Putting congestion in the right place

Jeffrey Tumlin, Jessica ter Schure, and Patrick Siegman argue that some degree of road congestion is almost unavoidable: “The most successful cities simply locate their inevitable congestion in places where it has the least impact on local economic development, quality of life, and other goals.” In a short section of Sustainable Transportation Planning, they tell how this is accomplished in three West Coast cities:

• San Francisco “intentionally places its freeway congestion in the middle of its downtown, where the Bay Bridge meets US 101. This has the effect of making it relatively easy to drive to downtown, but rather difficult to drive through downtown.” The city, in other words, has found a way to take economic advantage of the freeway.

• Vancouver, BC, “places traffic bottlenecks in a ring around the city. Traffic heading into the city from the Lion’s Gate Bridge, for example, may queue for more than a mile in a retained cut through Stanley Park as it is metered into the downtown grid. The result is relatively little congestion in the city center, because of the metering effect of the bottleneck ... .”

• “Santa Monica, California, knowing there is nothing it can do to eliminate the notorious congestion of Los Angeles’s Westside, has policies that intentionally place congestion where it has the least impact on residential neighborhoods and retail streets.

“Santa Monica accepts a high level of congestion at the first traffic signals before and after its freeway ramps, because it knows that if it eliminated congestion at these ramps, it would merely move the congestion bottleneck to the next intersection down the street. Intentional congestion points help meter the traffic to make sure that intracity traffic flows smoothly.”

At the core of these examples is a realization that transportation decisions ideally are about “how we get the best use of our investment dollars, how transportation investments can spur job creation or neighborhood happiness,” Tumlin elaborated in an e-mail exchange with Better! Cities & Towns. These are not strictly engineering matters. They are decisions based on economics and on community desires. Any community or region that focuses simply on moving cars is missing what Tumlin and his colleagues regard as a key component of transportation planning.

See the main article "What cities should do about traffic congestion."