Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Congestion

What If We Measure Streets for Walking the Way We Measure Streets for Cars?

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 4, 2016 | 7 Comments

“What you measure is what you get,” the saying goes. In transportation, the dominant metrics are all about moving motor vehicle traffic, so America has built a transportation network that moves a lot of cars. Our streets may be dangerous, expensive, and inefficient, but they do process huge volumes of motor vehicles. A quintessentially American transportation metric — […]

Another Tall Tale About Congestion From the Texas Transportation Institute

By Joe Cortright | Aug 26, 2015 | 7 Comments

Crossposted from City Observatory. Everything is bigger in Texas — which must be why, for the past 30 years, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has basically cornered the market for telling whoppers about the supposed toll that traffic congestion takes on the nation’s economy. Today, they’re back with a new report, “The Urban Mobility Scorecard,” which purports to […]

Great Cities Don’t Have Much Traffic, But They Do Have Congestion

By Angie Schmitt | Oct 31, 2014 | 17 Comments

Here’s a great visualization of what cities get out of the billions of dollars spent on highways and road expansion: more traffic. Justin Swan at City Clock made this chart showing the relationship between congestion levels, as measured by TomTom, and car use. (Yes, it has no X axis — here’s Swan’s explanation of how to read […]

Bike Lanes Don’t Lead to Congestion, But Some of Them Should

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 11, 2014 | 23 Comments

Gretchen Johnson and Aaron Johnson have posted a nice debunking of typical “war on cars” rhetoric over at fivethirtyeight. Johnson and Johnson gathered before-and-after traffic data from 45 miles of streets where Minneapolis installed bike lanes. They also looked at how Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West bike lane affected traffic conditions. They found, in short, that after the installation of […]

How the Self-Driving Car Could Spell the End of Parking Craters

By Tanya Snyder | Mar 26, 2014 | 20 Comments

Here’s the rosy scenario of a future where cars drive themselves: Instead of owning cars, people will summon autonomous vehicles, hop in, and head to their destination. With fewer cars to be stored, parking lots and garages will give way to development, eventually bringing down the cost of housing in tight markets through increased supply. […]

The End for LOS in California? State Wants Input on a New Planning Metric

By Melanie Curry | Feb 13, 2014 | No Comments

With little fanfare, California is considering a change in how it measures transportation impacts that could herald a major change in environmental law. SB 743, passed and signed into law in September, is a potential game changer because it could completely remove LOS — Level of Service, a measure of car traffic congestion — from […]

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