Everyone hates traffic, and you probably think you have it pretty bad where you live. But unless you’re living in Mumbai or Bogotá, you don’t have it as bad as those of us in Lima, Peru. So quit your complaining and read on to see how planning and infrastructure can make or break a city!
The Situation
The traffic in Lima is bad. Really bad. As in 3rd-worst-city-in-the-world bad. Worse than Mexico City, worse than Jakarta, and worse than New Delhi.
It’s bad.
Dutch GPS giant TomTom’s latest Traffic Index report has Lima rounding out the top three cities with the worst traffic congestion in the world. The word congestion here is key. What’s being measured and compared is not total hours spent behind the wheel, but specifically time spent behind the wheel due to traffic. In other words, the time difference between a theoretical trip from point A to point B with no traffic whatsoever and that same trip undertaken in real-life traffic conditions. Congestion levels are then expressed as a percentage, with 0% congestion representing a traffic-less journey, and percentages above 0 representing the extra time required to complete a journey with traffic. The higher the percentage, the longer the amount of time required to complete a trip in comparison to the baseline no-traffic 0%. In this particular study, the data under investigation was compiled from vehicle and cell phone GPS units all over the globe. Here’s a summary of the findings:
Lima’s 58% congestion score means that a trip that would last half an hour with no traffic in practice takes 58% longer—a little over forty seven minutes—and that what should be a one hour trip would in fact end up taking an hour and thirty five minutes.
And keep in mind that the scores in the table above are averages. Congestion will almost certainly be significantly less in the middle of the night, therefore. But the flip side of the equation is that it is also significantly worse at key times of the day. Morning rush hour congestion rises to 88% (with a theoretically half hour commute taking just shy of an hour), while your evening ride home will have you sitting, likely at a standstill, on roads collapsed under a whopping 104% congestion. That level of traffic congestion turns a straightforward one-hour commute into a 122-minute seat-warming marathon.
It’s also important (read: highly worrisome) to note that while congestion in most of the top ten worst traffic cities is improving slightly compared to years past, Lima is one of only three that is getting worse, and it’s getting more worse, more quickly, than the others:
The Problem
So what’s the big deal? I mean, no one likes sitting in traffic, but doesn’t all this fuss over a simple fact of modern life we all struggle with amount to little more than exaggerated self-pity and collective whining?
Well, actually . . . no.
Long lines of idling cars triggers a near-instant worsening of local air quality, not to mention contributing in the aggregate to rising CO2 levels the planet can ill afford. Spending hours in rush-hour jams also impacts personal health, first by increasing our exposure to noxious exhaust fumes, and secondly because of both the detrimental effects of sitting for extended periods of time and the cumulative effect of stress (and yes, traffic stress counts as stress!) on the body and mind in the long term.
Additionally, a citizenry’s time lost to traffic holds back economic development. And not just in some sort of loftily detached, hollow, numbers-on-a-spreadsheet sense, either. But in a very tangible manner that affects regular people’s lives and prospects in important ways. Let’s get a few numbers out of the way first, to understand the scale of the issue:
In the case of Peru, the capital city’s horrible traffic generates a shocking twenty billion dollars annually in economic losses, according to a recent report authored by the Lima city government’s Office for the Promotion of Private Investment (Gerencia de Promoción de la Inversión Privada). This same report also explains that residents can expect to spend a considerable chunk of their income on transportation—up to 25% in many cases!
Now let’s give some more practical or intuitive examples of the economic consequences of bad traffic.
People spending so much time traveling from place to place may end up working fewer hours. Those working for hourly wages will therefore take home less pay. If they pay for their own gas or take cabs, Ubers, or the like, they’ll spend more money getting around when their trips take longer. They’ll also spend less time with their families—less time caring for elderly relatives, less time helping children with homework, etc. This is not only isolating, putting a strain on family bonding, in many cases it forces people to spend more money on household help as a result (although this does have the positive effect of creating more work for domestic laborers, as will be very plain to anyone who has ever lived in Peru). Increased health problems will not only affect people’s comfort, it will affect their pocketbooks in the medium and long-term as issues deriving from long hours spent in traffic begin to require treatment. Beyond households, goods take a longer time to be transported from place to place and can become more easily damaged when road quality is poor. Localized shortages can arise when large deliveries cannot make it through, across, or around cities in a timely fashion, and shops have less to sell. Accidents, which cost money and lives, become more likely, first with huge amounts of regular vehicles circulating and their drivers getting tired and/or irritable, and then with the addition of semis and other large trucks on the roads mixing in with general traffic. Roads and other elements of transportation infrastructure can literally buckle (or crack, or crumble, or rust, etc.) under the strain of such large amounts of vehicles and will then require repairs, which cost money, more frequently. And on and on and on.
In contrast, in a country like Spain (where I have also lived, for over a decade), public transportation is clean, safe, and comfortable and covers a huge portion of the urban and even portions of the suburban populations, there exists a strongly rooted culture of walking places when you can, and public infrastructure is continually being updated and added. As a consequence, citizens enjoy longer lives, improved quality of life, and have more time for leisure activities, family, and friends, as well as for professional, entrepreneurial, investigative, and other pursuits. In short, with the help of good transportation planning and infrastructure, cities can be more pleasant, more flexible, and more economically dynamic.
seeking Solutions
What can be done to alleviate bad traffic and all its negative effects? Fortunately, lots!
Maintaining good road quality is an obvious first step. A well-coordinated and adaptive, intelligent system of traffic lights is another. Depending on the city, closing certain areas to outside or through traffic has proven in several test cases (most notably London) to be a useful measure.
As for getting the semis out of commuter traffic, time limits on when transport companies can operate within city limits may be advisable. Restrictions on which streets they can circulate on in the first place are a must. Ring roads and bypasses may need to be built or expanded to accommodate long-distance travel that would otherwise be forced through cities.
Of the utmost importance: more money needs to be allocated to creating and/or expanding public transportion options. Many cities (including Lima) have very little to no metro service, for instance, and many more cities’ public bus situation is a disaster. Good public transportation is a clear case of “if you build it, they will come.” So it needs to be built, and built well.
Simultaneously, especially in unruly megapolises, there needs to be well designed (not only efficient but also inclusive) and enforced regulation of private transportation. As Lima’s case makes clear, black-market transportation options will spring up if sanctioned modes of transportation are insufficient to cover city-dwellers’ needs. These options will tend to be less safe and more polluting than regulated vehicles, and they will contribute nothing to public coffers (that could then turn money back over into public traffic initiatives), because they don’t pay taxes.
Infrastructure is another key area that demands to be taken seriously. There need to be more and/or better placed overpasses, tunnels, metro and light rail systems . . . Zero-emissions public transport fleets are highly recommended as an easy way to both create green jobs and avoid dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Financial and social incentives designed to encourage the use of environmentally sustainable private transportation should also be created and/or continued.
Along with these considerations, structural changes in society will inevitably need to be pursued. These longer-term shifts may include: Public service campaigns to promote more sustainable habits such as walking or biking where possible and carpooling and/or public transportation for longer distances; engineering increased economic opportunities and dynamism outside of major cities to avoid urban overcrowding; encouraging and making it possible for parts of the workforce, in those sectors where feasible, to work from home; exploring the possibility of further decentralizing giant companies not just through the use of multiple headquarters in different cities, but by maintaining a constellation of smaller satellite offices or shared workspaces throughout larger cities. Eventually, universal basic income plans and increasing workplace automation in some sectors may make it possible for more people to cut out a certain number of work hours or days entirely, reducing overall traffic volume despite an ever-growing population.
Over to you
So how would you improve or eliminate traffic in your city? What obvious fixes would you put in place tomorrow if you woke up and found yourself suddenly in control of the city council and its budget? What utopic visions do you have for the traffic flows of your hometown? Do you dream of a pothole-free future? Self-driving commuter fleets? Neighborhood bike collectives? Glittering multi-tiered tunnels? Flying cars? Hover skateboards with their own dedicated lanes? A network of rooftop pedestrian rope bridges stretching for block after skyscraper-filled block?
Share all your great ideas—from your purely mundane little tweaks to your fantastically pie-in-the-sky overhauls—in the comments section below. It’s like backseat driving—but for the whole city!