i.e. employment or output effects) would likely be funded anyway, since they would almost certainly generate positive net social benefits. This conclusion also applies to transportation investment undertaken for purposes of fiscal stimulus and macroeconomic stabilization.

To legally ride the LRT in Minneapolis, you need to buy a ticket, or tap in with your Go-To card. I recently made a trip to DC via LRT (at Franklin Avenue) (and a bus, and an airport shuttle, and an airplane, and a Metrorail train, and of course, on foot), and was anticipating having to tap the Go-To card reader at the middle of the station where it had been since 2004. Lo and behold, when I arrived, the reader was at the station entrance, where it should be, and not in the middle where it had been, where I might spend an extra 15 seconds walking and miss the train. I don't know when this change took place, but it is the kind of attention to operational detail and consideration of the customer's time that is important. So thank you unnamed persons at MetroTransit who ordered the Go-To card reader moved, or added another one.

Accessibility Now and in the Future:

"Tuesday, February 19 2:45 – 3:45 p.m. CST

Room 1130, Mechanical Engineering Building
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN

Presented in conjunction with a joint meeting of the Transportation Planning and the Environment Council and the Transportation and the Economy Council.

About the Event

This presentation will discuss the techniques developed for a 2010 accessibility evaluation of the Twin Cities metropolitan region as part of the interdisciplinary Access to Destinations project. The 2010 accessibility evaluation sought to generate an accurate representation of accessibility in 2010 and to identify data sources, methods, and metrics that can be used in future evaluations.

The seminar will include a discussion of the methodology that can be used to implement future evaluations of accessibility, including a discussion of the development and use of software tools created for this evaluation. Study recommendations for the future will also be shared, such as the importance of standardizing data sources and parameters to ensure comparability between multiple evaluations over time. Other highlights include the need for data sources and methodology that provide a good representation of actual conditions, are based on measurements rather than models, and are usable with a minimum of manual processing and technical expertise.

Speakers

David Levinson is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Minnesota and co-leader of the Access to Destinations study. His current research focuses on understanding the process of network growth, evaluating transportation technology and policy, and modeling travel behavior.

Andrew Owen is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, where he is pursuing master's degrees in civil engineering and urban and regional planning. His research interests include network structure, travel behavior, transit systems, and multimodal accessibility. 

Webcast

The seminar will also be broadcast live on the web and available for later viewing. The live broadcast access link will be available here on the day of the event."

JW sends me to Dan Ariely on "The Pain of Paying"

JW writes:

Here is an interesting presentation by Dan Ariely about the pain of paying. I think there are implications for infrastructure spending. There is a tradeoff between reducing the pain of paying and creating a moral conflict, or developing morally dubious payment schemes. For example, general revenue funds are a common pool resource with all of the tragedy of the commons issues - as people try to exploit the "resource" first before it is exhausted. Tolls create a higher pain of paying than gas taxes. Motor vehicle registration fees probably fall in between. Property taxes may not be recognized as funding local roads and so the pain (and anger) may be misdirected. Vehicle mileage taxes create a higher pain level than fuel taxes I think.

Ariely has a nice framing and discusses "saliency". Andrew Odlyzko and I identified mental transaction costs as a related factor in:

• Levinson, David and Andrew Odlyzko (2008) Too Expensive to Meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 366(1872) pp 2033–2046

My colleague and co-author Guangqing Chi on Gas Prices and Traffic Safety on video:

Some of the work he is describing is published in these papers:

• Chi, Guangchi, Jeremy Porter, Arthur Cosby and David Levinson (2013) The impact of gasoline price changes on traffic safety: a time geography explanation. Journal of Transport Geography Volume 28, April 2013, pp. 1-11 [doi]
• Chi, Guangqing, Xuan Zhou, Timothy E. McClure, Paul A. Gilbert, Arthur G. Cosby, Li Zhang, Angela A. Robertson, David Levinson (2011) Gasoline Prices and Their Relationship to Drunk-Driving Crashes. Accident Analysis and Prevention, [doi] 43(1) January 2011, Pages 194-203.
• Chi, Guangqing, Arthur Cosby, Mohammed A. Quddus, Paul Gilbert and David Levinson (2010) Gasoline Prices and Traffic Safety in Mississippi. Journal of Safety Research 41 493–500.

One interesting policy implication is that as gas prices go up, average insurance rates should go down, since risk is dropping. Whether it goes down by cohort, or just overall as the shares of various cohorts traveling changes, is unclear.

I get interviewed about the reliability measures of the new Urban Mobility Report by Ariel Hart of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Atlanta traffic bad but predictable :

"‘People care about this,’ said David Levinson, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Minnesota who researches traffic psychology surrounding reliability. People will even accept more congestion to get more reliability, he said, and he has a mathematical formula to calculate how much.

‘It’s the surprises, the inconsistency of the delay that makes it difficult,’ costing people social capital with colleagues, clients and friends when they are unexpectedly late, he said."

The reliability ratio, the ratio of the value of reliability to the value of time us about 1, depending on how it is measured. See

• Carrion, Carlos and David Levinson (2012) Value of Travel Time Reliability: A review of current evidence. Transportation Research part A 46(4) 720--741.

To read the Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report is to believe congestion has more than doubled since 1982 (really between 1982 and 2000). From one perspective, of course congestion must have risen, demand (Vehicle Miles Traveled, Population, etc.) increased significantly over this period while supply (Lane Miles of Road Capacity) did not increase at nearly the same rate.

But I was alive in 1982, I was in cars at that age (and driving myself the next year) (in Central Maryland). I remember congestion in the 1980s. To misquote Lloyd Bentsen, "Congestion was a friend of mine", and TTI seems to be saying to 1982 "You're no congestion". But congestion doesn't seem appreciably different from today. People complained about it then as much as now. Some bottlenecks have been fixed, new ones have emerged.

So I wonder whether congestion did, in fact, "double".

Some hypotheses:

1. Measurement issues. Continuous roadway travel time measurements were a lot scarcer in the 1980s than today. Freeways now have loop detectors on every segment, whereas there might have been a permanent recording station every 5 or 10 miles in the 1980s, so a lot more had to be estimated and approximated. There are still no good arterial measurements, the most recent Urban Mobility Report uses GPS data from Inrix, and this will clearly come to dominate congestion measures. Notably, including this measurement forced TTI to re-estimate downward their historical congestion measurements.

2. Definition: As noted by Joe Cortright's report Driven Apart, mobility is not accessibility. A city where I can reach everything in 10 minutes, but travel at 30 MPH (when freeflow is 60 MPH) is more congested than one where I can reach everything in 30 minutes, but can travel at freeflow conditions. The TTI in a sense penalizes efficient land uses.

3. Induced Demand: Highway expansion tends to get used up (this is not a bad thing of itself, just a thing), so much of road expansion gets eaten up in more traffic. Similarly highway reduction reduces travel. Duranton and Turner write "We conclude that an increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion."
This does not explain why congestion is under-estimated in the past though.

4. Congestion vs. Speed: Travel times on journey to work increased only marginally over this period. Average distances for trips rose faster than travel times, indicating average travel speeds increased. So even with increasing congestion, if travelers shifted to relatively faster (e.g. suburb to suburb freeways) from slower (e.g. suburb to city arterials), congestion can rise on each link, but travel speeds still increase. See The Rational Locator for an example of this.

5. Perspective: This previous point about perception can be refamed as one of perspective. There are differences between spatial averages (which TTI uses) and person-based averages (which individual observers perceive). So the person based average for any metropolitan resident may be the same, but the amount of space (network) covered by congestion may increase if the total amount of space which is developed increases. Similarly, if there is peak spreading, congestion occurs over a longer duration.

However, TTI is not simply saying that the amount of area that is congested increased, they are claiming, for Washington DC the delay per person increased from 20 hours per year in 1982 to 74 hours in 2010.

I am willing to believe that with recent measurements, 74 hours per year for an average commuter in DC is plausible in 2010, since that is just under 10 minutes each way each day for 225 work days per year. 10 minutes of delay on a 30 minute commute means the freeflow time on that commute (un-delayed, e.g. Sunday morning) was 20 minutes. This seems about right for the "average" commuter. Rush hour is when everyone has to slow down.

But this implies in 1982 that delay was less than 3 minutes a day per commuter each way. That seems unreasonably small when you think about it, I could have spent 3 minutes at a traffic light in DC at the time, and that certainly constitutes delay. They are saying for every person who had a 10 minute delay, 2 people had 0 delay to get an average 3 minute delay, and that is not the metropolitan Washington I was familiar with. Congestion was sufficiently important than that radio stations had regular traffic reports, and traffic helicopters, it was not something insignificant.

Of course this is impossible to fully validate, as we cannot go back in time and accurately measure speed. The best I could think of was using the Google NGram feature to track mention of some keywords in books. This proves nothing unfortunately, and suggests a small uptick in the word "traffic" in the 1990s, but is interesting none-the-less.

One however can imagine the motivation for wanting congestion to appear lower in the past than it actually was. This means congestion is rising faster, and thus creates a greater claim on the public weal than if congestion were always with us at roughly the same level.

We sometimes think of the city as a collection of objects in space that exist for the purpose of reducing the costs of human interaction. The city is also a collection of objects in time. Taking the long view, cities once did not exist (the time before the founding of the city), and eventually may not exist again. The list of abandoned cities is long, and will eventually, though this may sadden us, grow longer.

However the city also operates at shorter timeframes. There is the multi-decade cycle of infrastructure renewal and replacement. There is the multi-year (though random) cycle of sports team victories. There is the annual cycle of the city operating through the seasons, with winter and spring and summer and fall events. There is the daily cycle of flows of people into and out of the city.

Why do we see diurnal patterns of flows? Why is there a morning and afternoon peak, or rush hour? The answer is to ensure some set of people (peak commuters) are generally in the same place at the same time. And we do this to reduce inter-personal coordination costs. If we are generally in the same place, we don't need to pre-arrange meetings, we run into each other in the hallways, I can easily knock on your door, I see you on the sidewalk. Our temporal coordination costs drop. And even if we do need to pre-arrange, it is relatively simple. As I tell my students in class: "I am here because you are here, you are here because I am here." In contrast, if we are not generally in the same place, we do need to pre-arrange meetings, I will not randomly run into you. Our temporal coordination costs rise.

There are lots of people for whom the congestion costs of the peak outweigh benefits of organizing work on the "standard" schedule. Many people with shifts in workplaces that operate more than 8 hours a day (medical, police and fire, manufacturing, transportation, retail, some construction, media) travel in the off-peak. For some this is necessary (you don't want to change bus drivers in the middle of the peak), for others convenience (why travel at rush hour when it is unnecessary).

In the Central Time Zone, that peaking pattern is partially dictated by what happens on the East coast. People here go to work earlier than they otherwise would to ensure a greater overlap in time at work with those back East. Similarly, people involved in international trade may keep odd hours locally to coordinate with their customers or clients elsewhere in the world. In other parts of the world, schedules similarly adapt to the needs of trade, as well as local custom. In some places, work lasts until very late, but there are mid-day breaks.

This temporal coordination imposes the cost of increased loads on the transportation system, as people converge and diverge at the same time, requiring either more capacity or more crowding (and slower speeds). We could (and do) smooth the flows on transportation systems, encouraging peak spreading (some of which the market does by itself) through differentiated prices.

We can be spatially coordinated to reduce our scheduling costs, or we can be temporally coordinated so that we have lower space costs. The classic multi-purpose room in 1960s era Elementary schools, hot-desking, or shared parking between office, stadiums, retail, and churches are examples of a form of temporal coordination to share a scarce resource to reduce land and structure costs. Most temporal coordination though shares the scarce resource of the humans being on the same task at the same time, and thus requires more space. Typical cities provide both spatial and temporal coordination, putting people close together and having them do the same things at the same time.

Cities work to reduce temporal coordination costs, one of the many ways they enhance economies of agglomeration. But they do so by increasing spatial coordination costs. We cannot occupy the same latitude and longitude at the same time. If we want to do so, we must go vertical. This adds to the cost of construction. We do not have freedom to use our land any way we want to, we must share some rights to it, because society demands it. This diminishes our freedom of action.

One expects that improved information and communication technologies will reduce the need for in-person interaction, and we certainly see some of that. But reducing the call of the city does not eliminate it. So long as some physical interaction is required, cities of a form will emerge. The need for young men and young women of different genetic lines to somehow interact in person is one such call upon the pattern of the city.

Just as 200 years ago, the city was barely what it is today, 200 years from now, the city may differ again. Cities may return to being seasonal, like the classic Medieval trade fair. These once comprised entirely temporary structures, which gradually became permanent. Look at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds for a more recent example of the temporary becoming "permanent". Today we construct state fairs with permanent buildings, but world's fairs, which do not repeat annually, have temporary structures. While not made of paper mach´e, the buildings of Chicago's White City or even New York's 1963 World's Fair are largely gone. But the world's fair is a lot less significant than it once was.

If people lose their need for daily interaction, we should expect a thinning of the urban support system, less reliance on costly permanent infrastructure, and more reliance on the ad hoc. Humans will still require shelter, and those shelters may still cluster so long as transport still has costs, but we can easily imagine a world where advanced technology means we don't need to commute or shop more than weekly. And that means we don't need to live as close together. And with advanced driverless cars, even that burden (the need to focus on the task of driving) is lifted, enabling even more spread.

Recently Published:

• Huang, Arthur and David Levinson (2013) The structure and evolution of a skyway network The European Physical Journal: Special Topics January 2013, Volume 215, Issue 1, pp 123-134 [download]

We study the structure and evolution of the downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota skyway network. Developed by private building-owners, the network evolved from tree-like to grid-like over the course of 50 years. We find that decentralized forces with the goal of maximizing individual buildings’ profitability shaped the network. Our analysis shows that a building with greater office size, a sign of greater accessibility, was more likely to be connected earlier. The distribution of existing skyway segments is found to follow a power-law function of the average degree, closeness, and eigenvector centralities of the vertices. We further explain and model the evolutionary process using an agent-based model. The simulation results suggest that the model replicates the network structure and its evolutionary process.