Post by bennyp81 on Jun 23, 2005 9:12:26 GMT -8
EC
User ID: 9495963 Sep 1st 8:09 PM
This is a long article so if it doesnt post correctly heres the link:
www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020902fa_fact
Well worth the read (as most new yorker articles are), mentions of Mass transit and how traffic will only continue to get worse.
THE SLOW LANE
by JOHN SEABROOK
Can anyone solve the problem of traffic?
Issue of 2002-09-02
Posted 2002-08-26
Shannon Sohn, the blue-eyed, freckled young helicopter reporter for New York's Channel 7 "Eyewitness News," was sitting in the office at the back of the hangar at Linden Airport, in northern New Jersey, fanning herself with a newspaper and waiting for the traffic to get bad. The office looked like a place where people keep odd hours. The couch had body-length indentations in its cushions, and soft-drink cans and coffee cups were spilling out of the wastebasket.
It was early in the afternoon on Friday, May 24th, or "getaway day," as Channel 7 called it—the start of the Memorial Day weekend and the traditional beginning of the summer traffic season. On days like this, all the drivers who commute in and out of New York City on a typical weekday are joined by the drivers who live in the city and use their cars only on weekends, producing the kind of chaos that traffic reporters in Atlanta or Los Angeles take for granted but New York reporters don't experience every day. If there were truly appalling delays, Sohn had a shot at leading the six-o'clock news. "As a helicopter reporter, that's what you want," she said. "To be first." Helicopter reporters in New York don't have the luxury of following high-speed car chases—there are too many bridges and tunnels in the way. Here a terrible traffic jam is as good as it gets. But would today's traffic be bad enough?
Since September 11th, as anyone who drives in New York knows, traffic patterns have changed. Congestion cleared up when Mayor Giuliani used his special emergency powers to restrict bridge and tunnel crossings into Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. Not since the Second World War had traffic in the city flowed as freely. In April, restrictions were lifted on some crossings, but morning-rush-hour restrictions on lone drivers entering Manhattan remained in effect below Fourteenth Street. Although the cleanup operation at Ground Zero has now ended, Mayor Bloomberg—who, during his campaign, promised to improve the quality of life in New York by making the city less auto-reliant—says that he will keep the restrictions in place while the reconstruction of lower Manhattan continues. Traffic has been getting steadily worse since April, but it's still less crowded in the city now than it was a year ago.
The phone rang in the office. It was the Channel 7 news desk, in Manhattan. The police scanner was reporting an incident that had shut down all the northbound lanes on the New York State Thruway. Sohn and her pilot, Arthur Anderson, hurried outside and climbed aboard NewsCopter 7. Anderson gave me a quick review of the emergency procedures, explaining that if we had to ditch he preferred to do so on land, not in the water. As we took off, Sohn unwrapped a lollipop. She was fourteen weeks pregnant, and relied on cherry-flavored Charms to ward off motion sickness in the chopper. Grape worked better, but it turned her tongue purple.
Linden Airport is near Elizabeth, New Jersey, and just south of Newark airport. As we headed northwest across Newark's sprawling runways, Sohn gathered information from the traffic-news desk. Around noon, a twelve-year-old boy called Scottie Van Dunk, of Mahwah, New Jersey, whose class had been let out of school early, had ridden his bike to a section of the Ramapo River known as "The Forty Foot," a well-known swimming hole just across the New York state line. At 2 P.M., the boy's body had been discovered at the spot where the river runs beside the Thruway. He had drowned, and police officers had shut down the highway for the recovery operation.
By the time we arrived above the scene, at 2:15 P.M., the traffic on the northbound Thruway was backed up for several miles beyond the I-287 interchange. Drivers who had been zipping along the highway minutes before were now trapped and unhappy, and their previously limitless sense of possibility had shrunk to a single option: whether to change lanes. The idea that the delay up ahead might be the result of a disaster far greater than anyone's personal inconvenience rarely occurs to the driver stuck in traffic.
NewsCopter 7's remote-controlled belly-mounted camera roved the river's edge, looking for a body or some other pitiless image of tragedy for the folks at home, but found only a couple of men from the Stony Point Fire Department, stowing rescue gear. Van Dunk's body had been taken away just before we arrived. Sohn directed Anderson to get some pictures of the traffic jam on I-87 and I-287, but said she doubted that this tie-up would be enough to make the six-o'clock news: "For that to happen, we need some really, really bad traffic."
Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by forty per cent, while the number of registered vehicles has increased by nearly a hundred per cent—in other words, cars have proliferated more than twice as fast as people have. During this same period, road capacity increased by six per cent. If these trends continue through 2020, every day will resemble a getaway day, with its mixture of commuters, truckers, and recreational drivers, who take to the road without regard for traditional peak travel times, producing congestion all day long: trucks that can't make deliveries on time, people who can't get to or from work, air quality that continues to deteriorate as commerce suffers and our over-all geopolitical position weakens because we are forced to become ever more dependent on foreign oil. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a traffic jam.
What can you do about the traffic? Take the train? The train may be out of commission; Amtrak, the nation's passenger rail service, may be out of business before too long. Fly? Airlines are cutting flights and raising prices to offset heavy losses. Manage traffic better? There are many schemes for managing traffic, but not very many practical ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. Even if people have an alternative to driving, as do many New Yorkers, over time an ever larger number of commuters choose to drive. Today, about 3.6 million people make their way into Manhattan's "hub" (the area below Sixtieth Street) each workday—about the same number who came on an average day fifty years ago. In 1948, six hundred and fifty thousand of the commuters drove; fifty years later, more than 1.3 million of them drove, and most of them drove alone.
It's not enough to build public transportation; you also have to get people to use it, either by making trains and buses more convenient or by prohibiting some people from driving during peak periods. But in the United States restricting people from using their automobiles whenever they like has always been politically difficult, and Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to do so are controversial. The new restrictions have brought joy to many of the city's residents—New York is the only city in the United States in which the majority of households don't own an automobile—but they have been a source of outrage for the parking-garage industry, restaurant and theatre owners, retailers, labor groups, and some local politicians. Traffic is bad, but, as some New Yorkers have discovered, a lack of traffic may be worse. "I think it's destroying the fabric of New York," Greg Susick, senior vice-president of Central Parking, told the Times in November. After a Christmas season in New York in which the traditional Five Days of Gridlock saw only light congestion, the Metropolitan Parking Association began investigating possible legal action against the city for maintaining the lone-driver restrictions.
If New York could do something permanent about its traffic, maybe other cities around the country could, too. In Atlanta, the time that the average commuter spends annually in traffic rose from twenty-five hours in 1992 to seventy hours in 2000. Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the country, but San Francisco, Houston, and Seattle are challenging L.A. for this distinction. These cities may find it necessary to impose restrictions on driving when traffic becomes even worse—much worse—as it inevitably will. That is why what happens in New York's experiment in traffic control is so important. Will New York, which is planning to build a state-of-the-art transit center in lower Manhattan, be the first city to implement a state-of-the-art traffic policy? Or will this period in the city's traffic history—a period in which the automobile is a privileged guest—end in the coming months, defeated by our insatiable desire to drive?
At 12:15 P.M. on getaway Friday, Rudy Popolizio, the director of systems engineering for New York City's Department of Transportation, was in the D.O.T.'s Traffic Management Center watching the city's roads for signs of trouble. The word "jam" was first used to describe automotive congestion by the Saturday Evening Post, in 1910, in a reference to New York City. (The British word "blockage," a holdover from horse-and-carriage days, was too civil-sounding to convey the awful noise and smell of automobiles densely packed into a tight space.) Because of the limited space and the dimensions of its grid, the heart of midtown Manhattan can accommodate only nine thousand moving vehicles without succumbing to gridlock: the congested traffic on one of the cross streets blocks the traffic on an avenue, which in turn clogs the next cross street. A bad case of gridlock can tie up all the streets in midtown within minutes, which is why engineers like Popolizio keep close watch on the city's roads, especially on days like this.
Traffic seemed to be flowing well, Popolizio reported. He suspected that a lot of people hadn't gone to work. "We may see an early peak today—around two o'clock," he told me over the phone. "But so far traffic is O.K. I'm looking at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge camera, and traffic is moving well."
The Traffic Management Center is in a large windowless bunker in a nondescript white brick building just off Queens Plaza, in Long Island City. I had met Popolizio there when I visited several months earlier. He and the other engineers work in the glow of thirty-four large TV monitors, each displaying changing images transmitted from the hundred and thirty remote-controlled closed-circuit cameras that the city and state D.O.T.s have installed at troublesome intersections within the city and at common choke points outside it. Traffic cams reduce the D.O.T.'s response time to accidents—the cause of fifty per cent of all traffic jams. In theory, the cams, available online at www.metrocommute.com, are supposed to provide an advance-warning system for the public, but, as a practical matter, most drivers aren't surfing the Web, you hope, while they're behind the wheel.
The most effective and equitable means of managing all the different users of the city's streets—bicyclists, in-line skaters, scooters, pushcarts, pedal cabs, and pedestrians, as well as drivers—is the traffic signal. "With the traffic signal, everyone's interests are reduced to red and green," Popolizio said. "It's 'You get yours, and I get mine.' " The electric traffic signal is an old technology, devised by an African-American inventor, Garrett Morgan, in 1914 (he also came up with an early version of the gas mask) and first deployed in the city in 1924, on Broadway; today, about twenty-seven hundred intersections in Manhattan are "signalized." Almost all signals in Manhattan run on ninety-second intervals, and over the decades the D.O.T. has steadily improved and refined the way the signals work together. "In a grid this tight, you can't afford to have a signal thinking on its own," Popolizio said. (Two weeks ago, a computer glitch caused dozens of signals around the city to start thinking on their own, and the result was chaos.) The D.O.T. times the sequence of the lights on most of the avenues progressively; and even if you don't know that the signals on, say, Ninth Avenue turn green at six-second intervals, you soon develop an instinct for just how much green you have left on the signal ahead of you before your progress is halted by red. E. B. White, writing in this magazine in the late nineteen-twenties, noted how quickly the citizenry had incorporated the newly invented timing progressions into its inner life. "These machinal rhythms are really very subtle," he wrote. "It is by such nice devices that man supplants the urge of hours and tides and the phases of a moon which he never sees."
More than half of the eleven and a half thousand signals in the five boroughs are connected to computers in the management center, and the city's traffic engineers can manipulate the timing of those signals throughout the day. During the morning and evening rush hours, for example, Sixth Avenue in midtown gets sixty seconds of the green time while the crosstown streets get thirty seconds, but during the middle of the day, when there's more crosstown traffic, the engineers change the signal timing so that both Sixth Avenue and the crosstown streets get forty-five seconds of green. Every one of Manhattan's signals is represented by a tiny light on a forty-foot-long tableau in the management center, and the lights are connected in real time to the signals on the streets. The model allows you to watch the sequences of lights sweeping along Broadway, or to study the subtlety of the signal pattern in Times Square. It represents the triumph of traffic engineering over traffic: a perfectly designed system, without drivers to mess it up. "We use very few left-turn signals in the city," Popolizio pointed out. "It's not like in the suburbs, where you have people going every which way in the intersections."
The day I had visited the management center, in March, there wasn't much traffic to manage. With all the rush-hour restrictions still in effect, the roads in the city and outside it were quieter than usual; an engineer had tuned one of the monitors to daytime TV. Finally, at the end of the morning rush hour, a crew from the city's Department of Environmental Protection stopped its truck in the middle of the southbound F.D.R. Drive, just south of Ninety-sixth Street, so that it blocked two lanes. The men got out, ambled over to the side of the road, and began peering into drains. Cars behind the truck immediately stopped, and, thanks to the D.O.T.'s cameras, we got to see the jam forming, travelling backward at eight miles an hour, a rolling wave of thwarted commuter desire which soon reached the Triborough Bridge. Meanwhile, a police car pulled up, its lights flashing, in the left lane of the northbound F.D.R., and the cops went over to see what the heck the D.E.P. was up to. It was a pygmy traffic jam, in the general scheme of things, but it was the only thing happening that morning, and the D.O.T. engineers got pretty excited. "What are those D.E.P. guys doing?" one shouted. "Do they have a work permit?" Fifteen minutes later, the truck moved on, and the jam slowly cleared.
On getaway day, Popolizio told me, "We're going to be putting in our outbound timing progressions a little early this afternoon, maybe at one-thirty to two instead of three-thirty to four, to give more green time to the outbound lights. All to help get people out of the city as smoothly as possible."
Unfortunately, in getting people smoothly out of Manhattan the city's D.O.T. engineers weren't necessarily making their trips faster, and they may ultimately have been slowing down the drivers by flooding the highways outside the city with more cars than they were designed to accommodate. No major new highways have been built around New York since the nineteen-seventies, partly because there's no room left, and partly because many people believe that building highways makes congestion worse, because drivers who had previously used mass transit to avoid the traffic begin using the new roads. Even if no new drivers take to the new roads, scientists have shown that increased road capacity alone can increase congestion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "Braess's paradox," after a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess. In the twenty-three American cities that added the most new roads per person during the nineteen-nineties, traffic congestion rose by more than seventy per cent.
But not building highways also causes traffic. The section of I-95 that runs from the New York state line to New Haven, for example, was designed to accommodate seventy thousand vehicles a day; it now carries more than a hundred and fifty thousand in places. Many parts of the nation's forty-seven-thousand-mile interstate-highway system, which was created in the nineteen-fifties, suffer similar overloads. Politically, it's almost impossible to build major new roads. David Schulz, the director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute, at Northwestern University, said recently, "When you talk about building a new road, the number of people who benefit will be large, but their individual benefit will be quite small. The number of people who will be harmed will be small, but their disbenefit will be very large. And it's those people who will get involved in the public hearings and stop the road." NIMBY ("Not in my back yard") has given birth to BANANA ("Build almost nothing anywhere near anyone"), which has spawned NOPE ("Not on planet Earth").
The Federal Highway Administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade to make highways "intelligent," deploying a wide range of detection devices known collectively as I.T.S. (intelligent transportation systems), which are supposed to track, predict, and possibly control traffic. Much of this technology was developed by the United States military and used during the Gulf War. (It is now part of our new homeland security measures.) It includes closed-circuit television cameras, vehicle sensors buried in the roads, overhead proximity radar, optical-image sensors, and the E-Z Pass transponder—the small plastic box on your windshield which communicates with overhead "readers," and which may be the most significant advance in traffic management since the traffic signal. Mark Hallenbeck, the director of the Washington State Transportation Center, at the University of Washington, says that the idea "is to add capacity with information, the way we used to add capacity with concrete. In highway agencies, we used to think of ourselves as being in the construction business. We build a road, go away, and then come back in twenty years and add a lane. Now all these agencies are having to learn how to increase capacity by adding intelligence to the system."
On Friday afternoon, after I had spoken to Popolizio, I called Transcom, a public interagency traffic-management organization based in Jersey City, to find out what was happening on the roads outside the city. Part of Transcom's mission is to coördinate information about I-95 which is supplied by the states that the road runs through. Traffic, after all, doesn't respect city or country boundaries. Today, Transcom's managers told me, they were busy alerting travellers to problems on the highway that had started hours earlier, at Exit 34, near Milford, Connecticut. At 6:30 A.M., a tractor-trailer on I-95 northbound, carrying a load of car batteries, had hit a guardrail, overturned, and caught fire. The state police closed all lanes, in both directions, while they cut apart the truck and made sure no battery acid remained on the highway—a process that took eight hours. By noon, traffic was backed up for thirteen miles. Information about the delays was posted on electronic message signs mounted over the region's highways, and alerts were broadcast over highway-advisory radio. At the moment, Transcom does not provide drivers with alternate routes, but, according to its executive director, Matthew Edelman, "Lots of these drivers know the roads, and if you tell them where the problem is they'll figure out how to get around it." This is assuming, of course, that drivers do what the system tells them to do. Dave Zavattero, the I.T.S. program manager for the Illinois Department of Transportation, says that many drivers deliberately do the opposite. "We have variable signs on the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways," in Chicago, he told me. "The signs tell you whether the local lanes or the express lanes are moving faster. But if I put a message up there that says the express lanes are five minutes faster a certain number of drivers will figure that the other drivers are taking the express lanes, so they're going to take the local lanes."
On this getaway day, any drivers heading out of New York early to avoid the afternoon rush hour who had checked the traffic cams and bulletins on the Web just before leaving would have known to take the Hutchinson River Parkway north to the Merritt Parkway, skirting the jam on I-95. But in fact the Hutch wasn't much better. Around noon, a truck driver had attempted an illegal dash along the parkway (which is off limits to commercial traffic) to avoid the problems on I-95 and got stuck under one of the overpasses. This meant that by 1 P.M. all the New England-bound travellers that Popolizio and his colleagues were helping to leave the city were about to find two of the principal northbound routes blocked, and, as we saw from the helicopter, by 2:15 P.M. a third—the northbound New York State Thruway—was a parking lot, too.
Shortly after 4 P.M., the N.Y.P.D. closed the Manhattan-bound side of the Brooklyn Bridge to investigate a suspicious package that had been found on the roadway. When those lanes reopened, at four-thirty, the police shut the Brooklyn-bound lanes for half an hour. The result was "terrorlock"— the latest gridlock neologism to enter New York's traffic vocabulary—on both sides of the bridge. Traffic on the neighboring Manhattan Bridge came to a standstill; the F.D.R. Drive backed up with people waiting to get onto the bridges.
NewsCopter 7 was on the scene, hovering over the Brooklyn Bridge, taking pictures of the police activity below.
"Here comes the bomb squad," Anderson said, zooming in on the truck.
I watched the streets of downtown Brooklyn filling with traffic. These drivers had been trying to avoid congestion by getting off the Gowanus Expressway before its merge with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a trouble spot that causes seven and a half million hours of drivers' delays annually, and then taking Hicks Street through Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights. In using this time-tested solution to highway traffic—back streets—these drivers were creating a traffic problem for the people who live on those streets, some of whom had hoped to avoid the holiday traffic by staying home.
At 4:45 P.M., while the police were searching the Brooklyn Bridge (they found only a stray knapsack), a car caught fire inside the Lincoln Tunnel, closing the Manhattan-bound lanes and creating congestion on the eastern spur of the New Jersey Turnpike. NewsCopter 7 flew across the river to check out the fire, but there was nothing much to photograph. "Car fires make great pictures—if you can get to them in time," Sohn said. "The problem is that the Fire Department puts out car fires so fast."
Sohn and her pilot had a hunch that the George Washington Bridge was their best bet for the six-o'clock news, so we headed up there shortly after 5 P.M., stopping once along the way to record a few "beauty shots" of the city skyline, which would be used to lead into the weather report. Sohn was careful to keep traffic out of the pictures. "Traffic is not what they're looking for in a beauty shot," she said.
As we came up to the bridge, we saw the jam: a solid line of traffic stretching from the New Jersey Turnpike to the bridge's toll plazas, then east all the way across the Cross-Bronx Expressway and north into Westchester County. The Major Deegan, the Grand Concourse, the Sheridan, and the Bruckner were also packed with cars and trucks. Only the traffic on the bridge was moving—the part you'd expect to be the most congested—offering travellers a brief respite between jams.
"Look at that," Sohn said admiringly.
She directed Anderson to hover over Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, where I-95 joins I-80 and swings east for its approach to "the George"—and where she could get the best shots. She sent some of these pictures to Channel 7 and waited. It was almost six. Removing her lollipop, Sohn positioned the onboard "lipstick camera," mounted on the instrument console, so that it was pointed at her face, ready to go live at the top of the hour if she was called upon.[...]
User ID: 9495963 Sep 1st 8:09 PM
This is a long article so if it doesnt post correctly heres the link:
www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020902fa_fact
Well worth the read (as most new yorker articles are), mentions of Mass transit and how traffic will only continue to get worse.
THE SLOW LANE
by JOHN SEABROOK
Can anyone solve the problem of traffic?
Issue of 2002-09-02
Posted 2002-08-26
Shannon Sohn, the blue-eyed, freckled young helicopter reporter for New York's Channel 7 "Eyewitness News," was sitting in the office at the back of the hangar at Linden Airport, in northern New Jersey, fanning herself with a newspaper and waiting for the traffic to get bad. The office looked like a place where people keep odd hours. The couch had body-length indentations in its cushions, and soft-drink cans and coffee cups were spilling out of the wastebasket.
It was early in the afternoon on Friday, May 24th, or "getaway day," as Channel 7 called it—the start of the Memorial Day weekend and the traditional beginning of the summer traffic season. On days like this, all the drivers who commute in and out of New York City on a typical weekday are joined by the drivers who live in the city and use their cars only on weekends, producing the kind of chaos that traffic reporters in Atlanta or Los Angeles take for granted but New York reporters don't experience every day. If there were truly appalling delays, Sohn had a shot at leading the six-o'clock news. "As a helicopter reporter, that's what you want," she said. "To be first." Helicopter reporters in New York don't have the luxury of following high-speed car chases—there are too many bridges and tunnels in the way. Here a terrible traffic jam is as good as it gets. But would today's traffic be bad enough?
Since September 11th, as anyone who drives in New York knows, traffic patterns have changed. Congestion cleared up when Mayor Giuliani used his special emergency powers to restrict bridge and tunnel crossings into Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. Not since the Second World War had traffic in the city flowed as freely. In April, restrictions were lifted on some crossings, but morning-rush-hour restrictions on lone drivers entering Manhattan remained in effect below Fourteenth Street. Although the cleanup operation at Ground Zero has now ended, Mayor Bloomberg—who, during his campaign, promised to improve the quality of life in New York by making the city less auto-reliant—says that he will keep the restrictions in place while the reconstruction of lower Manhattan continues. Traffic has been getting steadily worse since April, but it's still less crowded in the city now than it was a year ago.
The phone rang in the office. It was the Channel 7 news desk, in Manhattan. The police scanner was reporting an incident that had shut down all the northbound lanes on the New York State Thruway. Sohn and her pilot, Arthur Anderson, hurried outside and climbed aboard NewsCopter 7. Anderson gave me a quick review of the emergency procedures, explaining that if we had to ditch he preferred to do so on land, not in the water. As we took off, Sohn unwrapped a lollipop. She was fourteen weeks pregnant, and relied on cherry-flavored Charms to ward off motion sickness in the chopper. Grape worked better, but it turned her tongue purple.
Linden Airport is near Elizabeth, New Jersey, and just south of Newark airport. As we headed northwest across Newark's sprawling runways, Sohn gathered information from the traffic-news desk. Around noon, a twelve-year-old boy called Scottie Van Dunk, of Mahwah, New Jersey, whose class had been let out of school early, had ridden his bike to a section of the Ramapo River known as "The Forty Foot," a well-known swimming hole just across the New York state line. At 2 P.M., the boy's body had been discovered at the spot where the river runs beside the Thruway. He had drowned, and police officers had shut down the highway for the recovery operation.
By the time we arrived above the scene, at 2:15 P.M., the traffic on the northbound Thruway was backed up for several miles beyond the I-287 interchange. Drivers who had been zipping along the highway minutes before were now trapped and unhappy, and their previously limitless sense of possibility had shrunk to a single option: whether to change lanes. The idea that the delay up ahead might be the result of a disaster far greater than anyone's personal inconvenience rarely occurs to the driver stuck in traffic.
NewsCopter 7's remote-controlled belly-mounted camera roved the river's edge, looking for a body or some other pitiless image of tragedy for the folks at home, but found only a couple of men from the Stony Point Fire Department, stowing rescue gear. Van Dunk's body had been taken away just before we arrived. Sohn directed Anderson to get some pictures of the traffic jam on I-87 and I-287, but said she doubted that this tie-up would be enough to make the six-o'clock news: "For that to happen, we need some really, really bad traffic."
Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by forty per cent, while the number of registered vehicles has increased by nearly a hundred per cent—in other words, cars have proliferated more than twice as fast as people have. During this same period, road capacity increased by six per cent. If these trends continue through 2020, every day will resemble a getaway day, with its mixture of commuters, truckers, and recreational drivers, who take to the road without regard for traditional peak travel times, producing congestion all day long: trucks that can't make deliveries on time, people who can't get to or from work, air quality that continues to deteriorate as commerce suffers and our over-all geopolitical position weakens because we are forced to become ever more dependent on foreign oil. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a traffic jam.
What can you do about the traffic? Take the train? The train may be out of commission; Amtrak, the nation's passenger rail service, may be out of business before too long. Fly? Airlines are cutting flights and raising prices to offset heavy losses. Manage traffic better? There are many schemes for managing traffic, but not very many practical ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. Even if people have an alternative to driving, as do many New Yorkers, over time an ever larger number of commuters choose to drive. Today, about 3.6 million people make their way into Manhattan's "hub" (the area below Sixtieth Street) each workday—about the same number who came on an average day fifty years ago. In 1948, six hundred and fifty thousand of the commuters drove; fifty years later, more than 1.3 million of them drove, and most of them drove alone.
It's not enough to build public transportation; you also have to get people to use it, either by making trains and buses more convenient or by prohibiting some people from driving during peak periods. But in the United States restricting people from using their automobiles whenever they like has always been politically difficult, and Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to do so are controversial. The new restrictions have brought joy to many of the city's residents—New York is the only city in the United States in which the majority of households don't own an automobile—but they have been a source of outrage for the parking-garage industry, restaurant and theatre owners, retailers, labor groups, and some local politicians. Traffic is bad, but, as some New Yorkers have discovered, a lack of traffic may be worse. "I think it's destroying the fabric of New York," Greg Susick, senior vice-president of Central Parking, told the Times in November. After a Christmas season in New York in which the traditional Five Days of Gridlock saw only light congestion, the Metropolitan Parking Association began investigating possible legal action against the city for maintaining the lone-driver restrictions.
If New York could do something permanent about its traffic, maybe other cities around the country could, too. In Atlanta, the time that the average commuter spends annually in traffic rose from twenty-five hours in 1992 to seventy hours in 2000. Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the country, but San Francisco, Houston, and Seattle are challenging L.A. for this distinction. These cities may find it necessary to impose restrictions on driving when traffic becomes even worse—much worse—as it inevitably will. That is why what happens in New York's experiment in traffic control is so important. Will New York, which is planning to build a state-of-the-art transit center in lower Manhattan, be the first city to implement a state-of-the-art traffic policy? Or will this period in the city's traffic history—a period in which the automobile is a privileged guest—end in the coming months, defeated by our insatiable desire to drive?
At 12:15 P.M. on getaway Friday, Rudy Popolizio, the director of systems engineering for New York City's Department of Transportation, was in the D.O.T.'s Traffic Management Center watching the city's roads for signs of trouble. The word "jam" was first used to describe automotive congestion by the Saturday Evening Post, in 1910, in a reference to New York City. (The British word "blockage," a holdover from horse-and-carriage days, was too civil-sounding to convey the awful noise and smell of automobiles densely packed into a tight space.) Because of the limited space and the dimensions of its grid, the heart of midtown Manhattan can accommodate only nine thousand moving vehicles without succumbing to gridlock: the congested traffic on one of the cross streets blocks the traffic on an avenue, which in turn clogs the next cross street. A bad case of gridlock can tie up all the streets in midtown within minutes, which is why engineers like Popolizio keep close watch on the city's roads, especially on days like this.
Traffic seemed to be flowing well, Popolizio reported. He suspected that a lot of people hadn't gone to work. "We may see an early peak today—around two o'clock," he told me over the phone. "But so far traffic is O.K. I'm looking at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge camera, and traffic is moving well."
The Traffic Management Center is in a large windowless bunker in a nondescript white brick building just off Queens Plaza, in Long Island City. I had met Popolizio there when I visited several months earlier. He and the other engineers work in the glow of thirty-four large TV monitors, each displaying changing images transmitted from the hundred and thirty remote-controlled closed-circuit cameras that the city and state D.O.T.s have installed at troublesome intersections within the city and at common choke points outside it. Traffic cams reduce the D.O.T.'s response time to accidents—the cause of fifty per cent of all traffic jams. In theory, the cams, available online at www.metrocommute.com, are supposed to provide an advance-warning system for the public, but, as a practical matter, most drivers aren't surfing the Web, you hope, while they're behind the wheel.
The most effective and equitable means of managing all the different users of the city's streets—bicyclists, in-line skaters, scooters, pushcarts, pedal cabs, and pedestrians, as well as drivers—is the traffic signal. "With the traffic signal, everyone's interests are reduced to red and green," Popolizio said. "It's 'You get yours, and I get mine.' " The electric traffic signal is an old technology, devised by an African-American inventor, Garrett Morgan, in 1914 (he also came up with an early version of the gas mask) and first deployed in the city in 1924, on Broadway; today, about twenty-seven hundred intersections in Manhattan are "signalized." Almost all signals in Manhattan run on ninety-second intervals, and over the decades the D.O.T. has steadily improved and refined the way the signals work together. "In a grid this tight, you can't afford to have a signal thinking on its own," Popolizio said. (Two weeks ago, a computer glitch caused dozens of signals around the city to start thinking on their own, and the result was chaos.) The D.O.T. times the sequence of the lights on most of the avenues progressively; and even if you don't know that the signals on, say, Ninth Avenue turn green at six-second intervals, you soon develop an instinct for just how much green you have left on the signal ahead of you before your progress is halted by red. E. B. White, writing in this magazine in the late nineteen-twenties, noted how quickly the citizenry had incorporated the newly invented timing progressions into its inner life. "These machinal rhythms are really very subtle," he wrote. "It is by such nice devices that man supplants the urge of hours and tides and the phases of a moon which he never sees."
More than half of the eleven and a half thousand signals in the five boroughs are connected to computers in the management center, and the city's traffic engineers can manipulate the timing of those signals throughout the day. During the morning and evening rush hours, for example, Sixth Avenue in midtown gets sixty seconds of the green time while the crosstown streets get thirty seconds, but during the middle of the day, when there's more crosstown traffic, the engineers change the signal timing so that both Sixth Avenue and the crosstown streets get forty-five seconds of green. Every one of Manhattan's signals is represented by a tiny light on a forty-foot-long tableau in the management center, and the lights are connected in real time to the signals on the streets. The model allows you to watch the sequences of lights sweeping along Broadway, or to study the subtlety of the signal pattern in Times Square. It represents the triumph of traffic engineering over traffic: a perfectly designed system, without drivers to mess it up. "We use very few left-turn signals in the city," Popolizio pointed out. "It's not like in the suburbs, where you have people going every which way in the intersections."
The day I had visited the management center, in March, there wasn't much traffic to manage. With all the rush-hour restrictions still in effect, the roads in the city and outside it were quieter than usual; an engineer had tuned one of the monitors to daytime TV. Finally, at the end of the morning rush hour, a crew from the city's Department of Environmental Protection stopped its truck in the middle of the southbound F.D.R. Drive, just south of Ninety-sixth Street, so that it blocked two lanes. The men got out, ambled over to the side of the road, and began peering into drains. Cars behind the truck immediately stopped, and, thanks to the D.O.T.'s cameras, we got to see the jam forming, travelling backward at eight miles an hour, a rolling wave of thwarted commuter desire which soon reached the Triborough Bridge. Meanwhile, a police car pulled up, its lights flashing, in the left lane of the northbound F.D.R., and the cops went over to see what the heck the D.E.P. was up to. It was a pygmy traffic jam, in the general scheme of things, but it was the only thing happening that morning, and the D.O.T. engineers got pretty excited. "What are those D.E.P. guys doing?" one shouted. "Do they have a work permit?" Fifteen minutes later, the truck moved on, and the jam slowly cleared.
On getaway day, Popolizio told me, "We're going to be putting in our outbound timing progressions a little early this afternoon, maybe at one-thirty to two instead of three-thirty to four, to give more green time to the outbound lights. All to help get people out of the city as smoothly as possible."
Unfortunately, in getting people smoothly out of Manhattan the city's D.O.T. engineers weren't necessarily making their trips faster, and they may ultimately have been slowing down the drivers by flooding the highways outside the city with more cars than they were designed to accommodate. No major new highways have been built around New York since the nineteen-seventies, partly because there's no room left, and partly because many people believe that building highways makes congestion worse, because drivers who had previously used mass transit to avoid the traffic begin using the new roads. Even if no new drivers take to the new roads, scientists have shown that increased road capacity alone can increase congestion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "Braess's paradox," after a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess. In the twenty-three American cities that added the most new roads per person during the nineteen-nineties, traffic congestion rose by more than seventy per cent.
But not building highways also causes traffic. The section of I-95 that runs from the New York state line to New Haven, for example, was designed to accommodate seventy thousand vehicles a day; it now carries more than a hundred and fifty thousand in places. Many parts of the nation's forty-seven-thousand-mile interstate-highway system, which was created in the nineteen-fifties, suffer similar overloads. Politically, it's almost impossible to build major new roads. David Schulz, the director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute, at Northwestern University, said recently, "When you talk about building a new road, the number of people who benefit will be large, but their individual benefit will be quite small. The number of people who will be harmed will be small, but their disbenefit will be very large. And it's those people who will get involved in the public hearings and stop the road." NIMBY ("Not in my back yard") has given birth to BANANA ("Build almost nothing anywhere near anyone"), which has spawned NOPE ("Not on planet Earth").
The Federal Highway Administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade to make highways "intelligent," deploying a wide range of detection devices known collectively as I.T.S. (intelligent transportation systems), which are supposed to track, predict, and possibly control traffic. Much of this technology was developed by the United States military and used during the Gulf War. (It is now part of our new homeland security measures.) It includes closed-circuit television cameras, vehicle sensors buried in the roads, overhead proximity radar, optical-image sensors, and the E-Z Pass transponder—the small plastic box on your windshield which communicates with overhead "readers," and which may be the most significant advance in traffic management since the traffic signal. Mark Hallenbeck, the director of the Washington State Transportation Center, at the University of Washington, says that the idea "is to add capacity with information, the way we used to add capacity with concrete. In highway agencies, we used to think of ourselves as being in the construction business. We build a road, go away, and then come back in twenty years and add a lane. Now all these agencies are having to learn how to increase capacity by adding intelligence to the system."
On Friday afternoon, after I had spoken to Popolizio, I called Transcom, a public interagency traffic-management organization based in Jersey City, to find out what was happening on the roads outside the city. Part of Transcom's mission is to coördinate information about I-95 which is supplied by the states that the road runs through. Traffic, after all, doesn't respect city or country boundaries. Today, Transcom's managers told me, they were busy alerting travellers to problems on the highway that had started hours earlier, at Exit 34, near Milford, Connecticut. At 6:30 A.M., a tractor-trailer on I-95 northbound, carrying a load of car batteries, had hit a guardrail, overturned, and caught fire. The state police closed all lanes, in both directions, while they cut apart the truck and made sure no battery acid remained on the highway—a process that took eight hours. By noon, traffic was backed up for thirteen miles. Information about the delays was posted on electronic message signs mounted over the region's highways, and alerts were broadcast over highway-advisory radio. At the moment, Transcom does not provide drivers with alternate routes, but, according to its executive director, Matthew Edelman, "Lots of these drivers know the roads, and if you tell them where the problem is they'll figure out how to get around it." This is assuming, of course, that drivers do what the system tells them to do. Dave Zavattero, the I.T.S. program manager for the Illinois Department of Transportation, says that many drivers deliberately do the opposite. "We have variable signs on the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways," in Chicago, he told me. "The signs tell you whether the local lanes or the express lanes are moving faster. But if I put a message up there that says the express lanes are five minutes faster a certain number of drivers will figure that the other drivers are taking the express lanes, so they're going to take the local lanes."
On this getaway day, any drivers heading out of New York early to avoid the afternoon rush hour who had checked the traffic cams and bulletins on the Web just before leaving would have known to take the Hutchinson River Parkway north to the Merritt Parkway, skirting the jam on I-95. But in fact the Hutch wasn't much better. Around noon, a truck driver had attempted an illegal dash along the parkway (which is off limits to commercial traffic) to avoid the problems on I-95 and got stuck under one of the overpasses. This meant that by 1 P.M. all the New England-bound travellers that Popolizio and his colleagues were helping to leave the city were about to find two of the principal northbound routes blocked, and, as we saw from the helicopter, by 2:15 P.M. a third—the northbound New York State Thruway—was a parking lot, too.
Shortly after 4 P.M., the N.Y.P.D. closed the Manhattan-bound side of the Brooklyn Bridge to investigate a suspicious package that had been found on the roadway. When those lanes reopened, at four-thirty, the police shut the Brooklyn-bound lanes for half an hour. The result was "terrorlock"— the latest gridlock neologism to enter New York's traffic vocabulary—on both sides of the bridge. Traffic on the neighboring Manhattan Bridge came to a standstill; the F.D.R. Drive backed up with people waiting to get onto the bridges.
NewsCopter 7 was on the scene, hovering over the Brooklyn Bridge, taking pictures of the police activity below.
"Here comes the bomb squad," Anderson said, zooming in on the truck.
I watched the streets of downtown Brooklyn filling with traffic. These drivers had been trying to avoid congestion by getting off the Gowanus Expressway before its merge with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a trouble spot that causes seven and a half million hours of drivers' delays annually, and then taking Hicks Street through Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights. In using this time-tested solution to highway traffic—back streets—these drivers were creating a traffic problem for the people who live on those streets, some of whom had hoped to avoid the holiday traffic by staying home.
At 4:45 P.M., while the police were searching the Brooklyn Bridge (they found only a stray knapsack), a car caught fire inside the Lincoln Tunnel, closing the Manhattan-bound lanes and creating congestion on the eastern spur of the New Jersey Turnpike. NewsCopter 7 flew across the river to check out the fire, but there was nothing much to photograph. "Car fires make great pictures—if you can get to them in time," Sohn said. "The problem is that the Fire Department puts out car fires so fast."
Sohn and her pilot had a hunch that the George Washington Bridge was their best bet for the six-o'clock news, so we headed up there shortly after 5 P.M., stopping once along the way to record a few "beauty shots" of the city skyline, which would be used to lead into the weather report. Sohn was careful to keep traffic out of the pictures. "Traffic is not what they're looking for in a beauty shot," she said.
As we came up to the bridge, we saw the jam: a solid line of traffic stretching from the New Jersey Turnpike to the bridge's toll plazas, then east all the way across the Cross-Bronx Expressway and north into Westchester County. The Major Deegan, the Grand Concourse, the Sheridan, and the Bruckner were also packed with cars and trucks. Only the traffic on the bridge was moving—the part you'd expect to be the most congested—offering travellers a brief respite between jams.
"Look at that," Sohn said admiringly.
She directed Anderson to hover over Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, where I-95 joins I-80 and swings east for its approach to "the George"—and where she could get the best shots. She sent some of these pictures to Channel 7 and waited. It was almost six. Removing her lollipop, Sohn positioned the onboard "lipstick camera," mounted on the instrument console, so that it was pointed at her face, ready to go live at the top of the hour if she was called upon.[...]