To help understand the issue in the linked article I will give the following analogy: Let’s us say you own a restaurant where the air quality is a problem due to smokers. Well the solution should be obvious… put in more tables for smokers and hire more staff to service smokers to get them in and out of the restaurant a lot faster and make the non-smokers wait as they don’t cause any problems hanging around.
Sounds absurd right? But this is exactly the kind of thinking that drives the bulk of our transportation dollars. See the the link after the fold.
https://streetsblog.net/2010/09/30/how-flawed-outdated-formulas-lead-down-the-road-to-sprawl
NOTE:
The Travel Time Index is the ratio of travel time in the peak period to the travel time at free-flow conditions. A value of 1.35 indicates a 20 minute free-flow trip takes 27 minutes in the peak.oldId.20101002125543892
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Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?
Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better.
From https://www.streetsblog.org/2010/09/29/report-want-to-ease-commuter-pain-highways-and-sprawl-wont-help/