Central MA Transportation

Thursday, August 10, 2006

New Link

If you haven't done so yet check out the new link - Roads Gone Wild. This is the future of road design. Take the time to read the whole article. Nearly everyone has the same reaction, it'll never work here, cause people here don't know how to drive. Yet cities the size of Fitchburg and larger have taken this approach and found that it does work here. The longer we take to get on board and change the way we think about roads and road design the worse our traffic will get.

Friday, August 04, 2006

The 3Es

Road user behavior is the product of the 3 Es:
  • education
  • Engineering
  • enforcement

Road users include anyone that uses public roads, that includes everyone from the commercial truck driver down to pedestrians.

On the education side quantity and quality is all over the map. Learners permit and license exams for obtaining a Commercial Driver License are intense and passing standards are high. In the middle are class D or M license holders, where the passing score for a permit is a whopping 70% and the typical license exam doesn't even include backing up. At the low end of the spectrum are cyclists and pedestrians who do not require licenses and receive little or no training.
BTW: at some point in every trip we all become pedestrians.

Proposed changes in the Junior Operator Law have gotten a lot of press this year but the efforts are misguided and have moved in the wrong direction. Increasing licensing standard is not a bad idea but the return on investment won't be realized until we fix the root problem.

Many believe that increasing enforcement is the solution to improving driver behavior. But the level of traffic enforcement is like gasoline pricing. It finds the proper level on it's own and tampering with the price can have unintended consequences like creating shortages by increasing use and reducing exploration for new sources when prices are held artificially low. As for traffic enforcement, voters complain about what they perceive as problem traffic violations, politicians then react by forcing police to step up enforcement. Typically the people that get ticketed include many of the folks that were doing the complaining, most of the rest are their neighbors, the complaints subside, things slowly return to normal. A downside to the process is that it diverts manpower and other resources from more important police operations. Supporters of increased traffic enforcement will suggest that we need to increase the number of police but it's unsustainable in the long term. Increased enforcement reduces the number of violations initially but then the new officers have little to do.

So if the commonly perceived solutions, better training and more enforcement are ineffective where is the solution?

It's the one that's left, the one in the middle, the one were we already spend the most but need to do a better job of, the BIG E, ENGINEERING is the only viable long term solution. We need to ensure that road redesigns and new road construction include measures to:
  • reduce the frequency of road user conflicts
  • reduce the consequences of driver conflicts
  • reduce traffic congestion
  • reduce air pollution
  • keep traffic moving
  • allow drivers to use judgment
  • make good driving beneficial to drivers
  • make roadway users equal partners in their own safety
We don't do any of those things today.

The solution to practically every traffic problem, at least in the eyes of general public and therefore their elected representatives, involves increasing the number of traffic controls. That has been the approach for as far back as I can remember and I got my license in 1969, so far it hasn't worked. We got away with poor planing and bad politically motivated decisions for decades, but only because cause traffic density was lower and new road construction was keeping pace with the additional traffic on our roads. But that's a thing of the past, planning and new road construction takes much longer today. We're much more environmentally conscious today, roads were routed through sensitive wetlands decades ago. Today that's out of the question, at best such routes require years of studies and designs that mitigate the impact on the environment. We have to be smarter with our planning and and must find ways to use the existing footprint more effectively whenever possible. We also need to plan further ahead than we have in the past because of the extended time for new construction.

Were do we start? Locally of course, but what to do? If you're really concerned start by educating yourself about road design, read the TED TIPS at the link on the right as a primer. Look at what has been working in other countries and other cities in the US. I'll be providing a link to some articles about different design approaches that work soon. Realize that politics must take a back seat to good engineering if we're going to get the best solutions. And last but not least think things through don't assume organizations like the MRPC and MassHwy have the answers, they routinely make bad decisions sometimes even violating their own design guidelines.