American Gridlock
Traffic is making millions sick and tired. The bad news? It's going to get worse unless things change in a real big way
Many businesses, when deciding where to locate, now give increased consideration to traffic conditions and commuting times. Boeing Co., which just announced the relocation of its headquarters from gridlocked Seattle to Chicago, recently warned that its remaining jobs in the Seattle region are in jeopardy unless traffic congestion eases. In Atlanta, where a survey of local corporations found an overwhelming majority reporting "traffic congestion" as the most serious impediment to growth, BellSouth is consolidating all its suburban offices into three downtown locations convenient to the city's mass-transit system. A recent study by the Milken Institute, a think tank in Santa Monica, confirms that aging downtowns and former warehouse districts are often outpacing surrounding suburban locations as magnets of high-tech employment.
Unheralded boom. Another indication of how congestion is influencing the patterns of American life is the largely unheralded boom in public transportation. Reversing a trend going back to the time of the tin lizzie, ridership on the nation's public transportation systems has grown by 21 percent since 1995 (compared with an 11 percent increase in driving) and is now at the highest levels in more than 40 years. In San Francisco, nearly a fourth of all workers now use mass transit to get to their jobs. That means that while the city has the nation's second-worst traffic congestion problem, it ranks 29th in terms of the percentage of commuters affected.
So bad have the nation's traffic woes become that they are changing the politics of transportation--to the point that even some doctrinaire, free-market conservatives now support mass transit. Two years ago, Paul Weyrich and William Lind of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation called for more public investment in trolley services and commuter trains. Such investment, Weyrich and Lind said, "serves some important conservative goals, including economic development, which can be both spurred and shaped by rail-transit systems; helping the poor move off welfare and into jobs (which they have to get to somehow); and strengthening the bonds of community. . . ." Taking issue with traditional conservative objections to mass-transit subsidies, the two men noted that automobile drivers consume far more public resources than do subway riders. "The dominance of automobiles and highways," they wrote, "is a product of massive government intervention in the marketplace, intervention stretching back to World War I."
But moving to a safe neighborhood served by good mass transit isn't an option that most Americans can afford. In the Chicago area, for example, a home located within 500 feet to one-half mile of a suburban rail station now commands an average premium of $36,000 over houses that aren't within walking distance. Just moving a house 100 feet closer to a railroad station increases its value by 1 percent, according to a study by Aaron Gruen, an urban economist with Gruen Gruen & Associates.
Catch-22. Will building new highways help people who don't want to use mass transit or who can't afford to live where it's available? Not really. Consider what it would take just to accommodate the projected growth in traffic in San Diego over the next 20 years if auto dependency isn't reduced. San Diego is expected to grow by 1 million persons by 2020. If current patterns continue, that would mean an additional 685,000 cars. Today, there are five parking spaces available for every car in San Diego and parking is still a problem. To find sufficient parking spaces for another 685,000 cars, the city would need an additional 37 square miles of parking lots.
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