For the last three decades Billions of dollars have been spent on traffic congestion “solutions.” These ‘solutions’ are based on conventional wisdom and validated by the annual Texas A&M / Texas Transportation Institute’s (TTI) annual Urban Mobility Report (UMR.)
Every year for three decades Urban traffic congestion has grown worse and settlement patterns have become more dysfunctional – not just from a traffic congestion perspective but from a broad range of economic, social and physical parameters.
In April of 2003 SYNERGY published a PowerPoint “The Physics of Gridlock” which demonstrates why the basic perspectives upon which UMR is based generate more and more congestion and perpetuate the Mobility and Access Crisis. An updated version is available on The Shape of the Future, 4th Printing CD.
On 20 September 2004 SYNERGY published Column 39 “Spinning Data, Spinning Wheels” that catalogued problems with UMR. This column is available on the RESOURCE page at www.emrisse.com
Every column, report and post by SYNERGY that has addressed the Mobility and Access Crisis since 2004 has quoted these two sources.
And every year more Billions are plowed into infrastructure designed to overcome congestion but in fact making it worse – as documented by UMR.
NOW, finally, someone has put together enough money (from the Rockefeller Foundation) and enough talent (from CEOs for Cities – aka Enterprise Chief Executive Officers for Urban Regions) to expose UMR for what it is.
DRIVEN APART: How Sprawl (aka, dysfunctional human settlement patterns) is Lengthening Our Commutes and Why Misleading Mobility Measures are Making Things Worse.” http://www.ceosforcities.org/work/driven-apart
DRIVEN APART does not directly address the issues raised by SYNERGY, it attacks the core congestion index – the Travel Time Index. However, anyone who has understood anything SYNERGY has published since 1988 will understand the mutually supportive relationship between the problems with TTI’s TTI (sic) and the SYNERGY perspective.
How big is the change documented by DRIVEN APART?
Among the largest 51 New Urban Regions in the US the change is dramatic.
The Core of the Richmond New Urban Region goes from 44th worst congested due to settlement pattern dysfunction to number FOUR.
The Core of the National Capital SubRegion goes from 2nd worst in the US to 14th worst. The Cores of Chicago, New York and San Francisco New Urban Regions all improve dramatically. Even Houston goes from 4th worst to 12th worst.
These are not ‘good’ scores. Everyone agrees there is a Mobility and Access Crisis.
The key reality is that what has been done to solve the problem in fact makes it worse. The reasons are very clear if one understand human settlement pattern dynamics.
The exec summary is 24 pages but is only a 4 page read – a lot of big print and repeats.
Read it and weep.
Post Script: Several readers requested that the irrelevant comments by ‘hydra’ be deleted.
Later they changed their minds and requested that this note be added at the end of the post:
“Please read the comment on this topic by ‘Concerned Readers.’”
Since the Litmus Test criteria for removing irrelevant comments are not yet finalized, this seemed like a good comprise.
EMR
EMR