WHY FIX FOR COMMUTING ISN’T AS EASY AS IT SEEMS
I’ll cut right to the punchline of a joke that I’ve always loved: “Let’s you and him get into a fight.”
The speaker, of course, being the one who plans to emerge from the fracas unscathed and, presumably, rid of a looming threat in the person of “him.”
That joke came to mind as I listened Saturday morning to John-Michael Cortez, a special assistant to Austin Mayor Steve Adler, speak as part of a Texas Tribune Festival panel called “The Tyranny of the Commute.” It carried the subtitle “Getting from home to work and back in our biggest cities is harder than it needs to be. Here’s how to make it easier.”
I had a very good seat to listen to Cortez and the other three distinguished panelists. I was the moderator.
Anyway, Cortez right off the bat offered this:
“It’s actually a pretty easy one to fix,” said Cortez, formerly community relations manager for Capital Metro. “Commuting is really just a matter of space. You have a lot of people trying to occupy the same space at the same time. ... If we were to shift 20 percent of the travel, if one day out of every five working days everyone did something different, we’d have free-flowing traffic.”
I don’t dispute his math or his commitment. Cortez and I talked last week in the run-up to the panel (I cheated and shared my questions with him), and that phone conversation occurred while he was taking a bus to work. So, in that joke above, he is in fact the
“you” taking the burden of fighting the good fight against traffic congestion. For all I know he takes the bus a lot more than once a week.
But the problem with that sort of logic, and much of what I heard from most of the panel (not counting Beth Van Duyne, a former Irving mayor and now a Trump appointee who was opposed to most of what the other three were offering), was that their solutions required a leap of faith about what people can be persuaded or coerced to do.
Four out of five people might agree that it would be a very good idea for that fifth person to telecommute, or start work at 6:30 a.m., or take the bus or carpool — and government could be offering encouragement or even incentives. But that fifth person might be pointing the finger right back at the others as she climbs into her SUV in Buda.
The discussion — and, really, much of the whole transportation policy debate — comes down to money and choice. People choosing to live where they want, or can afford, to live. Developers choosing to build housing where and how they can. Big employers choosing to put workplaces where it makes business sense for them to do so. Politicians choosing how much to tax and how to spend that tax money.
And then in the wake of all that, people choosing a mode of transportation.
Dallas City Council Member Philip Kingston talked about something I had never heard about before: Marchetti’s constant. Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, posited that over the millennia, as those places where people live in bunches have expanded from hamlets to towns to cities, and as transportation has moved from walking to horses to trains to cars, people have shown they want to spend no more than an hour a day getting to and from work.
People, of course, do spend more time than that commuting in many cases, Kingston said, but we’re talking about averages.
So, post-World War II, cities spread farther and farther out from city centers as developers looked for cheap land on which to build houses. Policymakers responded to that by building roads to serve those people — though some would argue that the developers and highway builders often worked in concert. Sorting out the chickens from the eggs on that can be difficult.
Anyway, with the faster roads, people could live farther out and still have something close to Marchetti’s 30-minute oneway commute.
But that in turn put more people on those roads, which were then converted to freeways or (if they were already free of traffic lights) widened to accommodate the added people. Rinse and repeat, as long as there’s room.
Maybe employers moved out to the suburbs in numbers as well, or maybe not. Depends on the urban area and the specific history. Central cities, meanwhile, were fighting to maintain their primacy, attempting to revitalize their downtowns and draw in jobs as well.
Eventually, those roads get about as wide as they can get, and people start talking about trains. Maybe there’s money and political will to get some of it done — Dallas is an example — or perhaps there’s not, as in Austin. At some point, that Marchetti constant begins to look pretty darn inconstant, and the public gets more and more frustrated.
And then people gather at places like the TribFest to puzzle over it.
Kingston said that the sort of measures advocated by Cortez and state Rep. Celia Israel, an Austin Democrat who serves on the House Transportation Committee, were “fantastic ideas” in the short term but don’t address what he sees as the real problem.
“The only way to allow people to have reasonably decent lives, moving from home to work, is to locate their homes closer to work,” he said. Which is fine. But our political system doesn’t really allow government to tell employers where to put their offices or their factories. And incentives only go so far.
Van Duyne, since May