The narcissism of car-centrism, part 1: "Synchronizing Traffic Lights May Not Reduce Emissions."

The narcissism of car-centrism is like a narcotic. Once we get behind the wheel, it's all about our individual need for a fix -- and if you're not WITH drivers, you're AGAINST them.

Sorry, Los Angeles: Synchronizing Traffic Lights May Not Reduce Emissions, by Robinson Meyer (The Atlantic)

What makes one car more efficient may not work when you apply it to a city.

For years, progressive urbanists and environmentalists have advocated for synchronized traffic lights. Syncing lights, theoretically, makes everyone's lives easier: They promote a sense of flow and easiness on the road, and they reduce pollution, because a car running smoothly runs cleaner than a car stopping-and-starting.

So, the need to sync traffic lights has become somewhat well-known. The Baltimore Sun's transportation reporter wrote in 2010 that the "most common source of complaints" he heard from readers was out-of-sync lights. In 2011, a libertarian think tank praised Georgia's effort to syncronize lights, citing statistics about reduced drive times and gasoline usage. And sometime this year, according to an LA Daily News report, Los Angeles will complete its three decade-long effort to syncronize traffic signals across the city.

Except synchronizing traffic lights may not actually work. Todd Litman, of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, writes in a recent post that efforts which increase flow, like signal-syncing or expanding-road-capacity, only theoretically reduce emissions:

[R]esearch suggests that at best these provide short-term reductions in energy use and emissions which are offset over the long-run due to Induced Travel. Field tests indicate that shifting from congested to uncongested traffic conditions significantly reduces pollution emissions, but traffic signal synchronization on congested roads provides little measurable benefit, and can increase emissions in some situations.

For Pinocchio Rosenbarger and the Bored: Synchronized traffic lights on State Street won't solve anything.

At last week's Bored of Works and Auto Safety meeting, Grandaddy Naps tried to wrap his arms around traffic problems on State Street.

At issue was the prospective acquisition of land to place signal boxes in preparation for a federally-funded project to make State Street more navigable for greater numbers of automobiles, without taking minor factors like walkability into mind, so as to approve whole new parcels of auto-centric retail development, presumably to be financed by Scott "Banker" Blair's firm.

It may help to recall that even before it began picking its collective nose, the very first thing the Bored of Works did upon receiving Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal was to omit State Street from it.

Surely this was no coincidence.

One year later, the very same time-serving luminaries who brought you dainty sidewalk numbers for the motorcycle club ...

... will yet again pay no heed to the notion of induced demand, as explained here in relation to Los Angeles.

If you can find anything in any of this to inspire confidence that a gang perennially unable to plan straight will (a) begin two-way street reversions, and if lightning strikes and they actually do, (b) execute them according to spec ... let me know.

Do Synchronized Traffic Lights Really Solve Congestion Woes?

... Although many traffic experts agree that LA’s money was well spent on the synchronization, some are skeptical that the new system will reduce congestion in the long run. Statistics indicated an initial reduction in congestion … until people realized that the city’s roadways were less awful and a new population of previously avoidant motorists took to the roads.

It’s like loosening your belt after a particularly large meal — while it creates more room for your burgeoning belly, the space is quickly filled because you can finally relax (or eat dessert). The same thing is happening with LA traffic. By reducing average travel times, synchronized traffic lights allow more people to travel. The benefit may not necessarily be speedier traffic, but rather a greater number of cars passing through during the same amount of time. The level of congestion may stay the same simply because there are more cars on the road.