Bumper to bumper
Fear of longer commutes puts pressure on cities to act
The nation’s traffic jams have potential to get a whole lot worse, transportation experts warn.
At 4:35 a.m. each weekday, Stan Paul drives out of his Southern California suburb with 10 passengers in a van, headed to his job as an undergraduate counselor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some 80 miles and 90 minutes later, the vanpoolers finally arrive to start their workday.
On the return trip, Los Angeles’ infamously snarled traffic often stretches their afternoon commute to three hours. Since Paul joined in 2001, he has spent roughly 1½ years aboard the vanpool and traveled far enough to complete a round trip to the moon.
Transportation experts say Paul’s long journey offers a warning for the future, when traffic rivaling a major holiday might someday be the norm for many more Americans.
“If we don’t change, in 2045, the transportation system that powered our rise as a nation will instead slow us down,” the Department of Transportation said in report earlier this year titled “Beyond Traffic.”
“Transit systems will be so backed up that riders will wonder not just when they will get to work, but if they will get there at all,” the report said. “At the airports, and on the highway, every day will be like Thanksgiving is today.”
The projections were based on a population increase of 70 million people and a 45 percent increase in the nation’s volume of freight.
That prediction has opened a growing divide between cities that have been making huge investments in new transit options and other regions that have been unable or unwilling to get ahead of the crisis, including the fast-growing South and Southwest.
The issue extends beyond cities. Americans living in more sparsely populated areas are affected every time they head to cities for ball games, business, shopping or air travel. Within 30 years, the Department of Transportation projects, drivers will have to tolerate stopand-go conditions or slow traffic for some period of each day on more than a third of U.S. highways.
To avoid this slow-motion catastrophe, the nation would have to act decisively — and soon. Expanding mass transit or building new freeways takes years, even when money flows freely, which is rarely the case these days.
AVOIDING MISTAKES OF PAST
In many fast-growing metro areas, transportation officials are trying to avoid becoming the next L.A., Houston or Atlanta — places struggling to undo previous decisions that led to time-wasting, fuelburning traffic jams.
Faced with traffic congestion so notorious that it has become a cultural touchstone in movies and comedy repertoires, Los Angeles has embarked on a transportation building binge funded largely by a sales tax voters passed in 2008.
New rail lines are extending to Beverly Hills, the airport and other places that haven’t had such service in decades. Regional officials call the $14 billion being spent on transit and new freeway lanes the nation’s largest public-works project.
Similar challenges loom over the Atlanta metro region, where population growth by 2040 is expected to result in a daily average congestion speed of 18.8 mph — about 10 mph slower than today. The cost of wasted time and fuel will more than triple, from $874 per capita to $2,945, according to the U.S. Transportation Department.
Some cities have turned to bus rapid-transit systems, which give buses the right of way, permission to operate at faster speeds and sometimes their own lanes. Those systems are already in place in Boston, Cleveland, Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Seattle.
THE QUEST FOR CONSENSUS
Elected officials and transportation professionals generally agree on the nation’s intensifying traffic congestion but are divided about how to address it.
The Obama administration leans heavily toward getting people out of their vehicles, a solution preferred by many urban planners. New highway lanes aren’t enough, the theory goes, because they will simply attract drivers who had been taking other routes and encourage more sprawl.
One alternative is to encourage people to trade suburban amenities for more densely developed neighborhoods where they can easily take transit, walk or bike to jobs, stores and entertainment.
“As the population surges, we’re going to have more bottlenecks, so giving people another option is really important,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said. Rail transit can be a release valve for highway congestion, he said, taking enough vehicles off the road to help traffic move more smoothly.
Although ridership for trains and buses is at a 50-year peak, it remains only a tiny fraction of all trips nationally.
Conservative lawmakers in Washington and many state capitals tend to advocate road building, which better serves their primarily suburban and rural constituents. They question the effectiveness of enlarging big-city rail systems, which typically carry people from suburbs to jobs in the urban core, when so much commuting today is from suburb to suburb.
MONEY AND TECHNOLOGY
One of the tallest obstacles to ambitious transportation improvements is the lack of reliable funding. The 18.4-cents-a-gallon federal gasoline tax hasn’t been increased since 1993, and the revenue it brings in isn’t enough to cover current highway and transit spending, let alone increase it.
Raising the gas tax is unpopular with voters, as are other user-fee proposals such as putting more tolls on highways or taxing motorists by the number of miles they drive.
Unable to find a politically acceptable solution, Congress has kept highway and transit programs teetering on the edge of insolvency for much of the past six years. Instead of committing tens of billions of dollars to pay for transportation programs, lawmakers have repeatedly resorted to budget gimmickry.
States count on federal money for a share of their transportation spending, ranging from about a third in New Jersey to 93 percent in Alaska, where there are long distances to cover and fewer people to pick up the tab. Amid Washington’s inaction, states are trying to raise more money on their own, mostly through gas- or sales-tax increases, or imposing tolls. Uncertainty over how much federal aid they can count on has caused some states to delay or shelve construction projects.
Whatever plans are adopted, technology is sure to play a big role in helping traffic and commerce flow. Already, smartphone apps track GPS-equipped buses and alert riders when one is approaching so they don’t waste time waiting. In some urban areas, drivers receive congestion alerts on their phones and can see traffic in real time through highway cameras linked to the Internet.
In coming decades, cars and trucks might wirelessly “talk” to each other and to traffic lights and other infrastructure, directing drivers to routes that avoid congestion. They may be able to follow each other in close formation on highways, packing more vehicles into what is now empty space.