Does Transit Provide Congestion Relief?

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Whenever I've been in traffic in Highway 26 heading into Portland, I wondered weather the blue Max line provided congestion relief  on the highway. I would ask myself this because the amount of congestion that would occur on 26 during those peak hours is a nightmare. I start to feel irritable and short tempered and whenever I saw the blue Max line zoom on by, I become envious of those Max riders. For this week blog, I've decided to read the Access article titled Subways, Strikes and Slowdowns in hopes that it would help me understand how effective Portland's Max line is to congestion relief during peak hours.

  The Access article is written by Michael L. Anderson who is an associate professor at the University of California. He too was wondering if LA's public transit system provided congestion relief. He was able to conduct a research project where he collected data on freeway speeds during the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority strike that occurred in 2003. This workers strike created a complete shutdown to several bus lines and rail lines for a week. Before Anderson could calculate congestion relief, he first had to quantify the effects of the shut down on the freeways. With data freeway speed data already collected before the strike, he reported that the travel delay average was 0.4 minutes per mile. When the strike occurred the travel delay went up to 0.6 minutes per mile. That's a big jump!It was clear the the workers strike had an effect on congestion.




What are the costs benefits of congestion relief from transit? Anderson states that the hours spent in congested freeways in LA during peak hours is 0.19 minutes if delay per mile traveled. Anderson then states, "If time is valued at the half the average hourly wage, or $10.30 for Los Angeles County, transit yields an annual congestion-relief benefit of $1.2 billion per year." What Anderson ultimately found in the research is that the private benefits for transit raiders was small in compared to the much larger benefit for freeway congestion relief. Anderson provides his finding in a chart that can be see here.

Based on this information, I can understand that the Portland's blue Max line does hold an amount of value for congestion relief during peak hours. Now I wonder if any of my classmates have any information regarding the effectiveness of the Portland's blue Max line.

Edited by: Jensen Perrick

Work cited:
Anderson, L. Michael. 2017. "Subways, Strikes, and Slowdowns." AccessMagazine. http://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2017/subways-strikes-and-slowdowns/

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