IN PRAISE OF HIGHWAYS

There’s worse. The system already carries two and a half times the traffic it did in 1975, and congestion is still increasing. In the past seven years, highway capacity has grown 2 percent, traffic 37 percent. The logical response would be to expand what federal highway administrator Kenneth R. Wykle calls the “existing infrastructure” and build new interstates as well. But there’s no chance that either will happen any time soon. “More asphalt is not the answer,” Wykle deputy Gloria Jeff told USA Today.

It is, though. We desperately need more highways: more interstates, more beltways, more private toll roads, more arterials radiating from cities to suburbs, and especially more highways between suburbs. There’s no way around this. The alternatives — mass transit, special lanes for buses and high-occupancy vehicles, flextime, telecommuting — have failed miserably. Urban-style gridlock has been common for years now in the suburbs, exurbs, and beyond. On a typical morning, traffic backs up on I-95 for 20 miles outside Washington. The refrain from planners, urban experts, environmentalists, and government officials is that people should get out of their cars and walk or ride buses or trains. But people simply won’t do it. “We’ve got to educate the American people,” says Jeff. That won’t work either. Everyone knows about mass transit and carpooling. They just prefer to drive to work or anywhere else, usually alone. Who can blame them? A car gives them flexibility, mobility, and speed in getting around. In most cities, only those who can’t afford a car (the young, old, and poor) are willing to take the bus or train. That’s why these people are known as “captive riders.”

For what it’s worth, I like highways, the more lanes, the better. Without a thick network of them, America would have the transportation system of Pakistan, and the economy too. Interstates have the advantage of being twice as fast and twice as safe as other roads. And they used to be fun to drive on. When freeways in Los Angeles and then interstates were built in the ’50s and ’60s, they were things of beauty. In L. A., “some details of the system, such as the graceful intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways, raised civil engineering to the level of art and can be compared to the finest achievements of bridge builders in the 19th and 20th centuries,” insists Christopher Finch in Highways to Heaven: The Auto Biography of America. Interstates normally cut through rural areas without disturbing the natural setting. Elevated highways in downtowns aren’t as unobtrusive and may have done unintended harm. President Dwight Eisenhower, father of the interstate system, never envisioned interstates penetrating cities in the first place. On balance, though, cities have been fortunate to have them. Freeways, by spurring commerce and tourism, actually slowed the demise of cities.

My affection for highways has nothing to do with the real reason more are critically needed. America has changed dramatically since the interstate grid was designed in the early 1950s and thousands of lesser highways were built. For one thing, the main commuting pattern is no longer suburb-to-city but suburb-to-suburb. You know, Gwinnett County, Georgia, to Marietta, not Gwinnett to downtown Atlanta. Since 1960, such commutes have quadrupled. By 1996, suburbto-suburb trips accounted for 44 percent of all commutes nationwide. Of the 19 million new jobs created in the 1980s, 13 million were in the suburbs. So the problem is that there aren’t enough highways to handle the suburban traffic surge. More beltways — and especially outer beltways, like the one being completed in Paris — are urgently needed. Partial ring roads would help too. Mass transit isn’t the answer. People now “trip-chain.” That means they do other things on the way to work (take kids to school, drop off laundry) and on the way home (buy groceries, stop at the bank). “That lifestyle pretty much precludes the use of transit,” says transportation consultant Alan E. Pisarski. Or carpools.

The way goods are now produced and sold in America virtually mandates the use of trucks. Warehouses and large inventories are out, as manufacturers and retailers have adopted just-in-time delivery. Since they depend on trucks to do most of the delivering, they also are “more and more dependent on highways, ” says Larry Magid, director of transportation for the National Governors’ Association. “The speed with which you can get your product to market gives American companies their competitive advantage.” To avoid highway delays, Federated Department Stores dispatches its trucks at night. Wal-Mart schedules deliveries within an hour window.

Not surprisingly, truck traffic on highways has soared — 3M alone makes 800,000 truck deliveries a year — and the advantage American firms have in getting products to market is being eroded. On interstates, trucks are responsible for 12.5 percent of the miles traveled, far more than projected. Congestion has become so widespread that trucks are diverting to less direct roads and interstates. Because of spillover from I-95, trucks comprise as much as 40 percent of the traffic on I-81 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. (I-95 has another problem. It’s the main north-south artery on the East Coast, but a 30-mile stretch of it in New Jersey was never built.) The point is, delays due to congestion or bad roads affect commerce in an unprecedented way. Now, says Magid, “the condition of the public transportation infrastructure is becoming the single most limiting factor in the ability of American businesses to make further improvements in productivity.”

Nor has the highway system, with its east- west orientation, adjusted for the massive population shift to the South, Southwest, and West. Phoenix had 100,000 people when the interstates were laid out. Now it has 2.6 million. Salt Lake City had 300,000. Now it has 1.5 million. Just for starters, new interstates are needed from Phoenix to Las Vegas, the new American boomtown, and between Phoenix and Salt Lake City. An interstate (I-101) from Philadelphia to Norfolk and on to Raleigh makes sense. Meanwhile, truck traffic across the Mexican and Canadian borders has metastasized, notably since the North American Free Trade Agreement was approved in 1993. Expanding and modernizing I-35 through Texas, Oklahoma, and points north should be a top priority (including a bypass around Austin, Texas). A NAFTA highway dubbed I-69 from the Mexican border along the Gulf Coast of Texas, through Louisiana and Arkansas, and on to Indianapolis will get some money in the new highway bill, but it deserves prompt construction. Stretching I-83 all the way to Buffalo from Baltimore would facilitate trade with Canada.

Naturally, car-haters oppose more highways. Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back, believes the pre-World War I transportation mix is still right for the United States: trolleys, railroads, a few million cars, and lots of walking. (My favorite Kay line is, “In the desolate world of the parking lot, criminality grows.”) Writer James Howard Kunstler blames the car for devastating land, air, and “culture in general.” Though no car-hater, President Clinton wants to siphon some highway money for social spending. What’s surprising is so many conservatives have joined liberals in attacking the new highway bill. They complain it’s pork barrel. Okay, $ 14 billion for ” demonstration projects” like a road connecting two presidential libraries in Texas (LBJ’s and Bush’s) is a bit much. But some conservative criticism makes you wonder whether conservatives would have built the interstate system to begin with. “All in all,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “the highway bill is the lowest moment since Republicans regained Congress.” David Frum wrote in the New York Times that the bill “would leave scarcely a blade of grass in the lower 48 states unpaved.” Please.

Conservatives should be embarrassed by this witless rhetoric, none more than Chairman John Kasich of the House Budget Committee. He called the legislation an ” abomination” and said most highway funding should be left to the states. Doesn’t he know the federalism issue was resolved nearly two centuries ago and not in his favor? Henry Clay argued the federal government should have a major role in “internal improvements.” The Jeffersonians said it shouldn’t. Clay won. Conservatives should also be sensitive to breaking trust with taxpayers. The federal gas tax (18.4 cents per gallon) goes to a highway trust fund, at least as a bookkeeping matter. The deal with taxpayers: The money is to be spent on roads and bridges. A lot of it hasn’t been. At the moment, the trust fund has a $ 23 billion surplus. Even the Shuster bill won’t spend all the money collected for road-building, but it will come a lot closer.

Conservatives are hardly the biggest impediment to more and better highways. The largest obstacle is a string of myths about transportation in America. I’ve counted six of them.

Myth One: Americans have a love affair with the automobile and — irrationally and stupidly — balk at other modes of transportation. They balk all right, but it’s not irrational or stupid. Americans love their car like they love their microwave. It’s a useful and efficient device. Time is what matters to most people, and the average commute by car takes half the time of mass transit. Carpooling is also time- consuming. For every extra passenger, five minutes is added to a commute. Trip-chaining is especially rational, notes Alan Pisarski. “It’s time efficient, it’s pollution efficient and it’s energy efficient.” Significantly, the fuel efficiency for an auto at average occupancy is greater than that for a bus or urban train. And it’s twice as safe, based on fatalities per 100 million passenger miles, to drive as to take light rail. Faster too. The average commuting speed is more than 30 miles per hour by car, 25 on heavy rail, 15 on light. Planners, of course, want the public to conform their travel to the transportation system government has provided, which means mass transit. The public has no obligation to do this.

Myth Two: Mass transit makes more sense, particularly cost-wise, than cars and highways. Maybe on paper it does, but not in real life. Transportation analyst Wendell Cox estimates that, in 1998 dollars, $ 350 billion has been spent on mass-transit subsidies since the 1950s, and $ 350 billion on interstates. Which has worked best? Interstates are flooded with cars, while transit ridership fell in 1995 to its lowest point in two decades. This is happening worldwide. “The car is less subsidized and more heavily taxed in Europe than in America, and mass transit there has received massive subsidies,” James Q. Wilson wrote in Slate. “Despite this, auto use in western Europe grew three times faster than in the United States between 1965 and 1987.” Costly rail transit rarely comes close to achieving its ridership projections. Miami promised more than 200,000 people would ride its rail system daily. It struggles to get 50,000. The Detroit People Mover gets one-eighth the projected riders, the L.A. green line one-sixth, and so on. Calculated from U.S. Department of Transportation figures for 1995, the total cost per person-mile of operating a car was 16 cents. For transit, it was 63 cents. Oh, yes: There’s no evidence anywhere in the U.S. — and I mean anywhere — that investment in transit has reduced traffic congestion.

Myth Three: Highways generate new traffic. This is the Field of Dreams argument — build it and they will come. The fact is, if you don’t build highways, cars will come anyway, only gridlock will be a lot worse. There are many illustrations of this, but L.A. is the best. The city has the worst traffic congestion in the country. Planners assume the network of wide freeways attracted the cars. Not so. “Relative to things that matter – – population, built-up area, and traffic — L.A. is short of freeway lanes compared to the rest of America,” says Peter Samuel, editor of a newsletter on toll roads. It’s 50th of the top 50 metro areas in freeway lanes per vehicle-miles traveled. It’s 49th in the number of freeway lanes per capita. Here’s a little-known fact: Only half the L.A. freeway system was actually built. The struggle to build more of it goes on. I recently rode on the long- delayed Century Freeway (on which the movie Speed was filmed just before the highway opened in 1993) between downtown and the airport. The road had plenty of traffic. Down the median crept two small rail cars with few passengers.

Myth Four: Highways cause sprawl. It’s true that good highways make developments in the far suburbs more feasible. The question is, Which came first, sprawl or highways? Almost everywhere, housing developments preceded highways. Then, highways made further development practical. But beware of those who use the word “sprawl.” It’s a pejorative favored by people who’d rather you live in an urban high-rise and give up your cars. What they’re stigmatizing is the American dream of a single-family house with a yard.

Myth Five: Technology is the answer to America’s transportation problem. Federal highway administrator Kenneth Wykle talks about “increasing the capacity [of existing roads] by leveraging technology.” He’s not dreaming, only expecting too much. At best, technology can relieve 10 to 15 percent of the problem, and I’m being generous. It can improve safety and give drivers information for avoiding jams. Upgrading the 160,685-mile National Highway System — it includes interstates and carries 70 percent of America’s commercial traffic –will help. But smart cars that drive themselves to a designated destination are decades away (if we ever have them) . Until then, technology won’t offset the need for more highways. Wykle doesn’t claim it will.

Myth Six: Car manufacturers, highway builders, and politicians have put one over on the American people. By subsidizing auto travel, the government purposely doomed transit and promoted suburbs. ” Builders and lobbyists exulted over the implications of the interstate for peacetime mobility,” writes Kay. The problem is, so did most Americans. If there was a conspiracy to get people in cars and on highways, it’s been the most successful one in history. In Europe, government tried the opposite, to get folks out of cars. The result of that conspiracy: more people in cars and on highways.

The story of traffic in America is perfectly reflected in the post-World War II history of the Washington, D.C., area. In many ways, the city is a model of traffic management. Because of the complex of federal agencies, many good jobs have remained in the center city. A pleasant, 100- mile subway system dubbed Metro serves the area. Washington has the fewest single-occupancy auto commuters in the country. It has the highest rate of carpooling. It has express bus and HOV lanes on many roads. The government encourages staggered work hours to reduce gridlock. “Washington does just about as well as one can expect to do,” says Pisarski. Yet the Washington area has the secondhighest traffic congestion in the country (next to L.A.).

It’s obvious what went wrong. Transportation planners in the 1960s predicted accurately the level of traffic in the 1990s. But their projections also assumed 1,467 lane-miles of highway that were never built. One beltway was constructed. Two outer beltways, both with bridges across the Potomac to connect suburbs and steer interstate traffic around Washington, were abandoned. An inner loop of freeways downtown was built only in snatches (from the Jefferson Memorial past the Capitol, near the Kennedy Center). But cars came. And subdivisions sprouted up as far away as the foothills of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, despite the absence of adequate highways. Road rage became common, though not as violent as Michael Douglas’s gridlock-induced spree in the movie Falling Down.

The future looks grim. After years of debate, politicians haven’t agreed on replacing the dilapidated Woodrow Wilson Bridge on I-95 with a wider span. The area’s population jumped 21 percent in the 1980s, all of it in the suburbs, but Virginia still struggles with plans for a western bypass that would run near Dulles International Airport. Maryland doesn’t want any bypass at all. And a proposed limited- access highway connecting I-270 and I-95 in suburban Maryland was recently killed. In every case, a small, elite minority of environmentalists, liberals, and landowners is blocking construction.

People want more highways. In Washington and around the country, it’s time to provide them. Overall, highway spending has fallen 50 percent in the 1990s. Yet amazingly, conservatives, who can’t agree on an agenda, are eager to define themselves in opposition to the highway bill and willing enough to align themselves with left-wing zealots who loathe cars, freeways, suburbs, malls, and economic development. Conservatives could play a useful role in the fight over highways, but this isn’t it. Right now, they should be pressing to improve the current bill by returning the $ 36 billion earmarked for mass transit to its intended purpose, highways and bridges. Better still, they should be rising to defend a legitimate and popular function of the federal government – – building highways.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.