Ten Things You Should Know About New York City Traffic
I’m back at home and my thoughts turn to local traffic. And so continuing in the “Ten Things” series of my utterly unscientific, sample-size-of-one observations and picked-up-pieces of trivia:
1. The nation’s worst bottleneck is in the Bronx. According to INRIX, the exit 4B segment (.30 miles) of the Cross-Bronx Expressway is congested 94 hours a week. The average speed when congested is 9 mph. (the average New Yorker walks 3.4 mph).
2. The clearance phase here is about 1.7 seconds (e.g., when one set of lights turn red, the others will go green approximately that much later).
3. Access-a-Ride drivers are the worst in the city — I’m not sure if this is because they’re put on a too-tight schedule or they’re just trying to increase their numbers of passengers. Empty school buses are a close second, followed by off-duty ambulance drivers.
4. Smokers, and people on cell-phones, walk more slowly than other New Yorkers (4.17 f/s and 4.20 f/s, respectively, versus an average of 4.28 f/s for all pedestrians).
5. Every third car in Brooklyn has North Carolina license plates (insurance fraud, anyone?)
6. New York is the only major U.S. city without residential parking permits (see item #5).
7. The only thing harder than trying to park a car in NYC is trying to park a bike.
8. Bloomberg deserves reelection for his Janette Sadik-Khan appointment alone.
9. After a decade of investigation I still do not know the fastest approach lane on the massive funnel-like, ten-lanes-to-two entrance to the Holland Tunnel (once you’re past the tolls, on the Jersey side). The outside lanes sometimes seem better to me; not sure if this correlates to say, rice moving through a funnel.
10. New York City is home to the world’s first traffic circle, Columbus Circle, designed by William Phelps Eno (note, however, there is a countering claim that the ‘carrefour a gyration’ in Paris, by Eugene Henard, deserves the prize). Also note this has nothing to do with the modern roundabout, of which NYC has none.
Your further suggestions are welcome.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Ten Things You Should Know, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
| 
