The Case for Widening (Futility III)

I-380 (six lanes' worth) crosses 15th Street SW in Cedar Rapids

Drums continue to beat for the widening of Interstate 380 in eastern Iowa--specifically to add one lane each way in the 12 mile stretch of four-lane highway between US 30 and North Liberty, to match the six lanes that exist in Cedar Rapids and close to Interstate 80. The Iowa Department of Transportation has held public forums, and at least one local government (Iowa City) has taken a position (against).

The Cedar Rapids Gazette has published a number of opinion pieces (cited below), including one opposed to widening by Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan, and a strong statement of support by former Cedar Rapids mayor Ron Corbett. Corbett's administration oversaw not only recovery from the devastating 2008 flood, but adoption of complete streets policies including bike lanes, sidewalk construction, and one-way-to-two-way conversions throughout Cedar Rapids. His record of public service as well as time in private industry makes his position particularly worthy of note.

Ron Corbett (Source: Radio Iowa)

In his guest editorial, Corbett offers three main sets of premises:

1. We need to accommodate future growth. Linn and Johnson counties form the core of the economic region. (Corbett counts seven counties; the U.S. Census Bureau defines a five-county "combined statistical area." However defined, a huge proportion of the population lives in these two counties.) Their estimated combined population in 2016 was 442,000, which will surely prove larger once 2020 census figures are published. As the counties continue to grow--unlike most of Iowa--intercity commuting will increase, until it can't anymore. "Without an efficient transportation system," Corbett writes, "We risk losing our competitive edge." In other words, if car travel times increase beyond, say, 37 minutes, people won't switch to public transit, they will move to a more car-accommodating region, and our economy will strangle.
2. Our region is designed such that private cars are the only way to get around. The combined population of the two counties is roughly equal to that of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, but spread over 1,332 square miles instead of 57 (not to mention that Minneapolis is part of a larger metropolitan area of almost 4 million people). Other than where downtown Iowa City abuts the main campus of the University of Iowa, employment even in the cities is spread over a wide area. Downtown Cedar Rapids has come back gloriously since the flood, but as a center is still a shadow of its pre-sprawl self. People live and work all over the place. This is the "last mile problem" with a vengeance: Even if auto addicts were somehow induced to take an intercity bus or light rail, they would face additional challenges getting to their final destinations once they got to downtown Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. [For example: Someone commuting from near Cherokee Park in northwest Cedar Rapids to North Liberty's Commercial Park faces a two hour commute by buses, with two connections, opposed to 30-45 minutes by highway.] There is no incremental way to promote other forms of transportation. We live by our cars, and our cars must be served by wider highways.
3. Induced demand won't have bad effects. It will have good effects! Both Nicholas Johnson and Ben K. reference the Katy Freeway debacle in Houston, but given our relatively low population that nightmare will not be replicated here. (That's a nice way of admitting that the "congestion" on I-380 is pretty much a matter of perception, in a sparsely populated area where people often seem shocked to find someone else in front of them.) Corbett points out that if traffic increases enough, we will become eligible for more federal government spending: Right now, the ICR region is viewed as two different areas by the federal government due to the commuter activity between our two major cities – Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Expanding our current commuting options by widening I-380 will allow for additional commuters. Being recognized as one metropolitan statistical area (MSA) would bring millions of additional federal economic and community development dollars to our region. Remember, local governments and taxpayers are not footing the bill for construction of the Highway 100 extension and all the work on 80 and 380; these are funded by state and national governments. Besides, Des Moines got money for their interstates, and look what it's done for them.

Four lanes of I-380 north of Swisher in July 2018 (Google Earth screen capture)

On one level it's hard to disagree with Mayor Corbett: As our community journeys through time, the next step is most likely going to resemble the steps we've taken so far. It's the easiest decision to make, the easiest plan to implement, and requires only temporary adjustments by our residents. Switching public investment to different transportation modes might--might--catch on in time, but in the short run is unlikely to mitigate the congestion such as it is. We've been building highways for decades, for better or worse, and we know how to build more, expand the ones we've got, where to find the money, and how to drive on them once we've got them. Adding bike lanes to city streets was freaky.

But we can't be restricted to short-run responses to problems. Someone has to be thinking about long-term outcomes. What will this region look like a generation or two from now? Will there be a small number of densely-populated employment centers, or will population be spread thinly around? There are attractions to both, but only the former accommodates the environment, is resilient to changes in energy supply, affords alternatives to a car-dependent lifestyle, is resilient to changes in federal spending habits, supports local businesses, and is financially sustainable. Building and widening highways without taking into account the future we're building is committing future generations to the choices of the past--as well as all the consequences.

Video promoting St. Paul's A line

Maybe slapping a light rail line between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City tomorrow, in hopes someone will use it, is not the solution right now. But we certainly should be taking steps towards conditions that will enable us to adapt to whatever the future brings. That means committing resources to something other than doubling down on what we've got. Ben in his guest column suggests bus rapid transit (BRT), which would be a huge step forward in Cedar Rapids's transit system, and which could spur transit-oriented development. We could expand the area covered by form-based codes, which done right help spur compact, affordable development. City development resources should focus on ways to improve our resilience. Is a development likely to position the city for a walkable design that works with intracity and intercity public transit? Good. Does it provide a short-term infusion of cash while making us more vulnerable in the future? Resist! Does it insulate from financial risk some big developer with even bigger promises? Definitely resist!

A couple more considerations:

The need to "accommodate future growth" through vast expansions of infrastructure assumes that growth is inevitable and will be substantial, or at least will not occur at all unless there is a great deal of improved space readied for it. This is a relatively recent assumption. As Charles Marohn has pointed out, pre-World War II growth was done incrementally, so that when failures occurred they were of small not spectacular scale:

We sometimes mistakenly view this approach as primitive, lacking the sophistication that today’s auto-based cities have. In that, we are disastrously wrong. Modern development represents not just a step backward in sophistication but an abandonment of complexity in favor of systems that are efficient, orderly, and dumb.

Traditional development patterns, based around people who walked, emerged through trial and error over thousands of years. Societies learned to build this way by innovating incrementally—expanding on what worked while abandoning what didn’t. The result is a resilient building form finely adapted to people, a pattern that repeats with eerie similarity across continents and cultures.

We need to approach development of our cities and regions in an entirely new, which is actually the old, way:

The central task of the Millennial generation is not going to be expanding the boundaries of our cities but managing their contraction. We must find a way to unwind all of these widely dispersed and unproductive investments while providing opportunities for a good life—a modernized American Dream—in strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods. And we have to do all of this with the drag of large debts and a failed national system for growth, development, and economic management that largely associates auto-based development with progress. (Marohn 2015)

Secondly, we need to stop treating the federal government like Dad-with-the-bottomless-wallet. When federal money is the answer to everything, the federal government winds up making a lot of our decisions for us (Gladney 2019). Admittedly I'd like it more if the federal government put more money into mass transit and less into highway construction, or if the Iowa government put more money into school maintenance and less into constructing new buildings. But the principle remains: When we choose what to do based on what we can get federal money for, that's a problem. If Cedar Rapids needs money for highways, because Des Moines (and Correctionville) got money for theirs, where does it end? Sioux City and Waterloo have had rougher decades than Cedar Rapids. And the Iowa Rural Development Council wants you to know that our state has 900-plus small towns which they believe have not received their share of funding (Menner 2018). Doesn't every town in Iowa, every hamlet in the United States, deserve a new highway or airport or attraction? Remember, we're paying taxes to the state and federal governments, too. When federal money for I-380 seems too good to pass up, remember that it's only possible because we're paying taxes towards every other project in America at the same time.

City Lab recently quoted mobility consultant Rasheq Zarif:

It’s a matter of distributing the demand. It should not be expected that we should build more roads and it’s free. It’s a utility, a resource for us, and we need to respect that the same way as we respect energy, water, housing and so forth.... When you’re wearing big pants, loosening your belt will not help remind you about weight loss.

Loosening your belt after too much turkey solves your immediate problem, but not your long-term issue. Same goes for widening highways.

SEE ALSO
Ron Corbett, "Local Economy Depends on Infrastructure, Including Wider I-380," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 25 November 2019
Calvin Gladney, "The Feds Are Driving a National Policy of Sprawl," The Fifty, 22 March 2019
Nicholas Johnson, "Asking the Right Questions About Interstate 380 Expansion," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 26 November 2019
Ben Kaplan, "More Capacity on I-380 Won't Lead to Less Congestion," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 25 November 2019
Charles L. Marohn Jr., "Cities for People--Or Cars?" The American Conservative May-June 2015: 6-8
"P.S. on I-380," 24 February 2018

PS on I-380

"Bypasses have got to be built."
And interstate highways have got to be widened.

Last week I considered the plan to widen Interstate 380 between North Liberty and Cedar Rapids from four to six lanes. I tried to construct the strongest argument for the project, based on increased population and daily traffic, as well as reasons not to do it (induced demand, fiscal stress at all levels of government, environmental costs, maybe traffic safety). I explained why I thought the reasons not to do it were stronger.

Despite a public meeting this week, we're still without specifics on the cost, or on the metrics that justify the expansion. We need to know: How much time are we buying with our X hundred million dollars, and whose time are we saving? Consider that this is a 12-mile stretch of highway, with a 70-mile-an-hour speed limit (though the design speed surely is higher). Driving either direction between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, and assuming no obstructions, you should make it through this patch in about 10 minutes. In heavy traffic, that time will increase, but at what point do we say it's congestion? And how long does that "congestion" last--one hour a day?

Google Maps has a traffic function that allows the user to see where traffic is heavy, and how that affects travel times. So far, checking during morning and evening rush hours, I have yet to see heavy traffic on I-380, and travel times are always normal. You want to see congestion, check out I-290 west of Chicago.

So, when governments everywhere are financially stressed, infrastructure has been described as "crumbling" for a quarter-century, Iowa is closing schools and mental health centers and using contingency funds to balance the budget, is the I-380 "problem" that some politically-vocal drivers are annoyed when other drivers are doing 65 in a 70 zone--or 70 when they want to go 85--and they can't pass them? Politically-connected construction companies that need contracts? Politicians themselves who miss cutting ribbons? I hate to be sounding so cynical, but I'm just not getting any better explanation. 

What will happen when, after months of construction-related detours and delays, the highway is widened? Here are two scenarios.

Low induced demand (traffic stays around 54000 cars/day). Induced demand is not an intuitive concept. After all, as the ARTBA says on their websites, laying sewer pipe doesn't cause people to go to the bathroom more often! It is pretty exhaustively documented (see the earlier post), but usually in places like Los Angeles or Houston or London. Eastern Iowa is not highly-populated, and is not likely to be. So it could be the induced demand effect will be barely noticeable. Travel times will change marginally at most, and the driving experience won't be as much better as some people seem to think it will be. It will be, in short, a substantial expenditure of government money for nothing much in return. What we should have done instead: Nothing. Maybe fund schools and mental health.

High induced demand (traffic continues to increase, say to 72000-81000 cars/day). The appearance or expectation of a smoother ride might drive more people to live farther from work i.e. Ely, Fairfax, North Liberty, Shueyville, Solon, Swisher, or rural Linn or Johnson counties. This will help to fill up that third lane, so that in a few years traffic will be just as "bad" as it is now. On the other hand, it will also boost population and the tax rolls in those little towns and rural areas. They may well have a stake in facilitating commuters, and would expect to reap substantial benefits while bearing little of the costs. Here in D.C. there've been proposals floated to build a bullet train to Baltimore. There are a lot of unanswered questions about this, but the areas in between are wondering why they should provide land for a train that will favor these two major cities while bypassing them. What we should have done instead: Regional revenue sharing, (see also Liu and Arnosti 2018) and at least investigate passenger rail.

Whatever decision is made, and however it comes out, we should take collective actions for the right reasons. The Hamilton Project's recent study of infrastructure policy lists a number of standards for evaluating projects (2017: 2): economic return on investment (see also Marohn 2013 and 2016), economic vs. political considerations, rate of depreciation, cost of borrowing, where the money is coming from, and need for economic stimulus. By any of these standards, does widening I-380 pass the smell test?

OTHER READING:

Tod Litman, "Urban Sprawl Costs the American Economy More Than $1 Trillion Annually," LSE US Centre, 1 June 2015

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Ryan Nunn and Greg Nantz, "If You Build It: A Guide to the Economics of Infrastructure Investment," The Hamilton Project, February 2017

[P.S.: See also Dirk Vander Hart, "A New Report Shows Highway Widening Won't Solve Portland's Congestion Woes," Portland Mercury, 7 March 2018]

The futility of widening (II)

Discussion is going forward on widening Interstate 380 between North Liberty and Cedar Rapids, so that there are three lanes in each direction the whole way. Things are getting realer: The Iowa Department of Transportation will hold a public information meeting next Tuesday, February 20, at the District 6 office, 5455 Kirkwood Boulevard SW, Cedar Rapids, from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m.

As I wrote two years ago, the impetus for widening the highway is understandable: population in Linn and Johnson counties has increased: their combined population in the 2016 census estimate is 368,208, up 7.63 percent since 2010 and 39.0 percent since 1990, both faster than the United States as a whole Intercity commuting has increased with population--average daily traffic counts at the county line increased by about 50 percent between 1998 (38,200) and 2014 (55,600)--and drivers can at times feel trapped in traffic without an extra lane to set them free. The region and the state have sunk their investments into highway transportation, and citizens seem to approve; it’s easier to build on that than to try to create alternatives from nothing.

I-380 is a spur from I-80 west of Iowa City,
bending at Cedar Rapids towards Waterloo

The arguments against the project remain as strong as they did two years ago. First, widening the highway does not merely set existing traffic free. It encourages more traffic along the highway. Increased highway capacity encourages more people to commute and existing commuters to drive more. This has been shown in any number of studies. Here are some cited by Tom Vanderbilt (Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), Knopf, 2008) and Edward Humes (Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Harper, 2016):

• ·         2002 study of projects in England: most of the time the increase in traffic on alternative routes was nowhere near the traffic “lost” on the affected roads (S. Cairns, S. Atkins and P. Goodwin, “Disappearing Traffic? The Story So Far,” Municipal Engineer 151:1 (March 2002), 13-22
• ·         A 2011 project to widen a ten mile stretch of I-405 in Los Angeles from ten lanes to twelve cost $1.3 billion and resulted in (slightly) slower travel times once completed (“$1.1 Billion and Five Years Later, The 405 Congestion Relief Project Is a Fail,” Los Angeles Weekly, 4 March 2015)
• ·         Houston’s $2.8 billion Katy Freeway project widened I-10 from eight lanes to 26 lengthened travel times (Humes 142)
• ·         Braess Paradox: Adding a new road to a transportation network may actually slow things down for all its users, because “user optimal” is not “system optimal” (Dietrich Braess, “On a Paradox of Traffic Planning,” Transportation Science 39 (2005): 446-450
• ·         Nb Vanderbilt based on experience of London (and before that Disneyland) recommends congestion pricing as the solution to traffic congestion (Vanderbilt 2008: 175)… though it’s not clear to me what congestion means in an Iowa context 

More driving is, pure and simple, bad for the environment, which is, let us recall, what we are all living in, breathing and drinking. Not only does auto exhaust pollute the air (Stone 2008), the carbon emissions contribute to climate change (Bereitschaft and Debbage 2013), which is far enough along that it ought at least to bother people. Though Eastern Iowa is not Houston, sprawl also has a negative effect on animals and plants (cf. Weller 2018).

Secondly, in the current fiscal environment the costs of widening the highway alone are unconscionable, without even bringing opportunity costs to bear. The American Road and Transportation Builders Association estimates the cost to widen a highway from four lanes to six at $4 million per mile, which would make the total project cost $40 million. Even if this were on the nose, which I'm doubting, this is a transfer of funds from non-commuters to commuters. Even if the money were there, is this really the best use of it? The State of Iowa has been cutting mental health spending, and is increasing K-12 education below inflation, choices forced by its fiscal crisis. The national government, which for the time being remains a substantial source of state highway funds, just passed $500 million in spending on top of a $1.5 billion tax cut, which will aggravate its own fiscal crisis. Our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, we’ve been hearing repeatedly for three decades, so we’re building more?

After the highway is built, and development follows, it falls to city and county governments to follow up with streets, pipes, and year-to-year maintenance. It falls to school districts to get these farther-flung children to school. None of these governments are flush, either. It hardly behooves them to spread their responsibilities farther.

Finally, while the idea that more highway capacity will relieve congestion and improve safety has intuitive appeal, in practice these hopes are generally blasted. Besides the induced demand studies, cited above, there is evidence that wider roads do not improve safety, either because more open lanes encourage higher driving speeds or because induced demand eventually restores the former level of traffic density. “If you build a road that’s wide, has a lot of sight distance, has a large median, large shoulders, and the driver feels safe, they’re going to go fast,” says Tom Granda, a psychologist employed by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). “It doesn’t matter what speed or sign you have. In fact, the engineers who built that road seduced the driver to go that fast” (Vanderbilt 2008: 183).

My guess is that safety on a six-lane highway would either be a push or a slight decline. (Stroads present many more safety issues than even high-speed highways.) Interstate highways are engineered for speed and safety. I would caution that more open road means higher speeds, and that more lanes means more jockeying, at least in rush hour.

One more note: In the medium-term, should further capacity be needed, it’s much easier to scale up public transit by adding more bus and train runs than it is to build still more highway lanes.

Too many marching in for the current number of lanes?

SEE ALSO: 

Jonathan Coppage, "Our Infrastructure Inefficiency," National Review, 19 February 2018

Joe Cortright, "Questioning Congestion Costs," City Observatory

The futility of widening

No sooner had Iowans approved a 10 cent per gallon gasoline tax increase for infrastructure repair than the Iowa Department of Transportation began looking seriously at widening Interstate 380 between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. A recent Cedar Rapids Gazette interview (cited below) with Iowa DOT transportation planner Cathy Cutler reported the agency is designing a six-lane section between Iowa City and North Liberty, and is studying the possibility of adding two or even four lanes all the way to Cedar Rapids.

There are several rationales for additional highway construction between the two cities that bookend what has been branded the I-380 Corridor.

[1] Increasing population, and increasing incidence of dual-career couples with jobs in different towns, means there is more traffic between them on the average workday. All must be accommodated on I-380, which is the predominant route between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. (There's a two-lane road, S.R. 965, that once was a viable alternative but has now gone all stroad-y in North Liberty. Bus or train service is non-existent.)

Population increases in the "corridor":

Census:	1990	2010	2014 update
Linn County	168,767	211,226	217,751
Johnson County	96,119	130,882	142,287
Total	264,886	342,108	360,038

[2] The Gazette article, quoting my former Coe colleague Randy Roeder, focuses on the disruption to traffic caused by numerous crashes, suggesting an extra lane each way would allow commuting to continue while the accident was cleared.

[3] As Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and the towns between them chart their common destiny, facilitating traffic along the "corridor" would help to tie the region together.

[4] Any form of public transportation would not be attractive to enough people to be viable.

The DOT and the construction companies are ready to go. But say we're convinced, either by the above rationales or their eagerness, and the additional capacity along I-380 is built. (Never mind the dislocation caused by construction while it's happening, or that non-commuters are subsidizing the construction for the convenience of commuters.)

What outcomes can we expect? There's been a lot of research on this question, ably summarized by Tom Vanderbilt in his masterwork Traffic, particularly in chapter 6, "Why More Roads Lead to More Traffic (and What to Do About It)."

1. Traffic along the highway will increase. Induced demand is a widely-acknowledged phenomenon, except maybe not by the highway lobby: When more lane-miles of roads are built, more miles are driven, even more so than might be expected by "natural" increases in demand, like population growth. In other words, the new lanes may immediately bring relief to those who wanted to use the highway before, but they will also encourage those same people to use the highway more--they may make those "rational locators" move farther out, for example--and they will bring new drivers onto the highway, because they suddenly find it a better deal. (p. 155)
2. Government budgets will be additionally stressed (p. 161). Remember that the rationale for the gasoline tax increase was we are having trouble keeping the infrastructure we have in repair. Iowa's budget is not exempt from the stress governments around the country are feeling. Our governor recently item-vetoed a bipartisan increase in the education budget, is trying to get private insurers to take on Medicaid clients, and just suggested water quality problems caused by farm runoff could be addressed by shifting funds from educational infrastructure.  This is not a fiscal environment that suggests widening highways to achieve optimal rush hour commuting convenience is a really good idea. (See Cortright, "Pulling a FAST One": [The 2015 federal transportation bill] has utterly failed to craft a solution that asks the users and beneficiaries of the transportation system step up and pay for its costs.)
3. People will drive faster, and may take more risks. For years, economists, psychologists, road-safety experts, and others have presented variations on this theory, under banners ranging from "the Peltzman effect" and "risk homeostasis," to "risk compensation" and the "offset hypothesis." What they are all saying, to crudely lump all of them together, is that we change our behavior in response to perceived risk, without even being aware that we are doing so. (p. 181)
4. Hence, there will still be accidents, and resultant rubbernecking. The actual crash, which may or may not close a lane, is only part of the problem, of course. The highway's capacity drops an estimated 12.7 percent because of the line that forms--often on both sides of the highway--to take a look.... The economist Thomas Schelling points out that when each driver slows to look at an accident scene for ten seconds, it does not seem egregious because they have already waited ten minutes. But that ten minutes arose from everyone else's ten seconds. Because no individual suffers from the losses he inflicts on others, everyone is slowed. (p. 163)

The bottom line is that we'd be poorer as state but no happier as individual drivers, and probably would have induced more sprawl towards the outlying parts of the metro areas, with all the attendant negative social, environmental and fiscal consequences. (See Ewing et al. for the latest round of evidence of safety consequences.)

So what can we do? Vanderbilt is big on congestion pricing, to encourage traffic to move from peak to off-peak times. The DOT lists a number of public transportation alternatives worth looking into, mostly involving buses. Given the costs of getting it wrong, both financial and political, I'm for going slow on public transportation. What I'd like to see right now is to get the governments of Linn and Johnson counties to negotiate a no-poaching agreement, tax-sharing and urban growth boundaries. This would allow economic development to occur in ways that aren't wasteful and unproductive, and might lead to the sort of urban density that would make public transportation viable. In any case, as economist Joe Cortright concludes ("Our Old Planning"), we should be trying to maximize accessibility instead of mobility.

SOURCES
 Joe Cortright, "Our Old Planning Rules of Thumb Are 'All Thumbs,'" Strong Towns Blog, 6 January 2016
 Joe Cortright, "Pulling a FAST One," City Commentary, 8 December 2015
 Reid Ewing, Shima Hamidi and James B. Grace, "Urban Sprawl as a Risk Factor in Motor Vehicle Crashes," Urban Studies 53:2 (February 2016): 247-266
 Iowa Department of Transportation, "Executive Summary: I-380 Commuter Transportation Improvements," 19 August 2014, http://www.iowadot.gov/commuterstudy/pdfs/ITC_ReportWithAppendices.pdf
 B.A. Morelli, "I-380 Crashes, Gridlock Snarl Commutes in Cedar Rapids," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 20 December 2015, 1A, 7A
 Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (Vintage, 2008)