Today we have a guest blog post from the theoretical physicist over at Gravity and Levity. Please show him some love with some comments!

Being stuck in traffic is frustrating in a way that few other things are.  Something about the helplessness of it makes us extremely irritable, and we become inclined to think that the people around us are idiots.  The guy who just cut you off, the lady talking on her cell phone with her blinker left on, the construction workers standing around and looking at a hole in the ground instead of actually fixing the road.  Everyone seems incompetent and unintelligent when you’re stuck in traffic.

Not uncommonly, this line of thinking extends to the people that decided how and where to build the roads.  Their (lack of) planning can seem like pure idiocy, and the solution for fixing the terrible gridlock can seem painfully obvious.

I understand this type of thinking all too well.  My very first job was in the heart of Washington DC, which meant that I spent about an hour and a half stuck in traffic every day.  And during that time I thought about traffic, how terrible it was, and how it should be a solved problem by now.  It seemed to me that after decades of intense mathematical research and super-powered computer simulations we should understand traffic.  After all, we know where people live, where they work, and when they work.  Why can’t we “solve” for the most efficient pattern of roads and intersections?  Why do the world’s most modern cities still suffer from terrible gridlock?

During the eight years since then, I have thought off and on about traffic from a scientific perspective.  And the more I think/read/hear about it, the more difficult it seems to understand.  In this post, I’ll give a few reasons for our continued inability to “figure out” traffic patterns.

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Went around the Maryland Parkway corridor in front of UNLV Sunday, to see what there is to see. What I saw was parking lots! And a new parking garage! Here is the front of the school:

And the new garage:

Peachy keen, the first thing people notice about the university is the impenetrable gravel and concrete moat.

A 2007 survey asked students about parking – only a handful mentioned better alternative transportation. But the questions were very much skewed to get student thinking about how bad parking is.

Instead of asking – how would you PREFER to get to school or WHERE on campus do you frequent the most, they asked “Where would you like better parking?”

The numbers are also highly skewed towards faculty and staff – about 53% faculty and staff in the study. Um, hello? There are almost 27,000 students and only 46% of the respondents were students?

My conclusion – we can’t do anything with this study. The information gleaned can only be used to address faculty and staff parking needs. The university can’t make adequate decisions about parking and transportation policy unless a better sampling is taken.

Secondly – does the university really want to be encased in parking garages and lots? To the outsider, it doesn’t look so much like a university so much as a strip mall. Take a look at this screen shot from a map done by Mark Skinner called Walkable UNLV. Notice all those “P”s for Parking? And that’s not even all of them!

While I’m working on a couple of stories, I thought I’d give you all a round-up of what’s going on in transit around the nation, world and interwebs.

• San Francisco is installing solar powered, wifi ready bus stops. For anyone who lives in Vegas, you know you want it too! Shade, solar powered shade, and wi-fi? It’s like paradise on a bench. via TreeHugger
  
• U.S. citizens have more cars per 1,000 than Canada, even though both nation’s transits aren’t all that great. Canada does cover less area (even though it’s bigger). Felix Salmon at Reuters speculates that it would take 14 years for the US to get down to Canadian levels – 563 vehicles per 1,000. via TreeHugger

• Only one percent of news media cover transportation issues, with urban sprawl coming in last on a list of “important issues” facing the nation, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report. At Ecostreets, that number is 99.9%. Just sayin’. via DC Bicycle Transportation Examiner
• Great article from Ryan at Streetsblog on the arrogance of Randal O’Toole at the Cato Institute for maligning transportation bill supporters. Basically, O’Toole thinks that trucks and cars shouldn’t have to pay for public transit, even though trucks and cars come nowhere near covering the costs of the roads.
• For fans of Parking Wars, The Bus Bench went out on their own to film notorious meter maid Jimmy Price’s dereliction of duty.
• Emmily over at Sin City Siren is having fun on her Hawai’i vacation, but can’t stay away from her blog for too long, hence her post about public transit on the tourist haven of Waikiki.

• Mystery solved: Sichuan Tenzhong Heavy Industrial Machiner Co is buying out HUMMER. Good riddance? via Green Car Congress
• NYC is going to make Times Square into a place for just feet, not wheels. via EcoLocalizer

A lot of hullabaloo is being made about a light rail system that would go down the Virginia Street corridor from Meadowood Mall to the university. The Reno-Gazette Journal reported this at the end of April along with another article detailing more bus route cuts, and I hope you take a look at my own homage to past bus routes lost. Also, a fellow J-school student created this map of bus route ridership and neighborhood economic background:

View Larger Map

RTC Washoe is looking at Portland, Ore. as a model because they built a 2.4 mile long stretch of streetcar tracks. Portland is a good model for all the reasons stated in the article (increased ridership, residential and commercial developments along the line) but Portland proper has half a million residents, while Reno has barely 300,000 in its metropolitan area.
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The center of any city is its downtown. Unfortunately for Las Vegas, that downtown is littered with tourists who really don’t care about the Vegas community.

UNLV is a prime target to start growing a more connected city.

The people at the university’s parking services department have been almost irreversibly stigmatized because the student newspaper, The Rebel Yell, attacks them  repeatedly for the of lack of parking spaces.

More parking spaces means more cars, more cars means more gas burning, and more gas burning means terrible air quality and longer, hotter, drier summers.

But let’s not focus on parking, let’s focus on buses.

What would happen then if students were to actually take the bus to school? What would happen if the apartments in the surrounding area were dominated by students? It would create a chain reaction.

More bus lanes, better access and even university run shuttles to neighborhoods within a 2 mile radius could ease up the need for parking, create a real downtown feel and, of course, make UNLV green.

Right now, RTC is conducting a corridor study of Maryland Parkway that could better serve the area by adding a bus-only lane. It’s a fantastic idea. Tracy Bower, public information officer for RTC, said they were working with the university on the study.

I am waiting for Tad McDowell at UNLV’s Parking Services to return a call so we can begin the discussion.