Drudge links to an article about a study that claims that traffic jams are getting worse. Well duh.
WASHINGTON (AP) - If getting stuck in traffic makes you want to roll down your car window and scream, look no further than another of those studies to find the bad news: Gridlock is getting worse. Congestion delayed travelers 79 million more hours and wasted 69 million more gallons of fuel in 2003 than in 2002, the Texas Transportation Institute's 2005 Urban Mobility Report found.Overall in 2003, there were 3.7 billion hours of travel delay and 2.3 billion gallons of wasted fuel for a total cost of more than $63 billion.
"Urban areas are not adding enough capacity, improving operations or managing demand well enough to keep congestion from growing," the report concluded. ...
Roads aren't being built fast enough to carry all the people who now drive on them, according to the Transportation Development Foundation, a group that advocates transportation construction.
The number of vehicle miles traveled has increased 74 percent since 1982, but road lane mileage only increased 6 percent, the foundation said.
Most cities have some sort of public transit, but people don't want to use it. Buses and trains, like carpools, are things that everyone agrees that everyone else should be using. But each individual wants to drive himself. Our politicians serve us and should spend our tax money they way we want them to. They should build more highways; that's how democracy works.
More highways does not necessarily mean lower commute times or less traffic congestion. More often than not, increased capacity generates increased usage. It's a zero-sum game.
Freeway ramp metering and traffic signal coordination are, in many cases, better (and far cheaper) solutions than simply adding more highway or freeway lanes.
Mark: The studies that I've seen show that ramp metering is a waste. Signal coordination is good, of course. As I've pointed out in the past, however, building highways is certainly not a zero-sum game, because destinations need to be removed to expand road capacity. As destinations are demolished to buld roads, localized demand will lessen while capacity rises.
MW: Perhaps this will explain. Most of it deals with mass transit.. but there's a section about ramp metering:
"According to the mobility report, metering currently saves motorists 73 million hours a year. However, many freeways do not yet have ramp metering. TTI estimates that adding it to congested freeways that do not now have it could increase time-savings by nearly 200 million more hours."
Removing destinations? What do you think we need roads and highways for in the first place? Removing destinations is both financially and politically costly and, therefore, inhibitive of progress.
In this article, the following is said of what you propose:
"So should we simply go back to building more freeways, as in the 1960s? Only a handful of conservatives urge this course, in part because hardly anyone wants to defend cutting more neighborhoods in two and displacing hundreds or thousands of homes and businesses. Also, the reality is that the money is simply not there for major new freeways. Thanks to more than doubled fuel economy over the past 30 years, the gas tax in California today produces only one cent per VMT, compared with over four cents per VMT back in the ‘60s. This is not even enough money to maintain the asset value of California’s existing stock of highways and freeways, let alone add capacity. If California seriously complies with the new accrual-accounting requirements of GASB 34, we’ll be doing good to simply fix this problem."
I'm not saying that ANY highway/freeway expansion is a zero-sum game. There certainly are instances where adding infrastructure will yield a good return on the investment in terms of lower congestion. What I'm saying is that just adding freeway lanes or creating new freeways isn't anything close to the "silver bullet". In fact, there is no such thing as a "silver bullet" for traffic congestion. Some approaches work some of the time in some locales. And that's the bottom line.
Mark: No, what you're waving yours hands around is an admission that building lanes and displacing businesses and homes will in fact reduce congestion, but that you don't like that option. That's ok, you don't have to like it, but I'd prefer it to mass transit. Plus, with the growth of suburbs and exurbs and so forth, lots of people appear to be willing to displace themselves to non-central locations.
MW: Oh, it's not just me who doesn't like that option. Lots of other people and many businesses don't like that idea either. As you said, it's a democracy... and what the people want (or don't want) is what their elected representatives should do (or not do).
Building lanes and displacing businesses and homes will reduce congestion only if the public approves. If the public in any given city isn't going to approve such a measure, it's not going to do much to alleviate traffic congestion is it? As I said, there are very high financial and political costs associated with what you propose. Are those costs justified? Sometimes... and sometimes they're not.
Sometimes there are ways of improving traffic congestion that have nothing to do with adding lanes. In those cases, displacing homes and businesses to build more lanes is a very inefficient use of taxpayer money.
Mass transit is important for people who don't have cars, but it's not a good solution for traffic congestion either... and never have I suggested that it is.
In any case, just adding lanes or just pouring money into mass transit are both poor solutions, in feasibility, cost, and effectiveness.