| ARISTOTLE
on Orange County |
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| ARISTOTLE
on Orange County |
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What does ARISTOTLE have to do with modern urban transportation planning ? |
About WEBMASTER |
| Essays and Links |
Some of the following
documents are available in either html or pdf format. Better
prints of tables and graphs are available in the pdf
format. To read and print pdf you will need the Acrobat reader
which may be downloaded free from Adobe. |
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Orange County Transport Series |
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| #1. Introduction | Introduction to the plan and methodology of a series of short essays on historical opportunities to better understand how we can -- and how an how we cannot -- solve Orange County's transportation problems. 4/14/06 | |
| #2. The National Transportation Database | Since the early '70's the federal government has been collecting an extensive database of cost and performance data on every transportation system of every U.S. transportation agency. What do these data tell us about the relative effectiveness of alternative modes? 4/17/06 | |
| #3. The 1997 OC Major Investment Study | The 1997 Corridor Orange county MIS compared the effectiveness of rail vs., bus vs roads. Adoption of light rail as the locally preferred strategy was not because of, but despite -- and in direct contradiction to -- the objective findings of the study. | |
| #4. The 1999-2000 OC CenterLine MIS | The1999 and 2000 OC CenterLine light rail EIR found that at a cost of over a billion dollars, the light rail system made traffic congestion worse than doing nothing. | |
| #5. The 2003 OC CenterLine MIS | The 2003 OC CenterLine EIR and subsequent auxiliary studies, clarified why light rail made made traffic worse, and suggested that this would probably be the case with any street-level, fixed guideway system, including busways. | |
| A Value Oriented ROW Taking Policy | OCTA has tacitly adopted a policy of no more residence takings for freeway ROW. In the long term this can only result in traffic strangulation. In recent instance, the present value of the time savings foregone on account of this policy was 800 times the real estate value of the homes not taken A proposed rational ROW takings policy that shares the vastly increased value of property used for ROW between owners and drivers. | |
| Supporting Documents | ||
| CenterLine Unveiled | The 2003 EIR defines the CenterLine PROJECT as a bundle of Light Rail, Bus expansion, and Street widening. The only performance analysis pertains to the entire bundle. This hides the embarrassing fact that because of the street disruption it causes, the net transportation benefit of the Light Rail element itself is strongly negative, nearly canceling the positive benefits of the other two elements. 8/8/04 | |
| CenterLine
Debundle Analysis |
Detailed, gritty sources, assumptions and calculations underlying the above debundling analysis. Result: Removing the light rail element from the CenterLine Project would result in estimated 61% increase in transportation benefits at a billion dollar reduction of cost. 8/3/04. | |
| Critique of "Marginal Benefits Report" | OCTA tasked Parsons Brinkerhof to Study the issue of marginal benefit of Light Rail in the CenterLine Project. Result: They studied the wrong issue. | |
| The OCTA Major Investment Study | A $3.1 million OCTA Major Investment Alternatives Study shows that dollar-for-dollar, regular unrestricted road capacity additions would afford greater benefits than light rail in every benefit category by factors of from 4 to 32 times. Nevertheless, OCTA has rejected the roads alternative and selected the worst-place light rail solution. 12/7/99 | |
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A Multimodal Regional Congestion Model |
Develops a simple analytic model of regional average congestive travel-time delay as a function of regional volume/capacity ratio, V*/C*. Establishes C* as a valid level-playing-field measure of mobility benefit of various alternative transportation modes. 4/28/07 | |
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Highway
Subsidies |
Revision of an earlier, 1993 paper, updated with later (1999) data evaluating the government net cost of roads and highways. Improved and updated data sources show that in 1999, user fees exceeded total expenditures for roads and highways at all levels of government by $70 billion, a profit of 60% on expenditures. 4/12/03 | |
| Traffic Congestion: A Solvable Problem | link | A
paper by Peter Samuel arguing that we can --- and
showing with many working examples how to --- build our way out of
urban traffic congestion with separate truckways, tunneling,
and congestion tolling. |
| TTI's Urban Congestion Studies | link | Link to Texas Transportation Institute's extensive statistics on the growth of traffic volume, capacity, congestion, and costs of congestion since 1982 in the 70 major US Urbanized Areas. |
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GoTo:
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Thanks for the visit. Comments, links, and suggestions welcomed.
Jack
Mallinckrodt, Webmaster
mally@ieee.org
www.urbantransport.org/oc.html
