Mike on Traffic

Miovision Growing Pains

We are working on a counting project in Waverly, Iowa for Snyder & Associates this week.  Part of their motivation for hiring us was to see the Miovision camera system in action.  I drove down Monday afternoon to set up the camera system to perform a 7 am to 6 pm turning movement count on Tuesday (we also have a crew of four people doing manual counts all week in addition to a few pneumatic tube counts). 

I was a little nervous going into the project because we currently have just one video  camera system.  It worked great for an eight hour count a few weeks ago, but the engineer in me knew I was tempting fate by not having redundancy.  Of course the system didn't work when I started setting it up at about 6 pm.  To Miovision's credit, Curtis was in the office for some tech support.  Our quick field checks didn't get us anywhere, I went to the hardware store to get a few more tools, and called Curtis on his cell phone at 7:15 from my hotel room.  We figured out power wasn't getting to the camera.  Either the camera or one of the power connections was broken in transit.  In the process of testing I irreparably ripped apart a cable connection (I didn't having soldering equipment on me).

Tony at Snyder & Associates has been very understanding and is ok with us doing the counts manually instead of with the Miovision equipment.  Ultimately, they just need the data.  I was able to get one of my guys down to Waverly in about 5 hours from calling him and we'll finish the project on time.

Miovision is having me send them the camera and the whole cabeling system.  They'll either fix it or send me a new setup.

The last time I felt like this, I was a teenager fishing with my dad and the motor died.  It took us about an hour to row back.  He got it fixed, but that motor died on him one more time.  Dad bought a new motor instead of getting it fixed again.  He told me he didn't trust the old motor and he didn't want to row anymore. 

Effect of Gas Prices on Travel Behavior in the Twin Cities

I wrote a few days about the press release for the INRIX report on travel patterns in the United States over the first half of 2008.  The report is out now.  There was a strong correlation between gas prices and the amount of time people spent traveling in Las Vegas, Miami, and Atlanta.  People drove less in those metro areas as gas prices went up.  Curiously, there is zero correlation between gas prices and the amount of time people spent traveling in the Twin Cities.  I am really curious to see the Minnesota related data from the full 2008 INRIX National Traffic Scorecard that will come out in the first quarter of 2009.

INRIX Congestion Study

In June I had a post about INRIX's study that placed the Twin Cities as the 13th most congested metropolitan area in the United States based on 2007 data.  INRIX is releasing an update to their report today which looks at travel data from January through June of 2008.  A few highlights from the press release:

• 96 of the nation’s top 100 markets (by population) had drops in traffic congestion levels in the first half of 2008 compared to 2007, with a 3% nationwide average decrease in travel times during peak hours
• 75% of Midwesterners decreased their amount of driving, compared to those in the Northeast (60%), South (67%), and West (61%) [Harris Interactive survey]
• The average retail price of gasoline increased dramatically from $2.29 in January 2007 to $4.09 in June 2008, however prices began to plummet in the third quarter with an average of $3.30 during the week of October 10, 2008
• Those making less than $35K were most likely to have decreased their driving 76%, compared with 68% of those earning $35K to $74.9K, to just 57% for those earning $75K and higher
• "It is fascinating to see the disproportionate response that the impact of gas prices has on traffic, particularly how consumers changed their behavior more in markets like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and throughout the Midwest. You would think that major metros with significant public transit infrastructure such as in NYC and D.C. would have shown a much stronger correlation with gas prices through increased ridership,” said Bryan Mistele, INRIX founder and CEO. "Although we can't predict the future price of fuel, we can predict the potential impacts to traffic congestion. As a whole, the population appears to have made lasting changes to their behavior, which we expect to persist at some level even if gas prices revert to pre-2007 levels.”

The full report hasn't been released yet, so you'll have to check it out later today or tomorrow to see where your metropolitan area lands in the rankings.

Chris Leinberger author of The Option of Urbansim speaks at MN ULI

I attended last week's Urban Land Institute meeting in Minneapolis.  Chris Leinberger, an interesting person with an impressive background related to development, spoke about transportation and development.  Here are a few of the more interesting tidbits I took away from his talk (these are his claims, paraphrased - my minimal commentary is in parentheses).  I am not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, but they are topics we should all be thinking about.

1. Suburban sprawl has been an interesting 50 year experiment that started after World War II and is coming to a close.
2. Market taste has switched to urban, walkable, mixed use developments.  This has been pushed by the twenty-somethings since the late 1990's.  (This is evidenced in the Twin Cities by the Uptown and Warehouse District neighborhoods of Minneapolis that draw the young professional demographic). 
3. Developers and cities are slow to react and are still building suburban sprawl projects, even though they aren't selling anymore.  In many communities suburban sprawl communities are the only housing developments allowed by their zoning ordinances.
4. Developing walkable communities is exponentially more complicated than typical suburban development, which is why most developers (and banks behind them) aren't doing it.
5. 73% of green house gas emissions in the U.S. are produced by the built environment.  Development is going to be on the front line as our government starts to battle global warming.
6. Oil dependency is a huge national security issue.
7. In the 1950's, 50% of homes had kids.  Now only 33% do and this is trending lower.  More homes are being owned by single people or couples without kids.  This is a driver away from suburban, single family homes.
8. There are about 57 million single family homes.  22 million of them are expected to decrease in value (today's dollars) within twenty years because of the above trends.
9. Check out walkscore.com to see how walkable your neighborhood is.  (This is cool.  My neighborhood in St. Louis Park is a 68.  The Warehouse District and Uptown are in the high 90s.)
10. People are moving to walkable, transit friendly neighborhoods and getting rid of one or two of their cars.  Suburban families are spending 25% of their budget on transportation while those living in very walkable communities are spending 9% of their budget.  FYI - if you get rid of a Toyota Camry and amortize its costs you can afford about $150,000 more in your mortgage.
11. Unintentionally, the highway system has been the largest social engineering project ever undertaken in the U.S.  We need to refocus transportation funding to modal neutrality, spending more on light and heavy rail transit.  Americans don't like buses.
12. Denver is the model for building regionally significant, walkable communities tied to new light rail transit.
13. If possible, put transit underground.  At grade trains allow for development on the train station side of the tracks.  If underground, you double the amount of redevelopment because you don't have the "wrong side of the tracks" issue.
14. There is huge pent up demand for walkable communities.  Washington DC has had a tremendous resurgence of walkable communities.  There is one parcel in a redeveloped walkable area that was selling for $10/sq ft five years ago and just went for $700/sq ft.
15. Place management is key.  There should be a non-profit organization set up that is responsible for the amenities (and cleanliness) that go along with urban, walkable communities.

City Ordinance Issue - Dynamic Signs

City of Chanhassen (Minnesota) staff emailed me wondering if I had an opinion on dynamic message signs.  These signs are usually built with LED lights and the information on them can change every few seconds.  Chanhassen's ordinance bans these types of signs, but they are dealing with a variance request and are trying to decide if they should deal with the variance request or change the sign ordinance.  The easiest way to deal with the signs is either totally allow them or totally ban them.  As a traffic engineer on my high horse, these signs are a terrible idea.  They are purposely designed so the motorist will read the sign instead of paying attention to their driving.  Falling off of my high horse - our society has decided to allow some distraction (proof = billboards). 

I did some googling and I also queuried my fellow traffic engineers on a bulletin board through my professoinal society.  It turns out a lot of the relevant research out there is from my backyard.  The League of Minnesota Cities has a brief primer on the topic that helps frame the debate.  The City of Minnetonka commissioned a study that looks at the issue in depth. 

After reading through a lot of the research, I have come to a middle of the road conclusion.  We should allow these electronic, changable signs as a property rights decision (my personal view, I am not a lawyer).  On the flip side they need to be regulated by local governments for public safety reasons (they also need to be regulated for their impact on adjacent properties - but that is an aesthetic issue not a safety issue).  To manage the distraction (and degradation of motorist safety) the signs shouldn't be allowed to change more than every eight seconds (plus or minus depending on roadway speed) so a single motorist only sees one message.  This minimizes the distraction caused by these signs while protecting property rights.