How Flawed Formulas Lead Down the Road to Sprawl

To help understand the issue in the linked article I will give the following analogy: Let's us say you own a restaurant where the air quality is a problem due to smokers. Well the solution should be obvious... put in more tables for smokers and hire more staff to service smokers to get them in and out of the restaurant a lot faster and make the non-smokers wait as they don't cause any problems hanging around.

Sounds absurd right? But this is exactly the kind of thinking that drives the bulk of our transportation dollars. See the the link after the fold.

<a href="http://streetsblog.net/2010/09/30/how-flawed-outdated-formulas-lead-down-the-road-to-sprawl">http://streetsblog.net/2010/09/30/how-flawed-outdated-formulas-lead-down-the-road-to-sprawl</a>;

NOTE:
The Travel Time Index is the ratio of travel time in the peak period to the travel time at free-flow conditions. A value of 1.35 indicates a 20 minute free-flow trip takes 27 minutes in the peak.