L.A. Traffic Relief Possible If We Targeted Specific Neighborhoods, Says GPS Data

By Dennis Romero Mon., Dec. 24 2012 at 10:04 AM

Eric Estrada / Flickr

Remember car pooling, flexible work schedules and "telecommuting."

Yeah, none of that worked as far as our traffic goes. L.A. still has the worst congestion in the nation.

Will anything bring relief? Researchers at UC Berkeley and MIT think they might have come up with something:

These geniuses took advantage of the fact that we all drive around with virtual GPS devices in our cars whether we like it our not: Smartphones.

Looking at anonymous data and really crunching some numbers, they concluded that, rather than telling wide swaths of people to work from home to help traffic, focusing on specific neighborhoods that seem to affect street patters more would do greater good.

In fact, says a summary, ...

Eric Demarcq

... canceling the trips of 1 percent of drivers from carefully selected neighborhoods would reduce the extra travel time for all other drivers in a metropolitan area by as much as 18 percent.

Wow. Traffic could be reduced by nearly one-fifth just by telling those douches from Silver Lake to stay off the road? (We kid).

Although the academics focused on the Bay Area and Boston, the technology to figure out which neighborhoods contribute the most to adverse traffic is in-hand and could be applied to L.A. and even developing nations, the researchers say.

The study was published last week in the journal Scientific Reports. Berkeley's Alexandre Bayen:

Reaching out to everybody to change their time or mode of commute is thus not necessarily as efficient as reaching out to those in a particular geographic area who contribute most to bottlenecks.

We can imagine the L.A. equivalent of East Coast snow days for some of our neighborhoods: Stay-home days. Would be cool.

[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

Tags:

GPS, research, traffic, UC Berkeley

We Recommend

jacobsoboroff

@jillstewart @dennisjromero this "douche from Silver Lake" will do my best to stay off the road. tehe. Here's to a great 2013 for LAW!

dennisjromero

@jacobsoboroff @jillstewart Sorry Jacob. If it helps I wasn't envisioning you, unless you have a faux hawk and drive a Mini

jacobsoboroff

@dennisjromero @jillstewart just playing. but shaving a faux hawk and getting a mini sounds tempting.

abramsrl

Or we could put dog collars on poor people and if their cars tried to enter a freeway ramp, they would be automatically zapped!

abramsrl

Duh! We've know this since the 1984 Olympics. In fact, the ground work for this "knowledge" was set back in 1915 with LA Transit Study. In order to reduce traffic congestion, LA had to avoid Transit Oriented Districts [TOD's] and subways, which were mere excuses for excessive density.

http://bit.ly/cJh5BP

As the 1915 Transit Study warned, TOD's like Bunker Hill and Hollywood were solely to make a few landowners wealthy at the expense of everyone else. The result of excessive density is traffic congestion. TOD's are not designed to benefit the general public, instead their purpose is to make a few people wealthy.

"Such a policy would be nothing less than a deliberate exploitation of civic resources for the benefit of the limited number of property owners enjoying abnormal incomes from rental privileges;" LA Transit Study, page 38

We have seen this fact played out in Bunker Hill, Hollywood, and in the fight over the Century City stop of the Subway to the Sea.

Preventing a specific number of people from certain areas from using the roads is an artificial way to reduce the impact of density. The number of cars reflects the population density. As the 1915 Transit Study proved a century ago, no fixed rail transit system, above ground or below ground, can serve a large circular city. The only thing worse than a subway is a above-ground fixed rail system, e.g. trolleys. People who lived during the era of the Red Car recognized that they were a lethal menace and a serious interference with efficient transportation. That's why we tore up the tracks -- there was no General Motors conspiracy.

If you want less traffic, reduce population density. If you want to stop ever worst traffic nightmares, outlaw any increased in population density and all mixed-use projects.

CarterRubin

@dennisjromero Important to remember that trips to work are 1/5 of all trips. So walking to shops instead of driving could play a role too.

abramsrl

@CarterRubin OK, you walk from East LA to the Beverly and Rodeo, to the 3rd Street Promenade, to the Glendale Galleria. Oh, what's that? Los mexicanos tienen que stay in their own barrios and not have access to the rest of the city. Nice idea, i.e. poor people as Urban Serfs. Welcome to the year 1195.