Charles Komanoff's Balanced Transportation Analyzer
 

He's doing a great job measuring and quantifying the negative externalities of driving.

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The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic

“Any balanced analysis will surely prove that the taxpayer actually pays, for every person who chooses to drive to and from work in his own car, an indirect subsidy at least 10 times as great as the indirect subsidy now paid the mass-transit rider.”

In the end, Komanoff found that every car entering the CBD causes an average of 3.23 person-hours of delays. Multiply that by $39.53—a weighted average of vehicles’ time value within and outside the CBD—and it turns out that the average weekday vehicle journey costs other New Yorkers $128 in lost time. At last, urban planners could say just how big the externalities associated with driving are, knowing that the number was backed up with solid empirical analysis.

The BTA, Komanoff says, will finally allow engineers to model the effects of proposed transportation policies in realistic detail. He translates all traffic impacts—delays, collisions, injuries, air pollution—into dollars and cents; that way, it’s easy for users to compare the benefits and costs of different plans. He has even come up with a plan of his own that would, according to his calculations, collect $1.3 billion in motorist tolls per year—all of which would be spent on improving public transit—and save $2.5 billion in time costs by reducing delays. To that, add $190 million from decreased mortality as a result of making streets more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, $83 million in collision damage reduction, and $34 million in lower CO2 emissions.

But there’s one aspect of Komanoff’s plan that his spreadsheet can’t help with: how to put it into practice. Americans hate the idea of paying to drive on public roads. No US city has succeeded at passing any plan remotely like Komanoff’s. And the response from New York City’s Department of Transportation has been tepid at best. Komanoff may have created a vision of the traffic system of the future, but he’s still stuck with the government and politics of the present.

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/0..._traffic/all/1