Alleviating urban traffic congestion

Abstract

The average driver in US metropolitan areas endured 27 hours of traffic delays in 2000, a rise from 7 hours in 1980. Traffic delays are considerably worse in many other countries than in the United States, and in developing countries urban traffic congestion is increasing with alarming rapidity. Economists have been advocating congestion pricing as the way to deal with urban traffic congestion for fifty years; but today, even after some successes, congestion pricing is encountering considerable political resistance. Active consideration of more microscopic policies that attack the problem at the scale at which actual policy decisions are made is advocated by the authors of this report. They argue that Microscopic models, rather than macroscopic models that are too simplified and too aggregated, will lead to the analysis of a wider and more creative range of policies, at least some of which should work well and be politically acceptable. The authors illustrate the themes of the book, after developing them, by examining some areas of urban transport policy that have been neglected by the macroscopic approach. Included are the encouragement of bicycling, downtown parking policy, the staggering of work hours by dominant employers, and the use by medium-sized cities of a multimode ticket that charges cars entering the city center a toll equal to the transit fare. By no means will the reorientation of urban transport analysis that they advocate eliminate traffic delays, but it should alleviate urban traffic congestion by speeding up the adoption of a richer, more flexible, and ultimately more effective set of policies to alleviate urban traffic congestion.