Stark Reality VS Wishful Thinking 4 – Traffic Congestion
Traffic congestion has been around even before motorised buses and automobiles were invented. A hundred years ago, even if there were barely any cars on roads, when buses and active travel were the only options (resembling the scenario our policymakers are projecting for our future), the traffic was sluggish, with buses queueing before stations.
Whenever traffic speed dropped below a painful threshold it was given some more public space. It eased for a short while and it bounced back. And we gave it some more until we ran out of space. Some cities took it to another level (literally) adding some more traffic layers. However, congestion didn’t go away. It continues eating away at our time, money, and health, and projections aren’t optimistic at all.
Our beloved and powerful automobiles geared up to go 120 mph, once a symbol of freedom and flexibility, are now crawling at an average speed of 10-20 mph in urban environments. It’s extremely bad already. How could it be 30% or 70% worse?
It’s not like local authorities don’t care or ignore the issue. They simply have no more public space to surrender to transportation, and even if they had, the road-building budgets are tight. So, is accepting our faith our only option left?
No, there’s hope! They say a bus journey has a smaller eco-footprint than one by car. They also say a bus can take loads of cars off the roads and car parks, and indeed, they COULD and SHOULD reduce significantly both congestion and emissions from transportation, but in the real world they DO NOT.
Here’s some evidence taken from the DfT statistics available on .gov. uk. The UK has spent 690.4 Billion over the past 21 years (TSGB 1301) to encourage this transition. With this investment and the science-based reasoning behind the strategy, one would expect a dramatic drop of at least 50-60% in car use. Well, according to TSGB 0108b, in most regions of the UK, except for London, things went in the opposite direction. Even if some of the regions had a slight decrease (1-6%), considering the population swell, the absolute figures went actually up.
Although bus services have improved a lot, they now have dedicated lanes, and their subsidised fare prices defy inflation and economic common sense, bus use is in continuous decline TSGB 0108b.
So, after 21 years of relentless efforts and almost 700 billion spent to get people off their cars and onto buses, only 1% of the vehicles in traffic are buses and they only transport 6% of the commuters.
To add insult to injury, 87% of those cars are single occupancy, and there’s no meaningful sign of this trend going down. Sadly, all too often, even buses are single-occupancy during off-peak hours.
Successful transitions are driven by well-being enhancement. Humankind’s evolution was always determined by their desire to achieve more with less effort. In personal transportation “achieve more” means to travel faster, safer, and more comfortable, while “less effort” means less stress, more affordable, simpler, and more convenient.
Transport capacity can be enhanced (the extensive or wasteful way) by allocating more space. But it can also be achieved by (the intensive way) increasing speed, and this would also be in line with the most prevalent criteria we use to choose one transportation mode over another – journey time. However, a speed increase in road environments comes with a decrease in safety.
Nymbel’s solution is achieved by the interplay between well-being enhancement, and speed increase, helped by an ingenious workaround that leads to a significant safety improvement.