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Manville Explains ‘Induced Demand’ on Congested Highways

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville appeared on KCRW’s “Greater L.A.” podcast to discuss the practicality of freeway expansion projects. The I-605 Corridor Improvement Project is a massive freeway expansion plan that would add new lanes and exit ramps along 16 miles of I-605 and a stretch of the I-5 and other highways in southeastern Los Angeles County. However, Manville argued that “there’s no situation in a vital growing economy under which expanding a roadway to fight congestion makes much sense.” Highway space is valuable land that should be priced accordingly, he said. “We offer it to people for no direct charge,” Manville explained. “And so as a result, at times when lots of people would like to use it, there is more demand for the highway than there is actual highway in existence, and we end up with congestion.” He suggests charging for use of the roadway to deter just enough people from driving to avoid traffic congestion.

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Wachs on Understanding the History of L.A. Traffic

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A StreetsBlog article highlighted the findings of a new paper by Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning Martin Wachs and graduate students Peter Sebastian Chesney and Yu Hong Hwang about the history of Los Angeles traffic congestion. Their paper, “A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles: 1920-2020,” delves into the many arguments over how to battle congestion in the city over the last 100 years. While solutions including improvements in public transit and construction of new freeways have been proposed, these strategies have never brought more than a temporary reprieve from the unrelenting growth in congestion, the authors say. They argue that in order to address traffic congestion today, experts must understand the city’s complicated history with public transit and transportation infrastructure. Today’s proposals are not much different from past solutions, and even though mistakes have been made, it’s not clear that lessons have been learned, they wrote.

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Wachs on the Past, Present and Future of L.A. Traffic

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Urban Planning Professor Martin Wachs joined the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy’s Then & Now podcast to discuss the history of traffic congestion in Los Angeles. Wachs was joined by MURP student Yu Hong Hwang and history Ph.D. candidate Peter Chesney. The three described the findings of their recent report, which challenged the myth of Los Angeles’ car culture. Wachs also noted that increasing transit capacity does not necessarily reduce traffic congestion. “Transit is important, but it is not an antidote to congestion,” he said. Instead, he explained that investing in transit means providing people with alternatives to driving so that they can choose to take a bus or train instead of a car. Looking forward, Wachs suggested implementing congestion pricing in Los Angeles. “We will have to learn to live with traffic congestion as long as there is a strong consensus that we would rather sit in traffic than pay a fee to avoid it,” he concluded. The report’s authors also discussed their findings in a recent webinar.

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Manville on Reaching a Traffic Tipping Point

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Boston Globe about an uptick in traffic as the Boston metropolitan area reopens. Transit officials view the increased congestion as a real-time experiment to determine how much traffic the region’s highways can take before hitting their tipping points. Manville explained that, once a road nears capacity, each additional vehicle gums things up exponentially. “In ‘The Three Stooges,’ the classic trope is they all try and go through a door at once and they get stuck. If they had just walked through individually, not only could all of them have gone through the door but an almost infinite number of people could have gone in behind them,” he said. “You can have an incredibly high flow going through a door, or on a road, as long as a critical mass isn’t trying to do so at once.”

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Manville Predicts Return to Pre-Pandemic Traffic as L.A. Reopens

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in a KCRW segment on the resurgence of Los Angeles traffic congestion as the car-centric county reopens. “It’s some combination of businesses and recreation areas reopening, combined with quarantine fatigue,” explained Manville to Press Play program host Madeleine Brand. “It’s still well below what we would be experiencing in non-COVID times … but it’s up a bit from the absolute valley it fell to right after the stay-at-home orders were first put into place,” he said. Once the county reopens completely, Manville predicted that traffic will return to what it was like before the pandemic. “Yes, the numbers are creeping up, and I think we just notice that because they had been so low.”  Manville also noted that traffic congestion is the biggest constraint on driving speeds; during the pandemic shutdown, driving speeds increased and the overall number of high-speed collisions remained fairly consistent.

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Wachs on Return to Normal Traffic Levels When Economy Reopens

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Martin Wachs, distinguished professor emeritus of urban planning, was featured in a Los Angeles Times column discussing the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on traffic levels in Los Angeles. During the pandemic, vehicle volume has been reduced by 40% and more in parts of the city, air quality has improved, and traffic is moving 12% to 30% faster. Nevertheless, urban planning experts doubt the roads will stay empty when the economy reopens. Wachs pointed to congestion pricing as the only proven way to get people to drive less. ”The only strategy that works 100% of the time is charging people more money,” he said. “Charge more to park, charge to drive, quadruple the cost of gasoline, impose congestion pricing.” Traffic jams in the Sepulveda Pass could be eliminated by charging people $10 to make the trip, he said. However, many politicians are hesitant to embrace congestion pricing because they don’t believe their constituents want it.

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Manville on Angelenos’ Road Habits Under Coronavirus Restrictions

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Guardian about Angelenos’ road habits during the time of coronavirus. Even when just a few businesses asked workers to stay home, congestion was down quite a bit, demonstrating how relatively small reductions in cars can generate big increases in road performance, Manville said. “That has lessons for us, because it does remind us that when things get back to normal, policies that nudge just a few people away from a trip at a busy time can have a huge impact,” he said. However, Manville doubted the current health emergency would reshape Angelenos’ long-term relationship to the road. “It would be one thing if we were under an order to still go to places, but not in cars — some of us would find we like walking or biking,” he said. “But there’s no reason to think we will develop a different travel habit while we’re sitting on our couches.”

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Matute on the Eerily Empty Freeways of L.A.

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the COVID-19 outbreak’s effect on L.A. freeway traffic. As reported cases of COVID-19 surge in Los Angeles County, residents are following recommendations to stay at home and avoid public spaces, resulting in strangely empty freeways. Urban planning experts explain that reducing the number of vehicles on the road by a small amount can greatly reduce freeway traffic. “Pretty much every freeway lane in L.A. experiences some degree of this phenomenon: Everything is going fine, then suddenly it all slows down,” said Matute, an urban planning lecturer at the Luskin School. Freeway lanes have the capacity to support between 2,000 and 2,400 vehicles per lane per hour, but traffic grinds to a halt when lanes hit their capacity. On some freeways, reducing the number of cars by 5% could cut rush hour travel time in half, experts say.

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Manville on Combatting Congestion in L.A.

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to Curbed LA about measures being taken to combat traffic congestion in Los Angeles. According to a newly released index on congestion and mobility, the typical Los Angeles driver logged 103 hours of traffic in 2019. The index also found that the metro area is home to the two most congested stretches of road in the country, on sections of the 5 and 134 freeways. Among other strategies to lighten traffic, transit agencies plan to expand rail lines. While this would provide an alternative to driving, it may not reduce traffic, Manville cautioned. “It basically allows people to avoid exposure to congestion. But if you want to actually improve congestion on the 405, the unfortunate truth is that you have to toll the 405,” he said.

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Shoup’s Solution to Game-Day Congestion

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Distinguished Research Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup wrote an article for CityLab proposing transit validation as a solution to traffic and congestion at major sporting events. Due to limited bus service and no direct rail connections to Miami or Fort Lauderdale, most of the 62,000 football fans who attended the Super Bowl in Miami Gardens on Sunday arrived by car. While game-day congestion is often seen as part of football tradition, Shoup recommended that sporting venues contract with public transit operators so that all ticket holders can ride buses and trains free on game days. He argued that by arranging fare-free public transit on game days, sporting venues could increase transit ridership, reduce traffic congestion, save energy, and reduce pollution and carbon emissions at a very low cost. Validating transit rides is cheaper than building parking lots or garages for occasional game-day drivers, and it could reduce drunk driving incidents after sporting events, he said.

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