Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Center for Transportation Safety Equity for Rural, Isolated, Tribal and Indigenous Communities


UH-Manoa in collaboration with the universities of Alaska, Idaho and Washington was successful in receiving a 5-year Tier-1 University Transportation Center (UTC) from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Only 36 out of more than 400 proposals were successful.

UH's research budget share is $1.6 million over five years. The focus of the research is on Transportation Safety Equity for Rural, Isolated, Tribal and Indigenous Communities. The principal research investigators are Dr. Guohui Zhang and Dr. Panos Prevedouros.


The purpose of the UTCs is to conduct research that directly supports the priorities of the U.S. DOT to promote the safe, efficient and environmentally sound movement of good and people.  UTCs work with regional, state, local and tribal transportation agencies to help find solutions to challenges that directly impact their communities and affect the efficiency of the nation’s transportation system.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Brief Trump Presidency Forecast


It's about two months before Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the US. Here's my forecast for his presidency.

Trump will be full of surprises. Folks who adhere to “traditional values” and have no love for Hillary and Obama will be disappointed. Other than appointing one or two fairly conservative Supreme Court judges, I don’t think that he will do much about changing the status of issues that liberals hold dear such as abortion and gay marriage. (But there can be future implications, as with any conservative or liberal leaning court.)

Trump is basically a real world-based businessman and deal-maker, a New York City "lite-liberal" with soft Christian values. He’ll show a high preference for government investment in infrastructure and low preference for government-centered money redistribution schemes like entitlements and ObamaCare. 

Trump will be more US-focused rather than tackle global issues. More so if an economic recession hits, which is almost certain to occur in the next four years. He will attempt regulatory changes, especially in the energy, transportation and heavy industry sectors. Many will have negative implications to pollution but positive implications to domestic economy and employment.

Trump's biggest challenges will be managing the defense budget and the interest on the massive national debt vis-à-vis his ambitions for job creation and the Congress’ funding preferences. Pentagon may wind up being on the losing end. I doubt that Trump will push for a tax overhaul, although he may attempt one.

Two areas of Trump's inflammatory campaign rhetoric that will be subject to some sort of action are Islam-related and the wall between the US and Mexico. Islam-targeted (re)action is very likely if he is provoked by international or terrorism events; this is almost inevitable.  Some form of the wall will happen, mostly as an expansion of the existing portions; see below. The deportation of illegal residents will see a boost, mostly targeting criminals, human traffickers and drug operatives. (Many states want their domestic marijuana production and dispensation to succeed.)



Thursday, November 17, 2016

UH engineer: Speedier Traffic Lights Could Alleviate Congestion

Thanks to Jim Mendoza for covering the improvement of traffic signals yesterday on Hawaii News Now. Jim and Alan came to the intersection of Dole St. and University Ave. where I was with my 36 students in CEE 462: Traffic Engineering. 

Pleased to see it trending as a popular story: UH engineer: Speedier traffic lights could alleviate congestion


Monday, November 7, 2016

Better Ways to Fix Traffic on Oahu

Many thanks to the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and Aaron Lief for this great summary of my recent presentation on traffic solutions for Oahu: Better Ways to Fix Traffic on Oahu.



Thursday, October 20, 2016

55 All Around

55 year old driver driving his car through the 55,000 mile mark at 55 mph in a 55 mph speed zone at 1:55 pm. It took a bit of engineering and planning to get all these done legally and safely on I-55*!
* Alas, there's no I-55 in Honolulu, so I did it on the H-3 Fwy.


New Commuting Data: Same Old Trends

The informative summary below was developed by Robert Poole at the Reason Foundation.
---------------

Last month brought the release of the 2015 American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census. The data on commuting from ACS are generally accepted as the most-representative national-average figures. And what is most notable about these latest numbers is how little change they reveal, compared with their counterparts over the past decade.

Commuting expert Steve Polzin of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida posted an excellent summary, with 10-year graphs, on Planetizen.

Most of the commuting mode-share data show very little change over the decade from 2005 through 2015. Drive-alone remains the choice of slightly over three-fourths of all commuters (76.6%), with virtually no change over this time period. Interestingly, nearly as many millennials (age 20-24) drive alone (72.5%), despite all you read about them being new urbanists who walk, bike, or use transit.

The two most significant trends over the decade are the continuing decline in carpooling and the ongoing increase in telecommuting. Despite all the guff about the sharing economy and future "mobility as a service," there is no sign of this so far in terms of increased willingness to share rides with others; carpooling is down to 9.0%, from nearly 11% a decade ago (and from just under 20% in 1980). Telecommuting has increased from about 3.4% in 2005 to 4.6% in 2015 and seems to be catching up with transit's mode share of 5.2%. Biking (0.6%) and walking (2.8%) are largely flat over the decade.

Polzin notes that average commuting time (heavily influenced by the drive-alone super-majority) is now 26.4 minutes, up from 25.1 minutes a decade ago. But he also provides some useful perspective by comparing the 2005 U.S. figure with average 2005 commute times in other OECD member countries—e.g., 33 minutes in Spain, 36 minutes in France, 40 minutes in Belgium, 45 minutes in Germany, and 46 minutes in the U.K. These countries all have a higher transit mode share than the United States, and since transit trips generally take longer than driving trips, that may help to explain the difference between the U.S. numbers and Europe's.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Honolulu Rail: From $4.6 B to $8.6 B In Eight Years. Now What?

My article "Honolulu Rail: From $4.6 B to $8.6 B In Eight Years. Now What?" with Cliff Slater and Randall Roth was published in New Geography, a national urban issues and news website.

With its official cost now having risen to $8.6 billion and a funding gap of $1.8 billion, both of which are certain to rise, Honolulu’s rail project will run out of money before construction reaches the downtown area, perhaps even before it reaches Middle Street.
The Federal Transit Administration says it will demand a return of all federal money if rail does not reach Ala Moana Center, which is possible only if the state Legislature or Honolulu City Council increase taxes dramatically:  An average family of five would have to pay more than $1,000 per year just to complete rail, according to the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. Once completed, the annual cost of operating and maintaining a safe and reliable rail system would require comparable tax payments each year for the lifetime of the rail system.
State and city lawmakers are reluctant to raise taxes so dramatically, but abandoning the project at this late date would make those who had been supporting it look like idiots.  They must be asking themselves, “How did we get ourselves into this mess?”

Monday, October 3, 2016

Federal Funds Will Help State Conduct Study on New Ferries

Kevin Dayon reports in his article Federal funds will help state conduct study on new ferries in the Honolulu Star Advertiser that "The U.S. Maritime Administration has agreed to help finance a feasibility study for establishing a publicly financed Hawaii ferry service, a plan that may reignite public debate over one of Hawaii’s hot-button transportation and environmental issues."

I was quoted in the article as follows:

Honolulu established a ferry dubbed TheBoat in 2007 that ran between Kalaeloa and Aloha Tower during former Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s administration, but the city scrapped the effort in 2009. That ferry ran at about 30 percent of its 149-passenger capacity.

Prevedouros said the door-to-door travel times for TheBoat* were long, including the time needed to get to the docks to board the vessel, and to get from the docks to the passengers’ final destinations. The small boats used for the service were also unreliable, and provided a bumpy ride, he said.

“The people were not pleased with the whole experience, and the passengers never showed up,” he said. “Unless you really have a very good, stable and very fast boat, you’re going to have issues with travel times.”

Prevedouros is more optimistic about interisland ferry service, which he calls “a necessity” for an island state. The Superferry was popular with the public, and the community lost out when it was forced out of business by litigation, he said.

It is unlikely any private investor will want to invest in a ferry in Hawaii now, and publicly run enterprises in Hawaii tend to be expensive, he said. “I don’t like public systems in Hawaii,” he said. “Like everything that we touch, it becomes double and triple the cost.”

In a 2008 comprehensive study of commuting alternatives for Honolulu we estimated that the cost of removing one peak hour commuter from the traffic for 20 years was about $4 million for TheRail, about $1 million for TheBoat and about $80,000 for an express toll lane.

Below is an example of a high people and vehicle capacity vessel operating between the Greek Islands in the Aegean Sea:


Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Honolulu Star Advertiser: Road Woes Roll On


I was quoted extensively in the headline article Road Woes Roll On of the September 28, 2016 edition of the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the main newspaper in the state of Hawaii.

The latest Reason report found that Hawaii, with the nation’s smallest state-run road network at 1,016 miles, in 2013 spent about 2-1/2 times the national average in total costs per mile: $405,269.

Despite that heavy spending, the report further found Hawaii’s roads to be the worst in the U.S. for urban pavement conditions.

Unfortunately, it’s the worst of both worlds. We overpay and we under-receive,” said Panos Prevedouros, who heads the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

The statistics are reliable because these are self-reported numbers. They don’t paint a good picture for us,” added Prevedouros, who specializes in transportation.

...

Having the nation’s smallest road network also helps drive up the state’s average cost per mile, he said.

Prevedouros agreed.

“It’s like a small apartment and a big apartment — they still have the same appliances,” he said Monday, making a comparison to state road networks and the agencies that must maintain them.

It’s impossible for us to be at the top” of Reason’s list, Prevedouros said. But “there is a lot of room for improvement.

Hawaii might face some unique challenges, but it also avoids problems faced by mainland states, such as heavy interstate travel, Prevedouros said.

...

“The administration now is making significant improvements to make the maintenance better,” Sakahara said, adding that policy could lead to better grades in subsequent annual Reason reports for the Ige years.

Prevedouros said he believed the policy “may make the numbers even worse.”

Without adding more highway capacity, the state’s congestion grades for the Reason reports will likely worsen, he said.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Getting out of Gridlock: Should UH Start Later?

Last week Jim Mendoza of Hawaii News Now developed the story Getting Out of Gridlock: Should UH start later?

Traffic planners believe if UH started school at 9 a.m. instead of 7:30, 5,000 cars could be eliminated from the morning rush.  Students don't balk at the idea. "I can see it possibly alleviating some traffic," Ioane Goodhue said.

But UH communications director Dan Meisenzahl said that many students who start at 9 a.m. or later come to campus early anyway to find parking and eliminating early classes wouldn't change that.

In other words, he provided a reason to not look further into this.  But his statement is wrong.

First of all, many of the students who do not have permits come very early, park and go back to sleep or study in their car. But they are only 20% of the traffic-to-town generated by the UH.

UH-Manoa, HCC and KCC, that is, UH's three main campuses inside Honolulu, have a combined parking capacity of over 10,000 stalls of which at least 8,000 are assigned to annual or semester permit holders consisting of faculty, staff, seniors and graduate students.

Say half of those 8,000+ cats come from places west (Ewa) of Kalihi Street. If most of them arrive during the 6:00 to 8:00 AM rush, then these cars need a whole freeway lane to themselves.

As a result, when the UH is not in session, this lane goes back to non-UH traffic and congestion levels are markedly lower.

Another important point is this scientific finding: "Scientists have found that current school and university start times are damaging the learning and health of students. Drawing on the latest sleep research, the authors conclude students start times should be 8:30 or later at age 10; 10:00 or later at 16; and 11:00 or later at 18."

An additional advantage is that if UH started at 9:30 AM, it would be easier for its professors and lecturers to offer late afternoon and evening classes that working people can take. Now most of the classes are over by 3:30 PM.




Thursday, September 22, 2016

Traffic Expert: Honolulu Ideal for Driverless Vehicles

I, the traffic engineer, should be more careful with these driverless cars... if they become all knowing, autonomous and self-managing, they will need no drivers. And cities will need no traffic engineers ;)
Panos Prevedouros, chairman of the University of Hawaii's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, agrees that Honolulu is ideal for driver-less cars.
"Not only because of congestion but because we're really not an interstate state. Our speeds everywhere are modest to low. That makes the risk quite lower than Montana," he said.
...
The federal government believes automated vehicles will make roads safer and reduce gridlock.
But Prevedouros said self-driving cars could initially slow down traffic.
"In the future they can be aggressive. In other words, they can be tailgating each other to save a lot of space. But in the early stages this is not going to happen," he said.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Not Too Late to Make the Right Decision on Rail

By Panos Prevedouros and Randall Roth
Panos Prevedouros is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where Randall Roth is a professor on the law faculty.

The Federal Transit Administration says it will demand its money back if rail does not reach Ala Moana Center.  Rather than view this as the beginning of a negotiation, both mayoral candidates used it as leverage to convince voters that the city has no viable option other than to find the additional billions needed to satisfy the FTA. 
Fortunately neither the FTA nor the winner of the mayoral election will decide rail’s fate.  The members of the state legislature and the city council will decide whether to raise taxes enough to cover the cost.
Assuming these decision-makers approach their task logically, they will begin by addressing four questions: (1) How much more money would be needed to finish rail? (2) Where would that money come from? (3) What would be accomplished? And (4) What could be accomplished if the same amount of money was spent on something else, instead of rail? 
If they approach this with open minds, we believe that they will reach the following conclusions:  
  1. Another $5.75 billion, over and above the non-recoverable $3.5 billion already spent, will be needed to reach Ala Moana Center (i.e., total construction costs of $10.8 billion, less $3.5 billion already spent or irretrievably committed, less $1.55 billion federal money yields $5.75 billion);
  2. The chances of getting an additional federal grant for rail are virtually nonexistent;
  3. It is unrealistic to expect the private sector to provide more than an insignificant portion of the needed $5.75 billion;
  4. The bulk of the new money will have to come from local residents, who will have to pay an average of $200 per person ($800 for each family of four) every year until construction ends;
  5. The rest—roughly 15% of $5.75 billion—will come from tourists or other non-residents;
  6. After construction ends, each family of four will continue to pay an average of $800 per year, to cover the annual cost of operating and maintaining a safe and reliable rail system; and
  7. Traffic congestion will be much worse when rail becomes fully operational than it is right now.
Anyone who questions this last statement should see the Final Environmental Impact Study in which the city admits, "traffic congestion will be worse in the future with rail than what it is today without rail."
Other ways to spend the money:  Working together, the city and state can reduce traffic congestion, for example, by aggressively adding new traffic lanes to existing roads, as has already been done successfully on each side of the central part of H-1 Freeway; by installing flyovers and bypasses in chokepoint areas like the Middle Street merge; and by adding new contra-flow and bus-on-shoulder options.  Each is a proven strategy that, unlike rail, would directly benefit all commuters.
Equally important, the city could afford to greatly improve its award-winning bus system.  This might include increasing the number of express buses that go where commuters want to go, rather than eliminating most of them as is part of the rail plan.  
All of the above could easily be done for less than half of the money that would be saved by pulling the plug on rail now.  The legislature and city council could spend the rest on other areas of need, such as a comprehensive homeless plan, heat mitigation and other improvement for our schools, sewer and road repairs … or simply leave it in the pockets of island residents. 
The existing guideway could be modified for walking, biking, and other community activities, and provide unique views of the island.  The High Line in New York is a wildly popular public park built on an abandoned rail line above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side.  While no one would set out to spend $3.5 billion for a High Line trail/park in Hawaii, it could become a tourist attraction. 
And last but not least, twenty years from now traditional mass transit will be functionally and technologically obsolete for cities like Honolulu thanks to autonomous vehicles and ride-hailing apps. Who’s the future of urban transportation: Apple, Google and Uber or Caldwell, FTA and HART?
===============
We appreciate that The Star Advertiser published our article and KSSK's Michael W Perry posted it with the remark "Must Read: Great Article About Rail!"

Notice our concluding sentence: Who’s the future of urban transportation: Apple, Google and Uber or Caldwell, FTA and HART? We originally wrote it on September 9, 2016.

On September 17, 2016 the Washington Post published this article: Washington searches for new streetcar riders in an Uber era (!)





Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Green Light, Red Light Ratio

Today I received a very interesting question: Has there ever been a study on if the ratio of red lights to green lights that a driver encounters during a trip has an effect on the driver's mood? My response follows.

If the ratio green-to-red is 1:1 then this means that the driver has a 50% probability for either green or red as he or she drives down a street with a series of signalized intersections.  This is a poor ratio for a main arterial. A well managed arterial street should have at least a 7:3 green-to-red ratio; that is, many more greens than reds. This requires traffic signal optimization to accomplish.

Surprisingly, Honolulu is often the opposite, which makes it easy to fix, if anyone bothered to work on it. I demonstrated this to reporters in the two times I run for mayor. The best we could do was 1:1 which means the traffic lights operated at random!

As to the behavioral implications, I'm not aware of literature on past research associated with this ratio, but there is plenty of literature associated with congestion and loss of time. Of course one of the most irritating things is when one departs from a green, drives toward the next light which is green, but soon before s/he arrives at the intersection, the light turns red. This is terrible for loss of time, pollution, schedule failure for buses, etc.

The picture below shows the "bandwiths" of green light for both directions of a two way street.  Signal coordination is easy to do for one street, but it's complicated for a large city network, However, computers and software can optimize those with ease.


Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Chinese Straddle Bus -- Take 3

It looks like the Chinese Straddle Bus that I covered at length here (in 2012 and 2013) has moved from a video concept to an experimental prototype phase.  There was a huge interest in this concept when it first came out in early 2012... by late 2012 my blog post "Enough with the Chinese Straddle Bus!" had over 2,000 reads.

This is indeed an interesting development. The main problems will be much more related to driver behavior, and much less related to technological feasibility, although the sheer size of it and maneuverability limitations may make it suitable to limited locales and arterial streets.