Monday’s Friday Reads – 17 June 2019

1. The Old Street roundabout changes have an official report here as there wasn’t much detail about in the first link – https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/roads/old-street-roundabout/user_uploads/old-street-report-final.pdf

2. I know they aren’t universally popular but I’ve found the changes at E&C and Westminster Bridge roundabout have made them much nicer for pedestrians.

   Unfortunately the Vauxhall gyratory changes seem to have been put off until 2021 with completion in 2023.

   (And that was before the linked Vauxhall Cross Island scheme was called in by the secretary of state – no idea what delay that will cause.)

3. The LA article really seems to misunderstand one of the important lessons on traffic that we have certainly learned in London – that is, that (in a saturated network) traffic will always expand to fill the capacity available. LA is certainly also a saturated network, so it’s unreasonable to expect that new transit lines will reduce the amount of traffic on the adjacent main roads. Even though some drivers will undoubtedly have switched to rail, the capacity released will quickly be taken up by generated traffic. This misunderstanding is, in part, based on the fallacy that traffic flows are broadly constant – that is, that, as a generality, peak hour traffic is the same people making the same journey every day. Studies by Goodwin and others have shown that the degree of churn is very high so it’s easy to see how new traffic can be generated.

   What new transit lines certainly will do is to increase the transport options available, particularly for those who have little or no access to cars. They also provide the opportunity for road space to be converted to other uses with little adverse impact, if done quickly. This shows up in the Seattle article, a very interesting juxtaposition. LA does not appear to have taken advantage of this opportunity.

4. Interesting that while the Old Street proposals were popular with individual respondents, the Stakeholder groups (who while having a political “bias” are also perhaps more knowledgeable) had more reservations.

   Indeed what stood out was the London Borough of Hackney which was “fundamentally opposed” to the scheme, another example of TfL plans not always going down well with local councils, and in this case it can’t even be blamed on Tory resistance to Labour Mayor plans.

   https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2019/05/03/council-lays-formal-objection-tfls-old-street-roundabout-plans/
   https://www.hackneygazette.co.uk/news/hackney-council-to-formally-oppose-old-street-roundabout-plans-1-6031714

5. The LA research is interesting and useful.

   However a lot of the I10 traffic is commuting from beyond Culver City so the phase of the metro cover by the research had no impact on those flows.

   Expo line extension to Santa Monica opened back in 2016. The line now parallels the I10 all the way from the coast into downtown.
   Carried 60,000 passengers a day in 2018 https://la.curbed.com/2019/2/1/18204376/los-angeles-transit-ridership-down-trains-buses

   A long way to go to match vehicle traffic volumes though
   “I-10 at Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, used by 355,000 vehicles a day” http://caltransd7info.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-busiest-freeway-in-california.html

   In other bad news people in southern California have been buying more cars
   https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/31/16950224/metro-ridership-decline-stats-car-ownership-study

6. I find the urine detector article interesting and entertaining, particularly the quote at the end. However, I would challenge the usefulness of such inventions to funnel the offending essence back into the shoes of the producer; charged with three or four pints of Greene King’s best, there is not need to stand within a meter of the target wall.

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