Subway City: Making Plans for Rush Hour
The 2000 Census projected that New York will experience a population gain of two million over the next twenty years. Nationally, the 2000 Census projected a population gain of 60 million. To the urban planner, population growth and rush hour traffic are issues that go hand in hand.
From what I can observe, if the MTA subway system is kept running well in 2020—if public moneys are spent along the way to maintain and improve the system appropriately—the subway system should be able to absorb the added riders with little negative effect to the rush hour commute.
Nationally, however, it is a far different story. The nation’s growth will occur primarily in places that rely on private vehicles. The subsequent increase in vehicular traffic from growth will further bog down the lines of vehicles already in a crawl waiting in rush hour traffic.
It may seem odd to people who daily face the aggravation of bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but not every transportation system operates on the basis of saturated levels of congestion at rush hour. In New York, the world’s second oldest subway system actually moves people along faster during rush hour than any other time of day. (London, by the way, has the world’s oldest subway system.)
When I enter a busy subway station in rush hour, I find that navigating on foot through the station is usually no more time-consuming than at other times. Teeming commuters deftly weave and dodge each other around me with a flexibility of movement not possible in vehicular lanes of traffic. Subway cars arrive at a pace designed to avoid unmanageable levels of build-up of the burgeoning crowd. When I arrive at the platform, the frequency of oncoming subways is from 90-second to 10-minute intervals.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority subway system is composed of 468 stations along 660 miles of track. It has a fleet of 6,400 subway cars that moves 1.4 billion passengers a year. Total annual distance traveled amounts to over 347.1 million miles. In terms of energy, the subway system uses 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to operate for one year. Using an online conversion table, I found that the kilowatt hours amount is the equivalent to less than 49.2 million US gallons of gasoline for a year's operation.
The New York’s subway system is capable of providing peak efficiency during rush hour for moving vast masses of commuters with relatively small energy consumption. This is quite a contrast to my experiences as a consulting planner dealing with growth issues outside New York.
As a consulting planner, I have served public and private interests. Either way, it was often important to discuss the development proposal under consideration in terms of its effects on rush hour traffic patterns. I would find myself meeting with a developer, consultants, staff members, or project neighbors to turn over questions related to the local rush hour phenomena. Many of us would arrive at these meetings from our own rush hour commute.
If a formal traffic study was involved, we tended to talk in terms of peak-hour trip generation numbers, intersection counts, circulation requirements, capital improvement plans, sensitive noise receptors, cumulative future scenarios, and so forth. Lacking a formal study, discussions might be more qualitative, sometimes led off by technicians with balanced skepticism of their own opinions. Perceptions from past experiences were shared. Cost considerations were mentioned whenever hopes for one or another expectation needed to be trimmed back.
As a planning issue, rush hour traffic is typically treated like peak storm water runoff, in which an overloaded system requires a technical explanation and a design and schedule for responsive capital improvement. Somehow, though, drain system problems tend to fade away after improvements are made while traffic problems only worsen.
My experience was that board members who publicly and sincerely face indecision on a development proposal want to be illuminated from the fundamental principles they feel drawn to in their public role. Consequently, when it came to the issue of rush hour traffic impacts, I sought to find simple explanations that cut through the methodologies and statistics, quasi-legal interpretations of significance thresholds, and the rest of minutiae covered up and down in the typical traffic meeting. A traffic meeting usually proved its worth if I gained simple explanations that helped build persuasive and ethical conclusions about the development proposal’s effect on the rush hour’s commute.
The developer was in luck if a simple explanation was available that convincingly portrayed the development proposal as either not appreciably slowing down the flow of commuters during rush hour, or, given minor ancillary improvements, the transportation system’s capabilities could be tweaked to serve the project. Developers who were out of luck usually were left facing the prospects of a scaled-down project or a scaled-up transportation system.
I doubt many of us consider rush hour traffic to be the symptom of healthy social behavior, yet that is how I view the wider picture. During rush hour, our transportation systems are filled with people going to work, kids going to school, and people on errands or going to their appointments. Our way of life is synchronized to our daily routines for being together within the same timeframe. I can’t think of an alternative to this way of life.
Rush hour is a source of aggravation to people caught in the routine of inefficient transportation systems. However, in the wider picture, a lesser rush hour would indicate lesser public association. People cannot easily meet up with each other and interconnect without getting out of the house at the same time. Rush hour results from the inevitable crosscurrents of people and institutions pursuing patterns of social routine in the daily mix of public association.
Thanks to an urban form that is largely based on ,as well as served by, the template of a 101-year old transportation system, New York should be able to move capably into the period of growth ahead. Whether the MTA will meet the challenge only seems to be a matter of political will.
From what I can observe, if the MTA subway system is kept running well in 2020—if public moneys are spent along the way to maintain and improve the system appropriately—the subway system should be able to absorb the added riders with little negative effect to the rush hour commute.
Nationally, however, it is a far different story. The nation’s growth will occur primarily in places that rely on private vehicles. The subsequent increase in vehicular traffic from growth will further bog down the lines of vehicles already in a crawl waiting in rush hour traffic.
It may seem odd to people who daily face the aggravation of bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but not every transportation system operates on the basis of saturated levels of congestion at rush hour. In New York, the world’s second oldest subway system actually moves people along faster during rush hour than any other time of day. (London, by the way, has the world’s oldest subway system.)
When I enter a busy subway station in rush hour, I find that navigating on foot through the station is usually no more time-consuming than at other times. Teeming commuters deftly weave and dodge each other around me with a flexibility of movement not possible in vehicular lanes of traffic. Subway cars arrive at a pace designed to avoid unmanageable levels of build-up of the burgeoning crowd. When I arrive at the platform, the frequency of oncoming subways is from 90-second to 10-minute intervals.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority subway system is composed of 468 stations along 660 miles of track. It has a fleet of 6,400 subway cars that moves 1.4 billion passengers a year. Total annual distance traveled amounts to over 347.1 million miles. In terms of energy, the subway system uses 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to operate for one year. Using an online conversion table, I found that the kilowatt hours amount is the equivalent to less than 49.2 million US gallons of gasoline for a year's operation.
The New York’s subway system is capable of providing peak efficiency during rush hour for moving vast masses of commuters with relatively small energy consumption. This is quite a contrast to my experiences as a consulting planner dealing with growth issues outside New York.
As a consulting planner, I have served public and private interests. Either way, it was often important to discuss the development proposal under consideration in terms of its effects on rush hour traffic patterns. I would find myself meeting with a developer, consultants, staff members, or project neighbors to turn over questions related to the local rush hour phenomena. Many of us would arrive at these meetings from our own rush hour commute.
If a formal traffic study was involved, we tended to talk in terms of peak-hour trip generation numbers, intersection counts, circulation requirements, capital improvement plans, sensitive noise receptors, cumulative future scenarios, and so forth. Lacking a formal study, discussions might be more qualitative, sometimes led off by technicians with balanced skepticism of their own opinions. Perceptions from past experiences were shared. Cost considerations were mentioned whenever hopes for one or another expectation needed to be trimmed back.
As a planning issue, rush hour traffic is typically treated like peak storm water runoff, in which an overloaded system requires a technical explanation and a design and schedule for responsive capital improvement. Somehow, though, drain system problems tend to fade away after improvements are made while traffic problems only worsen.
My experience was that board members who publicly and sincerely face indecision on a development proposal want to be illuminated from the fundamental principles they feel drawn to in their public role. Consequently, when it came to the issue of rush hour traffic impacts, I sought to find simple explanations that cut through the methodologies and statistics, quasi-legal interpretations of significance thresholds, and the rest of minutiae covered up and down in the typical traffic meeting. A traffic meeting usually proved its worth if I gained simple explanations that helped build persuasive and ethical conclusions about the development proposal’s effect on the rush hour’s commute.
The developer was in luck if a simple explanation was available that convincingly portrayed the development proposal as either not appreciably slowing down the flow of commuters during rush hour, or, given minor ancillary improvements, the transportation system’s capabilities could be tweaked to serve the project. Developers who were out of luck usually were left facing the prospects of a scaled-down project or a scaled-up transportation system.
I doubt many of us consider rush hour traffic to be the symptom of healthy social behavior, yet that is how I view the wider picture. During rush hour, our transportation systems are filled with people going to work, kids going to school, and people on errands or going to their appointments. Our way of life is synchronized to our daily routines for being together within the same timeframe. I can’t think of an alternative to this way of life.
Rush hour is a source of aggravation to people caught in the routine of inefficient transportation systems. However, in the wider picture, a lesser rush hour would indicate lesser public association. People cannot easily meet up with each other and interconnect without getting out of the house at the same time. Rush hour results from the inevitable crosscurrents of people and institutions pursuing patterns of social routine in the daily mix of public association.
Thanks to an urban form that is largely based on ,as well as served by, the template of a 101-year old transportation system, New York should be able to move capably into the period of growth ahead. Whether the MTA will meet the challenge only seems to be a matter of political will.
posted by Paul Cogley at 5:33 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home