Mike on Traffic

How to Change ITE - Spack Petition for International VP

Based on encouragement from ITE members around the world, I've decided to try to be part of the solution instead of just grumbling from the sidelines.  

The first step – I need you to sign the online petition HERE to add me to the ballot.

I've setup a new blog that will be devoted to my campaign for ITE's 2014 International Vice President - MikeSpack.com.  Read about why I'm running and about my platform here.

Also, I apologize to my loyal readers who aren't ITE members.  The regularly scheduled programming will be back next week....

Thanks!

Mike

p.s.  The second step - I need your support!  Please encourage your colleagues and friends who are ITE members to sign the petition.  

 

Why does the Institute of Transportation Engineers exist? 10 Ideas for Big Changes

Without ITE, my career would not have evolved to the point it has.  The knowledge and friends I’ve gained through my ITE activities have made all the difference.  I know a lot of people in the industry who would say the exact same thing.  I’m very grateful for attending ITE meetings at every level, reading ITE publications, holding multiple committee chairmanships plus all board positions in the North Central section, and serving on the Midwestern District board. 

I believe every traffic engineer and transportation engineer should be heavily involved with ITE.  I actually aspire to someday be on the International ITE board, with the big dream of running for International VP/President.

My recent discussions with ITE’s executive director (link) over posting my trip generation comparison spreadsheet have given me pause.  So I’ve read everything posted about the Institute at ite.org.    A couple of highlights:

From ITE’s Strategic Plan - Mission:  To be the principal source of professional expertise, knowledge and ideas promoting transportation science and principles internationally.

From the Institute’s 1954 Articles of Association ( Article Two) - The purposes for which said corporation is formed are the following: 

• The advancement of the art and science of traffic engineering
• The fostering of traffic engineering education
• The stimulation of original research in traffic engineering
• The professional improvement of its members
• The encouragement of intercourse between man with mutual interests in traffic engineering
• The establishment of a central point of reference and union for its members

Big prices aren’t part of our founding principles and detract from our international mission.  Why are dues for ITE fellows more expensive than for members?  Why do many manuals cost more than $100 ?  Why does the Trip Generation Manual cost $400?  Why do some webinars cost hundreds of dollars?  These prices matter to engineers in developing countries where salaries and budgets are significantly lower than in the United States.

This was compounded when the executive director was lecturing me about my comparison spreadsheet and invoking the copyright of the Trip Generation Manual.  He said, “We’ve invested millions in Trip Generation and we need to protect that investment.” 

How?  The data in the Manual is collected by volunteers (I’ve submitted several data sets for inclusion) and it’s put together by a volunteer committee. 

Is ITE’s operation getting in the way of delivering its mission?

I think ITE’s guiding principles and subsequent mission are fantastic.  I hunted the ITE website and asked for a financial report twice – no response from staff.  But here’s a quick estimate – 17,000 members x $220/year in dues plus publications, meetings, etc leads me to guess ITE’s annual revenue is +/- $4.5 million.  I’m guessing a third to half of that goes to covering the 24 staff members and offices in Washington, DC.

Could revenue be shifted to better serve the mission and founding principles of ITE?  I realize these ideas are radical and would immediately be thrown out as heresy by entrenched staff, but here are ten areas I think the ITE board should explore.

1. Move.  ITE is located in Washington, DC, which is the 7^th most expensive American city according to Kiplinger’s.  Relocating headquarters to a different city with a lower cost of living and lower business operating expenses would lead to savings.  Of course the city should have good international connectivity (Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, etc).  I can see the need for the executive director to spend significant time traveling to DC, but that doesn’t mean the whole staff needs to be there.  And frankly, the executive director should spend more time abroad than in DC.  A subset of this is moving to more modest, smaller office space (we’re engineers and planners, not architects).  How about we implement the Travel Demand Management strategies we support by moving most employees virtual? 
2. Use Amazon’s CreateSpace to distribute all publications on demand (hard and electronic copies).  This eliminates inventory holding costs as well as the labor associated with managing and shipping inventory.  And for anyone who has ordered anything through ITE, Amazon is a huge step up in customer service.  I’m sure the individuals are nice people, but this would eliminate the need to have jobs with titles of “mailroom clerk” and a “supervisor of publications order fulfillment & mailroom operations.”  The profits from sales would be deposited monthly in the Institute’s checking account – slick. 
3. Get rid of the “ITE Community” and use LinkedIn Groups.  LinkedIn has the functionality of our ITE Community, it’s widely used by working folks, and it’s FREE.
4. Eliminate the hardcopy of the ITE Journal.  I was the NCITE newsletter co-editor in 1997.  More than a decade ago, we eliminated sending out 400 hardcopies of the newsletter and went to email distribution of the newsletter as a pdf.  Not a single complaint.  A lot of money and effort were saved with this move.  No more printing/postage.  We also dropped from two co-editors to a single editor when we didn’t have a quarterly mailing to put together.  This is a natural since ITE is already producing the journal as a pdf in addition to the hardcopy. 
5. Cut the cost of webinars and put recordings of them online for a low cost way to continue revenue generation ($25 per webinar?).  I think this would be a boon in revenue PLUS it is much better customer service.  Let people watch it when it’s convenient for them.  Again, technology makes this very easy.
6. Scrap the Technical Conference.  Travel budgets are being slashed and the internet is making these big meetings less relevant in all sectors of the economy.  It’s my understanding attendance is dropping at our international meetings (conversely the local section and district meetings are doing better because folks are staying local).  Everything at the Technical Conference could be easily done as a track of sessions within the TRB annual meeting and would take little ITE staff involvement.
7. Less face to face meetings at international headquarters, more skype.  And no need for five/six figure video conferencing systems that are obsolete in 18 months.
8. Spread the ITE staff around the globe.  I think this would end up cutting labor costs overall, but more importantly it would be a move towards expanding the international scope we aspire to.
9. Every person on staff should have a traffic engineering or transportation planning background.  Eliminate any position that has receptionist or assistant in the description.  Sorry, but it’s the 21^st century.  Use contractors, virtual assistants, consultants, etc to perform any tasks that do not need a traffic engineering or transportation planning background. 
10. Scrap OTISS or lower the costs.  The marketplace should drive this decision, but my hunch is that the pricing model is way out of line.  I actually love the idea of trip generation being in a cloud application and posted about it here, but I can’t justify the cost of OTISS.  I would like to see the dataset licensed out to programs like TEAPAC and Traffix so it can be imbedded in the software packages we already use.  ITE should not be in the for profit business of developing software.

I think the above changes could free up more than a million dollars that then could be spent more directly serving our mission.  Of course I would push ITE to be much more open source with all publications and endeavors (maybe the board is already discussing these things, but there’s nothing on the website about them), but that’s a different discussion than reallocating revenue.  I do realize with the reimagining of how the Institute operates, a lot of effort would need to be spent thinking about the value the individual members get and how to increase that.  Hopefully our global reach would expand and membership would increase.

So what other ideas are out there for furthering the mission and purpose of ITE?

Black Friday - Who else wants great deals on traffic engineering equipment?

There are great deals out there for Black Friday and over at www.CountingCars.com we thought we'd extend that courtesy to the traffic engineering and data collection professions. 

This season, give the gift of traffic data collection!

PicoCount 2500: $325 [limit 5 per customer] - Retail: $400 - Coupon Code: BLACK

Pocket Radar: $150 [limit 2 per customer] - Retail: $200 - Coupon Code: FRIDAY

*Legal stuff: Black Friday discounts apply to credit card payments. Discounts expire Tuesday, November 27th.

Is Mass Transit Bad for the Environment?

Check out this thought provoking blog post from Freakonomics.com.  The quick summary - 

• Cars carry 1.6 people on average, buses carry about 10, and rail about 25 per car.  
• According to the Department of Energy’sTransportation Energy Data Book, in 2010 transporting each passenger one mile by car required 3447 BTUs of energy. Transporting each passenger a mile by bus required 4118 BTUs, surprisingly making bus transit less green by this metric. Rail transit admittedly fares better, at 2520 BTUs per passenger mile, but even this is not the kind of slam-dunk advantage over the auto that transit advocates might hope for. 

Transit has the potential to be much better if they could get ridership up, but so could passenger vehicles.  The post talks about the NY subway system significantly skewing the rail transit numbers.  Throw in the 4 people per car requirement imposed in Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy on the passenger vehicle side of the ledger....  

I'm not arguing against mass transit.  Done well it can be great.  The argument is to improve marginal transit service or get rid of it.

Photo Credit:  JM

Painting Road Shoulders Green to Calm Traffic

Tompkins County, NY has painted the shoulders on a section of Ellis Hollow Road green.  They hope the green shoulders will make the road feel narrower and slow down traffic.  Below is a local TV news story about the project (link to Channel 9).

Painting the shoulders on the 1.5 mile section cost about $17,500.  The paint should last about five years.  

The county is in the middle of performing a before/after speed study to determine if the project is effective in slowing down traffic.  I applaud this kind of innovative experimentation.  It cost some money to paint the shoulders after the fact, but the cost would have been negligible if it was part of the initial repaving project.  

 

Good Engineering - Bad Consulting?

A school bus company is setting up a new facility in New Brighton at an abondoned lumber yard.  It's a good redevelopment in an industrial part of town.  The bus company had to apply for a permit and city staff brought up traffic as a possible issue.  I have a good relationship with the staff and they told the bus company they should give me a call.

I sorted through the details of the proposal and shared them with the county traffic engineer (the interseciton in question is the industrial park road's intersection with the regional county road).  Right now that intersection is side street stop sign controlled and the intersection a quarter of a mile to the north has all way stop sign control.  The all way stopped intersection is slated for a signal in about two years.

It turns out the outbound bus pattern will be about 90% turning right onto the county road, largely before 7 a.m.  And they leave over a couple of hour period - the approximately 80 buses don't all leave at the same time.  The buses coming and going throughout the rest of the day are dispersed.

I don't think there will be an operational problem and if there is the most logical solution would be stop signs.  Once the traffic signal goes in to the north, it will provide gaps in the traffic stream at this southern intersection.  

So instead of doing a several thousand dollar forecasting/capacity study, I laid out the above logic and proposed doing actual counts at the intersection of conceren the first week of school.  This is a much cheaper effort and the installation of a couple of stop signs can be done within a day of deciding to put them in.  The county's traffic engineer liked this approach.  

My philosophy leans towards the Minimum Effective Dosage - do the most effective thing to solve the problem and no more.  And if an improvement is in the gray area and is easy to implement, do it based on actual traffic conditions not forecasts.  But in this case I cost myself a couple of thousand dollars in engineering fees.  Oh well.

6000+ Bikes Take Over Lyndale Avenue!

Open Streets is a free annual event in south Minneapolis that transforms Lyndale Avenue, one of the city’s busiest commercial nodes, into an open space for bikes, pedestrians, rollerbladers and even yogis. The June 10^th event diverted traffic off 20 blocks of Lyndale Avenue while allowing cross traffic at intersecting streets.

We thought we’d help out with the effort by collecting traffic data for the six hour event.

We collected video with our COUNTcam system at four strategic locations along Lyndale Avenue. We watched 24 hours of total video, which we did on fast forward in approximately 7.2 hours with our PC-TAS software. The system worked great at capturing intersection volume and observing event-goers behaviors.

We counted a total of 24,717 bicycles, 8,837 pedestrians and 8,348 vehicles crossing the four intersections over the event's 6 hour period.

	Pedestrians	Bicycles	Cross Street Traffic
26th St	3,117	6,216	2,916
28th St	3,057	6,980	2900
35th St	1,641	6,444	1596
40th St	1,022	5,077	936

p.s.  Thanks to Nate Hood in the office for coordinating the project and putting together this post.

Testing Out Traffic Calming with Temporary Installations

I wrote about our low cost solution for putting in bumpouts in Pine Island with paint and planters here.  I saw Shaun Murphy (Minneapolis's Bicycle Coordinator) give a talk yesterday that reinforced the idea of testing things out before we make permanent installations.  

Minneapolis has been using barrels, jersey barriers, cones and other devices to create temporary installations of proposed traffic calming measures (traffic circles, bumpouts, refuge medians, etc) for more than 15 years.  This allows them to get neighborhood reaction to these devices (sometimes they love them, sometimes they hate them).  Temporary installations allow city staff to refine the permanent design as well as collect data on the impact of the device.  It is also easier for staff to convince policy makers to give the temporary installation a try.  Of course there is additional cost for the temporary installation, but I think the benefits outweigh the cost.

Here's a photo from Shaun showing a temporary installation of a bike/ped refuge island on 42nd Street and 17th Avenue.  We collected before/after speed data on 42nd Street for Shaun on this one.

And here's text from Shaun's notice to the area residents - 

Minneapolis Public Works will be placing a test median in the Bancroft neighborhood for approximately one month.  The test will be conducted at the intersection of 42^nd Street E and 17^th Avenue S, and is expected to be in place throughout the month of March.  The purpose of the test is to gain experience with a proposed permanent median, which would be installed at a later date as part of the federally funded Southern Bike Connection project. 

A median is expected to have the benefit of slowing traffic traveling along 42nd Street.  A median would also provide a stopping space for bicycles and pedestrians crossing 42nd Street at 17th Avenue.  Impacts from the median would include minimal parking loss on 42nd Street and prohibiting left turns from 42nd Street onto 17th Avenue, and from 17th Avenue onto 42nd Street. North-south traffic would also be prohibited on 17^th Avenue across 42^nd Street.

Temporary signing and barriers will be placed as part of the test, guiding motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians through the intersection according to the parameters above.  Comments are welcome through 311.  Signs inviting comment will be posted at the median.  For more information visit the project website:  http://www.minneapolismn.gov/bicycles/projects/Southern-Bike-Connection

 

Trainspotting - Modelling Gravel Trucks Through a Train Crossing

We're working on an interesting project for a gravel pit expansion.  The gravel trucks will turn off of a state highway onto a local street to get to the gravel pit.  This is a tee intersection with a right turn lane and bypass lane already built on the highway.  The intersection has side street stop sign control and low traffic volumes.

The big wrinkle is there's an active rail line paralleling the state highway.  There's about 50 feet of storage between the tracks and the highway.  The state folks asked if the bypass lane and right turn lane are long enough to store the increased truck traffic or should they be extended.

Modelling the geometry of the intersection/train tracks with Vissim is pretty straightforward.  The big wrinkle is getting good existing data to use as the foundation for the modelling.  In comes our COUNTcam system.

We set up several cameras and recorded the crossing and intersection for 48 hours on a normal Tuesday/Wednesday.  Over the 48 hours, there were 68 trains that caused the gates to go down at the crossing.  Each crossing lasted about two minutes.  For each train crossing, we noted:

• Time gate went down
• Time gate went up
• Number of cars in bypass lane after train cleared
• Number of cars in right turn lane after train cleared

Then we picked out a couple of time frames that have the most vehicle stacking combined with our added gravel trucks and conducted turning movement counts for those intervals.

This data allowed us to calibrate to the most intense existing conditions and then layer our increased trucking onto that period.  Without our video system, collecting this existing data would have been very expensive and there's a chance we would have missed something in the field.  With our COUNTcams, we were able to watch the videos several times and get different angles so we could efficiently hone in on the intervals we should model.

How to Cut Congestion in Half......

match all of the people driving by themselves during rush hour so every car would have two to three commuters in it, leaving half the cars at home.

It is a sad fact that the majority of cars on the roads during rush hour have just one person in them.  Ridesharing to date has a very lackluster track record.  Americans are just too tied to their little slice of the American dream - which in most parts of the country includes driving to work by yourself in your own car.

Minnesota is investing heavily in managed lanes - toll lanes where carpoolers can drive for free.  The first was I394, then I35W, and several more are being planned.  If all of the interstate highways running through the Minneapolis/St. Paul area have managed lanes, there would be a massive incentive for commuters to figure out carpooling.  It wouldn't be a silver bullet, but reducing peak traffic flows by a few percent is the difference between rush hour moving at 45 mph versus stop and go.

The Ridesharing Institute and the Transportation Research Board are holding a joint symposium on the topic in Oakland, CA on May 24th.  A portion of the symposium will be a free two hour webinar.  Details here.

p.s.  Another crazy option - instead of the two seat small car that is as wide as a normal car (and takes up the same long following distance as a normal car), put the seats in line like a fighter jet cockpit.  These 3 feet wide cars could get away with a lane that is roughly half as wide as the standard lane.  We could squeeze in a lot of these lanes and shift folks to a commuter car.  I know, good luck.....