Local traffic reports in Houston, Texas from Click 2 Houston and KPRC.View traffic maps and get the latest road conditions for the Houston, Texas area.Traffic conditions and more in Houston. Check out our webcams from the live cam in Orlando overlooking the famous Universal Studios Theme Park, EPCOT's fireworks, Downtown Disney "Characters in Flight" balloon, a quiet Winter. 2.4.2.2.2 Traffic. Traffic congestion on roads and streets or so-called traffic due to its direct impact on people's living standards is one of the major problems of metropolitan areas [44], which is of particular concern to urban planners. Some people think that in order to solve traffic and transportation problems, people should be encouraged to live in the suburbs or in the countryside rather than in the cities. To what extent do you agree or disagree? v.9 Traffic congestion is one of the major problems in most of the metropolitan cities. Many people say that the solution Over the last century, our cities faced unprecedented growth of traffic congestion and as a result of this, we encounter a litany of environmental pollutions. Some experts believe that the rising cost of petrol is the best way to tackle these problems. I firmly believe that there is a defensible basis for this argument. Proton pump: Proton pump is the important cycle primary active transport.It enhances the transportation of H+ ions mainly in stomach. It usually takes place in mitochondrial cell. Active transportation includes walking, biking, and rolling (mobility devices, skateboards, scooters, etc.).The primary purpose of this Plan is to promote and encourage people to choose walking, biking, and rolling Vay Tiền Nhanh. Is a traffic tax the solution to congestion in cities? Not necessarily, according to research from Wharton real estate professor Gilles Duranton. He recently spoke to Knowledge at Wharton about the findings of his study, which is being funded by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge at Wharton Could you start by telling us about your research? Gilles Duranton My research interest is in congestion because we all perceive that congestion, when we live in large cities, is a big problem in our life, right? It prevents us from going places when we want to. It is making our commutes longer than perhaps they need to be. In time use surveys, when we ask people what is the thing that they dislike the most in their life, they usually mention congestion as number one. Perhaps surprisingly, they mention childcare together with household chores as number two. To assess the social cost of congestion, I looked at one particular city, Bogota, Colombia. I chose Bogota because I think we know far less about congestion in developing countries where it may be an even bigger problem than in developed nations. The way I think about the problem is the following When you take your car and ride, you pay a time cost. One component of it is the time cost of going from one place to another without traffic. Then, there’s the traffic of others that slows you down. But you also slow down everybody else. So there is a difference between how much you pay — what is the time you spend while traveling, which is your private cost of going places — relative to actually how much you cost to society by imposing more congestion on others. So, the others are imposing some congestion on you but you impose some congestion on others. [Since we think that more travelers cause travel costs to increase, the cost we impose on others is larger than the cost they impose on us.] To quantify these costs, I start with data from an actual travel survey. I need to know where people go. On the supply side, I’m interested in how much slower traffic gets as you have more drivers. I’m trying to compute that quantity first. That allows me to infer both the private and the social cost of driving. “The social cost of congestion is much smaller than we think.” Of course, I am not looking at all the downsides from traffic. You also have really important issues such as pollution, accidents, and so on and so forth. But I’m only interested in congestion. That’s what I can measure, so that’s what I do. [This said, I only look at forms of transportation that take place on roads — cars, taxi, and small buses — but ignore large buses with rights of way since the congestion for that form of transit is different.] On the demand side, I also need to know how much people pay for their travel in terms of time, when they choose to travel. But in order to know about that demand, I also need to know how much they would pay at times when they’re choosing not to travel. [In essence, I need to know at what price people buy transportation when they buy it and what the price is when they choose not to buy.] In order to get those counterfactuals, I’m scraping data from Google maps. At the end of the day, what I find is that the demand for travel is mildly elastic. I think this is the first estimate in the literature, so hopefully that’s useful even though this first finding is not that surprising. But what is more surprising is what I find on the supply side. The wedge between the social cost of traveling and its private cost is actually far less than what we suspected, in the order of 5% to 20%, depending on the state of traffic. This is in contrast to the 100% or more that we were conjecturing before on the basis of studies of one particular road, or on the basis of some purely theoretical thinking. Knowledge at Wharton What were your key takeaways from this research? Duranton My key takeaway is that actually the social cost of congestion is much smaller than we think. I am not saying that traveling in large cities is easy. I’m just saying that the pure social cost of congestion is actually pretty small. [With a wedge of 5% to 20% between what we pay in time and what we impose on society, an optimal situation would not be that different from the one we currently observe. An optimal congestion tax would reduce traffic, but not that much. There is huge demand for travel, especially at peak hours. Yes, we could make traffic extremely fluid at all times by drastically reducing the number of travelers but that would be socially unproductive given that demand would no longer be served.] All that means is that for a city like Bogota, and maybe for other cities, we may want to think beyond just curbing congestion by imposing a congestion charge. This is still a meaningful idea but perhaps not the game changer we thought it could be. At the same time, maybe the real issues behind slow traffic are elsewhere. We may want to be thinking about how much roadway should cities provide and what sorts of transportation mode choices we want to give to people, whether it should actually be private vehicles or more public transit, or a mixture of the two [and in which proportion]. We also want to pay more attention to whether and how we should manage traffic, in terms of coordinating red lights. So, some of the big issues seem to be about the nitty-gritty of traffic management, beyond trying to curb demand. Knowledge at Wharton Did any conclusion surprise you? Duranton The size of the social cost of congestion is much smaller than I expected. It’s also much smaller than everybody else expected, who are interested in transportation. As a result, I’m getting people who [are showing] slight disbelief. At the same time, I think my findings are completely reasonable. The speed of traffic at the worst hours is only about half what it is at the best hours of the day despite the number of travelers being higher by a full order of magnitude. That suggests a wedge between private and social costs of perhaps 10%. When you do, in technical terms, your “triangle” of welfare loss, you have a small wedge, multiplied by a small quantity divided by two, because that’s a triangle. It’s going to be at most 1% of the daily income that we actually lose in pure congestion. So, what’s the problem? Again, there is strong demand, people want to travel and there’s only limited capacity for them to do so. That makes travel costly. But the pure external effect element is not that large. Knowledge at Wharton What are the practical implications of your research? What can other large cities do with this information? Duranton Actually, I’m revising, again, my judgment about how much of a priority should [be given to] charging for congestion. Like most economists, I thought, “OK, that’s what we need to do. That’s the beginning and the end of everything, about urban traffic.” I still think it’s an important idea and we should be thinking about that. But I now also think we should be thinking more seriously about how much roadway provision we have in developing cities like Bogota, actually, where the roadway may be grossly insufficient. Imposing a congestion charge “is still a meaningful idea but perhaps not the game changer we thought it could be.” We should also be thinking about traffic management very seriously, much more seriously than we’ve been doing so. [Urban planners, economists, and locally elected officials often make fun of traffic engineers who live to maximize throughput congestion at intersections. While there is a self-defeating element to this mission since better traffic begets new traffic, we should take this more seriously and join this up with other elements of urban transportation policy.] Knowledge at Wharton What sets your research apart from prior work in this area? Duranton There’s really not much prior work on congestion that actually looks at congestion rather than speculate about it. You are going to tell me “You must be kidding.” What people have done previously was measure things at the level of one particular road, or a set of segments on a road, or a small number of roads. It is deeply problematic to do that because on a road, when you keep adding cars, at some point traffic will stop, right? In an entire city, it’s a very different proposition because what happens somewhere has an effect on what happens elsewhere. It’s a network — things spill over — and we need to think about this network in its entirety. In particular, when the highway is clogged, people will start using main arterials. When the main arterials are clogged, people will start using secondary arterials, etc. It means … there are nearly always more options for going places. This essentially puts a floor [on] travel speed. Local roads are going to be slower; they’re not going to be practical. That may have some negative implications in neighborhoods, but people will start using them. It means barely ever will traffic come to a complete standstill in an entire area. Again, it can happen when there’s an accident on a particular road. But it normally does not happen. Knowledge at Wharton How will you follow up this research? Duranton What we did here was to work on only one city, where we had a lot of precise information. What I want to do now is actually work on all major cities of the world. We started collecting data for about 150 large cities in India and we want to generalize that to 4,000 to 5,000 cities all over the world so that we can actually look at travel behavior and the ease of travel, and the ease of reaching some particular destinations such as schools, train stations, or hospitals in cities of the world. Then, the objective will be to assess the determinants of these measures of mobility and accessibility such as the level of advancement of the country, the amount of roadway, particular policies, and all these things. Knowledge at Wharton How do you foresee innovations in vehicle technologies reshaping our cities based on your research? Duranton The first point is that self-driving cars, or whatever you may want to call them, they are coming, and they’re coming reasonably soon. The first big issue is, at some point we’ll need to get rid of the steering wheel, which is a big discrete change relative to what our cars are currently. This change, which is technically possible, may not go all that smoothly. [Google is betting on that radical change, but car producers want something gradual. There will be a huge regulatory fight at some point in the future.] But I think within 10, 20 years, that will happen. So the first thing that self-driving cars will do will be to lower the time cost of travel. Not because it will go that much faster. Actually, they will probably be slower. But we can do lots of other things while traveling instead of driving. “Self-driving cars will … lower the time cost of travel. … We can do lots of other things while traveling instead of driving.” Actually, when we try to estimate the costs of travel, a large fraction of that cost, with 50% to 90% depending on your income, will be your time. Now this time can be used productively, instead of just driving and paying attention to traffic. You can actually do work, watch movies, and do all sorts of things. It means that actually, the time cost of driving will be far less. So when we look at what is the propensity of people to travel depending on how costly it is to travel, we can only guess that people will want to travel more — and perhaps a lot more. Maybe 50% more, maybe 100% more. We’re talking possibly about a lot more driving, which means that people will probably be willing to come to work from much further away. I do suspect that indeed, there will be a big movement of suburbanization that will go even much further than anything we’ve seen. Some people are deeply worried about that. That’s clearly a distinct possibility with this new technology. This new technology will reduce the cost per mile. What you’re also going to reduce is the necessity to park, to go and reach your car, and so on and so forth — all what we can call the fixed cost of driving. In that case, that will mostly benefit people that actually pay high fixed costs per trip. These are people who live in dense urban environments, where finding parking is difficult, where accessing your car is difficult. These people also will gain a lot. They will start sharing cars. Indeed, cars will start showing up exactly where you are more or less when you want them to show up. One estimate says that we spend about 30% of our time when driving in the center of cities looking for parking. This will disappear. So that will also be a big gain. It means that city center living will also become more attractive. It’s unclear which one will gain most. But I think we will see both at the same time more suburban development really far away, but also greater attractiveness of city centers at the same time. Knowledge at Wharton How do you think self-driving technology will impact congestion in major urban centers? Duranton I think self-driving cars will actually impact major urban centers in lots of ways. What’s going to happen is that self-driving cars will be much more agile at going through intersections. Road capacity will increase a lot — the distance between any two cars, which these days is about to two seconds — can be dramatically reduced. Self-driving cars can travel really close to each other. This means that road capacity will be tremendously increased, perhaps by a factor of four or five, and on highways, maybe 10. It means that we may actually need, in the end, less roadway, even though I think traffic will increase a lot, but not in those proportions. It means that congestion may become a thing of the past at some point, which would be great, of course. We may also have very different cities in terms of layout. If everybody has a self-driving car — and that will happen at some point. Maybe not 15 years from now, but 30 or 40 years from now — we will no longer need traffic signals and so on and so forth. We may not even need sidewalks. We may actually be in for much more pleasant urban environments. How much time is wasted on traffic? It’s the time spent hitting your brakes, as you wonder why this spot on the freeway always comes to a screeching halt. It’s the time spent inching forward, as you crawl along the gridlocked road ahead. It’s the time spent sitting, as you frustratingly question how the traffic jam even are the causes of this phenomenon linked to stress, higher blood pressure and weight gain? We take a look in this also How autonomous driving will change our highways and citiesWhat are GPS jammers and how do you combat them?Types of congestionThere are two overall types of traffic congestion, according to the Department of Transportation recurring and non-recurring. The DOT states that about half of traffic congestion is the recurring kind, which happens daily and is due to a lack of capacity on the road — or in other words, there are more vehicles travelling at a given time than can physically fit. The other type of congestion, non-recurring, is what the DOT calls “temporary disruptions” in travel, such as bad weather or a vehicle these two types of traffic congestion, we’ll look at four more specific categoriesEnvironment non-recurringMechanical non-recurringHuman non-recurringInfrastructure recurringTaken together, these reasons account for why city-dwellers are likely to see what should be a 30-minute commute turn into a 45-minute EnvironmentA study by Dr. Jean Andrey and Daniel Unrau found that traffic collisions increase by around 50 percent during snow and rain. From rainy or foggy weather, to the extreme snowstorm that stops drivers in their tracks, weather has an uncontrollable effect on not just traffic but road conditions as well. Even a gentle rain can make an impact if all drivers slow down more serious such as a sudden mudslide could not only stop traffic but cause a collision if a driver happens to be in the wrong muddy place at the wrong muddy time. This is an example of how weather can have a compounding effect on traffic by creating bad situations, or by making already bad traffic situations even in all, bad weather is the main culprit in 15% of traffic congestion cases, according to the how you can protect your fleet from winter weather with a smart in-cab weather MechanicalAnother factor that can cause traffic congestion is the case of a mechanical failing. While arguably a mechanical failing could fall into a human-caused category, such as if the person failed to properly maintain the vehicle’s tires, this is not always the case. Mechanical failings can also happen due to external factors such as a sharp object on the road, and can happen suddenly while driving, even if you just had your vehicle humans can help prevent and decrease mechanical issues by inspecting vehicles before every trip and making sure preventive maintenance cycles are followed, either way, these issues require the driver to get off the road. When you’re on a five-lane highway, this task can prove difficult. When other drivers rush to get around the stopped vehicle, it only further drags out the impact on traffic as drivers merge into surrounding lanes instead of stopping to let the person quickly get to the while in some scenarios a driver may have been able to prevent the issue, even some of the most seasoned and responsible drivers can find themselves in these HumanThe all-too-common cause of traffic is humans. From distracted or drunk driving to drowsy driving or emotional driving, there are many dangerous scenarios — even with our opposable thumbs and large frontal lobes — that humans trigger on the road. Just taking a quick look at some 2016 traffic fatality statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gives a plain view at the chaos our decisions can cause on the roadThere were 29 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities per day. This number has been steadily increasing over the last few the passenger car segment, 21% of drivers involved in a fatal collision had a blood alcohol content of .08 or accidents accounted for 27% of 2016 NHTSA report also found that distracted driving and drowsy driving declined compared to 2015. While distracted driving might not be causing as many fatalities, it is an area where driver behavior can impact traffic on a regular basis. Consider this — in a AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety study on the brain’s cognitive load during driving, it takes an average of 27 seconds for the driver to become completely focused on driving Traffic Jams It’s unsurprising then that drivers end up making quick decisions and engage in behaviors like last-minute braking. Once a driver slams on the brake because he or she was distracted, a ripple effect begins. Depending on other traffic conditions, this one mistake in braking could slow traffic in that lane and surrounding lanes for hours. This is what’s referred to as phantom traffic jams because as drivers get through the sluggish spot, it will seem as though absolutely nothing had caused the slowdown. Researchers describe it as the same ripple effect that a bomb the Geotab report Predicting traffic congestion with driving behaviorThe even-worse situation is when that last-minute braking scenario turns into a fender bender. Again, that time getting off the road causes even more residual traffic, especially when “rubbernecking” is the truth is that much of the congestion caused by humans is due to a much simpler reason than any of those listed above — driver training. Many of our fleet readers who have gone through driver training programs likely agree. To get a license, a driver must show an understanding of the rules of the road, not necessarily how to best merge onto a freeway or use the accelerator instead of last-minute braking to deal with stop-and-go traffic. If all drivers went through the training and fleet safety coaching that many fleet drivers do, it’s arguable that some traffic congestion could be InfrastructureAnother category that could also arguably be human-caused is infrastructure. However, while humans created it, infrastructure is so vast and the world around it changing so rapidly, that’s it’s not necessarily the fault of engineers who didn’t foresee the demands which would be put on roads at exponential rates. From potholes that cause slowdowns to bottlenecks in areas that out-populated their roadways, infrastructure is the hidden troll that amplifies traffic problems in many urban and suburban alone account for 40% of traffic congestion causes, according to the DOT. Ironically, in our efforts to improve infrastructure, construction also causes 10% of also Podcast Smart Cities and data-driven trafficGetting control of the causesWhile environmental factors are outside of our control, technology provides some hope in solving the traffic challenges. Autonomous vehicle technology has the potential to mitigate human error, smart traffic signals can intuitively keep roads moving, and smart traffic corridors could end that phantom traffic once and for all. Our blood pressure could certainly use the optimization Plan deliveries better with traffic modeling6 Road crash statistics you shouldn’t ignore7 Smart City solutions to reduce traffic congestion Some people think that in order to solve traffic and transportation problem people should be encouraged to live in cities rather than in suburb or in the countryside. To what extent do you agree or disagree?Here is a band IELTS essay on this topic written by one of our students. Need help with IELTS writing? Get your IELTS essays, letters and reports corrected by IELTS essay sampleTraffic congestion and transport issues are a major problem in all major cities. Some argue that people who travel to the city ought to be encouraged to reside in it to avoid long delays in commuting. Personally, I strongly disagree with this notion and believe that this would substantially increase property prices and cause cities to eventually expand begin with, cities are not equipped to cope with any increase in their population. They lack the infrastructure and space. Most metros have limited size. Even if a city is capable of accommodating its current population, problems will arise when that population increases. In Mumbai, for example, people are forced to live in the suburbs, because the central area of the city is too small to accommodate all of them. As a result, despite people wanting to live in the city, it is not practically possible for them. These suburbanites, then, have to travel to the city each morning to reach their since property prices in cities are already high, few people will be able to afford them and this will force them to move to suburbs. Actually, moving to suburbs and living in the countryside is not much different. In either case, people have to travel. Now if people manage to move to downtown, it will still not resolve the traffic issue. It will actually make it worse. Unless everyone can walk to work, any increase in the population of metros will only worsen traffic problems. Eventually, it would take hours for even a 10 minute’s commute. Therefore, these cities have to spread horizontally and people have to commute to the city for work or recreational purposes leading to traffic conclusion, while encouraging people to reside in cities seems like an easy solution to avoid traffic and public transport issues, it is practically not possible due to high property prices in urban areas and the limited size of the cities.

people think that traffic congestion