One and a half weeks stuck in traffic …
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2015-06-17
If you're an average urban rush-hour driver in one of the 75 cities studied by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), you have likely spent an extra 62 hours--the equivalent of about one and a half working weeks--stuck in traffic-congested streets over the past year. In 1990 it was just 44 hours, and just 16 hours in 1982.
The annual Urban Mobility Report from the TTI was released on June 20, 2002, and it indicates that urban congestion is rising in three increasingly visible ways:
- the time penalty for making rush-hour trips is greater
- "rush hour" is getting longer
- the number of streets and freeways that are congested is greater.
The good news, says the TTI, is that there are solutions. These include:
- more roadways and transit
- ramp metering
- High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes
- better incident management (clearing accident scenes more quickly, etc.)
- incentives to make trips in off-rush-hour times.
The bad news, according to TTI researchers Tim Lomax and David Schrank, is that even if transportation officials do all the right things the congestion is going to get worse, because not enough is being done.
The report is fuelling new debate about the future of U.S. highway transportation. "Growing traffic congestion is likely to also cost consumers more than lost time," says an article on the Tripnet.org web site. "A recent study by the Washington Research Council looked at traffic congestion rates in the nation's largest urban areas and found that higher levels of traffic congestion resulted in greater rates of inflation as increasing costs of shipping products into a community resulted in higher prices at the store."
With commercial truck travel expected to double by the year 2020, says Tripnet, "increasing
levels of traffic congestion are likely to add to business costs, making it
more difficult for regions with high levels of gridlock to attract and retain
businesses in their core urban areas." This may drive businesses to relocate
to suburbs or less-congested communities to reduce transportation and distribution
costs.
Urban immobility
"The new TTI study might as well be called the urban immobility study," says Robert Dunphy, senior resident fellow for transportation with the Urban Land Institute (ULI). "Traffic congestion being up is no surprise, and is probably a fair trade for a good economy," says Dunphy, "One surprise is that building roads can help, contrary to the simplistic anti-road mantra 'you can't build your way out of congestion'" he added. "Among six areas who came close to matching road growth with traffic growth (in some cases simply by reclassifying existing rural roads to urban status), congestion was less severe than in areas in which traffic growth far outpaced road growth."
Unsurprisingly, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association ( ARTBA ) also supported the idea of building new roadway infrastructure as a solution. "The Texas Transportation Institute study released today makes it crystal clear that America is in the middle of a growing infrastructure capacity crisis that threatens the nation's economy and quality of life," stated ARTBA President & CEO Peter Ruane, in response to the TTI report. This, Ruane says, is why ARTBA is calling for a minimum $50 billion per year federal highway investment when the federal highway program is reauthorized in 2003.
"With the U.S. population projected to increase by 60 million people and highway travel by more than 40 percent over the next 20 years," argued Ruane, "there are a number of things that Congress should be considering now to help alleviate traffic congestion. Number one is significantly increasing highway and mass transit capital investment. No revenue raising option should be taken off the table--including the federal gas tax."
Congress should support options such as toll-financed truck-only lanes for existing Interstate highway rights-of-way, and double decking and tunneling in some urban areas, stated Ruane. "Other solutions include improved handling of traffic incidents to clear roadways quickly, increased use of synchronized traffic signalization, and 'smart road' technologies," he said.
Dissenting voice: problem with data
The Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), a Washington-based group funded by a number of foundations, says that the data gathered by the annual TTI study is flawed and it has decided to withdraw altogether from analyzing it.
"This report has been used for years by the highway lobby to whip up support for more road-building," said David Burwell, President of STPP. "But it doesn't tell us how the transportation system is helping people get where they need to go--it just measures mobility for people in cars. We spend a lot of the public's money on transportation. We owe it to the taxpayer to get it right."
The STPP blames the Washington DOT's actions for its decision. "This is the third recent example of a failure in transportation data to adequate reflect the true picture of our transportation system," states the STPP web site. A report posted on the STPP site titled "Decoding Transportation Policy and Practice #2--The Nation's Road Capacity" argues that while road capacity throughout the country may not have been growing, it has been growing in metro areas and in fact is outpacing population growth. The worsening of traffic congestion, says the STPP, has more to do with our reliance on driving for daily tasks.
"TTI's data show that population growth is only a minor factor in the recent rise in congestion. Population in the metro areas studied grew by 22% during the study years (1982-1997). By contrast, the delay experienced by drivers grew by 235% in the same period. This was in large part due to the increase in driving in these areas. Actual population growth in these areas totaled almost 22 million people over this period, but STPP calculates that the increase in driving by each resident makes it feel as if about 70 million more drivers have been added to the highways. This 'perceived population growth' experienced by motorists helps explain the widespread feeling that our metro areas are 'growing too fast' or 'bursting at the seams.' "
Comments to this article have been disabled.
