How to Solve Traffic Congestion, Make Revenue and Be Happy Paying a Toll

With road pricing, Stockholm, Sweden has reduced traffic congestion dramatically, and generates revenue for public works. Most remarkable outcomes also include that motorists do not feel that they had to change their driving and habits, and that 70% of residents approve of the road pricing.

Watch this 8-minute TED talk by Jonas Eliasson, Director of the Center for Transport Studies at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. It is a 10-year before-after real-life, real-city experiment documenting success.

Honolulu is a prime candidate for road pricing because of its limited lane capacity and ineffective traffic congestion plans such as TheRail.

I would not be surprised if road pricing is adopted in Honolulu after 2025 or so to sore up TheRail financially, nudge more people to it, and reduce peak traffic demand, as in Stockholm.

Enough with The Chinese Straddle Bus!

The Straddling Bus has attracted a lot of attention. I got an early video of this concept developed in China almost two years ago. Now I get two emails a week about it. At least!

Here's my take on it. It's a cool concept, but in reality, it is impractical and difficult as a retrofit. However, it can be adopted in new cities in China, India and other new, highly populated urban areas.

Challenges of the Straddling Bus include but are not limited to these: 

1.       Very few real world streets and traffic lanes are perfectly straight or level... traffic lanes are not built to airport runway standards. Therefore, at a minimum, expensive lane strengthening and re-alignment would be needed in order to operate this bus.
2.       How do we manage a crash of such a huge vehicle on the street? How do we tow it or lift it if it becomes sufficiently incapacitated?
3.       We do not know how "the common distracted driver" will react when a “tunnel” drives over him or her. Driver startling and related crashes will be an issue. This is why I proposed that the straddle bus runs as an Express Bus over existing BRT lines.
4.       The concept requires elevated stations which adds significantly to the cost because all elevated stations need to be ADA compliant. Obviously this will be an express service with stops at intervals of 1 km or longer.
5.       Overpasses, cross wires, sign and signal gantries, and trees will present significant challenges.
6.       Trucks, buses and other large vehicles have to be regulated out of the two lanes that go under the Straddling Bus. Writing the ordinance is easy. Enforcing it is not, and one unfamiliar trucker will block the Straddling Bus for a while.
7.       Receiving U.S. DOT certification to operate it on US city streets won’t be trivial.
 
As of mid-2012 not a single prototype exists. So let China build it, and then we can copy it. That'll be a first!

Why Rail Is Bad for Honolulu...

I agree!

HOT Lanes and Tunnels are Hot and Free to the Taxpayer

$52 Billion Chicago Plan. Carefully targeted investment to modernize the greater Chicago region's highway system would reduce projected 2040 congestion by 10% overall and by 20% within Chicago itself, according to a major report from the Reason Foundation's Galvin Mobility Project. The plan includes a 275-mile HOT lanes network, a new Outer Beltway, and several urban highway tunnels. All the new capacity would be variably priced, and projected revenues of $58 billion would exceed the $52 billion construction cost, according to detailed modeling carried out for the study.

Steps Toward DC-Region Express Toll Network. On August 1st, Virginia DOT and the Fluor/Transurban joint venture that is nearing completion of the Capital Beltway (I-495) Express Lanes, reached commercial and financial close on the $940 million I-95 project. It will convert the existing two reversible HOV lanes to three reversible Express Toll lanes along 28 miles of I-95. Across the river in Maryland, the Maryland State Highway Administration is studying potential express toll lanes for the I-270 corridor, which heads northwest from the Beltway.

Largest Infrastructure Fund Exceeds $7 Billion. Infrastructure Investor reported on July 31st that the world's largest infrastructure investment fund, Global Infrastructure Partners II, has amassed $7.02 billion in capital, towards its target of $8 billion. Overall, such funds have raised an estimated $200 billion over the past decade.

Port of Miami Tunnel at Half-Way Mark. The massive tunnel boring machine that is creating the tunnel between the Miami area's expressway system and the Port of Miami on Watson Island has completed the first of two 4,200-foot tunnels under Government Cut. The next step is for the TBM to be turned around to dig the parallel tube over a six-month period. The $607 million tunnel is being procured under a 30-year concession.

Dutch Pension Fund Buys Stake in Texas Managed Lanes. Pension fund APG from the Netherlands has invested $300 million to acquire a 12.3% equity stake in the North Tarrant Express and a 13.3% stake in the LBJ managed lanes project. Both are being developed by a Cintra/Meridiam concession company. Both concessions are for 52 years.

Source of the summaries: Robert Poole, the Reason Foundation.

What Has Been the Biggest Failure in Transportation in Recent History?

A well known transportation academic posed this question recently to other transportation experts.

Failure he said. You decide the criteria. Failures could be big small, but not too small and localized.

I am looking for projects, systems, technologies, or policies that have been failures.

To provide a response in a general way, I had to define failure in a general way. So I defined it as “the usefulness of a transportation mode or infrastructure to my adult life and the quality of it—the mode with the least usefulness would be a failure.” Here’s my assessment looking back in the last 30 years which also coincides with the length of my adult life, more or less.

Roads and cars allowed me to access everything that was out there… people, sights, activities, opportunities.

Roads and buses let me travel intra- and inter-city when I was making little money.

Roads, bicycles and mopeds made college life much easier and efficient. The bicycle as exercise on public roads and bikeways is among the least demanding and most enjoyable. It works for me.

Airplanes took me the world over. Nowadays, large airports like Incheon in South Korea allow me to get to Asia in one flight from the US and then the rest of Asia is one flight away.

Helicopters allowed me to study the main freeway in Honolulu and observe traffic shock waves in action. They are the best mode to view volcanoes in Hawaii and among the best means for rapid rescue the world over.

Bridges and tunnels. All had an obvious utility in time savings and safety.

Small ferries took me to islands with my car, large ferries took me to countries with my car, and container ships got me food, TVs, furniture and cars. Tanker ships bring oil to fuel most of the transportation I listed above. I love fish, so many thanks to the global fishing fleets and their harbors.

Freight trains. Without these trains and coal the US would not enjoy the cheap power it used to propel it to a global dominating status and the highest standard of living. Their indirect effect to my well being has been substantial.

Cable systems and telepheriques have a practicality all of their own and once built they are not too expensive to operate. The alternative, if one exists, is typically a long drive along narrow, winding and occasionally icy roads.

Passenger trains. There was always a substitute and they never were a necessity. I took the TGV in France, Shinkansen in Japan, and China’s fast trains. Without exception, all of them were one way trips, just to try them out. All of them were expensive and difficult to handle with two suitcases. They were much more crowded than airplanes. I also use metro rail in Europe and Asia, and in a handful of very large cities in the US chiefly because their downtowns are devoid of parking and their bus systems are too complex to learn in a short visit.

Thus, in relative terms, rail systems have done too little for my life experience and quality of life, thus, almost all rail systems built in the last 30 years were a failure. Add to this that all but Shinkansen are constant loss-makers and their first place as modern era transportation failures is assured.

ENDOTE
One maybe tempted to say that my response is skewed because Honolulu does not have rail. I've been in Honolulu for 22 years and my residence and work locations have been in a triangle formed by Kalihi, Kailua and Kahala. Rail would not be useful to me.

I spend a lot of time in Athens and my brother, sister and their families reside there. Less than 1% of our trips use any of Athens' multiple rail lines. For most people, a rail line makes no difference in their 21st century life style.