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Urban Mobility Report: Not Even the Title Gets it Right
Posted by Julia Klaiber on June 16, 2011 |
In a blog post highlighting the debate between Joe Cortright of CEOs for Cities and Tim Lomax of Texas Transportation Institute at the Congress for New Urbanism, Jarrett Walker discusses the flawed methodology found in the Urban Mobility Report. Agreeing with many of the points made in Driven Apart, Walker suggests much-needed updates to the Urban Mobility Report, starting with the name.
"Mobility is in the report title, but [it] is about congestion. ...The journalistic spin that TTI itself recommends is that non-car modes matter only if they reduce congestion, and that congestion remains the primary measure of urban mobility."
Walker specifically discusses a need to quantify the degree of freedom people have in moving about their city at will. This point resonates with Joe Cortright’s emphasis on the need to emphasize the accessibility of destinations when studying America’s traffic congestion.
Debating the True Cause of Congestion
Posted by Julia Klaiber on June 16, 2011 | News
At a Salon Session hosted by the Congress for New Urbanism on June 2, 2011, Joe Cortright, senior policy advisor for CEOs for Cities, debated Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute on the proper metrics for measuring traffic and congestion. The debate on congestion indices and urban accessibility focused on Driven Apart, CEOs for Cities’ critique of the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report.
Driven Apart questions the methodology of the Urban Mobility Report. It specifically criticizes the Urban Mobility Report for using poor fuel estimates. In the debate, which you can view online, Lomax admits that that Texas Transportation Institute is “guilty of [poor fuel estimates]…[They] took an old model and tortured the hell out of it.” He offers no explanation for why TTI knowingly published the 2010 report despite this inaccuracy.
Driven Apart takes a look at what really causes traffic congestion in America. The report finds, contrary to the Urban Mobility Report, the 25 year-old industry standard for traffic assessment, that many metropolitan areas have actually seen reductions in average peak hour travel times. The reduced travel time reported in Driven Apart is reflective of shorter travel distances, improved land use patterns and personal choices about where to live and work. The importance of compact cities in reducing travel time points to major flaws in the national standard for measuring congestion and suggests new metrics are needed.