So what is TxDOT doing?
History shows us that over time, everyone ends up back where we started: stuck behind the wheel
In 2014, just before a project was undertaken to widen two interstates in the northeast, Tom Maziarz, then the chief of planning at the Connecticut Department of Transportation, said, “You can’t build your way out of congestion.”
Well, this is Texas. And TxDOT appears to believe that you can.
Figured to cost $7 billion, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project will rebuild, reconfigure and reengineer about 24 miles of roads from Midtown to Beltway 8 to “manage congestion,” project documents say.
According to TxDOT, these 24 miles include eight of the most congested roads in Texas. (The most? Loop 610 near the Galleria, which is, of course, being redone in a separate $300 million project.)
But that word — “manage” — is an interesting choice. Strategic, even. At least TxDOT isn’t promising to “relieve” or “reduce” or even “ease” congestion, because none of that is likely to happen.
In a 2014 study of 228 U.S. cities, two economists at the University of Toronto found what they call “the fundamental law of road congestion,” which is known as “induced demand” or “induced travel.”
Even when you account for population growth, the law holds. The easier it is to drive, the more people do it. Adding capacity — widening a freeway by a few lanes or building a new one — makes driving more attractive, right up until the added capacity gets used up.
It is almost axiomatic. Over time, any reduction in congestion tends to be negated, and everyone ends up back where we started: stuck behind the wheel.
Houston has a perfect example of “induced demand,” in fact: I-10. In the 2000s, $2.8 billion was spent to widen it
to 23 lanes. At first, it seemed to work. Commutes became less bad, the Chronicle reported in 2012: “Four years after the project was completed, a comparative analysis of drive-time data for a three-year period before and after the expansion shows that at both peak and nonpeak periods of the day, it takes less time to traverse the Katy Freeway than it used to.”
Over time, Joe Cortright of City Observatory has found, the congestion went from less bad to worse than it
was before.
This comes as no surprise to Dr. Susan Handy, a professor at the University of California at Davis and the director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation. “It’s a simple economic principle,” she says.
“If you add capacity, you are reducing the travel time, and time is cost, so when you reduce the cost of something, people consume more of it.”
As you add capacity, she says, “the freeway carries more vehicles, but it’s very unlikely that you’re doing anything to reduce congestion. Adding capacity is just about accommodating more traffic.”
She adds that adding capacity can even generate more congestion, as it affects real estate and development patterns.
So, if not more and bigger roads, how do you “manage” congestion? Academics like Handy believe that you can do so through pricing: charging people to drive at certain times or in certain places. San Francisco, for example, has implemented “congestion pricing” by placing tolls on the bridges during rush hour and waiving those tolls for carpoolers. This also has been implemented in London and Stockholm.
Or, Handy says, we can design our cities better. “We need to rebuild our communities over time in such a way that people don’t have to drive so far to get what they need, or they have alternatives to driving. That’s how you manage congestion. You give people the possibility of spending less time in traffic.”
This won’t be TxDOT’s last big project, but it will be interesting to see how, as it is completed over the next decade, autonomous-vehicle technology progresses.
The congestion these roads are designed to “manage” might vanish on its own once driver error is eliminated.
Plus, Handy explains, the ability of autonomous vehicles to travel more closely together adds capacity in and of itself.
Though the project will create safer infrastructure and the opportunity for at least three “deck parks” in the city, which could help stitch neighborhoods cleaved by freeways back together, the question remains whether $7 billion is being spent to lay down roads that will be obsolete by the time the concrete dries.