Trafficking in Congestion

Traffic abounds, billions are spent on new roads and traffic lights, yet traffic grows exponentially worse. Is it possible that there is money to be made here and certain people don't actually want the traffic problem alleviated?

A March 2008 report on CNNMoney.com summarized several reports on traffic. In it, the motorist advocacy group Automobile Association of America (AAA) said accidents cost Americans $164.2 billion each year, an annual per person cost of $1,051, while the Texas Transportation Institute estimated that congestion costs the nation $67.6 billion each year, or $430 per person. "Nearly 43,000 people die on the nation's roadways each year," AAA President Robert L. Darbelnet said in the report. Sadly, this statistic is largely ignored in favor of more compelling human drama such as the 100 annual deaths suffered from accidental drowning. Methods to reduce sharply this tragic number can be summarized in three basic areas: public policy paradigm shifts, innovative road and intersection design, and public education. The barrier to implementation is in integrating modern traffic concepts among groups that have little understanding of their inter-dynamic role in traffic flow.

Public policy – ideally the easiest barrier to overcome – has proven to be the most difficult. Public works offices are often headed by engineers who last studied traffic theory in the 1950’s. An irrational and myopic fear of job losses in the construction industry and traffic signal trades, results in hysterical resistance to new traffic-flow models. Public officials are inundated with (dubious) statistic-packed reports from the traffic-light camera industry, which promise 100% traffic light compliance while (conflictingly) producing overstuffed coffers of collected fines. The well known public advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, has published over a thousand articles and news releases extolling red light cameras, yet not a single one of those articles questions the validity of the studies, or reports on studies that dispute those results. Why? In 2004 the Washington Post reported that Washington DC’s red-light cameras generated more than 500,000 violations and $32 million in fines over a six year period. City officials unanimously declared the move a success, claiming that the cameras made the busy roads safer.

But the Washington Post analysis of crash statistics shows that the number of accidents has gone up at intersections with the cameras, the same or worse than at traffic signals without the devices. The Post story reported that three outside traffic specialists independently reviewed the data and said they were surprised by the results. Their conclusion: The cameras do not appear to be making any difference in preventing injuries or collisions. "The data are very clear," the Post quoted Dick Raub, a traffic consultant and a former senior researcher at Northwestern University's Center for Public Safety. "They are not performing any better than intersections without cameras." So what is the success then, other than of having found a new way to generate city income?

Critically, understanding the intellectual processes drivers use when negotiating our roads are terribly misunderstood, and need to be raised to a level of awareness that engineering departments can capitalize on in some areas, while working to mediate in others. These paradigm shifts cannot be understated. The key to reducing congestion and traffic fatalities is innovative road and intersection design using knowledge about how drivers negotiate the road. For example, how many of you have had this experience: You are in the right lane of an interstate going through a city, traveling at 65 mph, when someone enters the highway from a ramp on your right. The person entering appears to be accelerating, but at the moment he pulls in front of you, you realize he is only doing about 50 mph and you brake to slow down. Patiently, you wait for him to speed up but he doesn’t. After about a minute you move out to the left, pass him, and get back in the right hand lane some distance ahead, resuming your earlier speed. About one minute later (sometimes one and a half) he passes you, only now he’s traveling in excess of 70. If this only happened once in your lifetime of driving, then obviously the guy was an idiot; rude, selfish, and a terrible driver. But it’s not once is it?

In fact this happens thousands of times a minute all over the country. People enter a highway at less than the cruising speed of traffic causing drivers behind them to brake, only to actually assume highway speed one to two minutes later. During peak highway usage periods, it only takes one person to do this, and the domino effect of braking results in the reduction of flow velocity for the entire grid. Where are the studies of this, an obviously psychoanalytical part of driver speed-processing? How might we exploit the results of those studies?

The major cause of traffic congestion is traffic that is stopped, because stopped traffic needs time and distance to get up to speed again. If we think of roads in terms of flow and capacity, traffic signals are obviously the biggest impediment to flow. Yet what is generally ignored, especially by local road engineering departments, is that they are also the greatest impediment to capacity. Capacity, or that amount of road available to the number of vehicles present, is really what makes or breaks congestion. At a routine four-way traffic light intersection, between 50% and 75% of road capacity is shut off at any one time as the light cycles between allowing flow in any single direction. If you’ve ever sat at a red light intending to go straight, and looked past the intersection to the road directly ahead of you and noticed that no cars were traveling on it at all, while behind you traffic was stacked up, what you were seeing was inefficiency to capacity. This image, courtesy of Google Earth, illustrates the loss of capacity created by a typical traffic light intersection. This is normal stopped traffic, at De Zavala and I-10, San Antonio, Texas. (Click image to enlarge)

One method to recapture that capacity involves replacing stop light intersections with continuous flow intersections. The simplest of these are called roundabouts. With roundabouts, all roads leading out of an intersection experience continuous flow. During periods of normal traffic they function as yield sign intersections – no one need stop if the entrance is clear. When flow if greater, drivers must wait their turn to transverse the intersection, and the roundabout functions as a traffic light. For a side-by-side comparison of the De Ze Zalla / I-10 intersection and a similar intersection constructed without traffic lights, follow this link.

The major cause of traffic related injury is the side impact collision. Roundabouts entirely eliminate side impact collisions. In a 2000 study by the Maryland Department of Transportation, six-months of data collected on a single intersection converted to a roundabout revealed a 67% reduction in accidents, with a 100% reduction in fatalities. 100 percent!

They concluded that the accidents that had happened, tended to be of the sideswipe variety, which cause less damage and injuries, because movements are all converted to right turns. (Click image to enlarge.)

If damages and injuries are reduced, it follows that insurance payouts are reduced as well, so why aren’t big insurance companies Like State Farm, Allstate, or Geico aligned behind roundabouts, the way they outwardly support intersection cameras? Could it be that they have determined that the increased insurance fees they charge to people who are ticketed by traffic cameras, outweigh the increased revenue retention they would enjoy from simply having less and lower costing accidents?

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) publishes a 275 page instruction guide for roundabout construction aimed at local engineering departments. The Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, publishes one as well. Yet I’ve not met a single local engineer from any locality I’ve inquired at who will admit to having heard of either of these documents. This needs to change.

The third element to improving traffic flow requires a relationship between our officials and the media. To be successful, a far-reaching media campaign must be realized to raise public awareness on the major causes of congestion, many of which are related to simple ignorance on the part of motorists. Habits engrained from years of driving on less populated roads must adjust to new realities and driving habits. Examples of these are the proper way to enter onto a highway, or ironically, the purpose of a yield sign, (it really is not just another type of stop sign). In 1966, when the United Kingdom decided to replace the majority of their traffic lights with roundabouts, they embarked on a two-year public education campaign. U.S. municipalities implementing signal-less intersections such as Alaska, Maryland, New York, and California, are doing the same today.

Finally, an economic point overlooked entirely at the local level is the impact of traffic on net sales revenue. Although hard to quantify, local business should be asking themselves how many dollars are slipping through their hands as people choose to forgo the traffic mess and shop from home. Although it's reasonable that most people prefer to shop by seeing and handling the goods they want to buy, something is causing millions of Americans to forgo traditional brick and mortar shopping habits. The internet has seen astronomical increases in sales. Broadwavestudios.com reports that according to ComScore, Inc, an intenet data collection company, online consumer spending grew 26 percent in 2006 to $24.4 billion. That money is coming from somewhere. Perhaps our local officials should be concentrating less on how much money they can generate from red light cameras, and instead focus on how increased vehicle traffic is negatively affecting local sales tax receipts.

Elly Martin, a spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), said that the ultimate cost of traffic might be even greater than the AAA study. A study by NHTSA concluded, "…the cost to society was $230.6 billion in 2000 and … is even greater today." Troy Green, AAA's public relations manager said, "(we are looking for)…leadership at the national, state and local levels," in support of what he called, "…a public health challenge."

Not everything needs to be serious and honestly I don't take myself as serious as I sound in print. Still, sometimes we all need to just let it out.

Down here in San Antone time is flying. The house we bought is 21 years old. Ugh. That means work for me. Picking which project to get into is a study in eclectics.

When we first moved in two years ago, I had to do the garage floor before the movers arrived with our stuff. My garage floors must be easy to clean and impervious to chemical (like petrochemical) spills. Once my stuff arrived there would be no way to ever 'empty' the garage again to do it, so it was a no-brainer that it was number one on my list. Off to Lowe's I went for my supplies. Of course, once the epoxy was cured, it made the walls of the semi-finished garage look terrible, so... off to Lowe's I went again.

The paint I used is kitchen and bath. That's about a 20% premium over say, plain old garage paint, but the method to the madness is ease of cleaning. You can wash kitchen and bath paint. A week later and with the walls all shiny and new looking, I had to install baseboard which meant filling in the gap between the sheetrock and the concrete floor, sealing every millimeter with a good quality (read "expensive") caulk. From Lowe's. That keeps the bugs out. Spiders I don't mind. Spiders good. Bugs bad.

With the walls and floors all looking like they should, I could now see that the ceiling was sagging just a bit. Several bits actually. Oh alright – over an inch. A little investigation revealed that when a previous owner opened up the attic access hatch to make room for a full sized drop-down ladder, he cut one of the main roof trusses to make it fit. That was bad but not unsolvable. I just had to reframe everything up in the attic to transfer the load to the remaining trusses. That's what he should have done.

Since he didn't, the ceiling joists and the sheetrock nailed to them had time - like ten years - to distress and sag. This meant that even with the rafters back up in the right place, the ceiling sheet rock stayed where it was so I had to shore it up over a couple more days to screw it into it's new, correct position. So far so good. After installing proper molding around the ladder door frame (omitted by said previous home improvement phenom) the ceiling was uptight and well, up and tight. Did I mention that I got the molding at Lowe's?

Ya know what bugs me? Installed lighting in a room with no switches to turn them on or off. Really. It annoys me. Perhaps I'm weird but sometimes I like to turn a light off (or on; I'm not dead-set against on).

In Europe and Asia for example, lavatory light switches are put next to the door outside the lavatory. Makes sense if you give it a think; after all, you usually leave such a location by the same door you came in through. It's nice to illuminate the bathroom before entering it so not to be surprised should anything be amiss in there. What I'm saying is that it's not an inconvenience.

On the other hand, a garage has a big HUGE door you might otherwise exit through. So why is the light switch for the garage ceiling light in the adjoining utility room? Ah! There's a good answer to that question too. It has to do with why the adjoining utility room door is equipped with a doorknob and a deadbolt.

To answer both these questions you have to understand the garage the way a builder understands it. That is, because the garage is not a room in the house. It's the garage. Ergo it's outside the house.

The utility room is of course "inside the house". You know that because you customarily enter the utility room from the kitchen through another door which is deadbolt deficient (remember the deadbolt?) and of course the word "room" as part of its name is a clue.

So, the 'builders' were of the mindset that the garage was "outside" the house, and you might choose to leave the garage door open all day whilst you were at work, and that's why the door to the utility room is fitted with a deadbolt. It's an 'outside' door. Light switches as we all know are ‘inside’ the house, right? You don't go outside to turn on the porch light now do you? Of course not. So it carries logically (to the builders) that the garage light should be switched from inside the house, too.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, projects, and the order in which I've been carrying them out. Well it may come as a shock to some but I don't subscribe to the theory that an attached garage is an empty space, dedicated to temporarily enshrining my automobile when it is not parked elsewhere.

I am of the opinion that an attached garage is a room belonging to the house, with just a really big door. I have constructed my opinion by way of the fact that my garage has, a) walls, connected to b) a roof, connected to c) the house, and d), it is lockable to the outside.

To support my opinion that a garage is (or can be) a room belonging to a house, a quick tour of any middle class neighborhood will reveal that most people keep an awful lot of valuable items in their garages. In fact in many garages, the number of valuable items is so numerous that a car cannot possibly FIT amongst them and must remain outside.

Generally speaking, the owners of these garages tend to keep them locked up quite tightly when they are not at home despite the fact that no car is in them. Are these people storing their valuable items outside the house as the builders would have us believe?

No? I don't think so either. Maybe the problem is semantics. Perhaps the problem with the light switch could be solved by changing the name of the garage to something else. Something with the word "room" in it somewhere. Again, let's take a quick imaginary drive around a typical middle class neighborhood and do an imaginary inventory of common uses for the space referred to as the garage, and see what it might otherwise lend itself to be called.

We know the builders want to go with "garage", we've already established that. What we're looking for here instead is a consensus based on actual use. Ready? How about "clutter room"? How about "the old cans of paint room"? The "lawn maintenance equipment room"? How about "the room we put everything in we don't use because its old or broken but we still don't want to throw out"? (Ok, that one is a little long but it did have the word "room" in it). The "storeroom" sounds good and from our survey appears accurate, but technically its just one word and I want to keep the naming rules consistent. How about.. oh screw it! How about the god-damned builders put in a light switch and we just call it a garage? Sheesh.

I digressed and got carried away. I apologize. I guess you can see from my torridity that the next thing was a light switch inside the garage. Now it so happens that the existing light switch was exactly where you might expect it to be, other than being on the wrong side of the wall.

All I needed to do was install a second switch-box on the correct side of the wall, swap out the existing light switch and replace it with two of what are called "three-way" switches (don't ask me to explain, it will take too long).

Easy right? So off I go to Lowe's but along the way I think, "You know, I might want to install better lights in the garage while I'm at it. Maybe some additional lights like fluorescents. Fluorescents that can only be turned on or off if I am inside the garage."

That single incandescent bulb the builders installed might be okay to walk you from your car to the door (provided you could magically turn it on or off from inside your car) but it is woefully inadequate for illuminating the room if it is filled with junk.

To solve that meant installing three switches, not one. And some wiring. And some lights. So I did. Well almost. I ran out of money. The switches and wires are all there, I am just waiting for a sale at Lowe’s for the light fixtures. It'll happen.

But that's not why I am writing about the switch. I am writing about the switch because it meant tearing into the wiring in the wall of the utility room. Not a problem in a normal house (what I call normal, anyway), but this house does not have normal walls. It has "textured" walls. Do you know what that is? It's a fancy term to make appealing a cost-cutting construction procedure wherein they don't actually 'finish' the walls.

Really, I'm not making this up. See, it can take a week or more to 'finish' sheetrock. You have to have a team of men and its all plastering, smoothing and sanding, then more plastering, smoothing and sanding and lots of drying time. Time is money. By texturing the walls you eliminate all that. One man goes in and sprays shit all over the walls to make it lumpy. This hides the fact the walls are not finished. An entire house can be done in a single day, and - arguably - it looks good. Builders sell this to homeowners all the time as a wall finish "style". Brilliant, right? Not to me.

The problem with textured walls is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to match the texture if you have any reason to disturb it. Like a repair. Or new wiring. Installing sconces for example. No matter how hard you try, you will NOT match the texture of the surrounding area and the section you worked on will stand out and look like crap. Normal walls are completely repairable because they're flat. Plaster it, sand it, paint it, you're done. This house has textured walls.

So I thought, "The utility room is not big. 6' x 8'. The brown color is dark and depressing. I'll go ahead and strip the walls down, rip out that old single shelf over the washer and dryer and install modern wire shelving onto every available vertical surface."

This would be a good experiment for wall stripping; you know, find out how difficult it is, what mistakes I might make, et cetera.

Every project is bigger than you expect. It's a rule.

For instance: down behind the washing machine there turned out to be a grate on the wall near the floor. It looked like one of those 18" by 6", under-the-eave soffit vents. Turns out it was an 18" x 6" under-the-eave soffit vent. What the heck was it doing down there? Prying it off I found a bigger puzzle. Er, a smaller puzzle. The 18" x 6" inch vent was covering a crudely sawn 4" x 2" hole just an inch from the floor. That's a lot of cover for a very small hole. I dug around inside the hole, inspected it with a mirror, and could find no reason that it had ever been made and decided to repair it correctly. So I did.

Then there was the issue of the dryer vent. Again, poor craftsmanship from the original builders had induced the hole to the outside to become badly deteriorated. It was an entry point for insects, and moldy from water damage, so I fixed that too. With the walls all flat now with white primer and well, flat, I could now see that the ceiling was a terrible yellow color. See how this escalates?

But, what the heck, I had plenty of paint so I painted that too. Now, in the course of installing the shelving I concluded that someone in the future (my wife?) might want to put some things on the shelves that were heavy. Too heavy for wire shelves. So on the wall that was nothing but shelves, I left out space in the bottom to install a custom wooden shelf /cubbyhole thingamajiggy, with pull out shelves and space for a trash can.

Two weeks to do a 6 by 8 utility room, and all because the garage didn’t have a light switch.

Actually, I realized just now that I'm way ahead of myself. There was a project I had to do first when I moved in. Not a lot except for this: the range vent hood did not in fact, vent. Now I'm no longer an uninformed homeowner fooled by cleverly disguised product descriptions. Oh no not me. I am well aware that most range hood vents don't. They might have, had the builders actually cut a hole in the wall for the venting function to expel through, but more often than not they don't.

I'm a stickler for accuracy so I want mine to perform - if not as advertised, at least as constructed. The woman I married is culturally distinct. She's from Punjab and man can she cook Indian food! So a vent that vents is sort of crucial to us if we want to keep our 'dry cleaning only' bills reasonable and our friends coming back.

But first an anecdotal story regarding said vent. To install a kitchen vent, you need some way for the hole to only be open during the actual venting. An open hole may be efficient, but it degrades basic home energy conservation goals and lets the rain in. So manufacturers, rushing in where builders fear to tread, provide external hooded duct thingy's with baffles and insulation and wire meshes (to keep out birds and such) for your purchasing pleasure. You simply screw it to the outside of the wall where you cut the hole for the air to flow through.

Unfortunately for me, this is not a common do-it-yourself type project so the product I've just described is not exactly found at the "impulse buy" displays at your local DIY centers. The reason I mention this is that it took several days of searching until I found one and, proudly standing in line waiting to take my purchase home, a man behind me chanced to notice it and struck up conversation.

When he made the mistake of asking what I intended to use the hood duct thingy for, my frustration before finding it at all suddenly burst and I found my chance to er, ahem...vent. I pretty much unloaded on him everything you've just read.

The surprising part of the conversation was what he said next. Would you believe he said to me that the reason he inquired was because he was a wholesale salesman for the very item I was buying?

Ok, so that's not a jaw dropper I admit. I mean, it can happen, right? And apparently it was happening. So I said to this man, "Why do the builders get away with not cutting the hole for the vent? You would sell so many more of these if they did."

His answer left me without a response (mind you - this is the guy who's job it actually is to plug these things), he said, "Most builders don't install the vent to actually vent because woman say they don't like the noise." End quote.

Huh? I refuse to believe that women are that stupid. They can't be and you know why? Because more often they're even worse than that. I can't tell you how many homes I've visited where the hostess had the range hood fan running, blithely unaware that the air flow was only being redirected back into the room through the little slots on the top of the hood.

In almost all the cases where I've seen this, the women-and often too, men- had lived there for YEARS without realizing that the vent didn't actually, you know, vent. Furthermore-and I admit I'm not in the venting trade per say-in all my life I cannot recall a women ever saying to me that she "didn't like the fan noise".

After I left the store I thought, "That had to be the worst salesman I have ever met."

Here's why. I'm thinking that his knowledge of women's collective taste in noise comes from the comments he receives from his customers. Remember though; he doesn't sell directly to the women using those range hoods. No. He sells to the merchants who sell range hoods. Merchants who sell range hoods to the builders of the houses that the women buy.

So if the comments he hears are coming from the merchants - who also do not meet the women using the hoods - then ipso facto the merchants must be hearing it from the builders.

Ah-Ha! We're back to the source aren't we? So the same people who don't install light switches because the garage is "outside", and don't finish walls because they opine it looks better sprayed with mud, are saying that their customers don't want them to vent the range hoods because they make too much noise? Uh-huh. I believe it all now. Not.

I should wrap this up. I just finished remodeling the master bathroom. That story starts with the line, "One day, my wife asked me to re-caulk the tub because it was ugly and made cleaning difficult..." I said ok and two months later we were the proud owners of a completely new bathroom. Including new caulk.

So there you go. The happiness of home-ownership. I'd tell you more about it but I have to go now to add a second story to the house. I have to because my wife noticed a roof tile was loose up there the other day and well, you know.