Congestion

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in the quest for free-flowing vehicular traffic. The result is wider highways, more sprawl, and more people stuck in congestion. But this week U.S. DOT took an important step to change course, releasing new standards to guide how transportation agencies measure their performance. Advocates for transit and walkability say the policy is a significant improvement.

Researchers have released new findings that suggest a more consistent traffic-reduction impact than previously thought.

MIT researchers got a ton of press for a mathematical model that showed sharing for-hire vehicles could replace 85 percent of New York City's taxi fleet. But their conclusions were built on shaky assumptions, says economist Joe Cortright.

The Obama administration purportedly wants to use the lever of transportation policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx recently said he'd like to reverse the damage highways caused in urban neighborhoods, but you'd never know that by looking at U.S. DOT's latest policy prescription.

"What you measure is what you get," the saying goes. In transportation, the dominant metrics are all about moving motor vehicle traffic, so America has built a transportation network that moves a lot of cars. Our streets may be dangerous, expensive, and inefficient, but they do process huge volumes of motor vehicles.

Crossposted from City Observatory.

Here's a great visualization of what cities get out of the billions of dollars spent on highways and road expansion: more traffic.

Gretchen Johnson and Aaron Johnson have posted a nice debunking of typical "war on cars" rhetoric over at fivethirtyeight.

Here's the rosy scenario of a future where cars drive themselves: Instead of owning cars, people will summon autonomous vehicles, hop in, and head to their destination. With fewer cars to be stored, parking lots and garages will give way to development, eventually bringing down the cost of housing in tight markets through increased supply. Pressure to expand roads will ease, as vehicle-to-vehicle technology allows more cars to use the same road space. Traffic violence will become a thing of the past as vehicles communicate instantly with each other and the world around them.