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Is there another way to cut city congestion?
Could the right combination of policies, technology, and economic incentives slash city congestion and perhaps even boost metropolitan growth? After putting the question out to tender, the US Department of Transportation has just awarded the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute $US1.2 million to find out.
Rensselaer has been given as its test case the city of New York and it now has two years to develop a “perfect combination” of incentives to reduce metropolitan congestion by up to 20%.
As far as the department knows, this is the first time in the world that such research has been undertaken and if Rensselaer finds an effective solution it could provide a rival to congestion charging as a way to end city snarls.
Prime target for Rensselaer’s attention will be trucks and ways to persuade most of New York’s transport companies to make deliveries after dark. According to Rensselaer, its research team plans initially to focus on delivery trucks that service the city’s 6000-plus restaurants. Each one of the restaurants receives “six or seven” deliveries a day that together represent more truck trips than those generated daily by the Port of New York and New Jersey combined.
The research is being led by Professor Jose Holguin-Veras who said in a statement that the solution had to be more than just imposing tolls. He said past experience had shown that competition is so strong in the trucking industry that many trucking companies were unable to pass on tolls to their customers without fear of losing business.
“As a result, the only impact of increasing tolls is to eat away the truckers’ profits, with no real impact on traffic congestion,” Prof Holguin-Veras said.
The proposals he and his team will develop will aim to target both the delivery companies and their customers.
willing to accept off-hour deliveries will benefit from economic incentives that may be funded from so-called “time of day” or another, yet-to-be determined tax mechanism.
The system—including the tax breaks—will be entered into voluntarily. Prof Holguin-Veras said earlier research had suggested that the cost of “off-hour deliveries” were almost 30% lower than those conducted during period of traffic congestion.
The scan also showed:
‘Instant’ extra lanes
Britain has cut travel times by more than 25% on a section of congested motorway—simply by letting motorists drive on the hard shoulder. The experiment on a 17km stretch of the M42 around Birmingham also saw fuel consumption fall 4%, emissions fall 10% and road injuries drop from 5.2 a month to 1.5. The test has been judged so successful that the government is now adding similar “extra” lanes to a section of Birmingham’s M6 and launching a study to see if hard shoulders can be used in other parts of the country’s road network. In the original experiment, hard shoulder driving was not allowed all the time—just when the motorway became congested. When that happened, gantry signs lit up to tell motorists to “slow down and spread out” in an effort to overcome the bottleneck. According to Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, fears some people had about safety did not materialise. “What is more, it’s popular among motorists as they can see the benefits schemes like this can bring,” she said.
Changing lights
How well traffic lights maintain a smooth flow of traffic can make a difference of up to a third in the amount of transport energy consumed by a city, according to Professor Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich. The trouble is, in Prof Helbing’s opinion, today’s traffic lights rely on technology developed in the 1960s and 1970s when traffic volumes were much lower than they are today. He says the result is that traffic lights are often optimised for pre-established assumed situations. If those traffic lights also happen to be coordinated, then today not even a super-computer is fast enough to compute all different options. “So the number of choices actually considered by the optimised program is significantly reduced,” Prof Helbing says. His solution is to create an entirely different computer program. He recommends a traffic light program that combines two different strategies. One strategy optimises the controls to local conditions; the other clears any traffic build-up when a “critical threshold” has been reached. The combined effect is smoother traffic flows but traffic lights that are never predictable—something that Prof Helbing accepts may not go down too well with all motorists. “Drivers are used to the present cycle of traffic lights and anticipate ‘their turn’ to enter an intersection,” Prof Helbing says. “The combined strategy would disrupt such expectations: if the traffic load is heavy in one direction, that road will be served two times, while others will be served only once. To support driver acceptance and avoid undesirable side effects, such as increased frustration or even accidents, any new traffic control system would need government support and funding by way of a well-publicised awareness campaign directed to the general public during the system’s introductory phase.” But despite the possible hassles, the big spin-off would be in reduced CO2 emissions and smoother traffic, he says.
Charging trucks
Having pioneered city congestion charging, Britain is now looking for ways it can identify trucks arriving with freight from continental Europe and bill them for the wear and tear they cause to UK roads. The UK Department of Transport is now investigating how a database of foreign trucks could be collected and the best way the “vignette” charging system could be introduced.
Early rising
One in eight Americans who drive to work now leave home before 6am—simply to beat rush hour traffic. Six years ago the comparable figure was one in nine. The change has put an additional 2.7 million early morning motorists on American roads bringing to 15 million the number who drive at dawn, according to the US National Academies’ Transportation Research Board.
Pricing free parking
What is the cost of a “free” parking space? The search for an answer is becoming something of a preoccupation among certain US city planners and green activists. One has even written a book on the subject. * Their worry is that America may have far too many parking spots and each one is doing nothing more than adding to urban sprawl, creating pollution run-offs and heat islands, and pushing up a host of hidden costs—including retail prices. In an attempt to quantify all the asphalt, one researcher, Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University has actually started to count the spaces—with the help of satellite photos. So far he has only managed to count the 355,000 off-street non-residential parking spaces of his home county of Tippecanoe in Indiana. Mr Pijanowski say that means Tippecanoe County has three times as many parking spots as it has registered cars. If that is a representative sample, then the US has about 15,500sq km of free parking spaces—more than enough to cover the entire state of Connecticut, he says. Is that too much?
Cutting delivery times
It is comparatively easy to workout a route for a courier van—if you know in advance all the pick-up and delivery points. The trouble starts when unexpected requests have to be inserted into the schedule while the van is out servicing customers. Solving such VRPs (vehicle routing problems) determines journey times, delivery times, and pollution. Now a group of researchers at India’s IIT-Madras think they have a software solution to manage re-routing more efficiently. The group, led by Professor T.T. Narendran, have found that under normal circumstances, the distance travelled by the courier van increases with the increasing number of new requests. The solution, and this is where their new software comes into play, is to recalculate the entire remaining route to be completed each time a new request is inserted. Prof Narendran sees the software being valuable not only to couriers but also emergency services. He describes the work in the October issue of the International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management.
