Article: Cities tackle traffic head-on with commuter options

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Cities tackle traffic head-on with commuter options

MINNEAPOLIS — The morning rush-hour traffic on Interstate 35W is crawling. The highway, which connects downtown Minneapolis and its northern and southern suburbs, is the busiest road in the state. When traffic snarls here, backups spread across the region.

A year ago, Peggy Birler, 45, would have been right in the thick of it, spending up to an hour driving alone to work. Today, Birler has a much shorter commute: She drives less than a mile to a Park & Ride lot, boards a bus for a 10-minute trip downtown, zipping along in a bus-only lane, then walks 1½ blocks to her office.

"When I drove in, it was just too much, with the congestion and everything," says Birler, marketing manager at Dunham, a mechanical and electrical engineering firm in downtown Minneapolis. "I was a little nervous about taking the bus. Now, I wouldn't go back to driving."

Getting people such as Birler to choose public transit, carpools, biking, telecommuting or other alternatives to driving to work solo is a major part of a campaign to relieve congestion on I-35W and other roads here. The state is spending $500 million, including $133 million in federal money granted to cities running innovative projects, on a broad effort to ease logjams on I-35W.

Officials here say it's working. I-35W used to be "a road you wanted to avoid," says Nick Thompson, who manages congestion-relief efforts for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. "There was congestion any day of the week, any time of the day. Now, this is the next-generation freeway."

Commuter use of three Park & Ride lots serving the highway has increased by 16%, 19% and 25%; trips on I-35W are an average 10-15 minutes faster, and the agency has achieved free-flowing traffic in express lanes on the highway 98% of the time.

The I-35W project is part of a regional approach that emphasizes creative management of the existing transportation system, rather than expanding it, and seeks to make alternative commuting options widely available. The goal: Provide residents with a reliable, on-time commuting option every day.

Spurred by a bridge collapse on I-35W in 2007 that killed 13 motorists and injured 145, Minnesota also has fundamentally changed its transportation funding system, approving billions for roads, bridges and transit; the state also gave metropolitan governments the power to implement sales taxes for transit improvements.

The congestion-easing efforts have helped make the Twin Cities, along with Seattle, a national leader among cities working to keep traffic moving, says Tim Lomax, a congestion specialist at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University.

"Those two are at the forefront of what's going on," says Lomax, co-author of the annual Urban Mobility Report, which ranks congestion trends in 90 cities. "The things that stand out in my mind are the use of information, very detailed information that drives their decisions about day-to-day operations and long-term projects. They are not only thought leaders but action leaders."

The cost of congestion

Snarled traffic is a frustrating reality for the modern driver. It's also a walloping blow to the nation's economy. Congestion costs the USA $87.2 billion a year in gasoline and lost productivity, according to Lomax's most recent report. That's 2.8 billion gallons of wasted fuel and 4.2 billion hours of wasted time.

Many transportation analysts agree that the USA can't build its way out of congestion. When a new road is built, usually at great cost, it quickly fills with traffic.

Congestion is a fact of life in large urban areas, Lomax says, but roads don't have to be congested all day. The best way to deal with congestion is smart traffic management. That involves controlling how many cars are on a highway at a given time through tools such as flexible tolling, in which drivers pay a toll to use special lanes during congested periods, and ramp metering, in which a traffic signal controls the pace of vehicles merging from an entrance ramp.

It also includes quickly clearing wrecks and other incidents; providing transit options and getting drivers to use them, and synchronizing traffic signals, not only on primary roads but also on parallel corridors that drivers use as alternatives.

Most cities use a combination of these methods. Among the steps taken to cut congestion here:

• The Twin Cities try to ensure that transit riders and carpoolers avoid daily traffic tie-ups. The region has 300 miles of bus-only lanes, in which the right shoulder of highways is opened for buses during peak traffic; that's more than the rest of the USA combined. Minnesota also recently added "priced dynamic shoulder lanes," in which the left shoulder of highways is restricted to buses, carpools and single-car occupants who pay a toll.

• The state rebuilt some key streets in downtown Minneapolis, widening sidewalks, eliminating on-street parking and adding a second bus lane, which allows buses to pass stopped buses. Since December, those changes have enabled buses on the affected streets to increase operating speeds by 60%, says Bob Gibbons, spokesman for Metro Transit, which provides 90% of local bus service here.

• The region, which has had just one light rail line since 2004, is expanding its network. A central corridor connecting downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul is expected to begin service in 2014; a third line, connecting Minneapolis and suburban Eden Prairie, was approved in May.

• Minneapolis emphasizes alternative forms of commuting. Just 35% of workers downtown drive to work alone, about half the national average; 40% use transit, 20% vanpools or carpools and 5% bike or walk, says Dan MacLaughlin, executive director of the Downtown Minneapolis Transportation Management Organization, a non-profit partnership between the city and the business community.

• MinnDOT is trying to cut congestion by encouraging employers to offer workers flexible schedules that allow them to work from home. The impact is tiny but growing: More than 30 employers in the Twin Cities now offer telework options.

Seattle cuts collisions

Across the USA, about 25% of congestion is caused by collisions. Seattle, which has one of the nation's most comprehensive traffic management systems, aims to reduce backups by cutting the number of accidents.

Seattle next month becomes one of the first U.S. cities to use a European-style active traffic management system, in which signs above each lane flash variable speed limits, whether a lane is open ahead and up-to-the-minute traffic information.

The signs, installed on the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 — one of the state's most heavily traveled corridors, where crashes cause up to 70% of congestion — will display speed limits from 40 mph to 60 mph, depending on traffic conditions. This will allow drivers to slow down well before they reach bottlenecks, thus reducing rear-end collisions and keeping traffic moving, although more slowly.

"In Germany, Belgium and England, they've seen a 30% reduction in injury crashes with the system," says Patricia Michaud, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

The department installed roadway traffic sensors, data-carrying fiber optics and new traffic cameras on a 9-mile stretch of I-5 in south Seattle. Information on traffic conditions is fed into a traffic-management center and overhead lane signs respond automatically; the process is monitored 24 hours a day by traffic engineers.

The state's wide-ranging effort includes 230 miles of lanes restricted to vehicles carrying multiple occupants, ramp metering and use of traffic cameras and variable message signs, says Craig Stone, director of the toll division of the state Department of Transportation. Other efforts:

• Travel times have improved on 14 of 18 surveyed commuter routes.

• Thirty-two of 48 high-occupancy vehicle routes running parallel to the most crowded lanes show improved travel times.

• The average time it takes to clear collisions, disabled vehicles and other congestion-causing incidents has been cut from 18 minutes to 12.9 minutes.

• Tow companies hired by the state can receive a $2,500 bonus if they respond to major crashes within 30 minutes and clear them within 90 minutes.

Moved by tragedy

The collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River during the evening rush hour on Aug. 1, 2007, prompted the state Legislature in 2008 to authorize a transportation funding package that will generate $6.6 billion over 10 years for roads, bridges and transit projects. It included an 8.5-cent increase in the state gas tax — the first rise in 18 years — and granted seven counties in the Twin Cities metropolitan area the authority to impose a quarter-cent sales tax for transit projects.

The tragedy also boosted efforts to pursue alternative commutes by employers, MacLaughlin says. "The business community came up with a bunch of creative ways to get their people downtown. The catastrophe motivated people to really work on this issue, and that has carried over."

Merete Wells, 25, a senior associate with the Minneapolis public relations firm Carmichael Lynch, takes advantage of an unusually creative option offered by her company: a "shoe incentive."

"They will give you $50 toward the purchase of a new pair of shoes a couple of times a year if you walk to work," Wells says. "It's a nice little incentive." She used to drive to work from St. Paul. However, when her old Volvo started to wear down, she decided to move closer to work instead of buying a new car. Now, instead of a 30- to 45-minute commute in summer, which stretched to 60 to 90 minutes in winter, she walks 10 minutes to work.

Many Minneapolis workers now view alternative commute incentives as an employee benefit, says Kirsten Spreck, director of corporate real estate at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a faith-based financial services organization.

Almost all of its 1,200 Minneapolis employees participate in the incentive program, which offers $50- to $100-a-month credits in pre-tax dollars, which the employees can use to pay for parking, a transit pass, and carpool, motorcycle, biking or walking costs such as shoes.

David Levinson, a civil engineering professor at the University of Minnesota, cautions that everything being done here is "just pieces to a puzzle. I wouldn't say they solve the congestion problem by any means. Only a small percentage of the workforce actually works downtown."

Across the region, only about 2% of all work trips are on transit. "That sounds pretty bad, and it is," he says. "But nationally, it's less than 1%."

While there's still much room for improvement, the Twin Cities' efforts are winning national praise.

"The aggressive operations focus that MinnDOT has is reflected in projects like the bus shoulder lanes, which a lot of places aren't contemplating because it's out of the ordinary," Lomax says. "It's a simple idea that's pretty complex to get done — but the benefits are significant."