Calgary commute: Is traffic actually getting better?

Take a straw poll of Calgarians right now and you'll hear many say their daily commute is getting faster. 

If traffic really is easing up, the reason seems obvious, if unfortunate. Oil price-inspired layoffs equal fewer cars on the road. The math appears straightforward enough, but is it actually true?

Traffic patterns contain a lot of moving parts and, as old statisticians like to say, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. 

Without data, it's just another opinion- Ekke Kok, City of Calgary

Add a road here, build an LRT line there, and the changes for how people move around the city ripple out in any number of ways. That said, someone always knows the answer to everything. For Calgary traffic that someone is Ekke Kok, the city's manager of transportation data. 

So what does he think about the daily commute? 

"Without data," says Kok, an engineer who's careful about making any pronouncements about traffic that can't be backed up empirically. "It's just another opinion." 

What about the numbers, then? Do they tell us anything?  

On the front lines of answering this question are data collectors such as Barney Fegyverneki, who's been counting cars for the city for 25 years. 

On this day, Fegyverneki, as part of a four-person team, is collecting traffic data on the north side of the Centre Street bridge. His part of the count includes estimating the number of bus passengers heading downtown. The southbound buses — this one a quarter full, another maybe half — go by fast, which makes the job part art and part science. Tinted windows don't help matters any. 

Other counters, armed with clipboards and tablets, are tallying the cars and trucks travelling in both directions, as well as pedestrians and cyclists. 

"We count everything that moves," says Fegyverneki. 

The city has a seasonal crew of 16 traffic counters who set up at intersections and roadsides to track who's going where, when. 

Other methods used to gather Calgary traffic data include:

• Permanent count stations scattered on 20 major routes that use magnetic loops buried in the road to measure passing vehicles.
• Specialized hoses, like those formerly used at gas stations to ring the bell, that crews stretch across roadways.
• Cameras placed on high-speed high-volume routes like Deerfoot Trail that collect video which is sent to a third-party vendor for processing.
• GPS data loggers to record travel times.
• Radar.
• Infrared beams and radio wave counters that track joggers and cyclists on pathways.
• Questions about commuting on the civic census. 

Big decisions like where to build new roads, as well as smaller ones like adding or removing a left hand-turn signal, are based in part on that data. 

Traffic volumes fell during the last recession

A look at the historical numbers can also shed some light on what's happening on Calgary roads today. Prior to the last economic downturn, the vehicle kilometres travelled on a per capita basis were rising steadily. 

When the recession hit in 2008, traffic volumes experienced a marked drop. They fell further in 2009, before picking back up in 2010 along with the economy. 

Given the depth of the current slump, it seems reasonable to think we'll see a similar drop in the 2015 numbers.

"Anecdotally, I would say traffic started to ease up at the end of last year," says Angela Knight, the traffic reporter for CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener. "We've definitely really noticed it since January."

Anecdotally, I would say traffic started to ease up at the end of last year.- Angela Knight, Calgary Eyeopener

Compared to recent years, Knight says, collisions on rush hour routes like the Deerfoot that would typically cause big delays aren't causing the same type of backups. 

On busy roads that are close to capacity, such as southbound Crowchild Trail at 24 Avenue, N.W. in the morning, or northbound Crowchild at Kensington Road in the afternoon, Kok confirms that taking a few thousand cars out of circulation would make a difference. 

However, he's quick to add that at this point drawing a straight-line between the layoff announcements and traffic volumes would only be speculation.

Traffic volumes are linked to everything from population changes to lane reversals to weather. Seasonal busyness, like kids returning to schools, matters, as do new roads or different transit options. Many commuters, obviously, changed their habits after the west leg of the LRT opened. 

Kok, of course, has his own closely held opinion on whether the oilpatch's corporate struggles are affecting the daily commute into downtown (although he doesn't feel his own commute to city hall is any shorter). 

More officially, he says a definitive answer about current commuting volumes will have to wait until March, 2016. The data on whether layoffs are affecting traffic is gathered, but the City won't have time to crunch it until then. 

"It's a fair suggestion," Kok says. "I would love to know the answer."