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Flash Points
- More superhighways ... or more subways? Americans drive nearly twice as many miles as they did in 1980, yet road capacity has increased a mere 3 percent, according to a recent report from the Urban Land Institute. But new highways would only "subsidize sprawl," the report concludes: Within five years, between 60 and 90 percent of added capacity is typically filled with new traffic.
Stop trying to strong-arm suburbanites into subways, others counter. "[Are] Hummer-loving, McMansion-living families going to come crawling back to the city to live in apartments and bicycle to work?" asks Alan Pisarski, a Heritage Foundation consultant.
- Pay to play. When traffic was snarled in ancient Rome, Caesar simply banned chariots during the day. Cities today are similarly limiting access to roads -- or charging for it. London, Singapore, and Stockholm have implemented "congestion pricing," drawing a ring around jammed-up downtowns and charging entry fees for cars during peak driving hours. The approach worked in London: Traffic dipped 33 percent, and bike riding increased by 24 percent. In Athens, cars are banned from the city center on alternate days, based on odd and even license plate numbers -- but some drivers are buying cheap second cars with the opposite plate number to outsmart the system. A market-based approach for New York City died in the state legislature last year; a plan in the Seattle area is moving forward.
- Global dimensions. When is traffic not merely a time suck but a dire environmental threat? When it's happening at breakneck speed in places like India and China, where 1 billion new cars in the next two decades will flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Others think the country with the highest rate of car ownership -- that's us, at 77 percent -- shouldn't complain.
What a waste! Gas lost to gridlock.
2007: 2,810 million gallons
1997: 1,820 million gallons
1982: 500 million gallons
Most Congested Cities
Hours lost per driver annually.
Los Angeles 70
Washington 62
Atlanta 57
Houston 56
San Francisco 55
Dallas, Orlando, San Jose 53
Detroit, San Diego 52
... and Least Congested
Lancaster, PA; Wichita, KS 6
Brownsville, TX 8
Akron, Corpus Christi, Spokane 9
Anchorage, Rochester 10
Beaumont, TX; Eugene, OR; Springfield, MA 11
The Causes
How all the slowdowns break down (%)
- Road construction 10%
- Crashes and breakdowns 25%
- Other 5%
- Poor signal timing 5%
- Capacity-related bottlenecks 40%
- Bad weather 15%
Helps traffic, looks so European. How can merging at a low speed in a counterclockwise circle help congestion? Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, explains that by eliminating the full stop for a red light and the interminable wait for a left-turn arrow, roundabouts speed overall flow. The circular approach also limits another enemy of a fast commute: crashes. Blindsiding is unlikely, and the number of places where one vehicle can strike another is cut by a factor of four, which means crashes drop by nearly 40 percent. The best part of all? In a roundabout, no one can "block the box."
The Back-and-Forth ...
"Some problems do not have feasible solutions. Traffic is one of them. So learn to enjoy congestion -- it is not going away!"
-- Anthony Downs, Urban Land Institute, author of Still Stuck in Traffic
"We can't get rid of traffic, but we can shorten commutes by operating our roads better -- clearing wrecks faster and timing lights more efficiently."
-- Tim Lomax,Texas Transportation Institute
"The only real long-term solution is treating roads like scarce goods instead of giving them away at the bargain price -- which, not surprisingly, draws crowds."
-- Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
"Those who argue that it doesn't pay to build a road because it just fills up again should test that argument on libraries, schools, and hospitals."
-- Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America
Forward Thinking
- Insects and driverless cars. Ants don't get stuck in traffic jams. They instinctively give the right-of-way to brethren carrying food and never tailgate leaf-toting slowpokes. Entomologists believe the insects somehow share information from one end of the line to the other, so that when a jam starts to form, approaching ants reroute. Several companies are working on car navigation systems that mimic the phenomenon with onboard computers that exchange information as they approach one another.
- Smarter roads and better signals. MIT mathematicians have developed a model that interprets bottlenecks as sonic waves: Think of a driver hitting the brakes and creating a bulge of traffic, followed by smaller ripples down the line. As it turns out, the ripples are key, since they help guide highway designers to build roads that broaden only where needed. Another study suggests that simply doubling the number of lanes on freeway off-ramps can cure most jams. And a relatively quick fix for clogged city arteries? Adding a few seconds to yellow lights.
- Assuming drivers are -- yikes! -- texting anyway. Services like sigalert.com already text drivers about brewing traffic jams. San Francisco is trying out parking spaces that send out texts when they become vacant (people cruising for a spot cause a surprising amount of city traffic).
- Carpooling for cash. This fall, Washington, D.C., commuters will receive $2 a day to carpool. A similar program in Atlanta converted 29,000 drivers, 64 percent of whom continued to share rides (or bike) after the payoffs ended.
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