The Strategic Mobility Plan's take on: Efficiency
Investments should increase multimodal system capacity and integrate technologies and management strategies that make the network more efficient for Austin's diverse range of users.
Measures of Effectiveness:
- Implementability
- Person capacity Added
- Capital Cost per person-trip per day
- Operating Cost per person-trip per day
Here are some fun facts to think about:
$6,251 - the amount the average two-worker household saves annually by taking public transportation instead of driving a car.
$7,912 - the amount the driver can save each year by switching to bicycle commuting. 40% of American families spend more on transportation than on housing each year.
A small reduction in driving causes a large drop in traffic. In 2008, the number of vehicle miles travelled dropped 3%, translating to a nearly 30% reduction in peak hour congestion.Parents on the "school run" increase local traffic by a third. Only about 15% of U.S. schoolchildren walk to school.
For the price of one mile of four‐lane urban highway, around $50 million, hundreds of miles of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure can be built, an investment that could complete an entire network of active transportation facilities for a mid‐sized city.
Simply increasing bicycling and walking from 10% of trips to 13% could lead to fuel savings of around 3.8 billion gallons a year. This is equivalent to swapping 19 million cars to hybrid cars.
Since the 1970's microchips have doubled in power and halved in price. If the same thing happened to cars then a Rolls Royce would do 100,000 miles to the gallon and would only cost you $38 for a brand new one!
SNAPP could not find data for Capital and Operating Costs that included bicycling and walking. Here are the rest. http://www.sxd.sala.ubc.ca/8_research/sxd_FRB07Transport.pdf
Here are a couple of options for how Efficiency brings it all together