“You all may not like it, but when it comes to transportation, I know what I’m talking about.” – Ed Braddy addressing the city commission during his first few months as Mayor. How do you establish what is true and should be believed versus what is false and should be rejected? Some people rely upon superstition to build their framework of the world while others simply jettison all personal biases in an attempt to see the truth. And still others allow cultural programming to be their guide while mixing it with superstition and labeling it freedom (see the Tea Party). Embracing falsified beliefs cannot be considered freedom by any stretch of the imagination. “Transit does not alleviate congestion,” another phrase the Mayor has said both at the dais, around the country, on the American Dream Coalition, and on his radio program countless times. His idol, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute - whom he references most frequently as a reliable source regarding all things transportation – also has stated innumerable times that transit does not relieve congestion. Both Randal and Ed have also said that transit DOES NOT get people out of their cars on just as many occasions. After witnessing last week’s victory of irrationality conquering rationality, during the process I must say I had suspected that a laundry list of baseless allegations would be batted about city hall but I didn’t think the EMV response times would take center stage. Now that they have, I am pleased to provide the links showing that road diets with a three lane configuration yield the fastest EMV response times, even faster than a four lane arrangement, so I take it that this will be the reason for converting 8th Avenue from four to three lanes on the stretch of 34th to 43rd. Let us not flip flop our justifications…remember, EMV response times (see links in comment). And before viewing you should know the results cover multiple states, many cities, and numerous routes which is why the FHWA supports it. So GPD can take their monkey survey, fold it into a barbed configuration, and gently slide it where the sun don’t shine because they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. As for the Mayor, I’ve noticed he couches his ignorance and dogma under the harmless guise: “Folks, it is okay for people to have a different opinion.” Well, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” When we are talking about the physical world we are talking about a domain of verifiable facts and falsities and it is everyone’s duty to keep unjustified belief out of the public arena. “I’m not a scientist man” type people, should not be serving the public when it is obvious our understanding of the world, and of ourselves within it, is predicated on our scientific understanding as a whole. So how do we go about proving something to be false? Take the statements “transit does not relieve congestion” and “when it comes to transportation I know what I’m talking about.” Here’s how you prove it: first we start off with a hypothesis; in this case, transit does relieve congestion. But how do we go about proving this while reclining naked on our sofas armed only with a laptop? Since we can’t manipulate the world to such an extent so as to vivisect all transit from a city and measure the resulting traffic congestion levels, we will have to see if this has miraculously happened at some point in the past, and indeed it has. Now I need to preface this with a recent article in the Gainesville Sun written by the Mayor whom I’ve warned on many occasions not to make arguments of proportionality because it signifies to people who know something about transportation, however small, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In 2003, Los Angeles MTA workers went on strike for 35 days and the entire transit system shutdown. What happened astonished everybody; traffic congestion went up 47%! Now I know that the Mayor has made statements like “only 3% of the general population uses RTS” in order to cast a negative blanketed perception on the funding level of RTS and indeed, why we shouldn’t build BRT. But, public transit only accounts for 1% of passenger miles traveled in the United States so why are we wasting our time in the first place? Well, as I’ve mentioned before on this forum about ten times, transit pays for itself just by its congestion reducing benefits alone. This is why people who understand that when it comes to transit, the marginal effects which yield exponential effects on the transportation system as a whole, don’t use stupid ridership proportionality arguments in rebuttal, lest they be promoting an ideology. Marta Gonzalez of MIT, whom I’ve mentioned before, showed that by strategically removing less than 1% of commuters from a network, her team could cut congestion by some 16%. I offered this to show that congestion pricing, when coupled with the “free market” choice of driving, is inferior to statistical inference. Her results mirror the MTA strike observations (though with different parameters entirely) and so I have reason to believe she is on to something. Whether it is smart growth’s relationship to housing prices in Houston, or the relationship between transit and congestion, the Mayor does not know what he’s talking about and at this point it should be obvious to every one of you, including him. are.berkeley.edu/~mlanderson/pdf/Anderson_transit.pdf
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 18:20:36 +0000
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