Talking Traffic

By Gene Williams
Staff Writer

March 17 -- Terms like “multi-modal corridor segments,” “micro-simulation models” and “congestion pricing theory” were frequently heard in City Hall Tuesday night, as a panel of four traffic engineering specialists shared their expertise with City officials.

Invited by City staff, the panelists focused on theory and criteria for establishing the Level of Service (LOS) -- the methods and guidelines for measuring how well the City’s transportation system is working -- during a joint session of the City Council and the Planning Commission.

Discussed during the more than four-hour-long meeting was what other cities have done to ease traffic congestion -- from widening roads and increasing public transportation to building sustainable communities and taxing motorists who enter congested areas.

At the end of the often technical session, Mayor Pam O’Connor asked City officials to step back and look at the bigger picture.

“Before we send anyone off on the measurement of traffic, we need to decide what it is we want the City to be,” O’Connor said to the panelists.

The panelists agreed that old LOS models focused too much on how fast auto traffic moved and too little on other questions, such as quality of life, and admitted that their profession should share in the blame.

“We begin by telling our students that ‘travel is a derived activity’ and then we quickly forget about that and focus only on traffic,” Will Recker, a professor of civil engineering at UC Irvine, told the officials.

Another panelist, Jeffrey Tumlin agreed. “Transportation is not a goal in itself,” he said.
Transportation is a means for “other goals” like “sustainability and economic justice,” said Tumlin, who has been a consultant to the City of Seattle.

“It depends on what you want,” said Tumlin, emphasizing that broader policy issues should dictate the methods for evaluating transportation efficiency.

Council member Ken Genser admitted there are shortcomings in the standards established by the City Council to measure traffic impact. (Genser was likely referring to standards that are based primarily on the amount of delay at intersections and rate as a “significant environmental impact” the addition of even one car at a congested intersections.)

“Based on our experience, I don’t think we’ve done it right here,” said Genser. “Back in the nineties we adopted a methodology that we thought was going to accurately give us some projection of delay, which was really the only thing we were measuring at the time.

“We adopted a standard for delay which, I think, has been called into question,” He added. “And I’ve got to say, as one of the people that was here, it was done fairly arbitrarily.”

Other panelists suggested that the issue of transportation has to be tied in with larger issues, including zoning laws and sustainable policies.

Randal Rutsch, emphasized that a “strong policy basis” is necessary for effective traffic engineering.

Rutsch, who works for the City of Boulder, Colorado, said that after 20 years of debate, “We’re not going to be adding road capacity to our community” in order to preserve the landscape.

Instead, Boulder spends more money on education and public transit to “try to eek every bit of efficiency that you can out of that system.”

Tumlin said that Rutsch was being modest. “Boulder has the best public transit system I’ve ever seen in any city of that density,” said Tumlin, noting that the buses are frequent and full of riders.

The panelists agreed that the era of building more roads to alleviate traffic congestion in metropolitan areas is over.

“We’re not going to be able to build our way out of congestion,” said Hasan Ikhrata, the director of Planning and Policy Development for the Southern California Association of Governments.

Nearly all of the tax money earmarked for transportation goes into maintaining what is already built, Ikhrata said.

“We need to provide people with alternatives then decide how to price it,” he said, noting that people will use public transit if it works well and is cheaper than driving and paying to park.

Tumlin said that there are two approaches to congestion: “One is the Detroit approach where you destroy your economy. The other is Singapore where you regulate the heck out of everything.”

Nobody likes either extreme, he said, so each community has to establish its own priorities and find a balance.

While Tumlin and Ikhrata both acknowledged that no one likes to be taxed, they did point out that charging fees to drive into downtown London has decreased that City’s traffic congestion by 35 to 50 percent.

All of the panelists were careful not to advocate specific solutions, but instead only gave examples of what other cities had done. “You need to look at the rest of the country and see what they’re doing,” said Tumlin.

Many of the questions from the council and commissioners were about micro-simulation models -- computer software that produces visual representations of traffic flow -- and what’s reasonable to expect from a six or seven digit investment in developing and maintaining one.

“What’s not in any micro-sim model is the front end,” said Recker, referring to the policy issues that determine what choices people make. “The part we don’t know much about is the side that drives it.”

The meeting was another step in a two year process of updating the Land Use and Circulation Elements of the City’s General Plan.

The next joint session of the City Council and Planning commission will be held in late April, when they will be presented with a report from Planning staff of the emerging themes that have come out of this and previous meetings, including the public workshops earlier this year.