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Collection: Congestion Pricing

Should Portland Try Decongestion Pricing?

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2017 but we’ve updated it with details about the current status of the project, including the Environmental Assessment published February 15, 2019, open for public comment through April 1, 2019.   [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column][vc_btn title=”FAQ: Portland Decongestion Pricing” color=”mulled-wine” align=”center” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sightline.org%2F2019%2F03%2F06%2Ffaq-about-i-5-rose-quarter-expansion-and-decongestion-pricing-in-portland%2F|||”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]What if you had back pain and your doctor … Read more

FAQ About I-5 Rose Quarter Expansion and Decongestion Pricing in Portland

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2017 but we’ve updated it with details about the current status of the project, including the Environmental Assessment published February 15, 2019, open for public comment through April 1, 2019. [vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Portlanders care about clean air, preventing climate change, preventing deaths, and relieving congestion. Unfortunately, expanding the I-5 … Read more

FAQ About I-5 Rose Quarter Expansion and Congestion Pricing in Portland

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Portlanders care about clean air, preventing climate change, preventing deaths, and relieving congestion. Unfortunately, expanding the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway will make pollution worse, won’t help safety, and won’t help with congestion. Here’s the answers to your questions. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_tta_accordion active_section=”1″][vc_tta_section title=”1. Why won’t freeway expansion relieve congestion?” tab_id=”will-freeway-expansion-relieve-congestion” el_class=” “][vc_column_text]On “Free Cone Day,” Ben & … Read more

Should Portland Try Congestion Pricing?

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What if you had back pain and your doctor told you: “Physical therapy could relieve your pain, and it offers other health benefits. Or you could do a very expensive surgery which comes with additional health risks and, I’m sorry to say, probably won’t help.” Would you: Shell out the money to do the surgery … Read more

Another Look at SR-520 Tolls

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Just to be clear: it’s way too early to be sure how the new SR-520 tolls will affect Seattle traffic over the long haul.  Still, as an I-5 commuter, I’ve found the effects of tolling both dramatic and fascinating.

Take a look at the animation below, comparing yesterday morning’s rush-hour with traffic from 4 weeks prior.  Not only was 520 a breeze after tolling started, but the traffic seemed to ease on I-5 southbound as well—and perhaps even on 405 southbound north of the turnoff to 520.

I chose December 7 more or less at random, but the traffic map for that day is familiar: Wednesday morning rush hour is typically the most congested day of the week, with long backups on I-5 southbound heading towards the turnoff to SR-520 (the northern of the two cross-lake routes).  Yesterday, though, it was smooth sailing into downtown. 

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SR-520: Before and After Tolling

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Editor’s note: Another version here.

Via Sightline pal Joe Cortright and Google maps, a graphic depiction of what happens when you toll a formerly free stretch of highway:  drivers flock to a nearby, untolled route.

(The image is a web animation—so if it’s not flipping back and forth between two different maps, you may have to change your internet browser settings to allow “animated gifs.”  Also, the “Toll” image is from this morning at 8 a.m., and the “No Toll” image is a typical weekday morning at 8 a.m.)

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Congestion: The Untold Story

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Last week, the Texas Transportation Institute released their annual “Urban Mobility Report,” which surveys congestion and traffic trends across US cities. And the first thing the authors argue in their executive summary is that congestion is a very serious issue indeed:

Congestion is a significant problem in America’s 439 urban areas. And, although readers and policy makers may have been distracted by the economy-based congestion reductions in the last few years, the 2010 data indicate the problem will not go away by itself – action is needed…[T]he problem is very large.

And so on. Clearly, the report’s authors want us all to believe that even if congestion is better than it was a few years back, it’ll rear its ugly head again as soon as the economy picks up again.

But my read of the numbers reveals a somewhat different story: in much of the Pacific Northwest, congestion flattened out long before the recession began.

It’s a story that’s especially clear for Seattle.

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Does Transit Really Reduce Congestion?

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There’s plenty of evidence that building roads doesn’t do much to relieve congestion.  This fairly exhaustive literature review from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute shows that building new road space in an urban area tends to encourage drivers to take advantage of faster-moving traffic by making extra trips.

Litman - generated traffic elasticity estimatesEstimates vary, but it seems that somewhere between most and all of any new road capacity is quickly occupied by new “induced” traffic. (See, for example, the chart to the right from the VTPI lit review.)

Reading this body of literature, Brookings Institution researcher Anthony Downs argues that traffic congestion has become an inescapable fact of urban life. In fact, he argues, the steps we take to fight congestion—such as building new roads—often carry the seeds of their own destruction:

Visualize a major commuting freeway so heavily congested each morning that traffic crawls for at least thirty minutes. If that freeway were magically doubled in capacity overnight, the next day traffic would flow rapidly because the same number of drivers would have twice as much road space.

But very soon word would get around that this road was uncongested. Drivers who had formerly traveled before or after the peak hour to avoid congestion would shift back into that peak period. Drivers who had been using alternative routes would shift onto this now convenient freeway. Some commuters who had been using transit would start driving on this road during peak periods.

Downs calls the shift of drivers from other times, routes, or modes the principle of “Triple Convergence”—a force that tends to keep traffic congestion at a rough equilibrium regardless of how much money a metro area throws at road construction.

But to me, that raises an interesting question:  if a city can’t build it’s way out of traffic congestion by adding new roads, what about investments in transit?  Transit advocates sometimes argue that bus or rail investments can help ease traffic, by getting people out of their cars.

Yet as far as I can tell, the evidence for this isn’t so good.

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