Underpaid Genius

How can we diminish traffic congestion? Turns out that adding more roads can paradoxically increase traffic, so that’s not reliable. What about charging higher tolls on highways during peak commute times? Well, that requires legislation, which — as Bloomberg discovered in New York — may be impossible to get. How about paying people to change their behavior?

Experimental Campaigns Pay Drivers to Avoid Rush-Hour Traffic - John Markoff via NYTimes.com

[…] this spring, with a $3 million research grant from the federal Department of Transportation, Stanford deployed a new system designed by Dr. [Balaji] Prabhakar’s group. Called Capri, for Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives, it allows people driving to the notoriously traffic-clogged campus to enter a daily lottery, with a chance to win up to an extra $50 in their paycheck, just by shifting their commute to off-peak times.

The program has proved so popular that it is to be expanded soon to also cover parking.

Amaya Odiaga, the director of business operations for Stanford’s physical education department, now drives to campus a few minutes earlier and says she has won just $15. But a co-worker got $50 — creating a competitive atmosphere that makes the program fun, Ms. Odiaga said.

Better yet, Ms. Odiaga’s commute now takes as little as 7 minutes, down from 25 minutes at peak hours.

Dr. Prabhakar is a specialist in designing computer networks and has conducted a variety of experiments in using incentives to get people to change their behavior in driving, taking public transit, parking and even adopting a more active lifestyle. Unlike congestion pricing, which is mandatory for everyone and usually requires legislation, “incentives can be started incrementally and are voluntary,” he said.

Moreover, systems based on incentives can offer a huge advantage in simplicity. Until recently, the Stanford system required sensors around campus to detect signals from radio-frequency identification tags that participants carried in their cars. But the need for such an infrastructure has vanished now that so many drivers carry smartphones with GPS chips or other locaters.

In principle, Capri-like systems could be deployed by municipal or regional traffic systems, so that if there is some calculable benefit in decreasing traffic, perhaps  lottery-style giveaways to those that move their travel to off-peak is the coming norm.

The same approach can help to decrease public transit crowding, too:

Experimental Campaigns Pay Drivers to Avoid Rush-Hour Traffic - John Markoff via NYTimes.com

Singapore is considering a system he and his students designed that offers lottery participation or a fare discount to public transit riders who travel at off-peak times. A trial run begun in January lowered rush-hour ridership by more than 10 percent. (Given a choice between discounts and lottery, riders overwhelmingly chose the lottery.)

China’s central coordination of economics and policy is unsettling when they manipulate their currency to maintain a strong export market for low-cost Chinese goods, but there is something attractive about China’s ability to control growth by simply telling cities and manaufacturers what to do:

Keith Bradsher, China Carmakers Told to Seek Fuel Efficiency, Not Sales

J.D. Power & Associates, the global consults, estimated last month that China would have a manufacturing capacity of 31 million vehicles by 2013. Yet the domestic market has decelerated sharply this year, with sales of family vehicles up just 5 percent in the first seven months, compared with the period a year earlier. By contrast, sales had soared 33 percent in 2010, compared with 2009.

Much slower sales growth this year has prompted strong lobbying by the auto industry for a renewal of government incentives. But if anything, policy makers seem to be leaning toward more limits to address China’s steeply rising dependence on imported oil and its traffic jams, air pollution and shortages of land in many areas for more road construction.

Officials in Beijing have urged the auto industry to improve technology for years. But they clearly shifted their tone at the conference this weekend in calling for curbs on the industry’s overall growth in sales and production.

Many Chinese automakers are partly or entirely owned by municipal or provincial governments, however, and these lower tiers of government have pushed their manufacturers to expand as fast as possible to maximize jobs and economic output.

But limits on car sales in big cities may pressure Chinese automakers to slow down. The municipal government of Beijing, China’s largest single market with 4 percent of sales last year, stunned the industry last December by imposing stringent limits on the number of new-car registrations each month, effectively imposing a decline in sales of close to 70 percent.

Industry executives argued that this was purely a response to severe traffic jams in Beijing and lobbied for the central government not to let other cities take the same course.

Shanghai is unusual in having limited car registrations since 1994 because its historic city center has many narrow old streets. But with the exception this summer of Guiyang in southern China, most Chinese cities have been awaiting signals from Beijing on whether to follow suit.

Mr. Jiang said during a brief interview Sunday on the sidelines of the conference in Tianjin that he expected other cities to do so. “Beijing is a very typical city from which other cities may learn,” he said.

In China, the collusion between government and industry isn’t concealed by shadowy lobbying groups and political donations, the government is a shareholder in the industries, and government officials are amassing wealth through their involvement. But at least when they decide that something is amiss — like too many cars in urban areas, the leaders can decide to take action, and do so.

Contrast this with the fooforaw when Mayor Bloomberg tried to limit the number of cars in downtown Manhattan through his congestion pricing proposal, based on similar programs in London, Singapore, and Stockholm, and which never even was brought to a vote in the NY State Assembly. Note that New York would have been eligible for $350 million in US Department of Transportation funding to expand various aspects of public transport. 

So, I for one cannot wait for the day that our corporate overlords simply acquire the government, giving up the pretense of a democratic system. At least then they won’t have to continue with the GOP versus the Democrats charade, and they will be able to pursue policies that are beneficial to the state — like limiting traffic in growing urban areas — without a Punch and Judy show about global warming or the freedoms of the individual car owner. Our leaders — albeit not popularly elected — would simply pass decrees, which might be better than political stalemate.

Everything is wrong with this story: anti-environment, anti-stimulus, and anti-new- infrastructure.

Patrick McGeehan, Christie Kills Hudson Train Tunnel

The largest public transit project in the nation, a commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan, was halted on Thursday by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey because, he said, the state could not afford its share of the project’s rising cost.

Mr. Christie’s decision stunned other government officials and advocates of public transportation because work on the tunnel was under way and $3 billion of federal financing had already been arranged — more money than had been committed to any other transit project in America.

The governor, a Republican, said he decided to withdraw his support for the project on Thursday after hearing from state transportation officials that the project would cost at least $2.5 billion more than its original price of $8.7 billion. He said that New Jersey would have been responsible for the overrun and that he could not put the taxpayers of the state “on what would be a never-ending hook.”

In scrapping the project, Mr. Christie is forfeiting the $3 billion from the federal government and jeopardizing as much from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The state may also have to repay the federal government for its share of the $600 million that has already been spent on the tunnel.

The tunnel, which would have stretched under the Hudson from North Bergen, N.J., to a new station deep below 34th Street in Manhattan, was intended to double the number of trains that could enter the city from the west each day. The project’s planners said the additional trains would alleviate congestion on local roads, reduce pollution, help the growth of the region’s economy and raise property values for suburban homeowners.

The tunnel was also supposed to provide jobs for 6,000 construction workers just as some other big transit infrastructure projects in the city, like the Second Avenue subway, were winding down.

Instead, the contractors hired to dig the tunnel will soon start laying off workers.

Leaving aside the near term impacts of laying off workers in a terrible economy, what about New Jersey commuters? New Jersey Transit has real transport problems, already:

Michael Grynbaum and Robert Gebeloff, Digging Into On-Time Figures for New York Trains

At the peak of the rush, from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., about 25 percent of New Jersey Transit trains entering Manhattan arrived late; about 2 in 5 of the late trains were tardy by at least 15 minutes.

[…] morning commuters on New Jersey Transit who passed through the Summit station were late on 1 of every 6 trips, nearly a third by more than 20 minutes.

The fact that there is only a single tunnel to NJ from NYC, shared with Amtrak, makes it functionally impossible to increase the number of trains.

Christie critics suggest he is planning to divert the funds from highway tolls to road and bridge repairs.

Access to the Region’s Core Project Map, via www.arctunnel.com

In a nutshell, we have a classic failure of the American system. Large and forward-thinking projects are considered and reconsidered for decades, only to be delayed or stopped when conditions turn down, or ideological considerations intrude.

Here, we have a large metropolitan area, with three (or more) states having a serious interest in the public transportation system, but there is no overarching management or political entity that is clearly in control. It’s like some jerk water country with a fragile power-sharing arrangement among various tribes who don’t like each other, and nothing serious can be accomplished because all of the groups have the veto.

Raising the fares to pay for the tunnel is just wrong. Businesses get a huge benefit from the existence of public transport, so the expense — only 50% of which is paid for historically by fares — should be spread out over the tax base.

Our only real hope is that Ray LaHood can step in and divert some more federal money into this mix. Otherwise, New Jersey, New York, millions of commuters, and thousands of workers will all suffer.

Update 8:27am: Krugman weighs in on this question:

Transit Economics

The usual suspects on the comment board are, inevitably, arguing that rail transit should pay for itself. The obvious response is that road transit doesn’t; why should only public transit have to self-finance, when private vehicles generally drive on free roads built and maintained out of taxes?

But in a way that misses the larger point: urban transportation is an area in which we know that market prices bear very little relationship to true social costs. Even if you ignore environmental impacts and the national security implications of oil imports, the fact is that driving in an urban area, especially in rush hour, imposes huge congestion externalities on other people.

He cites a piece by Felix Salmon, calculating the real costs of driving in NYC at rush hour, based on Charles Komanoff’s Balanced Transportation Analyzer, a 3.5 MB excel spreadsheet:

After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.

Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.

Komanoff wants to use his analysis for another run at congestion pricing for NYC, but one that is based on the actual impacts that the pricing has on the system as a whole. For example, he suggests that buses should always be free, to avoid delays caused by fumbling for fare cards: the delay is worse that the loss of a fare. (A reader mentions the alternative of random checks for fare cards, as done in Europe, or on Caltrain.) Likewise he wants to impose a 33% surcharge on taxi fares, with 10% of the surcharge going to the taxi drivers and owners, and 90% going to the MTA.

Very innovative thinking, and therefore, likely to get nowhere in today’s know-nothing atmosphere.

related articles

• Critics say Christie’s decision to scrap Hudson tunnel project will cost N.J. homeowners, commuters jobs (nj.com)
• Feds To Weigh In On NJ-NY Rail Tunnel Project (newyork.cbslocal.com)
• Christie Tunnel Move Irks N.J. Commuters Seeking ‘More Access’ (businessweek.com)
• The End Of The Tunnel (nytimes.com)
• Sinking ARC (www.urbanomnibus.com)