Cars Cause Congestion

From a very good Wired article

Komanoff found that every car entering the CBD causes an average of 3.23 person-hours of delays. Multiply that by $39.53—a weighted average of vehicles’ time value within and outside the CBD—and it turns out that the average weekday vehicle journey costs other New Yorkers $128 in lost time. 

He translates all traffic impacts—delays, collisions, injuries, air pollution—into dollars and cents; that way, it’s easy for users to compare the benefits and costs of different plans. He has even come up with a plan of his own that would, according to his calculations, collect $1.3 billion in motorist tolls per year—all of which would be spent on improving public transit—and save $2.5 billion in time costs by reducing delays. To that, add $190 million from decreased mortality as a result of making streets more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, $83 million in collision damage reduction, and $34 million in lower CO₂ emissions.

he produced a detailed statistical analysis of pedestrian and cyclist deaths—it showed that casualties are not random, unpredictable accidents but the foreseeable result of given traffic conditions.

Comments

[Chris]

That is a great article and a very ambitious plan. It'd be amazing to implement, but I could definitely see a lot of backlash, especially from the gps monitoring used to track and charge drivers. Guess we'll just have to route for him and see what happens.

[Aaron]

I like the title of this post: "Cars Cause Congestion." In other news "Pot, Kettle: Still Black" and "Breathing Smog: Health Risk" =). Excellent article.

[SJE]

Yes, but I was once delayed 1 minute by a cyclist: they must be the cause of the congestion!

[Max]

Cars don't cause congestion. People driving cars cause congestion.

[Jan]

People driving cars talking on the cell phones cause even more congestion - when they crash.