The reality of traffic studies: You can make the numbers work for whomever is paying you and it is almost always the developer.

perpetrators

There is corruption rampant in Traffic Impact Studies. I had trouble sleeping last night because I was planning on writing this. So, here are a few words. There was a time even not too long ago when I was naive enough to believe that the system could be fixed:A basic life lesson that we learned at an early age (or, that most of us learned) is that we have to clean up after ourselves, that we must “mitigate” problems caused by our actions. Supposedly, developers are required to mitigate the impact that their developments have on the traffic infrastructure by either improving the infrastructure or paying for needed improvements to the infrastructure.This is widely accepted and universally addressed in Comprehensive Plans at the municipal, county, and state levels.It all sounds great, doesn’t it?But in truth, its all a sham, an imposture, a fraud. The system has been corrupted.The legislatures – municipal, county, and state - have abdicated to the developers the responsibility and the right to perform these impact studies, and the right to choose the method of measuring LOS. So, the developers choose a methodology that grossly misrepresents LOS on roadways that are already severely congested. (In fact, the State of Florida actually recommends this inaccurate method – the count based methodology - in their “QLOS Handbook”.)So, no matter how congested a roadway is, the developer’s impact study shows that the LOS is acceptable, even with the additional traffic that their development will generate. And, municipalities must, as required by their own laws, and by both county and state laws, accept this bullshit and approve the development.So, traffic continues to get worse and worse.The truth of these statements is obvious to anyone that drives on the roadways anywhere in the state of Florida.The system is corrupt – top to bottom.How did this happen?The developers are major campaign donors for candidates running for public office. In fact, many of our elected officials are actually developers themselves. As a result of their money, the developers have corrupted and now control the legislature.It is so bad, even the traffic study"experts" can be found on the campaign donor lists.And traffic engineers know what side of the bread is buttered. They know that if they generate a study that shows impact, they will be blacklisted – they will never work for a developer again. And those traffic engineers that work (or contract) for a governmental agency know that if they object to blatantly dishonest traffic studies, they will never get a plum job with a traffic engineering company. And realistically, even if they did object to a dishonest study, the study will be upheld in the courts because to allow use of blatantly dishonest studies is written into law. So, engineers issue blatantly dishonest studies and professional opinions in violation of their professional code of ethics.Both our government and professional engineering in the state of Florida have been corrupted by developers’ money. This sham really sucks and I am stuck in traffic daily because of it.(Geniusofdespair - we wrote about this in 2015 even posting a picture of the Traffic Engineer most popular with developers.)