The theory of traffic

Compute if you can the total number of hours you’ve spent sitting in a traffic jam in the metropolitan Manila area from the time you first entered a moving vehicle to this day. Have you lost weeks, months, or years of your life to the daily monster? When we cite the major difficulties of living in this city, the traffic is a fixture on the list.

And what do we do when we’re stuck in traffic? We think about the traffic some more. Everyone has her own theory on the causes of Manila’s traffic jams: undisciplined motorists who violate road rules (or have no idea that there are rules); zombie jeepney drivers whose brains have long since been melted by the bass and treble of their stereos; inconsiderate bus drivers stopping in the middle of the street to disgorge and pick up passengers who for their part are consumed by a death wish; the “boundary” system which forces bus drivers to pick up every passenger they can regardless of the inconvenience to other motorists; the narrowness of city streets; overpopulation due to the absence of an official birth control policy; congestion due to mass migration to the city owing to the lack of opportunity in the provinces; the unavailability of good, efficient mass transport; and the sheer number of vehicles on the streets. Right?

Wrong, says Enrique Penalosa, who as mayor of Bogota, Colombia implemented “an environmentally and socially sustainable model which prioritizes public transport, public pedestrian spaces, and children’s happiness.” He is currently a senior international advisor to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York. Last Monday Penalosa gave a refreshingly candid talk on urban planning and development at a dinner organized by the Ayala Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

“What creates traffic jams is not the amount of cars,” he declares. “The amount of cars is only a small part of the problem. What causes traffic jams is the length of trips, and the amount of trips.”

First, he defined “a good city.” Simply put, it is a city where people want to be out of their houses, in public spaces. When shopping malls replace public spaces as meeting places for people, it is an indication that a city is sick. In developing countries, he adds, malls create environments for upper middle classes where they don’t have to see the poor.

“In a good city, you must be able to walk to buy milk or bread. If you have to get into a car to buy milk or bread it means the city is not well designed.

“What makes the difference between an advanced city and a backward city is not that it has flyovers or elevated highways or subways. What makes the difference is that upper-income people use public transport, use the sidewalks and parks. A good city is one with great sidewalks.”

Penalosa adds: “To the upper-middle class, the city is a threatening environment they have to pass through when moving from one private space to another. They leave home in a car. They can go for months without walking one block in the city. So they couldn’t care less if the cities have sidewalks or not. It’s the same all over the developing world.

“Upper-income people normally don’t need anything from government. They don’t go to public schools or hospitals or parks. All they want from the government is roads.”

And this makes the problem worse. “There is not one city in the world that has solved traffic jams by making bigger roads,” he points out.” Trying to solve traffic jams by making bigger roads is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. If you make bigger roads, people will take longer trips and more trips.

“There is no such thing as a natural level of car use in a city. How much space you want to give cars in your city is a political decision. The most valuable resource a society in a city has is road space,” he continues. “It is more important than gold or oil. So how does a democratic city distribute this road space between pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and cars? It’s not something a transport engineer that can decide for you. The bigger the sidewalks, the better the city tends to be.”

The only solution for mobility in large cities is mass transit. Good mass transit is low-cost and high-frequency; if you have to wait one hour for a ride home, the system isn’t working.

“There are two different problems with two different solutions,” the former mayor explains. “One is traffic jams, the other is mobility. Mobility is solved with public transport. But not even the best public transport will solve traffic jams. You can have a subway under every street and it will not solve traffic jams.

“The only way to reduce traffic jams is to restrict car use, but that’s different from having mobility.” Manila has three rail lines, he observes, and they don’t even move five percent of the population. “Upper-income people who have cars want railway systems not because they have the slightest intention of getting into a train, but because they want their poor people to get in them so their buses won’t take space away from their cars on the roads. But rails take huge amounts of money from government that could go to schools, hospitals, parks. Upper-income people don’t care because they don’t go to public schools, hospitals, parks anyway. The only thing they care about from government is roads. And some security, police, but basically roads.

“Manila will collapse,” Penalosa predicts. “Every year, Manila will have worse traffic jams. Say 100,000 more cars entered Manila last year. If each car takes 10 meters of road, then last year 1,000 kilometers of cars entered Manila. You can make as many roads as you want, but you will never make them fast enough for the cars.

“The suburbs outside Manila will create huge traffic jams. If someone who lives 10 blocks from work decides to live 20 blocks away and drives to work, it’s as if there is a new car in the city.

“Bus systems are the only possible solution,” he concludes. Yes, the same vehicles we blame for Metro Manila traffic.

“This is where Bogota is interesting to Manila,” Penalosa says. “Bogota was a mess, not as big as Manila but with seven million inhabitants.”

As mayor of Bogota, Penalosa launched the TransMilenio BRT, a bus system that operates exactly like a rail system. There are exclusive bus routes in the middle of the street. People pay when they enter a station. When the bus arrives every couple of minutes, the station doors open and people get out and get in exactly as they would in a train. Except that it’s a bus system.

It can go faster than a rail system. Trains have to stop at every station. Buses can use overpasses; there are express buses that stop every six or seven stations. And it’s attractive to car owners. People with cars take the bus system because they have to: it’s faster, and they don’t have to deal with parking restrictions for cars.

Today the BRT moves more passengers than 95 percent of rail systems in the world. “Public transport is not a goal in itself,” Penalosa notes. “To have public transport will not make you happy. It is necessary so you can have good cities, great sidewalks, physically-protected bicycle routes.

“I think we can make a city that is more humane and fun. Of course it is difficult and painful to change, but clearly we have to start by admitting that the city we have today is not really a fun city to be in.

“It’s very difficult politically. First you have to take space away from cars. Second, you have to deal with the jeepney operators. Politicians always want to be loved, they want to be the Sympathy Queens in beauty contests. But it is possible to organize a bus transit system in which a significant number of jeepney operators can become shareholders in the new bus operating company so that they continue to have a business. It is not possible to adapt to everybody. But there are wonderful things that can be done.”

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