This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined once again by professor Karel Martens of the Technion in Israel.
We learn about how transportation engineering is good at finding problems but not solving them and a new tool to determine the success of transportation systems.
Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.
Karel Martens: If I summarize the results, we came to a very interesting conclusion, I think, which was kind of opposite of what we wanted to do, but I think it's very, uh, useful, because we came to the conclusion that if you cluster all the answers together over the 12 questions and basically have a group that says, well, you know, no, my travel is typically not too long.
Or, maybe once in a while I forgot a trip. But most of them, they [say], "No, no. Oh, all is well, nothing happens. I never rely on others. I don't forgo trips. And trip is maybe every now and then too long and the rest is all fine." Two-thirds of the population said this: "There is basically no problem. I am doing fine."
And this was in Tel Aviv in 2017 when congestion was already very severe, and so slightly more than quarter said, "It's okay, except I'm really suffering from too long travel times. And that's also affects my comfort in travel". And every time that sometimes it leads to forgoing a trip and then a third very small cluster, only 6 percent reported actually consistent problems.
So this was, of course, first of all, very surprising, the distribution. I think partly because Tel Aviv has a reasonably good public transport system and, uh, quite dense cities. Local services very close by walking distance. Doctors, shops, hairdressers and, you know, many, many services you can really find in most neighborhoods in walking distance.
And so that's part of the reason that there's a relatively low group of people with severe problems. But we developed the tools to measure problems and what we developed was a tool to measure success. We didn't till that moment have a measure of success in transport. We only have a model that tells us where the problems are.
And since we never, ever solved congestion, you could never say, you know, we did something and the situation improved! No, about two years later it was the same. Now my assumption is that if you would systematically apply our tool, you could actually identify if you build a better transport system, it really serves more people better, that a percentage of two thirds will go up and up and up.
Now, I don't think we will easily get to 90 percent. You know, we build a system that is very problematic for anybody without a car in most places in the world. Paris, London, Berlin [and] Vienna aside. But in most city regions, a large share of people are struggling and more than 6 percent, I would argue. But we have a tool to measure success, which I think is very attractive for policy makers, which is hopefully what will trigger them to use this tool.
You identify the problems, but you also identify success and you can show your public, you know, yeah, that's congestion, but actually no two-thirds of you are satisfied. And it makes sense because most of your trips are not during congestion hours. Many people do not travel into the city centers.
You know, they travel from suburb to suburb and there's a little bit of congestion, but it's not too bad. And they have a free parking at their destination next to the workplace and it's always available and there's no worries. You know, and then you travel in the evening, you travel in the weekend where there's little congestion.
So most of people's trips are not in congestion. Certainly not in serious congestion and so, in a way, the result was not surprising, but it was completely opposite of the discourse in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. We did repeat the survey again at end of 2020, beginning of 2021, when there was still the pandemic going on, but there was no lockdown in Israel at that time. We actually stopped the survey for a while, when it was shortly a lockdown, and then we reopened the survey when the lockdown was over, very short. I think this was our third lockdown only, or the fourth, and we didn't have so much lockdowns in Israel in general, and we could perfectly see that our tool works.
So the moment, as you know, you know, traffic is down, congestion goes, people don't report so many problems. And they did report slightly more dependence on others, which is also, I think, explainable because of Corona. So people work more from home. So the car is at home. So partners could ask more for rides because the car was at home.
It was more easy to take people to places because there was no congestion. People were worried about public transport. So it's more logical to slightly more rely on rides rather than use public transport. So our tool proved to be very robust. It actually managed to capture the improvements that were generated by, uh, the Corona pandemic, at least for car drivers.
And there was no change at all for public transport, for people without cars, which I think is a combination of slightly less frequent public transport. Not much in Israel, but higher speeds, more reliability because of less congestion.
