I have a solution for traffic - what do you think?

Great Debates
1

Traffic! Everyone hates it, but nobody does anything about it. Well, I have a solution I’d like to debate.

I assumed GD would be the best forum for this, as much like which direction toilet paper should face, such a heated issue surely has strong proponents on both sides.

I could start off with a bunch of cites talking about how the average person wastes 42 hours per year in traffic jams, but I think it may be overkill. I think we can assume that nearly everyone hates traffic, and wishes there was a better way, or at least a less congested way.

As I see it, the essential problem with traffic is that the incentives don’t line up, and this is true at nearly every level, from individual drivers on the road to systems and city levels. Since the individual level isn’t feasibly changeable without massive societal change, self-driving cars, or both, the only level we can effect change in the next 10 years or so is at the systems-level. And as somebody who deals with optimizations and data flows for a living, we are in the stone age when it comes to that.

How many times have you cursed poorly timed lights, nonsensical lane closures, or flagrantly stupid infrastructure setups while driving? Traffic engineers have essentially zero incentive to maximize traffic flow. And there’s basically no one who’s accountable to poor design when it comes to traffic flow - the only folk who suffer are the ones driving on the roads.

I propose a two-part solution:
**Part I: We need to align the incentives - split up a given city / core congestion area into defined routes, and pay traffic engineers based on flow, and pay them well - if they improve current flow 20%, for example, they should make ~$400k a year. So they have an incentive in the positive direction. **

****Part II: **On the other side, at each stoplight and strategically placed within the route, you have a number to text where people can pay $1 to text to complain about the current traffic flow, and each complaint deducts $2 from the traffic engineer route-owner. **

Now the engineer has an incentive to really exert their skills to optimize the flow, and it’s been done in a way that pays for itself. In other words, for each complaint, the city essentially makes $3, and this helps offset the high upside salaries and can be allocated for road work and improvements.

This setup addresses most of the downside objections I can think of, while putting smart folk who know about optimization in charge and directly incentivizing them to do what we all collectively want - reduce traffic and maximize flow!

The objections and answers I’ve thought of:

1. It’s too expensive! **
It’s really not, especially with the “complaint” offset revenue. And isn’t this one thing we should be spending tax money on? It literally improves life for almost everyone in the city. In any large city where traffic is really a problem, that $400k salary will likely be optimizing millions of car trips per year.
**
2. Small roads will get discriminated against, and will never get greens.
*Not if the engineer doesn’t want to get “complained” into not making any money! They will quickly find the optimum balance between maximizing flow and minimizing recurring pain like this. *

3. Nobody will complain if it costs them money.
*Ha! If anything, the problem may be that people are too eager to punish the engineer responsible for some piece of idiocy! An informal survey from around 20 folk I know all indicated there would be a robust demand and utilization of paid complaints - but I am interested if a good number of people here think they would never pay to complain about traffic in a way that directly improved it. *

4. No traffic engineer will want to sign up for this if their downside is literally not making any money for the month. **
That’s just a matter of tuning - maybe we need to make the upside higher, or the complaint deductions half as much, but it should be easily tuneable where the expected value for being a good traffic optimizer is noticeably higher enough than being a captive engineer that there would be enough applicants. *
**
5. The traffic engineers aren’t in charge of road maintenance / closures / budgets, but these things directly impact how well they can do.
Well, let’s fix this and let them schedule maintenance and closures in their routes, and individually allocate a defined road improvement budget to different routes based on flow. *
**
6. They may not necessarily talk well or transition well between different engineers’ routes.
*They are directly incentivized to do so, and if they are able to revenue share, this could even result in macro-efficiencies where one zone with 3 adjoining zones routes a majority of traffic through a single adjoining zone because that maximizes revenue for both of them - and keep in mind, that means traffic flow for the city overall is being maximized. *

I could go on, but this is pretty long already - I think this would genuinely improve traffic anywhere it was implemented, with fairly limited downsides. What are your thoughts, Dopers?

2

:rolleyes:

A totally lame idea, for so many reasons. They’re not even worth going into.

3

There are traffic engineers?

4

I appreciate your eloquent and well-supported critique.

5

I used to commute in the Bay Area. With a few exceptions, none of these ideas make any sense.
Lane closures are done at night if at all possible. It is not like no one figures out they cause problems. We have smart lights which are programmed to optimize traffic flow whenever possible. (But you might have to wait longer if that optimizes the general flow.) Our freeways have metering lights to reduce congestion near ramps.
Traffic problems got worse despite this, directly proportional to the increase in employment. The crash was great for driving.
Traffic also increased with increased housing. A left turn I made took a lot longer to do thanks to the building of tons of apartments. I would have loved a longer left turn signal, but perhaps that would have slowed down traffic on the main road.
And I hate to think what it would have been like without the hundreds of millions of dollars of improvement from the infrastructure program. Thanks Obama!

6

Yes. After all, someone plans it out.
I actually studied transportation engineering as an elective as part of my civil engineering program in college.
The reason the OP’s plan makes little sense is that much of the problems with a road system don’t become evident until years after it is built. As the area develops, it attracts more traffic than the roads were designed to handle. And the new development or the terrain itself makes it difficult to expand the road systems.

Like how would the OP propose increasing traffic flow in and out of Manhattan vi the various bridges and tunnels?

7

It is precisely for the reasons you’ve called out that live, annual, and ongoing systems-level optimization is the best option for actually reducing congestion to the extent possible.

New roads do help congestion, but only until growth catches up to them, and they are often not an option entirely, for reasons you point out. So given the choice of trying to optimize an existing saturated road network, or throwing up our hands entirely and saying we shouldn’t do anything about traffic, you choose the second option?

8

The main issue I see is that it assumes that traffic engineers aren’t already doing their best to optimize traffic flow. Maybe there aren’t any more than small little improvements that can be gained without large capital investments that are outside the purview of the engineers.

9

You point out some measures done in SF towards optimization - I’ve lived in LA, Honolulu, and DC / NOVA, with similarly legendary traffic, and they don’t do a lot of things that could be done. Just because some things are being done to optimize flow today in some cities, doesn’t mean there is a direct and ongoing effort to optimize flow everywhere in a given city, and in other cities.

My proposed system would make sure that everything that can be done to optimize flow IS being done, in multiple cities. You don’t think that would be better than the non-coordinated, non-ongoing, half efforts we get today?

10

This is a great point. If you have some cite indicating this, I absolutely agree my idea is not worth it in the face of that.

Proof by visual inspection in multiple cities indicates that existing efficiency is NOT the case, to me, but perhaps my sample is biased or I’ve been unlucky.

11

Illegal in my state

12

It is not (normally) possible to prove a negative. It is your suggestion you should prove that it is necessary.

13

There’s a much simpler financial incentive that should be applied in the U.S. A gradually phased-in 300% tax on gasoline (with a commensurate reduction in general taxation such that the overall tax burden remains constant).

14

My suggestion IS the negative. That we are not efficient in our traffic optimization, and the proof is by visual inspection every day.

Your assertion that we ARE largely efficient is what would need a cite.

15

Meh, it’s nothing to do with proving “negatives” - it’s unclear what corresponds to a positive or negative assertion here, and in any case it’s a fallacy that you can’t prove a negative. It’s a question of the burden of proof resting with you to provide data to support the critical and unproven assumption upon which the validity of your radical proposal depends. The “visual inspection” only shows that there IS congestion, it says nothing about whether that’s attributable to inefficiency, or whether there are just too many cars and not enough roads. Neither of those possibilities is in any meaningful sense a “default” position with no burden of proof.

16

This isn’t controversial at all, and I’m surprised anyone would assert that traffic IS optimum.

That said, here’s a cite from the US DOT Federal Highway Administration, which verifies that better optimization is a key lever that we can pull to reduce congestion, and suggests that it is NOT currently being done widely and to the optimum extent:

Better operating the highway network is the newest approach to confronting transportation challenges in the 21st century. Much as airspace is managed to support a maximum number of flights, we can do more to operate the transportation system so that it performs better to meet customer expectations regardless of the demands placed on it.

17

I said you would need to show that there are efficiency gains to be had which a traffic engineer can provide. It isn’t enough to say from visual inspection that it isn’t good. Quality is not strictly speaking a measure of efficiency. First you need to show that there are actual inefficiencies, then you need to show that the inefficiencies can be improved by traffic engineers. Because if there are inefficiencies it is possible that they cannot be solved by traffic engineers. Once you’ve demonstrated those two things, then you can investigate whether your proposal would solve the problem but until then you have an unproven hypothetical.

If you want I can just assume the hypothetical. In that case, I don’t think your idea would work because I suspect that most traffic engineers, being professionals, are already trying their best. You might motivate a few here and there to make minor improvements, but I really don’t think that’s where the problem lies. Which I guess brings us back to showing that the problem is with inefficiencies that can be solved by traffic engineers. Sorry I just don’t see much to discuss until that has been shown.

18

Pay a buck to text while I’m sitting at a stoplight? What if the light changes while I’m texting? Now I’m part of the problem, not part of the solution. Besides, I can just wait until I get to my destination, call the street department and bitch for free. It’s my right as a taxpayer!

What if I’m the traffic engineer in charge of east-west flow on the north side of town, and I program all the traffic so that the north-south traffic gets clogged, then the north-south engineer gets huffy and gives priority to the cross streets, and the gridlock extends to the east-west streets on the south side of town and pisses off that traffic engineer?

Why does the OP think finding the “optimum balance” between main and side streets will eliminate complaints. People who live on side streets complain constantly that they’re being screwed. And guess what - those people are the ones who vote for the city council and mayor. Attention must be paid to them.

19

Per my cite above, the DOT Federal Highway Administration seems to agree with my position regarding optimization.

And I disagree that visual inspection isn’t enough to ascertain there are inefficiencies - I drive through plainly non-optimal traffic lights, intersections, and lane configurations daily, and I would wager so does everyone else here.

I would happily “take the bet” of becoming a traffic engineer paid this way, at least for my immediate area, and would have happily taken that bet in other cities I’ve lived as well.

20

You had posted the link while I was writing my reply so I did not see it.

Let’s say, that there are inefficiencies. Now you need to show that the inefficiencies can be solved by traffic engineers through their own efforts. Fine, you say that you see non-optimal intersections. Can a traffic engineer fix that through their own efforts? That seems unlikely since to fix it is likely to involve constructions costs, something which a traffic engineer cannot approve. Unless you also want to give them budgetary approval.

And then, if you can show that you still would need to show that traffic engineers are not fixing the problems because they lack the proper motivation.

Again, I disagree with the underlying premise that traffic engineers are not fixing the problems because they are not motivated. I highly suspect that the problems are at the city financial and political level. This pay scheme for traffic engineers would not solve that.