How can congestion be reduced

Welcome to the club. Congestion not only wastes time, it increases pollution and crashes. While this undoubtedly annoys you as a traveler, it could be worse; your city might not have congestion because no one wants to be there.

Still, it would be great to have a thriving city without congestion. People could reach more destinations in less travel time, and thus have more time to spend doing the things they wanted.

If you figure it out, let us know. This is probably because policy-makers want to sound like they are doing something without promising anything. There are a number of proffered solutions out there.

Congestion is, in principle, a mostly solvable problem, even if no fast-growing city has fully solved it. This article outlines 21 ways that congestion could be solved. Some of these are dumb, many are good, one is great. The first set of strategies are basically supply side. But congestion is caused by a mismatch of supply and demand. There are undoubtedly some pet solutions out there not discussed here, and lots of details overlooked. Feel free to add more in the comments. As John Lennon might have sung in the s:.

Pricing is the answer and you know that for sure Pricing is a flower You got to let it, you gotta let it grow. But is congestion really the most important problem? Is it not sprawling land use patterns which require personal mobility in order to reach our destinations? Would it not be better to deal with wasteful land use patterns first via some form of distance-based pricing schemes and appropriate taxation policies , and only then use separate policies to deal with congestion?

Like Like. If you have pricing set properly, charge for new public infrastructure impact fees, etc. You must be logged in to post a comment. Skip to content So your city has traffic congestion. Congestion, due in part to weather, on I This is what we do with most things if we can.

If our house is too small, we make it bigger. If the internet is too slow, we add capacity. In roads, this usually means adding lanes to existing roads. The first problem with this solution is that it is expensive. Further, if you expand capacity, demand will respond. New induced developments will be built, and much of the capacity will quickly be used up by new travelers.

There will still likely be a small amount of travel time saved for existing travelers, and the new travelers do gain benefits otherwise why would they make the trip , so it is not necessarily a bad thing, but it may not solve your congestion problem. Levinson and David A. King Connectivity — Often the problem is not width of the road, but where it goes.

So reducing the circuity indirectness of the network through selected connections can reduce congestion and total traffic by taking traffic off of longer routes. Even when there is nominal connectivity, it might not be very good. A bridge can replace much slower and lower capacity ferries, eliminating a bottleneck.

But as with capacity expansions above, it can be very expensive. In a mature network, all the cheap and useful roads have been built already. The induced demand outcome also applies. Removing accidents and incidents from major roads faster by using roving service vehicles run by government-run Traffic Management Centers equipped with television and electronic surveillance of road conditions is an excellent tactic for reducing congestion delays.

Build more roads in growing areas. Opponents of building more roads claim that we cannot build our way out of congestion because more highway capacity will simply attract more travelers.

Due to triple convergence, that criticism is true for established roads that are already overcrowded. But the large projected growth of the U. Install ramp-metering. This means letting vehicles enter expressways only gradually. It has improved freeway speed during peak hours in both Seattle and the Twin Cities, and could be much more widely used. Use Intelligent Transportation System devices to speed traffic flows. These devices include electronic coordination of signal lights on local streets, large variable signs informing drivers of traffic conditions ahead, one-way street patterns, Global Positioning System equipment in cars and trucks, and radio broadcasts of current road conditions.

These technologies exist now and can be effective on local streets and arteries and informative on expressways. HOV lanes have proven successful in many areas such as Houston. More regions could use HOV lanes effectively if there were more lanes built for that purpose, rather than trying to convert existing ones. Merely converting existing lanes would reduce overall road capacity. Demonstration programs have shown that if firms offer to pay persons now receiving free employee parking a stipend for shifting to carpooling or transit, significant percentages will do so.

That could reduce the number of cars on the road. However, this tactic does not prevent the offsetting consequences of triple convergence.

Restrict very low-density peripheral development. Urban growth boundaries that severely constrain all far-out suburban development will not reduce future congestion much, especially in fast-growing regions. And such boundaries may drive up peripheral housing prices. But requiring at least moderate residential densities—say, 3, persons per square mile 4.

In , thirty-six urbanized areas had fringe area densities of 3, or more. Those thirty-six urbanized areas contained Cluster high-density housing around transit stops. Such Transit Oriented Developments TODs would permit more residents to commute by walking to transit, thereby decreasing the number of private vehicles on the roads. However, the potential of this tactic is limited.

Even so, developing many of these high-density clusters might make public transit service more feasible to many more parts of large regions. Give regional transportation authorities more power and resources. Congress has created Metropolitan Planning Organizations to coordinate ground transportation planning over all modes in each region. If these were given more technical assistance and power, more rational systems could be created.

Without much more regionally focused planning over land uses as well as transportation, few anti-congestion tactics will work effectively. Raise gasoline taxes. Raising gas taxes would notably slow the rate of increase of all automotive travel, not just peak-hour commuting.

But Congress has refused to consider it because it is politically unpopular and fought by industry lobbyists. Peak-hour traffic congestion in almost all large and growing metropolitan regions around the world is here to stay. In fact, it is almost certain to get worse during at least the next few decades, mainly because of rising populations and wealth. This will be true no matter what public and private policies are adopted to combat congestion.

But this outcome should not be regarded as a mark of social failure or misguided policies. In fact, traffic congestion often results from economic prosperity and other types of success. For smart mobility, alternative options would need to be connected to the cloud:. A fourth criterion required to enable smart mobility to reduce traffic congestion is the evolution of autonomous vehicles. While still in development, autonomous vehicles are cars or trucks in which human drivers are not required.

These vehicles use sensors and software to control, navigate, and drive the vehicle. The use of autonomous vehicles to reduce traffic congestion depends on public policy. For example, self-driving cars could connect transit hubs, provide public transit services to communities not currently served, and be used to improve public transportation.

Traffic management is ultimately at the heart of reducing congestion. Wilson Parking enables drivers to pre-book spaces on the bridge, resulting in smoother traffic flows. The City of Denver uses its capabilities to take a proactive approach to transportation optimizations, for example, by enabling real-time adjustments to traffic flows in the case of accidents or other disruptions.

Mobility as a Service MaaS applications complete the smart mobility picture. The vision of MaaS is to make it easier and less expensive for car drivers and passengers to travel via alternative forms of transportation. MaaS applications enable travelers to plan trips based on their priorities and preferences. Specifically, congestion seems to slow job growth when it gets to be worse than about 35 to 37 hours of delay per commuter per year or about four-and-a-half minutes extra per one-way trip, relative to free-flowing traffic.

A similar threshold exists when the entire road network gets saturated throughout the course of the day. We have already talked about the population shift in Auckland with the average Auckland commute increasing by over kilometres a year from to but this is not an issue specific to New Zealand. In the US, the population continues to grow and shift from rural to urban areas. From to , the US population is expected to increase 15 per cent, from million to million, and the percentage living in urban areas is expected to rise from 81 per cent in to 89 per cent by This could exacerbate an existing trend—a per cent gain in the US urban population since —that has significantly increased vehicle miles travelled VMT in cities.

Meanwhile, motor vehicles remain the dominant transportation mode. While these figures may not be representative of cities in New Zealand, the problems are the same throughout the world. In Auckland , around 62 per cent of development over the next 30 years is anticipated to be in existing urban areas. A further 32 per cent is anticipated to occur in future urban areas with only 6 per cent forecasted in rural areas.

One of the biggest disruptors to transportation worldwide has been the exponential rise in ride-hailing services. Here in New Zealand, while we are starting to see an increase in ride-hailing apps when it comes to choice, we still lag behind many western countries.

Apps like Uber, Ola and Zoomy are three options here in New Zealand, but globally there are several other options to choose from. Lyft is one of the most popular in the US along with Curb. This increase in ride-hailing apps means that more cars than ever are on the streets, with people often substituting public transport for ride-hailing options. This contributes to the overall congestion on the roads, putting strain on already overloaded infrastructure.

Internet-based purchasing is on a rapid growth trajectory. Even before the Covid pandemic hit, online shopping was up 10 per cent in the first two months of last year, the report says. In the lead up to Christmas , NZ Post delivered more than parcels a minute, or 2.

While it once seemed likely that on-demand delivery would prompt consumers to reduce trips to malls and retail stores, the expected drop in VMT never materialised due to the resulting increase in single-package deliveries and smaller vehicle loads , failed deliveries which drive repeat visits, and the high return rate of e-commerce orders.