The taxi industry, berated as “Big Taxi” by Uber and its allies, is in many cities a vested cartel with medallions limiting entry. The nominal economic reason for the medallions are (1) too many taxis roaming the streets creates congestion (since roads are unpriced), and (2) too many taxis drives down wages, and (3) regulation […]
I did a recent post for CityLab: How to Make Mass Transit Financially Sustainable. The Auto/Highway System deserves similar treatment. The first toll road in the US, the Snicker’s Gap Turnpike opened in 1786, connecting Alexandria, Virginia with its hinterlands. This set off an era of toll-road building, mostly for intercity routes, in the United […]
The traffic congestion you face is caused by other people. Those people did not think about the delay they imposed on you when they chose to travel. They didn’t even know about you, since they were already on the road before you were. They are ahead of you in the traffic stream. Similarly as a driver, […]
US PIRG just released “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future“. The report is very much in line with our Fix-it-First report, noting many new expansion projects that waste scarce funds, not consistent with the actual needs for repair, and fly in the face of long-term “peak travel” trends showing declining use of the car […]
By David Levinson and David King. As a gross over-simplification, the current rap is that Democrats like trains and Republicans like roads, Greens like bikes and Libertarians like tolls. No party stands up for buses, which are by far the most used transit mode.1 Transportation policy has become politically divisive, especially for local politics which have been less […]
In the US, we have seen a great struggle play out in the twentieth century between what David Jones calls Mass Motorization and Mass Transit . The conflict between the modes continues to this day, and has become a morality play in the culture wars. While they mostly serve different markets, they compete for users, […]
The new version of The Transportation Experience describes the history of transportation across several five to six decade long waves. While the periods are straightforward (though somewhat arbitrary, as would be any periodization of social trends), there is some subjectivity in the dominant technology with which to characterize them. Certainly the first period is an […]
We have possibly reached peak vehicle, and peak travel in the US. Have we reached peak road? Noodling about USDOT statistics I see Table 1-4: Public Road and Street Mileage in the United States by Type of Surface (Bureau of Transportation Statistics), which suggests we reached peak road sometime between 2008 and 2011. Unpaved mileage […]
Some 20 years ago a book came out “Stuck in Traffic” by the brilliant Anthony Downs. One of his key points was the “Iron Law of Congestion”, sometimes called “Triple Convergence”, and now called “Induced Demand” which basically said if you expand a road, the extra capacity gets used up by people switching routes, modes, […]
Published at the CTS Conversations Blog as Why are Twin Citians taking fewer trips? The latest summary of the Twin Cities Travel Behavior Inventory is out, and it says the total number of trips in 2011 is lower than in 2001. This is consistent with a lot of evidence we have been seeing from various […]
David Levinson, Transportist 