View From a Height

A Poll Too Late

About a week ago, the Washington Post reported on how The Commute is faring in my old hometown. ("Painful Commutes Don't Stop Drivers", and accompanying poll.) If anything, things seem to have deteriorated even further since I left, and the traffic was one of the aggravating factors in my leaving.

Unfortunately, I seem to be a carrier, because the Denver area seems destined to repeat DC's mistakes. I wish this article and survey had been available last year when our friends at the Independence Institute were trying to persuade us that FasTracks was a mistake.

The one thing they seem most unwilling to do is give up their cars, so they accept long and frustrating commutes as the price for other lifestyle choices.

...

"There's nothing we can do to fix it," said Dan Tangherlini, the District's transportation director. "There are things we can do to try to influence it. But it is a little frustrating when most people sit around and agree that people are making all the wrong choices and yet more and more people are doing it."

Naturally, the people are making "all the wrong choices." Yes, I agree. Foremost among those wrong choices was an expensive below-ground subway system that was obsolete as soon as it was approved. It's completely unequipped to handle cross-county commuting, and it ends in what are now the inner suburbs. It picked winners and losers, can't possibly have nearly enough spokes or parking to be near enough people to be worthwhile or convenient.

Blaming people because they'd rather sit in their own private car, listening to what they please, rather than sweat it out, lurching along with a few dozen co-commters in tunnels where they can't call to say they'll be late? Yes, that's the worst of the bureaucratic mentality at work. Everyone is just making that "wrong choice" that they'd rather have flexibility and comfort, even at the price of a long, unpredictable commute. That's not a "wrong choice," that's a "trade-off."

Sadly, even Washingonians don't seem to have learned the lesson:

Solid majorities of area residents polled support a variety of big-ticket items to help ease traffic congestion, from extending Metro to Dulles International Airport to building an intercounty connector in the Maryland suburbs. Half would even be willing to pay higher gasoline taxes to fund transportation projects, compared with a third nationally.

I suspect the same flawed logic is at work here as built Metro in the first place, and that led to FasTracks: we'll build this, and that will get everyone else off my road.

Look, Maryland has been a terrible roadblock back there. A lot of DC's congestion is through truck traffic that has no place to go but the Beltway. DC won't finish I-95 through the city; and Maryland has blocked both eastern bypasses (to permit I-95 traffic to flow around the city), and western bypasses (to let other I-95 traffic connect with I-70 or I-270). Next time a shipment of nails from Birmingham bound for Camden spills and turns Northern Virginia into a parking lot for 10 hours, send your complaints to Annapolis.

One big reason that drives are longer here is that traffic tie-ups are far more frequent. Nearly 6 in 10 commuters say they get tangled up in traffic jams at least once a week. And more than 1 in 4 -- 28 percent -- said they encounter serious tie-ups every day, compared with 9 percent of commuters nationally.

Inconsistency is a classic symptom of a system operating near the edge.

"Sometimes it's just plain scary," said Danitza Valdivia, 31, a project assistant who lives in Northwest Washington and works near MCI Center -- a four-mile commute as the crow flies that takes her a half-hour to negotiate. "I get to work and have to take a coffee break before I start my workday."

The last few times I've gone back to DC, it's been Highway Culture Shock. I had forgotten how erratic the drivers are there. Of course, this doesn't get them more than a few car lengths during the course of an hour, and is probably responsible for a fair number of the accidents and tie-ups.

There's no question that traffic here is worse, and the drivers more aggressive than they were eight years ago when I moved here. Still, people assimilate. It's rare to get beeped at for not jack-rabbiting off a green light, for instance.

Still, it's still a manageable problem. C-470/E-470 is helping, and plans to widen US-36 between Denver and Boulder are an absolute must.

People are not going to get out of their cars, by and large.