The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams. [%comments]
Reducing Traffic by Closing Roads
TAGS: traffic
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Oh those crazy Canucks!
The problem with such scenarios is that they work only when there are alternate routes, with excess capacity, that drivers can take, which have enough capacity to accept the traffic they’ll have to bear. If a road system is already far too small to handle the load, and if all the alternative routes are at or past capacity currently, then closing one of them cannot do anything BUT increase congestion rather than alleviate it.
Put another way … the example cited in the blog entry (choice of short bridge vs. longer highway) is too idealized, artificial and arbitrary to reflect “real world” conditions everywhere. If life were as simple as this example, traffic wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a problem as it is. But life isn’t that simple, and we all know it.
Most metropolitan areas in the US currently do not have any of the excess capacity (i.e. the longer highway segment in the example) required for this to work. It would be nice to think that there’s some sort of “magic” in these selective road closures that makes traffic jams go away … but sorry, it ain’t so. Traffic that’s jammed on one road, has to go somewhere … it isn’t going to just conveniently vanish because someone decides to close that road.
Actually, according to the other paper in town, there were large traffic jams as a result of the bridge change: http://tinyurl.com/lt5tmv
As a Vancouverite, I kind of doubt the change will cause fewer traffic jams. There may be enough roads that overall, it won’t have a noticable effect.
In the meantime, studies in the US show that when you add one lane to a congested road, you eventually increase traffic, don’t they?
Hey, if they closed some of the roads to cars on my route to work, I would take my bike everyday. But as it stands now, it’s way too dangerous.
coud it be that everyone was scared of sitting in a traffic jam and therefore used alternate routes? what is the impact in 6 months or a year after everyone has recovered from the initial scare of one less lane? do the drivers come back to that road?
I would imagine a lot of traffic jams are caused by people swapping lanes constantly. They cause people to have to tailgate to keep “their place in line” and to come to abrupt slow downs when getting cutoff, disrupting the flow of traffic. Forcing folks to be more constrained would seem to limit this.
Aren’t they ignoring the effect of traffic lights that are not run by sensors, poorly timed, or not linked with nearby lights? I’m sure we all have sat at a light and watched it go through 3 or 4 cycles without moving.