| At the risk of repeating myself, politicians and government officials needs to stop proposing the widening of highways as a solution for traffic congestion. Our nation has been expanding highways for decades, yet the traffic problems continue to plague us.
Case in point: billions of dollars were spent in the 1980s to reconfigure the I-84/I-91 interchange in Hartford. We were told it would alleviate the traffic congestion, remember? Well, here we are 20 years later still complaining about the traffic congestion in Hartford. Same goes for the traffic problems along I-95 -- no amount of widening will relieve the traffic problems. Yet, we continue to poor billions of our tax dollars into highway widening and construction. If we can't change our way of thinking, nothing is going to change.
According to a new national study released in September, the nation's drivers languished in traffic delays for a total of 4.2 billion hours in 2005, up from 4 billion the year before, according to the Texas Traffic Institute's urban mobility report. That's about 38 hours per driver. The study estimates that drivers wasted 2.9 billion gallons of fuel while sitting in traffic. Together with the lost time, traffic delays cost the nation $78.2 billion, the study estimates. The Los Angeles metro area had the worst congestion, delaying drivers an average of 72 hours a year. It was followed by Atlanta, Georgia; San Francisco, California; Washington; and Dallas, Texas.
Things are bad and they're getting worse," said Alan Pisarski, a transportation expert and the author of "Commuting in America."
"We've used up the capacity that had been bequeathed to us by a previous generation, and we haven't replaced it," Pisarski said.
The study summed it up this way: "Too many people, too many trips over too short of a time period on a system that is too small." |
| Which leads me to I-95, the highway in CT most people talk about when it comes to traffic congestion. The CT section of I-95 is 111 miles long and opened in 1959. As Jim Motavalli, the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine, points out in a recent post, the far-sighted planners who designed the nation's highways in late 1950s and early 1960s imagined that at peak periods I-95 would carry 50,000 cars a day; instead, in 2007 it carries 150,000. Go ahead, widen I-95, I bet we will still be sitting in traffic after construction ends because as Jim points out, you can't build your way out of congestion.
One excellent solution to this mess is transit oriented development that clusters housing, retail and other services around bus or rail stations. For an excellent example of TOR, check out Orenco Station in Oregon. I don't know about you, but I rather spend my tax money on these type of solutions instead of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
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