highway

Reducing Highway Size Doesn’t Negatively Impact Congestion

- Adam Clare

Nobody likes being stuck in traffic and in the recent past the solution was to build more roads (or add more lanes). Ironically this makes traffic worse as an increase in traffic capacity means more people will drive places. These narrow-minded solutions are still applied in some places like Toronto where Crack-Mayor removed bike lanes. Hopefully the next time transportation options are being looked at crack-voters will come to understand that the best way to make traffic flow better is to not cater to car drivers.

Whenever some city proposes taking lanes away from a road, residents scream that they’re going to create a huge traffic snarl. But the data shows that nothing truly terrible happens. The amount of traffic on the road simply readjusts and overall congestion doesn’t really increase.

For instance, Paris in recent decades has had a persistent policy to dramatically downsize and reduce roadways. “Driving in Paris was bad before,” said Duranton. “It’s just as bad, but it’s not much worse.”

So where did those other drivers go? Many of them switched to public transit, which in Paris has increased by 20 percent in the last two decades. Other trips have simply been avoided, or done on foot. It’s not just Europeans who are eager to get out of their cars. San Francisco removed a highway section, called the Central Freeway, that carried nearly 100,000 cars per day in 1989. The boulevard that replaced it now only carries around 45,000 daily cars and yet they move. (Yes, I’ve been stuck in traffic on Octavia Boulevard, but it’s not like you never get through.) Perhaps the biggest success story has been in Seoul, South Korea, where the city tore down a highway that was considered a vital roadway corridor, carrying 168,000 cars per day. After replacing the cars with a river, parkland, and some smaller roads, traffic didn’t get worse and many other things, including pollution, got better.

Read more.

Urban Highways Should Be Torn Down; Replaced By Useful Space

- Adam Clare

Car-dominated infrastructure is clearly bad for local communities, transit, the environment (local and global), and the economy. So why do so many places refuse to tear down crumbling urban highways? The addiction to the car is a powerful one in many parts of the world and we need to curb it.

Over at Firefly Living, this issue is examined and argues that yes the highways should be torn and lists some places where this has worked rather effectively.

3. Milwaukee Tears Down the Past East Freeway

The cost of repairing Milwaukee’s aged Past East Freeway would have been upwards of $100 million. The cost of removing a mile of it was a quarter of that. The freeway used to carry 54,000 cars a day, now the boulevard that’s replaced it carries 18,600 cars a day. The area has added 3,400 residents in 5 years, thanks to the removal of the freeway. The city-owned land around the torn-down freeway has benefited from $700 million of investment to date.

Read more here.

Thanks to Jon!

Copenhagen Gets Bike Superhighway

- Adam Clare

Copenhagen is known as the most bicycle friendly city on the planet and they keep getting better. Recently, the capital of Denmark has created a bicycle superhighway that is separated from car-dominated roads. The network of highways is designed to get people in the suburbs to get out of their pollution producers and commute more sustainably.

Other cities like London have committed resources to encourage suburbanites to commute via bicycle. Hopefully this inexpensive pro-cycling attitude will one day get to the traffic-clogged car-centric cities of North America.

The cycle superhighway, which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle. More bike path than the Interstate its name suggests, it is the brainchild of city planners who were looking for ways to increase bicycle use in a place where half of the residents already bike to work or to school every day.

“We are very good, but we want to be better,” said Brian Hansen, the head of Copenhagen’s traffic planning section.

He and his team saw potential in suburban commuters, most of whom use cars or public transportation to reach the city. “A typical cyclist uses the bicycle within five kilometers,” or about three miles, said Mr. Hansen, whose office keeps a coat rack of ponchos that bicycling employees can borrow in case of rain. “We thought: How do we get people to take longer bicycle rides?”

They decided to make cycle paths look more like automobile freeways. While there is a good existing network of bicycle pathways around Copenhagen, standards across municipalities can be inconsistent, with some stretches having inadequate pavement, lighting or winter maintenance, as well as unsafe intersections and gaps.

“It doesn’t work if you have a good route, then a section in the middle is covered in snow,” said Lise Borgstrom Henriksen, spokeswoman for the cycle superhighway secretariat. “People won’t ride to work then.”

Read more at NY Times, be careful though, they have a paywall.

Thanks to Janet and Matt!

Madrid Turned a Highway into a Park

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Madrid made a very wise urban planning decision and buried a highway to make room for people and nature. Thanks to a lack of foresight, the Rio Manzanares was surrounded by concrete and industrial spaces that made for depressing scene. The smart people in Madrid decided to change that and make the area along the river a place for people to enjoy and bring back nature to the space.

They added more pedestrian space, bike lanes, and room for public transit. To make things even better they supported surrounding buildings in sustainable renovations to improve their carbon footprint!

Here’s a great video explaining what they did and how the project drastically improves the city:

The planning management of the project was first sub-divided into two phases due to its technical complexity and the high amount of investment required to complete the project. The two phases focused on different objectives which were:
1. Madrid Calle 30 (Phase 1) – to bury the M-30 highway, and
2. Madrid Río (Phase 2) – to treat the area surrounding the river by building parks, playgrounds, infrastructure, and other facilities.

…
In a project as big as this one, the objectives were met step-by-step through smaller projects that were carried out to focus on specific areas that would be affected. For example, one project would deal with the areas of Casa de Campo and Manzanares districts, while another would execute the project in areas of Palacio-Puerta del Angel districts. The planning of many focused projects such as these under one big project, displays the work breakdown structure (WBS) of the whole project as well as the divergence and convergence of the work paths that would occur in the process.

Read more here

‘Electric Highway’ Infrastructure Goes Live

- Adam Clare

The first location in what will be a series of fast-charging stations for electric and hybrid vehicles as officially opened in Washington State. Consumers cite concerns over how far electric vehicles can drive before char gins as a reason they won’t by electric cars (even though this is a none issue for the vast majority of commuters). With more stations where people can quickly charge their autos this distance issue will go away.

AeroVironment plans to install six stations every 64 to 97 kilometers along I-5 in shopping malls, fueling stations and restaurants with easy access to the highway. Three more stations will be built along U.S. Highway 2 to the north and potentially two more along Interstate 90, near Seattle.

2012 will be a pivotal year for electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf and plug-in electric hybrids such as the Chevy Volt. General Motors had high hopes for the Volt in its first full year on the market, but the company expects to miss its sales target of 10,000 cars in 2011, coming up short by more than 3,800, according to Bloomberg. Sales were stronger toward the end of the year. The company is expanding its annual production to 60,000 vehicles starting next month, even as the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigates lithium-ion battery-pack fires following tests designed to measure the vehicle’s ability to protect occupants from injury in a side collision. Neither Nissan nor Tesla Motors—both of which sell all-electric vehicles powered entirely by lithium-ion batteries—have reported any fires in either the LEAF or Roadster, respectively.

You can always read more.

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