The perception that traffic congestion is worse today than in the past is a real phenomenon. Might as well call it traffic nostalgia. Plus, the perception that traffic is only going to get worse is a common objection for constructing new housing anywhere. A fourplex or daycare being proposed can bring forth primal concerns about […]
According to a Star Tribune op-ed that’s already been heavily covered by streets.mn, we’re in for a summer long bombardment of messaging financed by local partisan think tank Center of the American Experiment. Despite reams of research that argues otherwise, motorists will see billboards, bumper stickers, and radio ads proclaiming that the only way to fix […]
Quite a bit happened last week: President Trump’s much ballyhooed Infrastructure Week was mostly a dead end, UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s snap election did not go as planned, and the heat index hit 100 degrees yesterday. A new crossposting feature on streets.mn this week is a series of podcasts about getting around produced by Apparatus with the first three […]
Rush hour is a cruel tyrant. It grips our lives with grim and gritted teeth. Each morning and afternoon I feel it weighing my heart, as if the neighborhood air has filled with clouds of anger. What can be done? Something must be done. And we have tried. Our efforts have been legend, the scale of our […]
Conventional wisdom seems to be that self-driving cars will do a lot to alleviate congestion. They will be able to interact with each other and the environment so that they can space themselves closer together, detect and reroute around congestion, and not cause crashes (which accounts for about a quarter of the existing congestion). However, […]
Well, today’s news is dominated by the perennial congestion report released from the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), which ranks cities based on congestion and then places a monetary value on that estimate. Feel free to read through James’ critique of the numbers, which was published on the site today. Or check out this chart, from Todd Litman’s […]
There were some mighty big numbers in the annual Urban Mobility Scorecard that the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and data company Inrix released Wednesday. Twin Cities residents, the study found, spent an average of 47 hours in 2014 stuck in rush hour congestion. That put us at 23rd among the 101 ranked metros. Washington, D.C., led […]
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) released a report last Thursday noting a slight year-over-year increase in Twin Cities freeway congestion. It’s a report and has lots of numbers, but it’s a fairly easy thing to skim through if you are interested. Lots of good stuff in there, and also in this newspaper version of […]
Having a plan to “accommodate bikes” isn’t as simple as drawing lines on a map. Often it involves tradeoffs between parking, travel lanes, and sidewalk space. But particularly in places where people will be bicycling, striping bike lanes can actually reduce congestion on the street. Here’s a neat chart from a 2013 study (via People for Bikes) that […]
I once had a quite lengthy conversation with a traffic engineer—about seven seconds. We were discussing if an intersection should include no-turn-on-red to increase safety for bicycle riders and pedestrians using an adjacent MUP. The engineer’s concern was that this would delay drivers by an average of seven seconds each. This was fascinating, as it […]