How do we solve traffic jams? Road congestion is an unfortunate reality in nearly every major city especially during rush hours. Jonas Eliasson reveals how subtly nudging just a small percentage of drivers to stay off major roads can make traffic jams a thing of the past.
On the one side we have three typologies of cities: European cities, with a dense urban core, good public transportation mostly, American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation and the emerging world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core. On the other side different measures were tried by specialists: dense cities or dispersed cities, lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information, or lots of different things, but nothing seems to work.
Jonas Eliasson give the example of Stockholm, where congestion charges two euro for every bottlenecks on the road map of the city. One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours. When congestion pricing were introduced people were fiercely against it. Seventy percent of the population didn’t want this. How Stockholm citizens reacted and how effective was the action taken? Watch Jonas Eliasson TED to find more:
Joanas Eliasson is the Director of the City of Stockholm Transportation Department since March 2016. He is part-time leave from the full professorship in transport systems analysis (although he still spends some time on research and PhD supervision).
Source & Photo: www.ted.com
