The Grid vs. Goliath

Robert Mundinger
Jul 21, 2017 · 9 min read

Aesop tried to warn us. He tried using wagering animals to show us how to live, but we didn’t listen. I’ve been tortoise and haring my way through the city for a while now, taking surface streets instead of highways to get places. Also I’m insane so I wrote an small app for my phone to record my latitude and longitude every 3 seconds that I’ve used a few times as I drive to work. I live near Lovers and Abrams and work at Maple and Oak Lawn. I took 2 different routes 2 mornings in a row leaving my house at 8:30 when traffic is the worst. First, I took the route google maps recommended for me. The morning after that I took a route that google maps would never recommend. I took the grid. Click below to see how this played out — this is actual data from an actual trip mapped and sped up (grid = purple, highway = yellow).

The grid was faster. It was much faster. It took 15 minutes to take the grid and it took 28 taking the google maps route. I was absolutely shocked. I think the main reason for the speed difference is that I never reach the ‘choke point’ on Mockingbird near Central where traffic slows significantly. The same choke exists on Lovers…and any way to avoid those greatly reduces travel time (including traveling down University and taking the U-Turn on Central which cuts significant time).

I decided to do some more testing so I took a more out of the way route on the grid and a more direct way on central (Mockingbird to Lemmon)

Despite the more direct route using central vs. an out of the way grid, it took the same amount of time. Ironically, the only significant slow down I had using the grid was sitting at a long red light that’s only there to for traffic on the access road of Central. I’m not going to say this will be the result every time, but I will say I’ve started taking the grid every day to and from work since, and it’s glorious. It’s faster and about 487 times less stressful.

So why does everyone take the highway? Because people are human and humans are horrible at analyzing all options and making efficient decisions. We’re lazy. I’m lazy. I’ve been taking Central the entire time I’ve worked at Maple and Oak Lawn and I just found out it takes almost twice as long. Highways are big shiny objects that trick us. They’re a heuristic, a rule of thumb. Glasses = smart, expensive = quality, highways = fast. True some of the time, but not all. The fact that it’s slightly faster in off peak times burns a repetition into our brain to think of it all time. When I’m at Mockingbird and Abrams and I have to go downtown, I think ‘Central.’

(central Abrams)

It’s mentally easier because I can think ‘Central’ at any place within any 2 mile radius of there and be right. It’s a constant solution getting downtown in that scenario, while my route using the grid in each instance would change, and nobody has the time or energy to recalculate a different grid route every time. This is the better route.

We collectively satisfice our way into congestion. We like to think the highway is faster so we don’t have to admit to ourselves that it’s really because we’re too lazy to find the optimal route in every situation. In most cases, we’re not making decisions to lower speed and time to destination, we’re making decisions to lower mental effort required to get there. And as you’ll see, the setup of our grid requires great mental effort.

Dallas isn’t a ’drive in the direction of wherever your destination is and you’ll get there’ type of city. It’s not even close to that. I feel sorry for business travelers over the past 40 years who have rented cars and tried find their way around before the smart phone era. How the hell did they find their way around? It’s no surprise Mapsco started here. In Chicago, if you want to get to Lake Michigan, you just get on a road that’s going east-west and there’s a fantastic probably you’re going to get there. That’s intuitive. It’s simple. It’s like popping an iPad out of the box and just knowing how to use it. Dallas less like an iPad and more like a doll house an angry dad has to put together on Christmas eve. As an example, look at the route you have to know to travel a straight line where our natural grid was.

That’s insane. So you either take that ridiculous route or you take Woodall Rogers to get ONE mile in the middle of the city. People who are taking short trips are forced to take highways because our messed up grid offers so few options. The people that theoretically have to take the highway have to deal with that added congestion. Fewer options (route options and mode options) = more congestion.

Look at our grid on the map, then look at the grids of these other cities.

List of Grids

We have an astonishing amount of dead ends and one way streets, creating choke points that everyone is funneled into. These areas are not fun to be at during rush hour, but for most they’re the only option.

Lakewood has a nice grid, but only 2 streets continue west any length past central (Mockingbird & Lovers). And those two streets are terrible to be on most of the time. The rest are cut off soon after they get west of Central. I’m not saying you should use surface streets if you’re coming from Plano. And I’m aware that if Central wasn’t sucking up a lot of this congestion the rest of the grid would be more congested. But, as an example, if 100 people live in this radius at the top and they all work in the one at the bottom and each takes the same route to work, we’d have a ratio of (cars on the road) / (routes taken) of about 100:1. We should try to raise the number of routes so we lower that ratio.

But our grid almost forces it to be 100:1. I know we don’t want the majority of the city driving down residential streets, so don’t take that graphic literally, I’m just showing it for illustrative purposes — we need more connection. You could take Lovers to Preston or maybe Hillcrest to Cole. But that’s kind of it…you can’t get through SMU on the west and on the east, you can’t get back west except for Lovers. And ask anyone who is ever at Mockingbird and Central during peak times. It’s a disaster. People will try to take a left into Mockingbird Station from Mockingbird and sit there forever until they eventually give up because Mockingbird is always so backed up to get onto Central. As our core gets more dense with more travelers, that’s going to get WORSE. There are no amount of highways that’s going to get us out of that. But if we open up more connections, we can mitigate that.

For uptown, try and find one street that travels east-west that cuts all the way across east of 75 to west of Stemmons. (from here to here):

(map of uptown)

There isn’t a SINGLE ROAD that does that. There’s a lot of development going on in Uptown and if all of those new people are driving everywhere it’s going to be an absolute disaster to get around. If you enjoy driving, you should be praying that we make things more walkable, bike and transit friendly. When there’s only one road that flows from point A to B, no one is going to bike on it. And no one wants to walk across highways, so they don’t. They hop in their car, adding more clog to the system while making people think more road is necessary. More balance would free up roads

Another reason we have congestion is that it’s easy to make bad routing decisions in a blind system like traffic. We can’t see how full the road next to us is when we’re on Stemmons. I wanted to see just how underutilized an asset the city already has directly parallel to where they want to put the trinity tollroad so I took Riverfront at 8:30am from where a connection could be made from 45 all the way to Inwood. It only took me 8 minutes!

(8 minute travel)

(I added my lovers route from before for frame of reference) It was empty and I would have compared that to how long it would have taken on I-35, but I didn’t want to do that to myself. It’s kind of unbelievable how stupid we can become in traffic. But as we enter the stage in transportation where we don’t have to account for that human stupidity because we have a smart grid that can see an entire network at once and start making routing decisions for us automatically, we’ll want to change the way we plan our city to account for more productive use of our network.

Citylab’s ’future of transportation’series recently focused on…you guessed it….the future of transportation. Given so much of our city’s transportation planning seems to be stuck in the past, this report sheds interesting light on what our priorities should be:

“in the 21st century, transportation’s focus will shift to managing existing infrastructure (as opposed to building new roads) and improving accessibility.”

Managing existing infrastructure? Seems like we haven’t been super focused on that in Dallas.

We are stuck in an era of the past with our thinking on transportation if we’re trying to add highways in our inner core. Of course highways are useful between cities, but not as useful as you might think in the inner city. At the beginning of the 60's, America launched an aggressive campaign of highway building that Eisenhower never intended to extend into the center city. Take Dallas, and look where JFK was shot.

Look at our street grid to the right and to the left as a metaphor for America at a tipping point between the calm serenity of the 50's on the right with a structured, ordered grid and the chaos of the 60's on the left. We’re again at a tipping point — the economics of sprawl, gasoline, automotive technology and demographic preferences are shifting, but our decision makers continue to push past policies for our future infrastructure. After JFK was shot another man who can spin a nice fable, Bob Dylan, released a song that sums up my thoughts about our antiquated mindset about roads and the way forward.

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Robert Mundinger

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Founder of TheMap — technology, cities, mapping

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