This is the first article in a five-part series by Streetsblog publisher and LimeWire founder Mark Gorton:
Traffic is a crushing problem that oppresses our city, yet many people who drive into New York each day do not have a good alternative.
I'm an engineer by training and the traffic flow problems facing large cities today have many similarities to the engineering issues that I have encountered at LimeWire, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that I founded. LimeWire involves many computers connected to each other passing messages around a network. Early in the development of LimeWire, the network was choking on its message traffic as each computer tried to send more messages than the network could collectively handle. The solution to this problem involved having each computer reduce its message traffic and organizing the network to take advantage of efficiencies that could be gained by designing a new computer network architecture.
From a network management point of view, the road networks of New York and many other large cities are horribly engineered. The traditional traffic engineering solution to congestion problems is to try to increase capacity. However, similar problems in computer engineering are solved by reducing the underlying need for traffic. Biological systems, which are the most sophisticated systems on the planet, are extremely judicious in how they move things around.
Our surface transportation system today is premised upon the primacy of the private automobile, yet the private automobile is the single most inefficient means of moving people in a city. By catering to the private automobile, we have inadvertently made an engineering choice that maximizes danger, noise, pollution, and congestion and creates a host of other problems that suck the life out of our public spaces.
In less than ten years, with minimal capital expenditures, we can create a new form of mass transit that transforms the way we run our surface transportation system and drastically reduces the need to have private cars in New York City. I call this new form of mass transit Smart Para-Transit. Smart Para-Transit takes advantage of innovations in information and communication technology to create breathtaking increases in efficiency of our road network. My very rough initial estimate is that widespread adoption of Smart Para-Transit would allow for an 80 percent reduction in automobile traffic in New York City.
The basket of ideas involved in Smart Para-Transit are too long for one blog post. So I am serializing the explanation over the course of a week. For those of you who can’t wait, you can download and read the full description.
Purely for political and self-serving purposes, Mayor Adams is attacking congestion pricing — and, in doing so, is undermining the implementation of a program that he has long claimed to be a "strong" supporter of.
Sherif Soliman, who was appointed to the board only last year, quietly resigned on Sept. 22, and the mayor won't get a new person on the panel until next year.