Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Transportation Costs, Carcentricity, and Trinity Drive

The latest iteration on how to rebuild Trinity Drive at the east end of town has almost run its course. The state DOT and some very vocal citizens insist that vehicle level of service be once again allowed to roll the transportation steamroller over anything else.

Business Insider, in this post, points out that such car-centric thinking actually drives up total costs: "...Because it evaluates transport system performance based primarily on travel speeds, conventional planning favor faster but more costly transport modes, such as automobile travel over slower but more affordable modes such as walking, cycling and public transit. This tends to create automobile dependent transport systems which increases total costs..."

Maybe one of these days we will get it. I doubt it will be any time soon. Expect a bigger, faster roadway to nowhere very soon. As an afterthought, someone might wonder how we are supposed to get over to the Krogerville Shopping Mall or down to the Los Alamos Co-Op and the rest of the Airport Basin without a car.

 Thanks to Andy Cline over at Carbon Trace for getting me on this rant.

From Todd Litman's report cited in the Business Insider article

4 comments:

Steve A said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Steve A said...

Why is Canada not a peer country? They generally are less prone to building freeways through their urban cores than are we in the USA, but are otherwise more similar to the US than any of those medieval countries.

Khal said...

I have not been able to download Todd Litman's report. Can't help you.

Ian Brett Cooper said...

Steve, on the issue of Canada, I agree with you. But as a European myself, I'm pretty sure Europe stopped being medieval 559 years ago. ;)