Recently in Roads and Highways Category

I get quoted in Global Construction Review: $40bn “fix it first” plan headlines Obama’s infrastructure push

In his State of the Union address last month, US President Barack Obama proposed investing $50bn, starting right away, on the country’s transportation infrastructure.

Of that, $40bn would go toward the upgrades most urgently needed on highways, bridges, transit systems, and airports in what the White House has dubbed a “fix-it-first” policy.

“The national transportation system faces an immense backlog of state-of-good-repair projects, a reality underscored by the fact that there are nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges in the country today,” the White House said in a statement.
Mr Obama’s plan, which would need congressional approval, also proposes attracting private investment by pairing federal, state, and local governments with private capital, in what’s being called the “Rebuild America Partnership”.

And a third plank in the President’s infrastructure push is cutting red tape. Through a “historic modernisation of agency permitting and review regulations, procedures, and policies”, the President hopes to cut in half the duration of typical infrastructure projects.
The “fix-it-first” element of the plan received a muted welcome from Professor David M Levinson, an expert on the economics of infrastructure at the University of Minnesota.

“The priority should clearly be on repair because most of the system is built out, and we’ve had nationally declining travel over the last 10 years, so there’s not a major need for expansion nationally,” he told GCR.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has warned of an investment gap of $846bn in surface transportation
“The general problem is that the median age of an interstate highway link in the US is almost 50 years old now, and the expected lifespan of such links was in the order of 50 years.

“Generally most of the infrastructure that has got to be there 10 years from now is there now, and if we want it to be there ten years from now we need to fix it.”

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has warned of an infrastructure investment gap, between now and 2020, of $846bn in surface transportation. If not addressed, says the ASCE, this shortfall will hurt the US economy.

Is $40bn enough?

“No,” Prof Levinson said. “No one really knows what’s enough. It’s about the equivalent of one year’s federal spending on roads. So it would be like adding an extra year to the decade, or 10% more over 10 years. It’s not trivial. It’s not going to solve the problem, either, but it’s a real amount of money.”

He also questioned the wisdom of infrastructure investment driven by the federal government.
“The states should be addressing this,” he said. “They can prioritise things locally, they know where the issues are, and they’re the beneficiaries.

“They know how much they need to spend locally to satisfy the local risk-reward, benefit-cost ratio. The federal government allocates things by formula and that means there’s a major inefficiency there.”

Now at streets.mn There’s no business like snow business :

" I wouldn’t say we become bad drivers. We are bad drivers, we just reveal it when the environment changes to the unexpected."

Reihan Salam at NRO on Ending the Federal Surface-Transportation Program Might Be Crazy in a Good Way :

" So far, the most attractive realistic proposal for reforming federal highway expenditures is ‘Fix It First, Expand It Second, Reward It Third: A New Strategy for America’s Highways’ by Matthew Kahn and David Levinson, which calls for the following:

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.

But now Rohit Aggarwala of Bloomberg Philanthropies has called for a more radical approach, which might garner bipartisan support while forcing believers in competitive federalism to ‘put up or shut up.’ The proposal closely resembles an idea floated by Christopher Papagianis, my erstwhile Economics 21 colleague. Aggarwalla calls for abolition of the federal gasonline tax and the devolution of responsibility over surface transportation to state governments:

Getting rid of the tax would force a serious discussion in each state about how, and how much, to fund roads and transit. States could choose to reimpose the same tax, or they could set a different rate based on their desired level of transportation spending. They could choose to raise other kinds of revenue to pay for roads and transit — such as sales taxes, property taxes, local taxes or tolls. Or they could simply reduce their transportation spending. "

I have been thinking about this for a while.

In the wake of MAP-21, it is worth reflecting on "Why is there a federal role?" In short the argument against are that the system exists, most is traffic local, and the states are perfectly capable of managing and preserving the system, since they already do. All they need to do is raise their gas tax by the amount the federal tax is reduced, and they are no worse off (assuming all federal transportation funds come from the Highway Trust Fund, which is less true than it used to be.

The federal role could be reduced to research (which might look self-serving as I am a researcher, but I support a federal role for this outside my field as well, since research is a public good with positive externalities), and safety regulations.

One argument against the Aggarwala position is that it is needlessly cumbersome to to fight 50 gas tax fights in 50 states, there is a strong convenience of existing revenue source, and this greatly reduces political transaction costs, since it is the status quo.

A second argument against is that we essentially need to rebuild the Interstate in place, and this recapitalization is a national need, just as the initial construction was, justifying a national funding source. We would not want one state to let its existing Interstates devolve to rubble due to poverty, even if it mostly hurt them. I don't think that would happen (at least not at a large scale), but clearly different states would have different investment levels without the federal minimum funds.

I suggested in Enterprising Roads that state DOTs be transformed to be more like public utility than a branch of government.

Norton (in Fighting Traffic) defines " a public utility was not just an enterprise 'of real public importance,' but also one in which competition was unfeasible." That seems to be an accurate representation of most roads in the US. We could argue about long distance roads being competitive, but there are large network economies at the local level, and while we could think about what might happen with atomistic competition (a really neat idea), it is not practical implementability in the short run.

We don't have or need federal funding of the backbone public utility electric grid (though there is regulation, and I am sure some subsidies somewhere), and seem to do ok, surely roads are similar. However, in the absence of that public utility transformation and movement to fuller understanding of direct user fees as the best funding source, avoiding 50 political battles and relying on the status quo funding (which is also an indirect user fee) for a few more years, and directing that existing funding, seems to me a good second-best solution, better than immediate complete devolution. Of course, one could argue that devolution might help force the transformation, so this is not obvious.

Looking for rationales for the highway program I stumbled on the following. In part this falls under the category: We have learned nothing in 30 (60) ((90)) years. The following paper could easily have been written today.

Gomez-Ibañez, Jose, (1985) Chapter 7 "The Federal Role in Urban Transportation" in
Quigley, John M., and Daniel L. Rubinfeld, editors American Domestic Priorities: An Economic Appraisal. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The Rationale for Federal Aid

Whatever the appropriate level of urban highway investment, one key issue is why the federal government should be so heavily involved. Since 70 percent of the United States population lives in urban areas, the majority of the country clearly has a strong interest in urban highways. At least in theory, however, our federal system reserves powers and responsibilities to state and local governments unless some compelling and distinct national interest is involved. This devolution of responsibilities is based both on democratic ideals and the pragmatic argument that those who are closest to a problem often know best how to solve it.

The principal rationale for federal highway aid programs has been the national interest in an intercity transportation system that serves long-distance or interstate as well as local traffic. When federal highway aid began in 1916, the road system was largely unpaved and road construction and maintenance were the responsibility of county governments. The counties were notorious for their failure to cooperate in improving roads that served more than one county, perhaps because their dependence on property tax revenues made it difficult to finance improvements that served more than local needs. An interconnected road system would benefit all, it was argued, by promoting interstate commerce and reducing the social and political isolation of rural communities. The federal government gave highway aid directly to state governments, on the theory that states would have more interest than counties in promoting an intercity highway system.[18]

While federal intervention may have been needed to promote an interconnected highway system seventy years ago, it may be unnecessary today. Thanks in part to early federal aid, each state now finances and administers its own system of trunk highways, leaving county and city governments responsible mainly for local or secondary roads. Federal aid may not be necessary even to induce states to build a coordinated interstate highway system. In the decade before the Interstate System was funded,
for example, many Eastern and Central states cooperated in the construction of an interconnected system of limited-access toll expressways that allowed motorists to travel between New York and Chicago or Boston and Albany without ever having to stop for an intersection or traffic light. Toll financing had eliminated the problem of using local taxes to support interstate travel and by 1956, when Interstate funding ended the boom, around 12,000 miles of toll expressways had been built, started, authorized, or projected.[19]

To the extent that there is a distinct national interest in the highway system, it applies more clearly to roads that primarily serve long-distance and interstate rather than local travelers. Although Interstate System planners rationalized the inclusion of urban segments on the grounds that interstate traffic often originates or terminates in urban areas, urban expressways probably have a limited claim to federal aid, since their design is largely dictated by peak-hour local commuting traffic.
Perhaps the strongest argument for a federal role is in the areas of highway research and demonstration projects. Research on pavement durability, highway planning techniques, and highway safety measures is of potential benefit to all states. Since no single state captures all the benefits, there is little incentive for a state to fund research alone. The federal government, however, can consider the benefits to all states in designing its research program.

He also wrote a section on Mass Transit

The Federal Rationale

The rationale for federal involvement in urban mass transit shares many of the weaknesses of the rationale for federal aid to urban highways. The argument most often cited in the early 1960s debates over the initial federal capital grant program was the need to counterbalance federal highway aid. The federal and state highway trust funds, all financed with dedicated gasoline taxes, were thought to have induced state and local governments to channel too much capital spending into highways and too little into mass transit. Transit had declined because of undercapitalization, the argument continued, and federal transit aid was needed to correct the imbalance.[47]

The failure of the transit investments of the 1970s to increase ridership significantly suggests that undercapitalization was probably not a major cause of the decline of mass transit patronage. Rising real household incomes, suburbanization of jobs and residences, and other demographic trends probably played more important roles in the postwar patronage losses. Even if local governments had seriously over-invested in highways and underinvested in transit, a massive new transit aid program may not have been the correct answer. By subsidizing both the highway and transit modes the federal government might reduce the balance between transit and highways only at the risk of overcapitalizing transportation in general. Reducing or eliminating the federal highway aid program might have encouraged more balanced spending on all forms of transportation.

Notes

18. Gifford, "The Federal Role in Roads"; Burch, Highway Revenue and Expenditure continue
Policy ; and John B. Rae, The Car and the Road in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1972).

19. Rae, The Car and the Road , pp. 173-82.

47. For examples of this argument see Lyle C. Fitch and Associates, Transportation and Public Policy (San Francisco, Calif.: Chandler, 1964); Thomas E. Lisco, "Mass Transportation: Cinderella in Our Cities," The Public Interest no. 18 (1970): 52-74. The contrast between the overcapitalization and the demographic hypotheses was shown most clearly in George W. Hilton, "The Urban Mass Transportation Assistance Program," pp. 131-44 in Perspectives on Federal Transportation Policy , ed. James C. Miller, III (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1975); and George W. Hilton, Federal Transit Subsidies (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1974).

Recently published:

• Levinson, David (2013) Enterprising Roads: Improving the Governance of America's Highways. Policy Study 410, January 2013. Reason Foundation.
  [Download full report]

Most roads in the United States are owned and managed directly by government, with funding for construction and maintenance derived primarily from taxes on gas. For many decades, this system worked well enough, despite widespread problems with congestion and road quality. Recently, however, rising maintenance costs and falling fuel tax receipts have begun to call into question the sustainability of this model.

At their current levels, gas taxes will not provide the revenue needed to maintain America’s roads satisfactorily, let alone to rejuvenate and extend the network where necessary. Yet, direct political management hinders the development of new revenue streams, leads to operational inefficiencies and hampers innovation. Put simply, the organizations that built the U.S. highway networks are no longer suited to running them.

A better approach is urgently needed. Ideally, the organizations that manage roads should be able to finance road construction and maintenance through the sale of bonds, without requiring direct consent from higher political authorities. And they should be able to cover the costs of those bonds by charging for road use. More generally, they need to be capable, energetic, ingenious and ready to act. And for all those reasons, they need greater autonomy.

This paper argues that roads should be managed by independent enterprises, with a clear mission of providing service to customers. One way to achieve this, while maintaining overarching political control—and thereby prevent abuses of monopoly power—is to convert existing government operated road management organizations (such as the state Departments of Transportation) into regulated public utilities.

Within such a framework, a wide variety of ownership structures are possible, ranging from municipal- or state-ownership to mutual- and investor-ownership. Each structure has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but all are superior to the existing system in one crucial respect: they clearly orient the road enterprise away from day-to-day politics and toward providing value to their users.

The regulated public utility model is already well-established in other important sectors in the U.S., including water, energy and telecommunications. Indeed, around 10% of wastewater utilities, 20% of water utilities, most pipelines, electric utilities, natural gas utilities, and virtually all telecom and cable utilities are investor-owned.

Internationally, the regulated public utility model is already operating successfully in transportation. The New Zealand Transport Agency, for example, has an independent board of directors who appoint the CEO, and works in accordance with a performance agreement negotiated with the New Zealand Ministry of Transport. Management is separated from governance, and service delivery is separated from policy. New Zealand’s approach has delivered large efficiency gains without compromising service levels.

Australia’s state road enterprises, meanwhile, demonstrate the benefits commercialization could bring to state Departments of Transportation in the U.S. By contrast with their American equivalents, Australian road enterprises—like New South Wales’s Roads and Traffic Authority or Victoria’s VicRoads—are innovative and highly business-like.

The United States should follow Australia and New Zealand’s lead, and transform its state Departments of Transportation (or the highways divisions thereof) into separate, publicly regulated, self-financing corporate entities. Full-cost accounting—as already performed by Arizona’s Department of Transportation—constitutes a necessary first step in this direction. In making the transition, policymakers should strive to impose regulation only where absolutely necessary, to minimize the anti-competitive effects of any such regulation, and to leave social objectives to the government, thereby freeing road enterprises to focus on economic ones. Accordingly, road enterprises should be permitted to pursue cost-effective contracting and public private-partnerships as they see fit.

The new road enterprises should also be given latitude to make greater use of user fees—as opposed to general revenue—for funding their activities. Such charges are not just more efficient and equitable than traditional funding sources; if properly designed and implemented, they are also better suited to reducing congestion through effective pricing. Vehicle-miles-traveled charges, weight-distance charges and electronic tolling are all options that road enterprises should be free to pursue.

There is no single formula for success. Road enterprises will learn by doing, and by trialing alternate strategies. The U.S. has 50 separate laboratories of democracy in which road enterprises and state authorities can experiment to find out what works and what doesn’t. There will be successes and failures along the way: successes will be replicated; failures will be eradicated. It is only by establishing a learning process like this that innovative progress in surface transportation can be made.

Andrew has a nice, long-awaited post unlocking the Twin Cities street alphabets @ streets.mn: When You Plan, You Begin With A B C :

"I was driving through Uptown with a friend in 2004 when it hit me: these streets are in alphabetical order! As a visitor I was impressed by such orderliness; a month later I moved to Minneapolis (not because of the street names—or at least, not entirely because of them). I learned about the second alphabet while visiting friends in Linden Hills, but it wasn’t until several years later than some random Google Maps browsing revealed not two but eight (okay, maybe just 7 and 1/13th) sequences of alphabetically-ordered street names extending west from Aldrich. By this time I also knew of the presidential sequence in northeast Minneapolis, and more map browsing revealed some others."

I appear in this pro-transportation video by the Minnesota Transportation Alliance. I am pleased with how this turned out, it has mostly a fix-it-first flavor, but of course there is a pitch for expansion and new construction at the end.

Mike Hicks @ streets.mn: Good transit needs good roads | streets.mn:

"Streets and highways that see lots of bus traffic should be prioritized for repair and repaving projects, and not just because it would help the bus glide along more smoothly. Much like the broken windows theory of crime, I feel that there’s a strong case for a similar “broken pavement theory” related to the quality of life in a neighborhood.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul have begun attacking some long-damaged streets in the past few years, and it’s often remarkable to see the road surface and sidewalks in a pristine state. Battered pavement is often a sign of bureaucratic paralysis brought on by budgetary belt-tightening over the course of years and decades. As freeways were built in the latter half of the 20th century, city streets were often left to rot.

While a lot of attention goes into designing and maintaining parks and plazas as public spaces, streets are the most basic type of public spaces I can think of. They should be treated with respect, and designed to facilitate many different modes of travel. Better surfaces don’t just help cars or buses—well-designed spaces make things more comfortable for cyclists and pedestrians, and improves the value of properties along the way.

Next time you feel that busted old street, think about the decisions that led to it becoming a low priority, and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again."

Asha Weinstein Agrawal: What Do Americans Think About Federal Tax Options to Support Public Transit, Highways, and Local Streets and Roads? Results from Year 3 of a National Survey :

"The survey results show that a majority of Americans would support higher taxes for transportation—under certain conditions. For example, a gas tax increase of 10¢ per gallon to improve road maintenance was supported by 58 percent of respondents, whereas support levels dropped to just 20 percent if the revenues were to be used more generally to maintain and improve the transportation system. For tax options where the revenues were to be spent for undefined transportation purposes, support levels varied considerably by what kind of tax would be imposed, with a sales tax much more popular than either a gas tax increase or a new mileage tax.

In 1968 there was a famous Computer Science article Go To Statement Considered Harmful by Edsger W. Dijkstra (of algorithm fame). It says in part:

My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

In early 21st Century America, pedestrian crosswalks may be marked or unmarked. Whether a crosswalk is marked is functionally based on the whim of the traffic department. A fuller discussion of issues about "how" to use crosswalks (from the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts) is here, but not "when" to use them, hence my use of the term "whim", which says engineering studies are required, but does not have hard and fast rules about application.

Interesting the Brookline document asserts:

Marked crosswalks are viewed widely as "safety devices," and most municipalities give the pedestrian the right-of-way when within them. However, there is strong evidence that these facts prompt many pedestrians to feel overly secure when using a marked crosswalk. As a result, pedestrians will often place themselves in a hazardous position by believing that motorists can and will stop in all cases, even when it may be impossible to do so. It is not unusual for this type of aggressive pedestrian behavior to contribute to a higher incidence of pedestrian accidents and cause a greater number of rear-end collisions. In contrast, a pedestrian using an unmarked crosswalk generally feels less secure and less certain that the motorist will stop and thereby exercise more caution and waiting for safe gaps in the traffic stream before crossing. The end result is fewer accidents at unmarked crosswalks.

Implicitly the document blames pedestrians for asserting their rights, rather than drivers for violating them.

I posit that if you are a trained, but human driver, whose "intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations" you will generally respect crosswalks. You will believe, just as all stop signs are marked, all legal crosswalks are marked. As "our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed" you will disrespect unmarked crosswalks, since if they were legitimate, you reason, they would be marked. You may not even notice them if they come from side streets for which you have no stop sign of traffic signal. They only appear relevant when there is a person surprising you in the road. Hence you will be aggressive to pedestrians trying to cross at unmarked crosswalks, as you will (wrongly) believe you have the right-of-way. Pedestrians will in turn be intimidated as suggested by the Brookline document above. Research about driver and pedestrian behavior can be found in this paper by Mitman et al. It notes:

Driver yielding behavior was a statistically significant variable at all six observation sites. For all road types, pedestrians in the marked crosswalk were more likely than pedestrians in the unmarked crosswalk to have drivers immediately yield the right-of-way to them.

and

Average gap acceptance was a statistically significant variable at five of the observation sites. At all five locations, pedestrians in the unmarked crosswalk were more likely than pedestrians in the marked crosswalk to wait for larger gaps in traffic before crossing. This finding was consistent across all road types.

The empirical findings are sound as far as they go. I disagree with the recommendations.

The problem is inconsistent ambiguity.

Solution A. Mark all crosswalks.

If we were completely consistent about where pedestrians might be found, (i.e. crosswalks) that would be acceptable, drivers and pedestrians would both understand the law. It would be clearly spelled out to drivers where pedestrians might be, including smaller intersections that might otherwise be raced by. It would be bad from a pedestrian rights perspective, as it over channelizes walkers and gives too much power to cars.

By implication, it requires pedestrians to use only marked crosswalks. It in a sense delegitimizes jaywalking. It increases pedestrian travel times. As Peter Norton notes in Fighting Traffic:

"Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong." "Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces." [Quoted in Planning Pool]

In practice, we will not mark all crosswalks. The vast majority of intersections in the US are unmarked, and no one wants to spend the money to mark them all. Hence if we claim to adopt solution A, we will in fact resign ourselves to inconsistent ambiguity (false certainty) or crosswalk markings.

Solution B. Unmark all crosswalks.

In contrast, if we were completely (i.e. consistently) ambiguous about where pedestrians would be, that would be good from both a safety perspective, and in the long run, a pedestrian rights perspective. While in the mixed environment, pedestrian might wait more, in the no crosswalks environment, pedestrians will be cautious where they are now reckless. But pedestrians would also be more assertive in more places (those without crosswalks now) as they would know that drivers would be also be more cautious. This strategy will make both drivers and pedestrians more aware of their surroundings since pedestrians might be anywhere. (See shared space.)

In addition to unmarking all crosswalks, we should put up periodic reminder signs/messages to drivers when entering new districts, leaving freeways, etc. that pedestrians have the right-of-way. We might put up markers where pedestrians have died to somber-up drivers. (Further, we ought to develop some hand-signal communication protocol so pedestrians can signal drivers they are about to enter the roadway. Reuben Collins has a nice discussion here.).

…

It is the false expectation of consistency that causes many of the 4,280 pedestrian deaths per year in the United States.

I strongly prefer Solution B. Do we have any examples of this in the United States over a widespread area? A single street with shared space would be insufficient to draw conclusions.

Comment: this is the same argument as about Class III Bikeways. Since Class III Bikeways give bicyclists no advantage, they imply to drivers that on any unmarked road, they have rights over bikes (when they don't).

Comment: Yes I did see a driver yell at a pedestrian for crossing an unmarked crosswalk again today, and the intimidated pedestrian ran after trying to yield the road.

Newly posted @streets.mn: The Missing Link

How to pay for the Vikings stadium is the topic of the hour here in GreaterMSP. I have another solution that has not been broached to recover part of the $77 per ticket subsidy.

Let us establish a Congestion Zone around the proposed Minnesota Sports Complex, which is in effect on game days only (and could be extended for other special events). Drive into this zone on game days and pay $100 $150 (assuming an auto occupancy of about 2, and most fans drive) as a congestion charge. As with the London Congestion Zone, on which it is loosely modeled, residents would get a discount. This would ensure people driving to the game, regardless of where they park, would have to pay.

The funds earned would pay for administering the zone and the new stadium. Wilf would have no say in the matter. I have put a first draft of the zone boundaries on the Google map below, but obviously this could be discussed (should it extend to Cedar-Riverside or to St. Anthony Main? I am counting on the inherent laziness of Vikings fans being unwilling to walk to counter-act their inherent frugality. Every entrance to the zone would be cordoned, starting say 10 am on game days, and running until say the end of the first quarter, and people would have to pay to enter the area or produce evidence of residence.

Fans coming by transit, foot, or bicycle would be exempted.

Obviously there would need to be some new legal framework established for this.

View Vikings Congestion Zone in a larger map

Lewis Lehe has posted: An Animated Argument For Congestion Pricing at Streetsblog. Well worth watching.

IEEE Spectrum asks When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners? - : "To win over the public, the autopilots of tomorrow will have to start today by exploiting niches where civilian pilots can't or won't work—just as was the case in the military. With time, the systems will improve and eventually fan out to conquer additional segments of the broader market."

Adam Ozimek @ Modeled Behavior describes The rise of micro-markets: "I also sometimes comfort myself knowing I would be outbid in micro-markets. If I’m two minutes late for a train and I find myself thinking “surely the welfare gain to me of them waiting two minutes is bigger than the loss to all the other passengers for being two minutes late!”. But then I consider an auction where I had to buy off every riders’ extra two minutes, and I know I would not win that auction, which I find comforting in a way. When micro-markets like the one I imagine here are real and widespread people will have a less hard time deluding themselves like I initially do. The angry guy in line behind you in line who is mumbling about how late he is running will have less grounds to be angry if he can offer you to buy your place in line but it is not worth it to him."

Getting Around Minneapolis finds maps of the diffusion of street pavements1895 Paving Map , See also 1899 and 1910.

Transportation Nation sends us to this: Google Street View: Not Just For Directions Anymore : "When you’re a desk toy doomed to a stationary existence, you don’t get out much — unless you know how to use the Internet. Address is Approximate is a short stop motion film that imagines the toy “tak(ing) a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.” You can follow along as the toy goes over the Brooklyn Bridge, through cities, forests, and deserts–ultimately making it to his West Cost destination. Watch it below!"

WaPo: Maryland cuts ribbon on new toll road between Shady Grove and Laurel :

WaPo: ICC puts strain on Maryland’s transportation funds

Baltimore Sun: ICC opening to bring regions closer :

"Next month's opening of the main section of the Intercounty Connector linking Interstate 95 with Interstate 270 in Montgomery County is expected to have significant effects on Baltimore's economy as it brings the state's richest job and commercial market a half-hour closer to its largest city.

The debut of the new section Nov. 22 will close the gap between the already opened western section of the ICC and I-95 in Prince George's County. Unlike the first section, which has been mostly used for local traffic, the opening of the new stretch is expected to bring immediate benefits to many Baltimore-area drivers for whom the trip to Rockville or Gaithersburg has long been a traffic nightmare."

I drove the first section this past summer on my periodic visits to Montgomery County. It is a very nice ride, perhaps one of the more pleasant roads to be on. Compared with most long-distance roads on Montgomery County, it does not (yet) suffer congestion (and with tolls, it may almost never). It may even be faster to places like Aspen Hill from Tysons than using surface streets, despite the added distance (and cost).

As a planning question, rather than a subjective ride question, my views are more mixed. I did not work on the road plans when I was at MNCPPC, though we did model it (and tested what would happen with and without, just for fun). Clearly induced demand and induced development applies. Build it and they will come, don't and they won't. That does not of itself mean it is a bad thing, but it will shape development patterns assuming the tolls are not so high as to capture all of the benefits.

Montgomery County has lots of land use controls, so the induced development will, at first be in compliance with existing plans. But as new accessibility creates new value, the pressures to change zoning to accommodate that potential value will intensify. My own sense is the key points are the interchanges at I-95 in PG County, US 29 (itself mostly converted to freeway) and Shady Grove. Maybe not this election, maybe not the next, but at some point. And once that window is opened, facts on the ground will be essentially irreversible.

The other pressures will be to extend eastwards and westwards. I think eastwards (as once proposed to US 301) is more likely, since it is within the state. The flows on to and off of the ICC will inevitably create pressures on upstream and downstream links. Whether those pressures get relieved depends on numerous factors (roads are obviously slow to build and long to unbuild).

The Montrose Parkway, once the Rockville Facility, is a stub that was originally to connect the ICC with I-270 south of Rockville. As the right-of-way for that was turned into Matthew Henson State Park in the early 1990s, it would be difficult to revive. On the other hand, Matthew Henson State Parkway has a nice ring.

MediaPost reports on an Audi ad I spotted yesterday during a football game: : "A second execution points out that highway repair is underfunded, costing drivers $67 billion per year. The ads with the tagline "The road is now an intelligent place" will run in national and cable buys with print in national newspapers and online beginning this month."

Underfunded highways is a selling point for upgraded cars. This is really fascinating. Maybe we should just fix the roads. If anyone has a video of the ad, please let me know. Thanks to Mike Hicks for finding the link

Wikipedia has a brief article on the history of Green Line Coaches

Rather than coloring each bus route (or BRT service) as Metro Transit is proposing, London and other cities color code buses based on the type of service. Green Line was service to the country (which was greener than the city, which retains its Red Buses).

We can imagine a system which the different services (express, local) received special branding rather than the Right-of-Way. As CityFix reports on Korea quoting John Calimente:

The bus re-brand certainly helped. Calimente explains what each of the colors mean:

Blue buses travel long distances on major arterial roads.

Green buses operate as feeder buses to the eight lines on the subway system.

Red buses are express routes with limited stops connecting major suburban towns to the central city.

Yellow buses are circular routes that travel between the major destinations in the central city.

The colors in Korea denote function, and are actually the color of the buses. This isn't about way finding, for which colors are not terribly natural solutions, and lend themselves to problems if any complexity emerges.

London and New York, among others, don't waste their time on color-coding lines. (i.e. it is the District Line, not the Green Line, because of history, even if it is confusing due to various splits.

We are throwing away 7 years of history (and natural way-finding) by renaming Hiawatha. Wouldn't it be easier to rename Bottineau Blvd to Hiawatha Ave N and keep the LRT name? [I think the Bottineau name is fairly new in most parts, and most people seem to call it County 81.] Maybe we should call it Bottinwatha. (Okay, this is facetious, but the point remains).

We introduce more confusion if buses transfer from one BRT to another (as Brandon suggests the Red Line buses going on 62 to I-35W), or LRT vehicles don't follow the color-coded right-of-way. DC is going through contortions now, with various train services not matching the color coded tracks. The service is the color, or the track? When they were identical, not an issue, now it is.

Working paper:

• Zhu, Shanjiang and David Levinson (2010), A Portfolio Theory of Route Choice Presented at 4th International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability, July 2010, Minneapolis, MN.

Although many individual route choice models have been proposed to incorporate travel time variability as a decision factor, they are typically still deterministic in the sense that the optimal strategy requires choosing one particular route that maximizes utility. In contrast, this study introduces an individual route choice model where choosing a portfolio of routes instead of a single route is the best strategy for a rational traveler who cares about both journey time and lateness when facing stochastic network conditions. The model is then tested with GPS data collected in metropolitan Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Our data suggest strong correlation among link speed when analyzing morning commute trips. There is no single dominant route (defined here as a route with the shortest travel time for a 15 day period) in 18% of cases when links travel times are correlated. This paper demonstrates that choosing a portfolio of routes could be the rational choice of a traveler who wants to optimize route decisions under variability.

JEL-Code: R41, R48, D63

Keywords: Transportation planning, route choice, travel behavior, link performance

Toronto Star:Fallen slab is concrete proof Montreal’s crumbling

MONTREAL—A huge concrete slab fell Sunday on a major expressway that runs under downtown Montreal, the latest in a series of incidents that point to the city’s crumbling infrastructure.

No one was injured in the collapse in the Ville-Marie tunnel, but the incident could have had disastrous consequences if it had occurred on Monday at the same time, during rush hour traffic, police said.

“Our officers arrived at the scene and we verified and made sure that no one was stuck underneath the rubble,” Daniel Thibaudeau, spokesman for Quebec provincial police, told reporters Sunday.

About 100,000 vehicles use the expressway during an average weekday, according to Transport Quebec.

It is somehow reassuring when infrastructure in other countries is falling apart too.

A reader sends this along ....Green Roads Construction: Are Contractors Our Roadblock?

The article argues in favor of green construction techniques, (construction results in a great deal of CO2 emissions, e.g.) and suggests the barrier is the cost-plus contracting system found in many places which rewards contractors for higher costs. An excerpt below:

"The lone region that’s scrapped “cost-plus” contracting, North Carolina, is indicative of the untapped potential of green construction. Instead of awarding contractors on a cost-plus basis, North Carolina has established road performance criteria. That means contractors in North Carolina have to bear the cost of asphalt themselves and can use any method available to them as long as they meet the standards set forth by the engineer.

“What [we] need to do is say, ‘Roads need to be paved to this standard, give me the least cost contract.’ Let the contractor take up the risk of the asphalt. If they think they can do it and meet the standard through hot in-place recycling, they’ll do it. They may make more profits in the process, but that is what you want – you want to incentivize more sustainable roads.” – Hadi Dowlatabadi

And guess, what? North Carolina has the lowest cost of road construction in all of North America. Coincidentally, it’s also home to the highest amount of hot in-place recycling. Consider this, in British Columbia it costs $25/square meter to build a road; in North Carolina it costs roughly $19/square meter. It’s no surprise that these lower costs result in higher profits without the need to use more asphalt."

NY Times: Phone Data to Give a Picture of Traffic Shutdown in L.A.

In what is locally referred to as Carmageddon:

Chaos is expected to descend on Los Angeles on July 16, when a 10-mile stretch of I-405, a major highway running through the center of town that carries an average of 500,000 cars on a summer weekend, shuts down for more than two days.

...

But KABC, the local flagship station for ABC, sees the closure as an opportunity to experiment with technology tools as its plans to report on the mess as it unfolds. The station has partnered with Waze, an Israeli technology company that makes a navigation app for smartphones, to give drivers a real-time picture of what is happening on the roads.

Waze’s app tracks the movement of each of its users to get a sense of traffic, and then directs them to quicker routes based on the data it collects. The company says it has 180,000 users in the Los Angeles area.

JW sends me this link from Technology Review and writes "If the sensors and technology for collision avoidance systems can be implemented on smart phones it seems a disruptive way to move robotic vehicle technology forward. It bypasses the vehicle manufacturers and potentially the regulators. Clearly the app does not result in a robotic vehicle, but it may further public acceptance and allow the collection of comparative crash record data, two issues which are much more important than the technology and software in my view."

App Provides Extra Eyes on the Road - Technology Review:

iOnRoad for Android detect and tracks cars on the road ahead using a phone's camera and machine vision software. It also draws on a phone's GPS, accelerometer, and orientation sensors to calculate the distance to other cars, and the speed at which they are traveling.

Just place your device in a mount on the dashboard and start up the app. Then your phone will diligently watch the road ahead, and beep a warning if you get too close to the vehicle ahead, alerting you to hastily brake before any damage occurs.

iOnRoad is a clever idea, and it highlights just how powerful and capable smart phones have become. Just few years ago, such an app would struggle on the fastest smart phone.

In practice, however, I found it a bit distracting. During a drive to Cape Cod last week, with the phone mounted beneath the GPS, my windshield felt cluttered. I kept glancing at the phone whenever a car outline changed from green to yellow (depending on how close I was), in addition to checking the GPS. With continued use of the app my eyes would probably stop drifting over to check how far away each vehicle was. Thankfully, I didn't get into any near-collisions, and the road was pretty traffic-free.

The app can also work in background mode, so it'll only sound and show a warning if it detects an imminent collision. So iOnRoad could run behind a GPS app while driving.

The Israeli company behind the app, Picitup, has previously created vision recognition software for to automatically cataloging products (which eBay uses). At first, iOnRoad will be free; and it will be available next month.

Getting Around Minneapolis reports on Feet of street :

The brilliant blog Mapping the Strait posted an infographic yesterday comparing the feet of street per resident of 8 American cities.

The metric is supposed to give an indication of the amount of infrastructure per resident, to augment standard persons per area measures of population density.

According to the Design Guidelines for Streets and Sidewalks, Minneapolis has 1,423 miles of roads and vehicle bridges, not counting freeways. My rough Google Earth measurement of freeways within city limits is 30.3 miles (that includes the part of 62 on the border but does not include highways 55 & 121 because I think they are in the city’s measurement, although that’s just a guess). That makes for 7,673,424 feet of streets and highways, or 20.1 feet for each of the 382,578 residents counted in the 2010 census. We’re closer to Detroit, Phoenix or San Antonio than Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Chicago on this count.

That doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable result to me, although by measuring residents only you ignore the significant market for infrastructure represented by workers. In that case cities such as San Antonio or Houston that contain most of their employment catchment area in their city limits are going to be more accurately portrayed by this metric. One of the commenters at Mapping the Straight asked for this metric by area of paved surface – I think using lane feet would be better than centerline feet, but probably less widely available. Fun to think about anyway.

A new report from the UK, echoing the issues in the US ... Driven to disrepair? England’s roads under pressure from traffic, weather, spiralling costs and budget cuts - Audit Commission:

England's 236,000 miles of local roads - used by 30 million drivers every day - are under attack from increasing traffic, severe winters, higher repair costs, and dwindling highways funding.

The challenges faced by the country's 152 council highways authorities are the subject of a new Audit Commission reportGoing the Distance: Achieving better value for money in road maintenance.

The report highlights how councils can get more for their money, including cost-saving collaborations with neighbours, asset management to show when road maintenance will be most effective, new ways of keeping residents informed, and weighing short-term repairs against long-term resilience.

Between them, council highways authorities are responsible for 98 per cent of the country's roads*, spending a total of £2.3 billion in 2009/10. Yet, in response to increasing financial pressure on councils, highways budgets are facing significant cuts.

The Commission has found that the cost of maintaining roads is now 50 per cent higher than it was ten years ago, in part due to inflation in road materials and construction costs. Other pressures facing councils are:

• Road traffic is expected to increase by more than 30 per cent by 2025;
• In the next three years there will be a 26 per cent drop in government revenue funding and 16 per less capital funding via local transport plans;
• Damage by utilities works costs nearly £50 million every year.**

Councils must also strike a difficult balance. Public perceptions of whether roads are in good shape are often only skin deep, so potholes and patchworks attract the most criticism. But dealing with these so-called 'worst first' surface issues must be weighed against prolonging a road's 'whole life' before it is too late.

Chairman of the Audit Commission, Michael O'Higgins says:

'Prevention is better than cure, but councils have to consider the safety and insurance risks of damaged surfaces. Roads costs are rising while councils' belts are tightening. Improvement in A roads seems to have stalled, and the road network overall is starting to deteriorate.'

In cash terms, its road network is a council's single most valuable asset. Yet councils struggle to apply asset management principles to roads. They cannot be sold, they don't generate income, indeed they consume large resources. Hardly surprising that some councils see roads as liabilities rather than assets.

But the report urges councils to consider asset management plans, such as Cornwall's Transport Asset Management Plan (TAMP), which for an investment of £80,000 is driving consistent levels of service and road condition across the whole county. Such plans also indicate when best to intervene with works to extend the whole life of a road, typically a maximum of only 20 years.

The study team found that collaboration pays real dividends. The Midlands Highway Alliance estimates it has delivered £5.1 million savings for councils and £7.8 million for the Highways Agency in its first three years, and it is looking to a further £14 million of savings between 2010 and 2014. Ten authorities in the East of England have also formed an alliance to save £6m over five years, with £3.3 million from shared back office costs alone.

Michael O'Higgins says:

'Sadly we found collaboration between councils to be rare, with too few councils procuring in cost-saving partnerships.'

'Pick up any local newspaper and you will see that people care very much about their local roads. In the last national Place Survey, roads were a higher priority with residents than crime or affordable housing. Our report aims to help councillors maintain their local network against a backdrop of reduced funding. Roads in disrepair can put the brakes on trade, economic prosperity, even emergency services. But a well-maintained network helps people, goods and services to move freely and safely.'

I am not convinced about the rising traffic, but the revenue issue and continued aging of infrastructure are quite real.

Media barons willing, I will be on KSTP tonight (c. 10pm) talking about Washington Avenue, closed to traffic. I will be asleep, so tell me what I said.

Recently seen at a bus shelter:

Business Wire press release:

Teamsters Local 320 Opens “Stop the Slash” Phase II With Twin Cities Billboard, Bus Shelter and Print Campaign

As the battle over Minnesota’s projected $5.2 billion budget deficit intensifies, Teamsters Local 320 – representing some 11,500 public employees throughout Minnesota’s 87 counties – has begun an advertising campaign asking lawmakers to halt plans to balance the budget by firing public employees, neglecting street maintenance and cutting education, rather than require the richest Minnesotans to pay their fair share of taxes.

“Hey Minnesota Legislators… They pay their fair share of taxes… or we pay with our futures.”

“The war on working families and the middle class must stop,” stated Local 320 Principal Officer Sue Mauren. “As Governor Dayton has said again and again, it’s time for the rich in Minnesota to pay their fair share of the bills. And it’s time for some legislators to stop blaming public employees – the teachers, trash collectors, police and firefighters, public defenders, university workers and airport workers – for America’s recession when they should be blaming the real culprits on Wall Street and K Street.”

...

The third ad, which appears on billboards throughout the Twin Cities, features a picture of a large pothole with the caption: “Defeat The Pothole Protection Act”

Chuck Marohn endorses streets over roads ... Co-opting Complete Streets

: "Now notice that I called this route a 'road' and not a 'street'. Understanding the difference between a road and a street is critical to understanding the problem we have with engineers misusing the Complete Streets approach. From our Placemaking Principles for a Strong Town:

To build an affordable transportation system, a Strong Town utilizes roads to move traffic safely at high speeds outside of neighborhoods and urban areas. Within neighborhoods and urban areas, a Strong Town uses complex streets to equally accommodate the full range of transportation options available to residents.

Roads move cars at high speeds. Streets move cars at very slow speeds. We should build roads outside of neighborhoods, connecting communities across distances. We should build streets within neighborhoods where there are homes, businesses and other destinations. The auto-road is a post-WW II replacement of the rail-road. The street should be what it has always been; the street."

Streets are in cities, from the Latin Strata (and have always been paved with something), roads are in the country, from the same root as "ride", and harken back to the rural routes taken by men on horses. Streets are for land access (and secondarily movement), roads are for movement (and secondarily land access). We get problems when we treat roads like streets and streets like roads. The words are probably muddied in common usage, but transportationists need to keep these things clear.

eMercedesBenz Electric Roads May Be In Our Future

We ask a lot of our cars – heat me, cool me, be silent, be comfy, be exciting and, increasingly, propel me without costly and polluting gasoline. It’s the latter request that confounds, since batteries, the most obvious replacements for gas, are heavy and have limited energy storage.

But what if the energy storage burden was shifted from our overworked cars to the road?

Researchers at the Energy Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University are working on just such a solution, called electrified roads.

Electric vehicles, or EVs, could pick up small amounts of electricity as they drive over charging pads buried under the asphalt and connected to the electrical grid. Researchers say that a continuously available power supply would allow EVs to cut battery size as much as 80 percent, drastically reducing vehicle cost.

“Basically you get power directly from the grid to the motors as the car moves,” said Hunter Wu, a Utah State researcher who was recruited from The University of Auckland in New Zealand, where the technology was pioneered, to further develop the concept. “You can travel from the West Coast to the East Coast continuously without charging.”

Nicola Tesla first discovered the principles of wireless charging, or inductive power transfer, in the late 19th Century. It works by creating an electromagnetic charging field that transfers energy to a receiving pad set to the same frequency.

Manufacturers are already marketing wireless charging pads for electric vehicles – retrofitted to accept the charges – that can deliver a 5-kilowatt charge with 90 percent efficiency from a distance of about 10 inches.

There is also a trial application of electric roads – albeit at slow speeds and using very long charging pads – for buses at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, south of Seoul.

But Wu is thinking of something much more radical: charging at interstate speeds. This will require several technical breakthroughs, he said.

“At 75 mph, you’re only going to stay on a pad for about 30 milliseconds,” he said. “We need to turn the pad embedded in the road on and off really quickly.”

The pads would need to be able to signal to each other that a car is coming and the car would also need to communicate its need for a charge, he said.

Wu said the pad must also deliver power even when the car isn’t directly over top of it – a capability called horizontal misalignment that the current generation of stationary inductive power transfer chargers don’t have.

John Boys, a University of Auckland professor who is credited with refining the technology, said it would be possible to transfer up to 30 kW of power at an average efficiency of 80 percent on the highway. Assuming that chargers would be available at home and work, Boys said, a car would only need “a battery big enough to make it to the nearest interstate or major road.”

Wu said the cost of electrified roads, pegged at $1.5 million to 2.5 million per lane mile, could be made up through charging a toll along the roadway.

Not only would the cost of EVs, but range anxiety would be totally eliminated, he said.

“This technology,” Wu said, “would propel EVs forward.”

This is a fascinating proposed technology that could reduce the required battery size and weight, and thus increase efficiency of EVs. I previously noted a proposed technology: turning the road into a solar panel.

Combine these two ideas (solar roads with electric roads), and you can take the road and the car "off the grid."

Minneapolis roads are falling apart, so reports the MnDaily. Props to U of Mn professor Mihai Marasteanu for his quotes: Cuts could force Minneapolis to slow its assault on potholes | mndaily.com - Serving the University of Minnesota Community Since 1900:

"‘We have a very large system that was built many years ago,’ University of Minnesota civil engineering professor Mihai Marasteanu said. ‘Right now we are [at] the point in time where we need to invest to keep it at a reasonable level.’

Marasteanu said he believed the city was doing the best it could given budget constraints, but repairs will only get more expensive in the future if there isn’t enough maintenance now.

‘This is a big issue,’ Marasteanu said. ‘There’s a huge gap between what is needed and what is actually spent.’"

The headline "assault on potholes" and its military metaphor is like the DMZ museum, where the South Korean military described its successive victories at points farther and farther south on the Korean peninsula.

I will just add that the budget constraints are false constraints. City roads are in more terrible condition than County or State roads. Priorities are not set right (witness the city bidding for the Vikings stadium). There are lots of solutions to fund roads, and if people believed the funds would actually go to fix those bad roads, they would get support in many places (though not everywhere).