Would you use a rototiller to get rid of weeds in a flowerbed? Of course not. You might solve your immediate goal of uprooting the weeds — but oh, my, the collateral damage that you would do.

Yet when we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.

Image: Andy Singer

Image: Andy Singer

First, an explanation of what I call the “deadly duo”: travel projection models and Levels of Service (LOS) performance metrics.Travel projection models are computer programs that use assumptions about future growth in population, employment, and recreation to estimate how many new cars will be on roads 20 or 30 years into the future.

Models range from quite simplistic to incredibly complex and expensive. Simple models deal primarily with coarse movements of vehicles between cities, while complex models deal with the intricacies of what happens on the fine grid of urban areas. To be truly accurate, growth projection modeling can be expensive. Therefore, absent compelling reason to do otherwise, most growth projections tend to be done using less expensive techniques, which usually lead to overestimates.

Levels of Service (LOS) is a performance metric which flourished during the interstate- and freeway-building era that went from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using a scale of A to F, LOS attempts to create an objective formula to answer a subjective question: How much congestion are we willing to tolerate? As in grade school, “F” is a failing grade and “A” is perfect.

Engineers decided that LOS “C” was a good balance between overinvestment in perfection and underinvestment leading to congestion. In urban areas, a concession was made to accept LOS D, representing slightly more restricted but still free-flowing traffic. LOS is commonly (actually, almost always) calculated using travel projections for 20 to 30 years into the future.

Using basic traffic models and LOS C/D to plan and design the interstate system was a no-brainer in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. When deciding how many lanes to build on a freeway connecting major cities, a sensitivity of plus or minus 10,000 trips a day could be tolerated, and the incremental difference in cost to plow through undeveloped land was relatively insignificant.

Good approach, wrong setting

I’m not going to look back and quibble with the general philosophy of how the interstates and the associated high-speed freeways were planned and designed. On many levels, the approach made sense.

But it became increasingly less persuasive when applied to the rest of our road network. Unlike interstates and freeways, most roads exist not just to move traffic through the area, but also to serve the homes, businesses, and people along them. Yet in search of high LOS rankings, transportation professionals have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other inappropriate strategies. In ridding our communities of the weeds of congestion, we have also pulled out the very plants that made our “gardens” worthwhile in the first place.

It’s worth remembering, too, that not all congestion is bad. John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee and current CEO and President of the Congress for New Urbanism, suggests that congestion is like cholesterol: there is a good kind and a bad kind.

What makes the prevailing situation even more troubling is that there are no comprehensive requirements dictating the use of either LOS or travel modeling in transportation planning and project design. The “Green Book” from the Association of American State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) (more formally known as “A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets”) clearly states that these are guidelines to be applied with judgment — not mandates. So does the Federal Highway Administration’s “Highway Capacity Manual.”

The idea that we must rid our roads of  any and all traffic congestion is, in fact, a self-imposed requirement. As Eric Jaffe wrote in an article for Atlantic Cities in December, 2011:

Although cities aren’t required to abide LOS measures by law, over the years the measure hardened into convention. By the time cities recognized the need for balanced transportation systems, LOS was entrenched in the street engineering canon.

Worse yet, many designers size a road or intersection to be free-flowing for the worst hour of the day. Sized to accommodate cars during the highest peak hour, such streets will be “overdesigned” for the other 23 hours of the day and will always function poorly for the surrounding community.

If that isn’t troubling enough, LOS is often calculated using traffic predicted 20 years into the future, even in urban settings. Until the forecasted growth materializes, the roadway will be overdesigned, even during the peak hour. Overdesigned roadways encourage motorists to drive at higher speeds, making them difficult to cross and unpleasant to walk along. This degrades public spaces between the edges of the road and the adjacent buildings, encourages people to drive short distances, and generally unravels a community’s social fabric.

Let me repeat: Contrary to what you may hear, there is no national requirement or mandate to apply LOS standards and targets 20 years into the future for urban streets. This thinking is a remnant from 1960s era  policy for the interstate system, and has erroneously been passed down from generation to generation.

Image: Andy Singer

So what are the right approaches?

Asking the simple question, “Do you want congestion reduced at a particular location?” is a question out of context. It’s like asking you whether you want to never be stung by a bee again. Of course, the answer will be yes. But what if I told you that to in order to never suffer a sting again, every plant within a several mile radius would have to be destroyed — and that you could never leave the area of destruction?

You would have a completely different answer, I’m sure.

The question that needs to be asked in urban settings is not whether you ever want to sit in congestion again. Who does? The question is whether you want to eliminate congestion on your Main Street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year — knowing that the consequence would be a community with decimated economic and social value, increased reliance on car use, increased crashes, and, ultimately, more congestion.

Recognizing the need for balance, a number of entities are beginning to promote approaches sensitive to the context.

I was the New Jersey Department of Transportation’ s project manager for  the “Smart Transportation Guide” (STG), adopted jointly by the state DOTs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.   The STG directs DOT designers to consider the tradeoffs between vehicular LOS and “local service.” It goes on to say that if the street in question is not critical to regional movement, that LOS E or F could be acceptable — and that designers may actually need to design to slow down cars.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers, an “international association of transportation professionals responsible for meeting mobility and safety needs” also promoted this concept in its landmark “Context Sensitive Solutions Guidelines for Urban Thoroughfares.” Florida DOT has adopted multimodal LOS standards, and cities like Charlotte, N.C., have elevated pedestrian and bicycle LOS to the level of that for automobiles. We have a long way to go, but the door is opening.

Creating balanced standards for roadway design will benefit transportation as well. In the Netherlands, the “Livable Streets” policy led to a remarkable improvement in safety on their roadways. They started in the 1970s with a crash rate 15 percent higher than in the U.S., and now have a crash rate 60 percent lower.

Design with the community in mind

It’s time for communities and transportation professionals alike to accept that we have been using the wrong tools for the wrong job. LOS and travel modeling may be effective when sizing and locating high-speed freeways, but are totally inappropriate in every other setting. If travel modeling with high rates of growth is used to make street decisions, your community may be doomed to a series of roadway widenings or intersection expansions. If vehicular LOS C or D performance measures are adopted as non-negotiable targets, major road construction will be heading your way.

Village, suburban and city streets need to be designed with the community in mind using the PPS principle of Streets as Places to  create a vision for a great community and then plan your streets to support that vision.

Lets not be fooled by the appearance of science behind Levels of Service and Traffic Modeling. As I pointed out in an interview with Wayne Senville that was published in the November 2010 “Planning Commissioner’s Journal,” LOS standards are easy to understand — and that’s exactly what makes them so dangerous.

Rep. John Mica's five-year transportation bill will be unveiled tomorrow. (Update: no it won't.) Photo: 13 News

When Congress adjourned last month, the Senate had made significant progress on a two-year bill. In the House, Rep. John Mica had repeatedly promised a five- or six-year bill, but nothing had been introduced. Now, finally, Congress is showing signs of picking up where they left off. Here’s a rundown of the latest:

Details of House Transportation Bill Emerge…

According to multiple sources, the House transportation bill – called the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act – reauthorizes highway and transit programs for five years at around $52 billion per year, for a total of $260 billion. It seems likely that the bill would use revenue from oil and gas drilling fees. Mica is reportedly still pushing for a sixth year.

Rep. Bill Shuster said yesterday that T&I Committee Democrats would get their copies of the bill today, and the full text would be released to the general public tomorrow. (Jan. 27 update: A press event unveiling the full text of the House bill is now planned for next Tuesday, Jan. 31, instead.) Shuster had much more to say about the future of federal support for transportation, and Streetsblog will have more on that later today.

…And Next Week Will Be Busy…

Once the full text is released, three House committees need to bring portions of the bill into markup: Ways and Means, Natural Resources, and of course Transportation and Infrastructure are all planning markups for next week. T&I’s markup for the House bill is tentatively scheduled for next Thursday at 9 a.m., but it does not yet appear on the committee’s legislative calendar.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, long-awaited markups in the Finance and Banking committees are also tentatively scheduled for next week. They are each responsible for a portion of Barbara Boxer’s bill, which comes in at $54 billion per year for just two years. The Finance Committee is charged with finding some way to fill in the $12-ish billion that gas tax revenues would not cover over the life of the bill. If gas and oil drilling fees come up for discussion, that committee’s markup could offer us a preview of the entire bill’s fate.

…But LaHood Thinks Reauthorization Will Wait.

For all the activity in Congress, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood believes that political realities will prevent any long-term bill from being passed until after the election. Per the Washington Post:

“I believe we’ll probably have to wait until next year to get to a surface transportation bill because of the huge differences,” LaHood told a conference of transportation experts meeting in Washington. “Given the politics, the number of days that remain, the differences between what the Senate and the House are looking at, I think it’s very unlikely that we’ll have a surface transportation bill during this year.”

LaHood’s remarks came at nearly the same time as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced a push to “Make Transportation Job #1.” The Chamber — which normally aligns with the oil lobby, fought openly against climate change legislation, and cares little for reforming America’s highway-centric transportation policy — has released an open letter to Congress urging a long-term reauthorization at increased spending levels, and will be spending half a million dollars on a multi-state publicity campaign.

Also From LaHood: Transit, High-Speed Rail

While it’s not exactly as earth-shattering as the changes proposed by LaHood this time last year, the secretary did propose changes to speed up the FTA’s New Starts and Small Starts programs approval process. The FTA’s press release was vague on the details, but the official notice of proposed rulemaking [PDF] explains how they hope to accomplish this:

• Using a simplified measure of “mobility benefits,” giving additional weight to trips generated among “transit-dependent” populations
• Expanding the ability of projects to pre-qualify based on project or corridor characteristics
• Proposing ways to simplify data submitted for evaluation
• Simplifying the development of “points of comparison” for a build/no-build scenario analysis
• Clarifying the local financial commitment criteria
• Eliminating the need to re-evaluate projects that stay within a set “envelope” of cost and scope.

The changes are incredibly technical, but it seems most of the time savings will come from a smaller paperwork burden. In LaHood’s estimation, these changes could shave as much as six months off an FTA approval.

As for high-speed rail, LaHood is not backing away from President Obama’s vision of giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail by 2036. “If you look at the money we’ve invested over the last 18 months – almost a billion dollars in Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor, which is what members of Congress have been clamoring for – we listened to them, and we made those investments,” LaHood said yesterday. “High-speed rail is a priority for President Obama and it’s a priority for the administration, and we’re going to continue to make progress.”

Introducing the newest member of the Streetsblog family… Luna Blue Evans-Snyder was born the afternoon of January 13. She weighed in at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

As you might imagine, Tanya’s byline is going to be a little scarce over the next several weeks. If you’d like to send her well-wishes and recommendations for a good balance bike, you can reach her at tanya.c.snyder@gmail.com.

Image: XKCD

Personal note: Between the time I matriculated at graduate school and the time I finished, the word “sustainable” had been added to my official concentration.

Meanwhile, I’d like to introduce you to Ben Goldman. You may have noticed his byline popping up over the past few weeks. Among his innumerable other achievements, Ben is allowing me to take off for a few months of baby time with the peace of mind that if big transportation news breaks, it’ll be ably covered on Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Ben just finished a graduate program in urban planning, with a focus on sustainable transportation, at the University of Pennsylvania. Rail transportation, in particular, is sort of his thing, having worked with OnTrackAmerica, Inc. and co-authored a set of recommendations to federal officials on how high-speed rail should be implemented on the Northeast Corridor.

If you have questions, comments, warm welcomes, tips, breaking news, or holiday gifts for Ben, you can reach him at bgoldman@streetsblog.org.

You might not be hearing a whole lot more from me for a while, so Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and have a great first few months of 2012! I wish you health, happiness, and robust performance measures in all federal transportation decisions.

- Tanya

Before I get to that, congratulations to the winner of last week’s prize: Long-time Streetsblog reader Marc Agger will be taking home a Zero Tweed bag from Rickshaw Bags.

This week’s prize comes courtesy of Levi’s. Make a one-time or monthly gift by Friday at midnight and you could win a jacket and jeans from Levi’s new Commuter line, designed specifically for cyclists.

The jeans

The jacket

I have the Commuter jacket and it’s great for riding in the spring or fall, even in the rain.

Thanks again to all our dedicated supporters. If you haven’t donated yet, please pitch in and help make 2012 a great year for livable streets coverage.

Check out this cheaply-produced rap video, starring Transformer Optimus Prime, warning kids to … (drum roll, please) … drive safely.

Hey, ODOT, speeding is bad. But I have news for you: Kids don’t drive! They walk and ride bikes.

Maybe there’s a safety message you could provide about safely crossing the street or wearing bike helmets? Or does that violate your policy of only officially acknowledging car transportation?

If you haven’t contributed yet, here’s a little extra incentive. Give between now and the end of the week, and you could win a lovely, sturdy, functional Zero Tweed Bag courtesy of the fine San Francisco-based manufacturers at Rickshaw Bags. Feast your eyes on the prize:

Donate between now and Friday at midnight and you’ll be entered to win one of these puppies. We’ll announce the winner next week.

Whether you claim the prize or it goes to someone else, you’ll come away with a warm feeling after making a contribution to your online voice for livable streets.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming…

Senators Collins, left, and McCaskill at their press conference. Image: STLtoday

Last week, McCaskill and Collins introduced the ambitiously-named Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act. The bill begins with the payroll tax cut and wraps it in additional tax cuts, deregulation measures, and a $35.8 billion infrastructure investment program. The whole thing would be paid for by eliminating some subsidies for oil companies and by instituting a surtax on millionaires’ income—though exceptions will be made for small business owner-operator “job creators.”

The two senators are generally touting this bill as a tax relief bill first, and a pay-your-fair-share bill second—infrastructure gets third-stringed at best, but the provisions are still worth looking into.

The McCaskill-Collins infrastructure plan [PDF] includes $10 billion to capitalize state infrastructure banks and $25 billion for highways and bridges—just highways and bridges. Out of $25 billion—about half an average year’s transportation spending by the federal government—not a dime goes to transit.

By promoting state infrastructure banks, McCaskill and Collins are throwing their weight behind the Republican vision for infrastructure spending and against the President’s. The President and a number of other prominent figures have advocated to no avail for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, and Politico reports that they’ll try again next year—to the familiar tune of $10 billion. Meanwhile, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica has included support for state infrastructure banks—not a national one—in his reauthorization bill. The senators opted for state I-banks in this case because they are an existing program that could be expanded, while “there is no consensus yet on how to address a National Infrastructure Bank,” according to Senator McCaskill’s press secretary, John LaBombard.

Furthermore, the bill summary states that the $25 billion for highways and bridges is for “rebuild and repair” projects, but LaBombard clarified that they can also be used for expansion of existing roads and new construction. They can’t, however, be used for transit.

McCaskill-Collins is the latest in a growing list of bills that attach infrastructure spending to various other issues, all in the name of job creation. First there was the “drilling-for-infrastructure” proposal, touted as the House Republicans’ major jobs bill. Then there was Rep. Nick Rahall’s Buy America bill (“regulation-for-protectionism”), and now the vote on Boehner’s Keystone XL bill.

With Congress staying in session until a deal is struck on the payroll tax cut, and the pressure high to get it done by Friday, McCaskill and Collins could be poised to present a true bipartisan alternative and break the deadlock. If their bill passes, and the infrastructure portion remained intact, we can only speculate as to the effect it would have on the Senate reauthorization bill come February.