Search

The reports on the need for congestion zone in New York. It mentions the city has the worst traffic in America, average speed has decreased between 2010 and 2019 in the proposed zone. It also mentions to avoid paying tolls in Manhattan, lorries are likely to use the Cross-Bronx expressway, a congested motorway.

Considers the different costs of automobile driving. California's imposition of variable pricing on heavily traveled routes; Identification of external social costs attributable to automobile driving, including injury and death caused by accidents, environmental harm, infrastructure costs and congestion; Connection between automobile driving and desirable lifestyle; Factors that may affect future traffic congestion.

Considers the difficulty of charging drivers for the congestion they cause. Singapore's efforts to deal with traffic congestion in economic terms; Impact on traffic movement in the city center; Unintended side effects of government controls.

Discusses the use of intelligent transportation systems, or telematics, which involve application of advanced computing and telecommunications to local driving. Information available to drivers in Seattle, Washington; California software company Fastline's development of systems that real-time information on traffic, weather and mass transit based on an individual starting point and destination; Impact of cheap driving on Seattle's urban sprawl.

This article reports on a European transportation project called the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTE) that will wirelessly link cars into autonomous convoys called platoons. The plan would reduce congestion, lower fuel consumption, improve highway safety, and free time for drivers and commuters. Information is provided on platoon technology and the environmental benefits of reducing drag.

The article looks at discussion surrounding the implementation of a national road-pricing scheme in England. Transportation and politics do not mix. Road and rail policy operates on time-spans of a decade or more, offering little electoral advantage to ministers, who are never more than five years away from losing their jobs. So it was nice to see Alistair Darling, the transport secretary, taking the long view last week by restarting the debate on using pricing to reduce congestion on Britain's worsening roads. Everyone agrees that big changes are needed. The problem is not a lack of capacity (most roads are empty most of the time) but the lack of an efficient system for allocating it. A system that charged individual drivers for the costs of increased traffic density, vehicle emissions and damage to the roads would encourage more efficient use of a scarce resource and be fairer to boot.

The article looks at the increasing amount of traffic congestion in America. What is the price of America's love affair with the car? According to a recent "urban mobility study" from the Texas Transportation Institute, it adds up to $63.1 billion a year (plus another $1.7 billion if the latest petrol prices are included) in wasted time and fuel. Most drivers would add an emotional cost in frayed nerves. After all, who wants to spend 44% of their daily commute--the figure for the regions around Los Angeles and Washington, DC--in a crawl? Most sufferers have no choice. As cities sprawl first into suburbs and then into car-dependent "exurbs", the daily commute becomes an ever more painful fact of life. What, if anything, can be done about it? More public transport? Some of America's train and subway systems have been successful, notably San Francisco's BART. But they cost a fortune. In the end, virtually all the solutions involve making drivers pay. Politicians could reduce that congestion by charging motorists more for the petrol they guzzle and the roads they use.

The article discusses parking costs in the U.S., focusing on the effect free parking has on traffic congestion, the way it influences opportunity cost decision making among commuters, and initiatives in more densely populated urban centers to change the cost of parking, despite its political cost.

The article reports that the great advantage of having a former chief secretary to the Treasury as transport secretary is that he knows a thing or two about raising money. This week economist John MacGregor launched a debate on a scheme which could, in the medium term, turn Great Britain's motorways into money-earners by charging motorists to drive on them. The transport secretary thinks Britain needs more roads, and therefore wants to extract more money from road-users. Economists like the idea of charging motorists for the costs that traffic jams impose the environment and the community.

The article discusses traffic patterns and says that as more drivers begin to use information about traffic flows, it may actually cause more traffic problems. Drivers typically switch routes if they find that one is moving slowly, but when too many drivers switch, the second route becomes slower than the first, and many go back to their first route. This is called Nash equilibrium. Some researchers have found that closing certain roads actually made traffic flow faster.

This article reports on new techniques being developed to spot, predict, and help drivers avoid traffic jams. Systems such as the Traffic Message Channel and the Vehicle Information and Communication System (VICS), in Europe and Japan respectively, pipe data from traffic centres into in-car navigation systems via FM radio signals. Meanwhile ITIS, a British company, is one of several firms experimenting with mobile-phone signals to monitor traffic on roads that lack sensors or cameras. In Redmond, Washington, at the headquarters of Microsoft, employees have been testing a traffic-prediction system called JamBayes. Users register their route preferences and then receive alerts, by e-mail or text message, warning them of impending gridlock. JamBayes uses a technique called Bayesian modelling to combine real-time traffic data with historical trends, weather information and a list of calendar events such as holidays.