Mark Hansen
Some people seem to think there's a universal Law of Traffic Congestion ruling that traffic expands to fill the space available to it. Thus, they believe it's impossible to relieve highway congestion by building more roads.
Charles Lave
Congress may soon pass a law that allows states to set their own speed limit. What might happen if state choose to raise these? We don’t need to guess. We can examine what happened when states were allowed to raise certain speed limits in 1987. The result: Higher speed limits caused and overall gain in safety.
Joy Dahlgren
Public policy currently promotes high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes and discourages construction of general-purpose lanes. HOV lanes supposedly reduce congestion and harmful emissions because they encourage ridesharing and transit use. Just add a few passengers, and you can be rewarded with a fast, pleasant drive to work. That's the ideal behind HOV lanes. But the reality is not so simple.
Melvin M. Webber
They've made it possible for most of us to leave the old urban centers and move into decent houses in the spacious suburbs. They permit most of us to live where we choose and then to accept jobs located at any compass point from our homes. We're free to go wherever we wish and whenever we wish, freed from the rigid schedules of common carriers.
Donald Shoup
Whether you're driving to work, to a doctor's appointment, or to a dinner with a friend, you don't want to reach your destination and then circle the neighborhood for 40 minutes looking for a parking space. You want even less to compete with dozens of other cars looking for that same vacant space, while dodging double-parked cars and listening to honking and cursing.
Melvin M. Webber
Despite huge reductions of noxious emissions from factories and cars, Southern California's air is still terrible. It's so bad that the state is requiring that two percent of new cars sold in 1998 be zero polluters and ten percent by 2003. Many researchers here have become preoccupied with the foul air, and so are searching for ways of making cars less obnoxious and hence better servants.
Melvin M. Webber
The first issue of ACCESS seems to have been well received, so we're pleased to continue these summaries of our research. Paralleling the spurt of work on new transportation technology, there's been renewed attention to institutional means for improving the nation's transport system. We focus here on several such fiscal and organizational tools for decreasing solo driving, increasing transit riding, and thereby reducing highway congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption.
Donald Shoup
Employer-paid parking is an invitation to drive to work alone. Thus, it increases traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption. To deal with problems created by employer-paid parking, I propose a minor technical change in the Internal Revenue Code. The proposal is that employers who subsidize employee parking should be required to offer employees the option to take a taxable cash travel allowance equal to the fair market value of the parking subsidy. Case studies and a statistical model suggest that offering employees the option to cash out their parking subsidies could reduce solo driving to work by 20 percent, reduce automobile travel to work by 76 billion miles per year, save 4.5 billion gallons of gasoline per year, eliminate 40 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, and increase tax revenues by $1.2 billion per year. These objectives would be accomplished by offering commuters the option to take taxable cash in lieu of a free parking space.
Kenneth A. Small
Driven by problems of traffic congestion, U.S. policy toward urban highways has lurched over several decades from highway building to high-occupancy-vehicle lanes to travel demand management. Yet congestion has worsened, and there is scant evidence that these policies have had any appreciable effect on it. As financial straits tighten, policy analysts are looking for new solutions.
Meanwhile, economists have been polishing up a long-standing proposal known as congestion pricing. Under this policy, drivers would have to pay a very high fee for driving on the most popular roads during peak hours. We already expect to pay top price for long-distance phone calls during business hours, and many of us wait for discounts at night. But can the same concept work for highways?
Melvin M. Webber
With this first issue of Access, we at the University of California Transportation Center Seek to introduce our research to a diverse, community of readers. By presenting our findings in a nontechnical format, we hope to make them accessible to professionals in various fields and to citizens who might find them useful or perhaps merely interesting.