Hailing each new tool or data source or process as a breakthrough in planning is a risky business. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman quotes Bill Gates on energy innovation: “You are not going to see it coming. The breakthrough will probably come out of somewhere you least expect, and we’ll only know it happened looking backward.”
Those words came to mind when I read about the Kheel plan for traffic pricing in NYC, courtesy of the Gotham Gazette. Or rather, to be more specific, the moment occurred when I followed a link to the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, and 30+ sheets of Excel complexity unfurled before me. At your fingertips: a transport model for New York City, including a dizzying range of adjustable inputs and pages of notes and explanations. Want to experiment with a variable subway fare and a flat-rate bridge toll? Or perhaps free subways but pricey bridges? See the results in volumes of travel, environmental impact and speeds.
It’s easy to forget how pervasive the effects of traffic models are. Our transportation networks are built in response to their outputs - from signal timings to the number of bridge lanes or flyovers required. And the decisions driving those networks intrinsically determine the types of neighborhoods and cities we build. A key test for any new development is often the traffic model’s verdict on additional traffic to be generated.
Of all the parts of the planning process, the black box of traffic modeling is perhaps the most closed to external scrutiny and debate. Few understand how the models function. Even when well-informed external observers exist they are generally unable to interrogate the model and its handlers, because of the complexity of the models and the constraints of process and protocol.
The Balanced Transportation Analyzer offers an alternative. A model we can directly interact with. I may come up with the wrong answers - perhaps I don’t entirely understand the correct elasticities for change in transit volume per change in auto volume caused by change in auto time - so there’s still plenty for the transport engineers to do. This isn’t a full traffic model with millions of trips between origins and destinations. There are some tasks that still need the big computers and many-faceted matrices, though these in time too can move online and into the crowd.
If a single spreadsheet can being to capture the complexity of transport within NYC, and still be accessible for anyone to test their transport schemes, how long til we have web-based open models of smaller cities? How long til a neighborhood group can run their own figures for a traffic calmed intersection, or demonstrate the impact of introducing two-way flow to one way streets? Or quantify local air pollution and greenhouse gases from different bus strategies? In fact, why not use open standards, open source, peer-reviewed modeling tools for all urban traffic simulations?
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I wonder whether the generation of kids raised in sim worlds such as The Sim, 2nd Life, WoW etc will take more easily to these tools? I hope so because, while there is always the risk of confusing the map with the territory, discussing a model seems much more pragmatic than arguing ideologically as now…
Tools are great, but only if they get out into the wild. I’d like to see a bunch of HS kids take this spreadsheet, play with it, then show it to their community board.