Category: General

Are You a Lineupper or a Sidezoomer?

Traffic in Knightsbridge, 1960s.Traffic in Knightsbridge, 1960s., originally uploaded by Fray Bentos

On people’s reactions to traffic lane restrictions, The Urge to Merge:

So I started consulting professionals on my own: traffic engineers, the highway police, queuing theorists. The learning curve, it must be said, was robust. I hadn’t known queuing had theories. But of course it does, mathematicians and business-operations people have to work them out, the heart-attack patient gets in ahead of the sprained ankle and nobody has a problem with that, and anybody who has been to Europe intuitively understands what one engineer meant when in midsentence he said to me, “perfect England,” meaning culturally mandated compulsive queuing, and, “perfect Italy,” meaning culturally mandated compulsive nonqueuing. I learned about the father of modern queuing theory, an early 1900s Dane whose specific who-goes-first challenge was the new Copenhagen telephone system, which required callers, disembodied but queued nonetheless, to be moved along in a way both maximally efficient and acceptable to all.

This is particularly bad in New York City where highways can go from four to two lanes abruptly.
The key to faster traffic? Don’t get in line too early and let the sidezoomers in.

P.F.1 (Public Farm One)

P.F.1 (Public Farm One)P.F.1 (Public Farm One), originally uploaded by plemeljr

I visited WORK AC’s P.F.1 (Public Farm One), winner of the Ninth Annual Young Architects Competition at P.S. 1 and I took a bunch of photos.
Generally, the work is interesting – and at least it isn’t falling down like previous year’s installations. The main criticism is that there is a definitive lack of shade and seating. And the seating which was provided where made out of black rubber. Watching from the 7 Train yesterday, volunteers scaled the installation pruning, picking and harvesting the installation.

  • P.F.1 (Public Farm One)
  • P.F.1 (Public Farm One) - Chickens!
  • P.F.1 (Public Farm One)
  • P.F.1 (Public Farm One)
  • P.F.1 (Public Farm One)
  • P.F.1 (Public Farm One)

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The Real Cost of Roads

The Overhead Wire on The Truth About Road Subsidies regarding a Texas DOT study on the cost of building and maintaining roads:

The decision to build a road is a permanent commitment to the traveling public. Not only will a road be built, but it must also be routinely maintained and reconstructed when necessary, meaning no road is ever truly “paid for.” Until recently, when TxDOT built or expanded a road, no methodology existed to determine the extent to which this work would be paid off through revenues.
The Asset Value Index, was developed to compare the full 40-year life-cycle costs to the revenues attributable to a given road corridor or section. The shorthand version calculates how much gasoline is consumed on a roadway and how much gas tax revenue that generates.
The Asset Value Index is the ratio of the total expected revenues divided by the total expected costs. If the ratio is 0.60, the road will produce revenues to meet 60 percent of its costs; it would be “paid for” only if the ratio were 1.00, when the revenues met 100 percent of costs. Another way of describing this is to do a “tax gap” analysis, which shows how much the state fuel tax would have to be on that given corridor for the ratio for revenues to match costs.
Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

Just remember this when someone states that gas taxes pay for roads in total. Texas DOT themselves admit that roads are heavily subsidized outside of gas taxes.