April 7, 2016

Traffic Congestion in an urbanizing world – can Millennials and technology bring an end to the gridlock?

There has been a lot of focus on the transportation habits of Millennials compared to previous generations. As cities continue to attract new, young citizens, these shifting trends have captured the attention of public and private companies alike. Seattle in particular is experiencing both rapid growth rates (at or above 2% for the past few years), along with tremendous public initiatives to improve public transit and non-motorized travel options within the city through Sound Transit packages and the Move Seattle Levy. In addition, private companies such as Uber and BMW have been launching new services for ride and car sharing within the city, respectively. Despite these efforts, in 2015, Seattle and New York City tied for the fourth most congested city in the US, which is downright impressive given that the population of Seattle is just over 650,000 compared to NYC’s 8.4 million according to the 2013 American Community Survey.

At present rates, the growth and the congestion are only going to increase, and since 95% of software engineers in the Seattle area come from out of state, these numbers pose a serious concern for employers.  As a result, companies such as Amazon, Expedia, Microsoft, Zillow, and others (totaling 17 of the city’s top companies) led by former Washington State Gov. Christine Gregoire recently launched the Challenge Seattle initiative in an attempt to address the issue of congestion from the private sector. To support their efforts, they will be partnering with the University of Washington’s CoMotion (formerly the Center for Commercialization) to create a new Mobility Innovation Center, which will serve as a breeding ground for entrepreneurial efforts to provide transportation innovations for the City, with metrics for success laid out in Figure 1.

Regarding the “Business” metric, Challenge Seattle has set a goal of reducing the number of employees who commute in single occupancy vehicles (SOVs) to 35% by 2035 in participating firms. While this is an admirable goal, it will likely be relatively easy and may only have a minor effect on traffic congestion.

From a preliminary, latent class analysis of data from the Puget Sound Regional Council’s (PSRC’s) 2014 Household Travel Survey (HTS), a team of grad students (of which I was a part) assigned individuals from the HTS into one of six classes based their typical travel mode choices. The general characteristics of the six classes were:

1. Gen-X majority lower-income renters who own <=1 vehicle and live alone w/ no kids
2. Highly-educated boomer generation homeowners who own >1 veh.
3. Mixed generations (majority millennial) who are lower-income, minimally educated renters and part-time workers who own >1 veh.
4. Highly-educated millennial renters with all levels of income – they are the newest to Seattle, own <=1 veh., and have no kids
5. Highly-educated, median-aged couples that are between Millennial/Gen. X and are wealthy homeowners with >1 veh. and most have kids
6. Gen-X majority wealthy home owners who own >1 veh., have a partner and/or have kids

The classes represent different percentages of the total area population; these percentages of the total sample population  and the percentage of transplants in each class are shown in Figure 2.

Concerning transplants to the region, 10% of Class 1 and 5 and 30% of Class 4 had moved from a different state within the past 5 years. Once these classes were defined and over-arching characteristics were identified, we generated descriptive statistics relative to the mode choices of each class as shown in Figure 3. Note that only commuter trips (identified as trips to or from work) were considered to better control the outcome given that mode choice can also vary by activity.

The motorized category includes SOV and HOV, and non-motorized includes walking and biking. Transit includes any bus, light rail, or heavy rail, while Other includes car-bus combination, ferry, and any PSRC “other” response (such as taxi, van pools, etc.).

Compared to the percentage of SOV/HOV trips taken by the entire population (~68%), individuals in Classes 2, 3, and (particularly) 6 take significantly more vehicular trips and far fewer non-motorized and transit trips. Alternatively, individuals in Class 1 and 4 take fewer vehicular trips and substantially more non-motorized and transit trips, especially Class 4. Class 5 is essentially the same as the total population with a few more vehicular trips and a few less non-motorized trips.

Classes 1, 4, and 5 contain the majority of new area residents, and the combined total of SOV and HOV trips for the Millennial (4) class barely exceeds 40% for commuter trips already. Assuming that these classes represent the majority of new hires at the Challenge Seattle companies (recalling that 95% of new computer science hires in the region are from out of state), the 35% goal set by the Challenge Seattle CEOs does not seem all that challenging at first glance. However, we should consider that the more-settled Gen. Xers in classes 5 and 6 drive substantially more than their younger Millennial counterparts in class 4.

Essentially, Challenge Seattle may well reach its 35% goal in the short term, but maintaining that achievement will rely on how effectively these companies can keep aging millennials out of cars as they settle into the region and move through life.

Don’t get me wrong, any initiatives to address the very serious issue of traffic congestion within the City of Seattle are great and necessary. Arguably, if the metrics proposed in Figure 1 are adopted in the public sector, they could shift focus from performance comparisons of different transit authorities through traffic volumes and ridership counts to a focus on metrics that promote the safe, reliable, sustainable transportation of the regional population, regardless of what agency controls the mode. Such a shift could provide an opportunity for collaboration rather than competition not only between the agencies, but also between the public and private sectors.

Given that King County Metro and Sound Transit do not appear on the list of Challenge Seattle organizations (while Puget Sound Energy does), such collaboration seems unlikely. Further, a lack of collaboration with major private sector transportation providers such as Uber, Lyft, Car2Go, Zip Car, and others is not ideal. Presently, all of the private sector companies are in competition with each other as well as with the public transit agencies – everyone is competing for ridership. Policies and economics that promote some form of collaboration between these public and private providers is key so that multi-modal transport services can be presented to the traveling public as cohesive, easy-to-use services.

I would argue that, while the emerging technologies, innovation, and millennial transportation trends appear to be promising solutions to congestion (and may provide some assistance), they do not really address the root causes. A flashy, young, tech solution to the problem is certainly more attractive, but without policy reform within the transit agencies and creative new business models and/or incentives to encourage public and private collaboration among transportation service providers, I doubt a sustainable 35% SOV share can be achieved.