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To Mayor Peter Carlisle and all 2012 candidates for mayor: If you haven’t noticed it, our congestion is getting worse. It’s clogging up our highways and economy. Rail is not the answer. What are you doing to deal with the congestion?
While our cars used to let us dash to every corner of Oahu, now congestion rules the day. We sit locked powerless in a world of flash-jam with our only escape being the radio and, for a bold few, the phone. This is not acceptable.
Enter the nonprofit "Code for America." Its designers and programmers help cities all over the country. Three of them recently came from San Francisco to help with applications for the city. The first thing they do is talk with people to find out what apps would be best for that city. Then they code.
There are many apps they could code, but how about some apps to address the congestion? That’s what we need, and we’d be grateful if they could help us do that. First up, they could build an app to calculate the costs of congestion.
Those costs are enormous. For example, 250,000 drivers stuck in traffic one hour a day for 200 days a year lose 50 million people-hours. Even at an hourly loss of $20, that’s $4,000 annually per driver or a total of $1 billion. This "hole-in-your-pocket" app could make these calculations and raise our awareness.
That app would then add the cost of wasted gas and oil and maintenance for that sea of cars, along with the losses suffered by employers, stockholders, tax revenues and the state economy. In our hearts we already know about these losses, but the app would tell us scientifically and be all the more troubling.
Los Angeles has developed the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system to reduce congestion. It uses 18,000 sensors and 400 cameras to gather traffic data. It processes that data every second to re-time 4,000 signal light cycles and keep traffic moving. It is not only automated, it’s adaptive.
As congestion builds, the system re-times the signals to stay green for congested lanes. It also builds a database of traffic patterns to adapt its analysis and avoid overreacting to a given jam. Driver travel times fall by 14 percent, and drivers make 20 to 30 percent fewer stops. This price of success is $150,000 per intersection.
In the last two years, Los Angeles has built 18 miles of bus-only lanes and 200 miles of bike lanes. When buses run late, the traffic signals stay green longer for them. When a bike approaches an intersection, sensors turn traffic signals to green.
Los Angeles developed the system software in-house and now licenses it to others. The city will sell a license for the complete "prediction and control" package for $75,000. That’s a small fraction of what an outside consultant would cost.
Los Angeles has turned its congestion liability into an asset. We need to buy the system or do even better and code our own. Maybe Code for America can help. Whatever it costs, it’ll be a whole lot less than $6 billion for rail.
Why sit at a light when there’s no cross traffic? An app can sense this and turn the light green. Of course, you need code to factor in the peculiarities of the streets, the weather and the time of day, but with Hawaii ingenuity and an adaptive system, that app could get better and better all on its own.
The bottlenecks in Waikiki are unforgettable. Cars can’t turn right because pedestrians are in the crosswalk. The light changes, and now pedestrians are in the other crosswalk. So the cars wait cycle after cycle, traffic stacking up. Add an app with a no-walk sign, and the bottleneck is gone for minimal cost.
You tackle a daunting challenge by breaking it down. Look at each part and see how apps can make it work better. With an app, a taxpayer could "adopt" an intersection and follow the traffic patterns to monitor improvements there.
You can vote your heart out on rail, but that’s not the real issue. Congestion is the elephant in the ballot box. We haven’t had any relief so far, so we need to vote for the candidate who has a solution, preferably tech. Maybe a "kick" app can reveal the candidates who just kick the congestion down the road.
This is America, the land of GPS on the planet of the apps. Apps can do anything we want, so let’s see what they can do for traffic.
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Jay Fidell, a longtime business lawyer, founded ThinkTech Hawaii, a digital media company that reports on Hawaii’s tech and energy sectors of the economy. Reach him at fidell@lava.net.
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