In the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, a ghost whispers “Build it and they will come” ‘it‘ refers to a baseball field; ‘they‘ are the ghosts of past baseball players. This has been adopted by planners to describe the idea of induced demand, which applied in transport is that if you build a new facility […]
Bill Lindeke writes in MinnPost about Detours and induced demand Probably the craziest detour in Minnesota history was the impromptu rerouting following the Interstate 35W bridge collapse. Needless to say, the 2007 bridge tragedy was completely unexpected, and forced state agencies to reroute 150,000 cars per day into other parts of the Twin Cities’ freeway system. […]
PREDICTED TRAFFIC AND ACTUAL TRAFFIC AFTER A ROAD WIDENING by Wes Marshall You already have a congested roadway, and the transportation planners predict even more traffic on that road in the near future. What do you do? For most of the last century, the answer was to increase capacity. In the short-term, this seemed to […]
JW Writes: I strongly agree with David King’s recent post that we so often forget accumulated knowledge and that we seem to re-discover this knowledge in endless cycles. Nowhere does this seem more true than in the field of economics, which brings me to the reason I reacted so strongly to David’s post. I […]
Adapted from Levinson, D. and Krizek, K. (2017) The End of Traffic and the Future of Access. Network Design Lab. Cross-posted on the ITLS Thinking Outside the Box blog. Each technological advance in mobility over the past 200 years increased the size of metropolitan areas. The ability to go faster, either owing to new technologies […]
When I was a naive young modeler, running the Travel and Travel/2 models for the Montgomery County Planning Departments, regional travel demand models took up to 24 hours to run in full form. Talking with modelers today, it seems models still take on the order of 24 hours to run. Why? I posit “Induced Complexity.” […]
There are a number of ways to view the cost of automobile travel. For instance We can look at the congestion costs imposed [link]. We can allocate infrastructure costs [link]. We can assess full costs to consider internal costs, subsidies, and externalities [link]. This post looks at the idea of road rent. At the margins, […]
Welcome to the February 2018 issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter. Thank you to all who purchased Elements of Access. Copies are still available. Transportist Posts A Friendly Guide to Transport Planning | Human Transit [“Access — where can you get to soon? — is, or should be, the […]
Now available: Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen. 342 pages, 164 Images (most in color). Published by the Network Design Lab. About the Book Nothing in cities makes sense except in the light of accessibility. Transport cannot be understood without reference to the […]
Every year for four years now, I have done a top posts article: Transportist – Top 21 Posts of 2016 Transportationist – Most Popular Posts of 2015 The Transportationist’s most popular posts of 2014 The Transportationist’s most popular posts of 2013 These are the most popular posts for 2017. Those published in earlier years marked with an *. […]
