Identification, cost evaluation, and prioritization of urban traffic congestions and their origin

Abstract:

With:

Yoav Lerman, Planet Urban Consultancy

Lior Steinberg, Humankind

Adir Cohen, Department of Geography and Environmental Development, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

In recent years Israel's Ministry of Transportation (MOT) had declared a change in emphasis in policy and budgeting intended to "flip the pyramid" of policy priorities. From an absolute precedence to private automobile's movement and parking needs, to an emphasis on pedestrian and non-motorized modes of travel safety and accessibility. The work presented here was commissioned by Netivei Ayalon, one of the public companies used by MOT to carry out its policies. Having started with a mandate to develop a policy paper for car-free cities, we quickly realized that a much better expression of the policy would be to define cities as primarily pedestrian oriented, where motorized vehicles are allowed and tolerated under certain conditions. Using an extensive literature review and examples from the world, we defined a tool kit for pedestrian oriented urbanism at three levels of scale: the urban region, city and urbanized areas, and local places. We further developed parameters for application of the various tools in the extremely varied Israeli urban contexts, and completed the work by suggesting implementation strategies at the ministry (MOT) and city levels as well as NGO or citizen group initiatives. We present HaShalom Interchange as an example of the significance of considering the entire road network simultaneously and not analyzing traffic congestion at the local level. i.e., a single or a few adjacent junctions. We demonstrate that by solving the traffic congestion based on the analysis of individual junctions, one can miss the real bottlenecks that have the most significant effect on the overall road network.