Pumping Gasoline

USA Today and The Washington Post weigh in on progress:

Los Angeles for years has had the nation's worst traffic jams, but these days even the streets and highways in small and medium cities from Brownsville, Texas, to Anchorage, to Honolulu, Hawaii, are giving rush-hour drivers fits.

Snarled traffic is costing travelers in the 85 biggest U.S. cities a whopping 3.5 billion hours a year, up from 700 million two decades ago.

The problem worsened over the past two decades in small, medium and large cities, according to the Texas Transportation Institute's annual Urban Mobility Report released Tuesday. The institute, part of Texas A&M University, looked at data from 1982 to 2002.

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Washingtonians are spending an increasing amount of their lives stuck in ever-worsening traffic, according to a national study released this morning that also found that the region maintained its ignominious status as having the nation's third most crowded roads.

Washington area drivers spent an average of 67 hours a year stuck in traffic in 2002, according to the study by the Texas Transportation Institute -- 21 hours more than the national average of 46. That is up an hour from 2001, a rise of 19 hours since 1992, and 46 hours more than in 1982. Only motorists in the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland regions endured worse traffic than local drivers.

USA Today manages to put a pro-Bush spin on things, noting that traffic problems have declined in some areas thanks to a piss-poor economy:

Traffic in some cities has actually gotten better — but that's because their economies have done poorly.

"In a lot of the places in the past we've seen success in cities suffering job declines — Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland," [Alan] Pisarski said. "Unemployment is a great solution."

But the real solution is exactly what this country spent the last fifty or so years obliterating--public transit:

The biggest time-saver, according to the report, is public transit, which shaves 32% off the time drivers spend sitting bumper-to-bumper.

"If public transportation service was discontinued and the riders traveled in private vehicles, the 85 urban areas would have suffered an additional 1.1 billion hours of delay in 2002," the report said.

Lomax said the benefits to transit systems are in cities that are already too congested to handle more vehicles.

"Typically you're in a situation where you can't handle any more transit on the roads, so public transit becomes the way you support economic development," he said.

No shit. Having spent the last week of August in New York, which has extremely effective, if not always aesthetically pleasing mass transit, I can attest to its ease of use. There's no way I'd want to actually deal with a car anywhere close to Manhattan, when for the economical price of $21 dollars, I get unlimited rides on trains and buses for seven days. And, if you know what you're doing (or, like me, sort of know what you're doing) you rarely have to walk more than, say, half a dozen blocks or so.

Now, if I lived up in the city, I could see times where recourse to a taxi would be necessary--by way of example, my last Saturday found me dripping with perspiration after dealing with a combination of heat and humidity that rivals anything here in the Gret Stet AND you had the added issue of being underground and not always close to circulating air. But private cars are still more of a hinderance than a benefit in a major urban area--indeed, some suggest that cars literally suck the life out of cities themselves.

I say this even though lately I've been spending a fair amount of time looking to replace my aging fossil burner--which has tansmission problems, turbocharger problems, stalling issues, etc. Nothing three thousand dollars or so couldn't fix, but given that the bluebook value of the car is about six hundred and fifty bucks, I'm looking at it more as something to trade in...

Still, if there was even halfway decent public transit in this, um, "city," I'd be trying to scrounge out another 30,000 miles or so on the car before giving it up--while using said public transit a lot...