America's secret love affair with congestion

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Maybe the way we think about traffic congestion is all wrong. Typical of the conventional thinking is Tuesday's Associated Press story on the Texas Traffic Institute's annual report on congestion: "Drivers waste nearly an entire workweek each year sitting in traffic on the way to and from their jobs . . ." And the theme continues: "The nation's drivers languished in traffic for a total of 4.2 billion hours in 2005 . . . " Leading to the inevitable, an expert concluding, "Things are bad and getting worse."

Notice those loaded words "waste" and "languished." But now consider congestion from the perspective of many commuters. They are encased in climate-controlled comfort and swaddled in heated, fully adjustable seats with a cooler close at hand in the center console. There are hundreds of stations on the satellite radio, unlimited music from the driver's personal library, elevating lectures by great professors, possibly a language to learn and perhaps a DVD player discreetly tucked below the dash. If the outside world must intrude, there's always the iPhone.

Maybe many commuters subconsciously don't mind congestion, even at some level desire it.

If congestion were all that bad, people would do something about it. At the very least they wouldn't begrudge sufficient funding for highway improvements. Yet they do, while finding fault with all the alternatives: public transportation, carpooling, telecommuting. "Congestion pricing" - high tolls at peak hours - is dismissed as elitist.

Perhaps the fault, fellow driver, is not in our traffic planning but in ourselves. Now, if that moron in the car in front of us would only get a move on . . .