$450000 traffic light cost eyed for Holyoke

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By KEN ROSS
kross@repub.com

HOLYOKE - A request to spend $450,000 to install a new traffic signal on Easthampton Road remains an option for the City Council.

And while the price tag might seem high for one traffic light, city officials insist that's the going rate to design and install such an item.

"They're smarter controllers than they ever were in the past," Department of Public Works Superintendent William D. Fuqua said yesterday. Fuqua submitted the request Jan. 14 to Mayor Michael J. Sullivan requesting $450,000 to design and install a traffic signal at the corner of Easthampton Road and Jarvis Avenue.

Sullivan approved the request Jan. 15 and referred it to the City Council, which must vote on whether to appropriate the money. The council has referred the item to its Finance Committee. The committee is scheduled to meet today, but Fuqua said the request is not slated to be discussed at the meeting.

"It (the request) is in there and it's waiting its turn," Fuqua said.

City Councilor and Finance Committee Chairman Todd A. McGee confirmed yesterday that the committee will not be discussing the request at today's meeting.

The reason a single traffic light costs so much, Fuqua said, is due to "the cost of the hardware." Each traffic signal must be custom made. In addition, the cost of steel used to support the lights and the traffic signals themselves have gone up dramatically in recent years.

In addition, modern traffic signals are controlled by computers that adjust how frequently the lights change based on real-time traffic situations, Fuqua said. For example, Fuqua noted that a traffic signal at the corner of Homestead Avenue and Westfield Road adjusts how frequently the lights change based on how many vehicles are waiting in a particular direction. And on many streets, all the traffic signals are coordinated precisely so they change in sequence and drivers get all green lights in a row provided they drive the speed limit.

Designing the lights and making changes to the curbs or road itself also add to the total cost, Fuqua said. So far, 25 percent of the design has been completed for the Easthampton Road and Jarvis Avenue traffic signal project, Fuqua wrote in his funding request letter Jan. 14 to Sullivan.

Every year or so, one or more traffic-counting organizations trots out a report claiming that congestion is costing us tens of billions dollars each year. Despite the “big data” and elaborate estimates, the results are simply bunk, because they’re based on a flawed premise.

Each of these reports calculates as the “cost” of congestion how much longer a trip takes at peak hours compared to off-peak hours, but fails to define what actions or policies could produce such a change in traffic, and how much they would cost. Every one of these reports tallies up the supposed “costs” of congestion, without telling how to solve the problem or what it would cost.

Traffic lights cost billions

You can apply this idea of computing a “cost” to any kind of waiting. (We’ve even done it, tongue-in-cheek, but calculator in hand, for cappuccino.) Others take this notion seriously. For example, crack statisticians at the University of Maryland have sifted through reams, nay, gigabytes, of big data, and have produced a comprehensive, nationwide estimate of the amount of time lost when we sit, waiting for red lights to turn green.

According to those University of Maryland estimates, time lost sitting at traffic signals amounts to 329 million vehicle hours of delay, and costs us $8.6 billion dollars per year. They estimate that time spent waiting at traffic signals is roughly three-fifths as great as the 561 million vehicle hours of delay associated with routine “recurring” traffic congestion.

This University of Maryland study calculates that roughly 19 percent of all traffic congestion is due to waiting at traffic signals. And yes, those traffic lights do get in your way and slow you down:

As an accounting exercise, there’s little reason to doubt these calculations. But whether they constitute a “loss” is highly doubtful, because there’s no question that we’d all collectively lose more time in travel if there were no traffic lights.

The policy implication of this finding is not that we should be tearing out or turning off traffic signals. That would be absurd, of course. And what the claims of time spent waiting at traffic lights constitute an actual “loss” rests on the assumption that there’s some other traffic-light free way of managing the flow of traffic at intersections that would involve less total travel time for those now waiting. Simply getting rid of traffic lights — and, say, replacing them with stop signs — would likely decrease the throughput of many intersections and actually increase delays (though it might beneficially reduce traffic speeds and improve safety for vulnerable road users). Theoretically, one might replace every single traffic light in the US with a fully grade separated interchange without stops.

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you could instantly replace all of the 330,000 or so traffic signals in the US with grade-separated interchanges that eliminated traffic signals. That might eliminate all the time “lost” by vehicles waiting at traffic lights, but it would come at a cost. At say, $10 million per intersection (which is probably a conservative estimate) that would cost about $3.3 trillion, all that to save maybe $8.6 billion per year. Time spent waiting at traffic lights is costly, only if you ignore the vastly greater cost of doing anything to try to reduce it.

It’s easy to point out that the theory about the “time loss” due to traffic lights is pretty silly. But what’s true of the elaborate (but fundamentally wrong-headed) estimates of the time “lost” to traffic signals is that it also holds for all the other estimates of supposed congestion costs. For years, a range of highly numerate charlatans have been purporting to compute the value of time lost to traffic congestion. The congestion cost studies generated by the Texas Transportation Institute, Inrix, Tom-Tom and others invariably conclude that traffic congestion costs us billions of dollars a year. Their copious data creates the illusion of statistical precision without providing any actually useful knowledge.

They generate heat, but don’t shed any light: The congestion cost estimates are part of the propaganda effort of the road-builders, who assert we need to spend even more billions to widen roads to recoup these losses.

It’s an example of a measurement that’s literally true, but quite meaningless. It’s true in the sense that people probably do spend millions of hours, collectively sitting at traffic lights or traveling more slowly because of congestion. It’s meaningless, because there’s not some real-world alternative where you could build enough road capacity to eliminate these delays.

So, as an elaborate accounting exercise, you can use big data and computing power to produce this estimate, but the result is a factoid that conveys no useful, actionable information — just as we’ve shown with our Cappuccino Congestion Index, which totes up the billions of dollars American’s “lose” waiting in line at coffee shops.

Where are my flying cars?

The sky’s the limit if you want to generate large estimates of the supposed time “lost” due to slower than imaginable travel. Consider for example flying cars, which according to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, are just about to darken our skies. One company, Aska, is showing a four-seat prototype that can whisk you and a friend at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour, land in the space of a helipad, and park in an area no larger than a conventional parking space.

Unsurprisingly, the flying car advocates are pitching it as a solution to traffic congestion (move over Elon Musk):

If you could travel by flying car to all your destinations, it would shave hours a day off your total travel time. Imagine all the time we could save if everybody had a flying car, and what those savings would be worth. With a spreadsheet and some travel data, you could work out an estimate of how many million hours might be saved and how many tens or hundreds billions of dollars that saved travel time would be worth. You could produce a report arguing that the personal flying car shortage costs us in lost time and money.

It would be a large but meaningless number, because there’s no world where its financially feasible, much less physically possible, for everyone to take every trip by flying car.

The price per flying car is a cool $789,000 (plus operating costs), and there aren’t enough heliports or heliport-adjacent landing spots to accommodate everyone; not to mention that there’s no air traffic control system for thousands of such vehicles moving over cities. The only way to make meaning of such numbers is in the context of plausible, real-world alternatives.

And that’s exactly what these cost of congestion studies almost invariably fail to consider. Something is only a “cost” if there’s an actual practical alternative that would save the lost time without incurring even greater monetary costs in doing so. Imaginary savings from an impossible, or impossibly expensive alternative aren’t savings at all.

It’s tempting to believe that more data will make the answers to our vexing problems, like traffic congestion, clearer. But the reverse is often true: an avalanche of big data obscure a fundamental truth. That’s what’s going on here.