Urban Mobility and Traffic Congestion
The primary cause of traffic congestion in populated areas around the world is often correlated with a surge of vehicles during specific times of the day. Traffic congestion is a direct threat to the urban mobility of a city. As an example, an article by the Inquirer focuses on traffic congestion-afflicted cities in the Philippines (https://business.inquirer.net/280456/a-primer-on-urban-mobility-2). The article notes that there is often a “common ripple effect of traffic,” noting that road closures caused by construction also worsen daily congestion of roads, especially routes populated by motorists.
Urban cities like the traffic-heavy areas in the Philippines could benefit from incorporating network traffic research into city/urban planning and modeling city routes after information networks. The objective of city planning and route construction should be to enhance urban mobility, or as the article put it, “reducing the friction costs of distance.” Travel time has become an increasingly relevant metric of distance in urban settings, making it even more important to reduce traffic congestion in growing cities. As we’ve observed in class, traffic networks can be modeled after information networks, as commuters actively decide on what routes to take based on the information they know about travel time, distance, and other factors that may affect their trip to destinations. On the other hand, we’ve also seen how infrastructure projects that are well-intentioned can paradoxically worsen traffic congestion (i.e Braess’ Paradox) and increase the friction costs of users.
We see similarities in the class lectures about travel time and real-life traffic networks. The article reports that local governments in the Philippines currently work on infrastructure projects that aim to reduce travel time to the center, and notes that these projects can be critically flawed as they create more dependencies on certain paths and modes of travel (i.e adding more car lanes to congested routes). Rather, these projects need to be evaluated and based around network traffic research, especially in optimizing land use and redirecting people to alternative modes of transportation, in order to reduce friction costs of mobility and economic/productivity losses. Thus, the article concludes: there should be a significant redirection of city planning guidelines. Rather than asking “how can new infrastructure move people faster from A to B?”, urban mobility should be taken into consideration. City planners should instead reframe their objectives to answer “how can ease of movement be provided with decision-making processes and networks research in mind?”