Kyle Piira

Tag: city planning

  • The Toll No One Charges but Everyone Pays

    When you drive on a busy road, you always pay a price. The real question is how you pay it, with money or with time.

    In most of the United States, we have chosen to charge drivers in time. There is no toll for entering a congested road, but during peak hours you might spend an hour commuting when the same trip would take 20 minutes with no traffic. Because there is no monetary cost, the time price people are willing to tolerate rises dramatically, and congestion becomes the norm.

    The problem with using time as the cost is that it creates bad incentives, especially around carpooling.

    Imagine two people traveling from the same neighborhood to the same restaurant across town. They could drive separately or share a car. If traffic makes the trip take an hour either way, there is no time savings from sharing. Each person still loses an hour. Given that, many people will choose separate cars so they can control their own music, podcasts, or comfort. Time-based pricing gives no reward for reducing the number of vehicles on the road.

    Now consider the same trip with congestion pricing. Suppose there is a $10 toll, and as a result traffic flows freely and the trip takes 20 minutes. If the two people drive separately, they pay $20 total. If they share one car, they pay $10 total, or just $5 per person. Suddenly, carpooling has a clear, direct benefit.

    That incentive scales. Larger groups are pushed toward higher-capacity vehicles like buses and trains, where the toll cost per person becomes almost negligible. A $10 toll split among 20 bus riders is just 50 cents each. At that point, the toll barely matters, especially if it is offset by fares.

    Once pooling becomes economically attractive, this also opens the door to entirely new transportation options. Private bus services, pooled taxi services, and on-demand shuttles become much more viable in a congestion-priced world. When the road cost is shared across many riders and travel times are predictable, these services can compete effectively with private cars while offering convenience and flexibility that traditional public transit may not always provide.

    This shift matters because traffic engineers should not be optimizing for the number of cars moved on a road. They should be optimizing for the number of people. Congestion pricing encourages fewer vehicles to carry more people, which reduces traffic and moves everyone faster.

    There are secondary benefits too. Revenue from congestion pricing can fund better public transportation, improving affordability and access. Wealthier drivers can still choose to pay higher tolls to use private cars during rush hour, as long as traffic keeps flowing and high-capacity vehicles are not stuck.

    In fact, if congestion pricing truly eliminates traffic, some dedicated bus lanes may become less necessary. Their primary purpose is to help buses avoid congestion. If congestion disappears for everyone, the system becomes simpler and more flexible, even on roads where bus lanes are not feasible.

    In short, you pay the cost of driving either way. Making that cost monetary instead of temporal creates far better incentives, rewards efficient behavior, and allows cities to move more people in less time.

  • Rethinking Fault: Are City Planners to Blame for Car Crashes?

    We like to think of car crashes as the fault of individual drivers. Someone was distracted, drunk, careless, or reckless. But I don’t think that’s the full story. I think the real blame belongs to the people who designed the cities that make driving the only option in the first place.

    City planners and traffic engineers know that not everyone is good at driving. They know that some people have medical conditions, slower reflexes, or just aren’t equipped to operate heavy machinery safely. They know this, and yet they’ve built entire societies around the assumption that everyone can and must drive a car.

    So when someone who’s not a great driver gets into a car and causes an accident, who is really at fault? Is it the person who made a mistake, or the people who designed a city where that person had no choice but to drive?

    If you’ve created a system where the only way to get to work, school, or the grocery store is to operate a two-ton machine at highway speeds, knowing full well that not everyone can do that safely, then you are responsible for what happens next. You can’t act surprised when the predictable becomes reality.

    Even “safe” roads in America are not truly safe. Engineers brag about wide lanes, big medians, guardrails, and bright signage. They call it “forgiving design.” But you can’t “forgive” the fact that every trip still requires people to pilot deadly machinery at lethal speeds.

    Every hour of every day, someone dies in a car crash. And we call them “accidents,” as if they were random or unavoidable. But they’re not random. They’re built into the design. The engineers who made these roads could tell you exactly how many people will die on them each year. They run those models. They know the numbers. And they build them anyway.

    Drunk driving is the perfect example of how our urban design fails us. Nobody is saying people should drink and drive. But when it’s common, that’s a symptom of terrible planning.

    If someone wants to have a few drinks, they should be able to do that without risking their life or anyone else’s. In most American cities, that’s not possible. You drive to the bar because there’s no other option. You can’t walk because there’s no sidewalk. You can’t take a bus because it either doesn’t exist or stops running early in the evening. You could take an Uber, but that’s expensive. So people rationalize. “I’ve only had one or two. I’ll be fine.”

    And here’s the kicker: cities require bars to have parking lots. They literally make it illegal to open a bar without providing a place for people to park their cars. They are mandating a system that encourages drinking and driving. Then they turn around and lecture us not to do it. It’s absurd.

    Meanwhile, in Europe, you can walk to a bar. You can take a tram home. You can go out, drink, and get home safely. The safe option is also the convenient one. In America, the safe option barely exists.

    Here, if you don’t want to drive, you’re out of luck. You either pay for expensive rideshares or risk walking along a strode with no sidewalk. So people drive, even when they shouldn’t. And when something goes wrong, we blame them.

    But the truth is, most of these “bad drivers” are just doing what the system forces them to do. They’re acting rationally inside a setup that makes the rational thing dangerous.

    Traffic engineers like to say they’re just following orders. “The city told us to widen the road, so we widened it.” But that’s not good enough. If someone told them to build a bridge they knew would collapse, would they do it? Would they sign off on something they knew would get people killed?

    Of course not. Yet they do it all the time with roads. They sign off on stroads that they know will lead to hundreds of deaths a year. They approve designs that make walking, biking, and transit impossible. They don’t want to kill anyone, but they don’t care enough to stop. And that indifference is deadly.

    When someone dies in a car crash, we talk about personal responsibility. But we almost never talk about the people who built the environment that made that crash inevitable.

    Drivers might hold the steering wheel, but it’s the planners and engineers who paved the road, set the speed limits, banned mixed-use zoning, and made driving mandatory. The blood isn’t only on the drivers’ hands. It’s on the people who built a system that forces everyone to do something dangerous just to live their lives.

    If we actually want to stop the death and destruction, that’s where we need to start looking.