Posted Sep 6, 2013, 4:06 PM
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BANNED
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Lower Mount Royal, Calgary
Posts: 5,147
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Here's another good one from the Manning foundation! While I do agree with some of his points, he seems to be implying that sprawl is the solution to reducing congestion/commute times on our roads 
I do think we need to start widening some of our main roads though.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/busines...180/story.html
Quote:
Seymour: Why city hall doesn’t care that our roads are congested
BY DAVID SEYMOUR, CALGARY HERALD SEPTEMBER
Crawling traffic is tolerated like almost no other frustration. If home appliances flickered dim every time too many people tried to use electricity, there would be outrage, and yet Calgarians tolerate a 66-minute average round trip commute as though a world without congestion is impossible to imagine.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. What if it was possible to arrive at your destination, point to point, without congestion delay? That seems to be what most people would like. Congestion, roads, traffic and parking is the No. 1 concern of Calgarians, according to a large poll by the Manning Foundation conducted last October, and the City of Calgary’s most recent Citizen Satisfaction Survey.
However, the city has long since given up on such a goal. Despite the 2011 census showing that 77 per cent of work trips in Calgary were made by car (unchanged since the 2006 census), the city’s goals range from avoiding the problem to actively opposing private vehicle travel.
Of seven stated transportation goals in the Calgary Transportation Plan, three involve “reducing the average distance travelled by automobiles,” “reduc(ing) vehicular travel” and “reducing vehicle trip distances.” The other four are a mixture of providing alternative transport modes, changing the shape of the city and, more sensibly, using infrastructure efficiently.
If you’re one of the 77 per cent, then at best the city has forgotten about you. There is not even one goal in the plan that says “reduce commute times for those who choose private vehicle travel.” At worst, the city is practising chief planner Rollin Stanley’s maxim that “congestion is good.”
“What it does in some areas is to force people to slow down,” explained Stanley. “It forces them to think about alternative transit, like biking, walking or mass transit. It also helps retail because people are on foot, and they’re going slower ...”
To be fair to Stanley, that quote is from before he was Calgary’s chief planner, and his madness has some method. The quote finishes: “If you think of any environment that people truly like and want to go to, such as London, Paris or New York — they are congested. They are places where you can’t use your car.”
Forgetting whether most people want or can afford to live in the congested centres of those cities, it seems that city hall has dialed down traffic engineering for a healthy dollop of social engineering.
Putting aside the old-fashioned notion that city policies should align with citizen concerns, is the goal of getting people (other people, of course) out of their cars even viable? The international evidence says that doubling density would reduce vehicle travel by as little as five per cent per person. Twice as many people driving in the same space doesn’t sound like a solution to congestion.
The city hall bureaucrats try anyway, because they believe mobility has reached a high-water mark in history, and must be curtailed. The assumption grows from the old beliefs that “we can’t build our way out of congestion,” that we need to save land (even in Alberta), and that cars will destroy the planet, even as technology looks set to provide a new golden age in transport technology.
Electric vehicles are now getting the equivalent of over 100 miles per gallon. Serious big carmakers are promising driverless vehicles by the end of the decade. These precisely controlled vehicles could make better use of road space while increasing safety. They’d also free up commuter time for activities other than staring at the car in front. They could park themselves somewhere less crowded when they’re not needed.
Innovative systems like Car2Go are transforming the way that people own cars, while services such as Carma Carpooling and Fastcab are changing the way that people access rides. Calgary is already making some use of intelligent transportation systems that manage traffic flow in real time by informing drivers of congestion and changing traffic light sequences, but more can be done.
The growing technological ability to charge road users for their exact time and place of use has been shown to significantly reduce congestion in Stockholm, Sweden, as users respond to price signals. Such charges are also fairer because the direct beneficiaries of roads pay more of the cost.
Importantly, road user charges can provide revenue for road upgrades where they are needed, perhaps built as public-private partnerships, rather than where the ideology of master planners would prefer them.
Far from needing to solve congestion by making it so bad that people stop trying to drive, there is an opportunity for the city to change its goals to align with voter preferences and make Calgary a centre for technology-driven mobility. Such an approach needn’t mean abandoning transit, but simply taking a modern approach that supports Calgarians’ mobility choices.
David Seymour is the Senior Fellow in Municipal Governance at the Manning Foundation for Democratic Education. His latest report, Decongestion: Getting Calgary Moving, is available at www.manningfoundation.org.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald Buy this article at www.HeraldContentMarketplace.com
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