The Texas Transportation Institute yesterday released its urban mobility report, its annual ranking of the nation’s cities based on their relative highway congestion. Topping this year’s list were Chicago and D.C.
Let’s imagine for a second all the ways we might measure a concept as broad as urban mobility. Maybe calculate the average speed of buses. Or factor in the percentage of people who can walk to their local grocery store.
But rather than delve into the complexity of urban transport, TTI boils mobility down to a single measure: the speed of traffic on a given city’s highways. Newspapers all over the country today will be carrying stories about their city’s relative congestion rate and all the stories will be based on this narrow measurement.
David Alpert at Network blog Greater Greater Washington explains that even when it comes to measuring just car commuting, TTI continues to get it wrong:
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| Chicago, IL, photo by ifmuth |
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