WIRED MAGAZINE: Upside to the Economic Downturn: Less Traffic * By Tony Borroz Email Author * July 8, 2009

Upside to the Economic Downturn: Less Traffic

* By Tony Borroz * July 8, 2009 |


The economy [five-letter vulgarity deleted], but at least we’re spending less time in traffic.

People are driving less because of high fuel prices and as a result spent an average of 36.1 hours creeping through traffic in 2007, according to a biannual study released today by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. That’s down from a peak of 37.5 hours recorded in 2005 and it marks the first time traffic congestion has fallen since 1991.

The institute’s Urban Mobility Report comes as Congress contemplates the $500 billion transportation spending bill written by Rep. Jim Oberstar, D.-Minn., and Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. That bill calls for $337 billion in funding for highway construction, $100 billion for public transit and $50 billion to build a nationwide high-speed rail system. The rest of the money is set aside for a variety of other projects.


The report draws on the most recent data available and notes that although the decline started before the recession started, the bad economic climate could prolong the trend as riders embrace carpooling and mass transit to save money. “As goes the American economy, so goes the traffic,” the researchers said.

Still, it isn’t a pretty picture. According to the study, traffic congestion remains a Herculean problem that drains $78 billion from the economy in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel.

“That’s 105 million weeks of vacation time and 58 fully loaded supertankers,” the report notes.

The decline makes sense. The less money people have to spend, the less driving they will do and the more likely they are to use public transportation. Ergo, traffic congestion goes down. But there’s a downside to this upside to the economic downturn: It won’t last. Sooner or later the economy will pick up and Americans will be back in their cars, yakking on their cell phones, eating their burgers and clogging up the roads the way they clog up their arteries.

Also, it is worth realizing that the improvement is slight and only blunts the trend of our roads growing ever busier.

“This is a very small change. No one should expect to be driving the speed limit on their way to work because of this,” says David Schrank, one of two researchers who compiled the report.

Researchers examined state and federal transportation data for 439 urban areas nationwide. The Los Angeles area still topped the list of most hellish commutes with an average of 70 hours spent in traffic, but residents there shaved two hours off the time spent creeping along. Washington, D.C., displaced Atlanta to take second place on the list. D.C. residents spent 62 hours in traffic in 2007, according to the report.

Atlanta, Houston and the San Francisco-Oakland area rounded out the top five worst commutes. Of the 90 largest urban areas in the study, Buffalo, N.Y. fared the best with people there spending an average of 10 hours in traffic. (See the full list here in .pdf form.)

Other highlights from the report demonstrate the effects of the nation’s traffic woes:

* The overall cost (based on wasted fuel and lost productivity) reached $87.2 billion in 2007 — more than $750 for every U.S. traveler.
* The amount of wasted fuel topped 2.8 billion gallons — three weeks’ worth of gas for every traveler.
* The amount of wasted time totaled 4.2 billion hours — nearly one full work week (or vacation week) for every traveler.

OK, it’s bad. But do they have any solutions? Actually, they do. The researchers recommend a “fair and expanded approach” to reducing traffic congestion, essentially saying we need more of everything. The strategies include:

* Get as much use as possible out of the transportation system we have.
* Add roadway and public transportation capacity in the places where it is needed most.
* Change our patterns, employing ideas like ridesharing and flexible work times to avoid traditional “rush hours.”
* Provide more choices, such as alternate routes, telecommuting and toll lanes for faster and more reliable trips.
* Diversify land development patterns to make walking, biking and mass transit more practical.
* Adopt realistic expectations, recognizing for instance that large urban areas are going to be congested, but they don’t have to stay that way all day.

It sounds straightforward, but nothing about our transportation system is easily addressed. The researchers urge policymakers to act swiftly to address highway and mass transit issues because such projects typically take 10 to 15 years to complete. But they say we can’t rely on the government alone to fix this mess.

“The best solutions are going to be those in which actions by transportation agencies are complemented by businesses, manufacturers and commuters,” says Tim Lomax, who worked with Schrank to compile the report. “There’s a mindset that says that this is a city government’s job or a state DOT’s job, but the problem is far too big for transportation agencies alone to address it adequately.”

And we need not necessarily think big. Jim Corless, director of Transportation for America, says offering more mass transit and incentives to telecommute, bike or walk could yield big benefits.

“There is ample evidence that shows reducing peak hour traffic by just a small percentage will dramatically reduce congestion and all of the costs associated with traffic,” he said in a statement....
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