Are Traffic Jams Made In City Hall?
Reason online has posted a thought-provoking article by the authors of The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It . The article is adapted from their book and discusses the congestion problems of Minneapolis and Atlanta. While Minneapolis is described as having one of the most competent planning agencies in the country in the form of the Met Council, the authors observe that the Met Council’s stated plan is not to reduce congestion, but to slow the growth of congestion. The authors criticize the Met Council for a focus on mass transit that is unlikely to help reduce the costs of congestion and is at odds with what the citizenry wants. The authors conclude by proposing some alternative ideas that they consider more likely to be successful at freeing us from gridlock.
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Sounds interesting–I look forward to reading the article. I just moved to Mpls, and it has been very interesting seeing how the traffic patterns work. Obviously I-94 is the big problem in the existing road network. The cities appear to have a normal amount of morning inflow / afternoon outflow. No big surprise there. As an urbanite, I always wonder why people choose to live in suburbs and thus ensure that they will deal with rush hours every day (!!!).
The obvious solution to congestion is to prioritize mass transit. Sadly, that is a difficult proposition. It means a lot more than just putting in more convenient bus routes. Our entire way of life is organized around car-based personal transportation. Furthermore, even if you built a non-car based neighborhood in the middle of a city, many of the residents would still want to own cars so that they could access the car-dependent neighborhoods. It is immensely difficult to find a way to transition ourselves out of car dependency.
–Steve (http://grossreport.blogspot.com)
Yeah, but others are arguing that tearing down highways would reduce traffic.
Reason is a libertarian mag, so it’s predictable they’d bash government-subsidized mass transit. It’s also predictable that there’s quotes like:
“Privatization. We’re much more likely to adopt ideas like the above when roads are built and managed by companies responding to market incentives, not by government officials responding to planning fads and political clout.”
The Twin Cities does well because of it’s planning, which helps coordinate our communities and transit to reduce the need for highways. Other metro regions are like concrete wastelands … our area’s still lots of green.
oops, “still got lots of green”
The authors criticize the Met Council for a focus on mass transit that is unlikely to help reduce the costs of congestion and is at odds with what the citizenry wants.
And that’s why their piece is getting covered in Reason(s to be Libertarian) magazine. Folks should read the STrib’s article from this week that illustrates the huge demand for a more rapid implementation of mass transit in conjunction with this article.
Political leanings are immaterial to the validity of an idea. The article does make me wonder — the Met Council’s plan is to spend billions of dollars to wind up with worse congestion than we have now? I checked the Met Council website — that’s what their plan boils down to, with the logic of “it would be even worse if we did nothing.” I hate a plan that intends to wind up with a worse situation at the end than existed at the beginning.
In the last 20 years congestion has only increased in the metro area. Why should we have to live with that? Let’s plan for improvement — not slower decline.
in the last 20 years, legislators at the capitol loved highway construction. now people finally realize that lrt and street cars can cut down on cars.
lrt also has the benefit of altering behavior by shaping cities to enable people to ditch cars. and it helps move people. and it cuts down on pollution.
Except that the Met Council thinks spending 25% of the region’s transit budget will not reduce congestion, just make it worse more slowly.
Feeling happy about the current plan is akin to being on a ship in the middle of the ocean and feeling happy that it is sinking slowly.