Drive over the Potomac River from Virginia into Washington across the 14th Street Bridge, and you can’t miss a large electric sign overhead. “SafeTrack Is Here,” it says. “Rethink Your Commute.” That’s supposed to be helpful advice. Properly understood, it’s a warning.
It tells people in their cars the traffic congestion that’s been a feature of living in the nation’s capital for decades is worse than ever or soon will be. So brace yourself. And getting to work, never easy, will be a nightmare if it isn’t already.
This fact of life for the politicians, bureaucrats, planners, media types, and lobbyists won’t displease most Americans who live far from the Washington metropolis. Indeed, they’re likely to feel that difficulty in getting around town is a punishment the political class deserves. And maybe it is.
In Washington, there’s a lot of blame to go around for the traffic crisis. Highways and bridges, necessary to accommodate a surging population and more cars, were never built. Advocates of “smart growth,” environmentalists, and planners who find cars mess up their plans—together they bear a measure of responsibility. Neglect of maintenance throughout the Metro rapid transit system is the fault of Metro personnel.
But accountability not being part of the Washington culture, no one is held accountable. Poor Metro maintenance, the Washington Post reported, “resulted from public pressure to keep the subway operating at full capacity for economic and convenience reasons.” So the public was at fault? This is doubtful. Did the riders, informed that critical maintenance was needed for safety reasons, insist that it be put off? Of course not.
Anyway, the current disruption began when Metro, the once-elegant, 118-mile system connecting Virginia and Maryland to D.C., started having safety issues, delays, and other problems. Trains broke down. Fires ignited in dark tunnels between subway stations. A woman died of smoke inhalation. Ridership declined.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated and discovered lousy maintenance, a slipshod safety culture, and a failure to learn from earlier troubles. “Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in organizations,” said Robert Sumwalt, an NTSB board member, to the Post. “And literally that is true in this case.”
So now we have SafeTrack, the euphemism for partial Metro shutdowns that will make life harsher than it need be in Washington from June to next March. The entire system was closed for a day for “inspections” last March. Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economist, called this a “theatrical play to justify” the extensive shutdowns that were announced in May. He was right.
Cowen feared the worst. “There is no longer much resilience in the area traffic patterns, or so many possibilities for rerouting, so downtown might be at a gridlocked standstill much of the time,” he wrote on his blog Marginal Revolution. “It’s already hard enough to cross past the White House since the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue.” He got that right too.
Why is “rerouting” one’s travel or attempting to “reroute your commute” so difficult? Very simple. Many of the highways that were supposed to be built along with Metro were scratched. The subway opened in 1976. The highways have been erased from the memory of planners. It wasn’t clear until this year, with the subway under repair, how big a mistake this was. The only roads to which one might reroute today are already clogged with cars and trucks.
Not all the once-planned highways were a good idea. Indeed, Washington would have been honeycombed with interstate freeways if they’d all been built. Settled neighborhoods would have been torn apart. Some were, in anticipation of highways that never got beyond the planning stage.
But it was the killing of one highway in particular that has had an outsized impact. It’s known as the Outer Beltway. Conceived in the 1950s, it was to be a 108-mile loop circling the Washington area outside the famous Capital Beltway, built in the early 1960s. It drew complaints, the most serious being that it would cause a fresh wave of suburban development—catering to two-car families—to reach farther into Virginia and Maryland from Washington. It would generate what its opponents these days call “sprawl.” They were aghast.
Most people weren’t. That’s why new neighborhoods far from Washington were gobbled up so fast by home-buyers. One thing should have been obvious from this phenomenon: Development is inevitable. It doesn’t depend on the construction of another beltway to spur it. So much far-flung development has occurred around most metropolitan areas, it has its own name—exurbs.
Today, the Outer Beltway would be a way around the Washington area, a “regional bypass facility.” Tens of thousands of travelers up and down the East Coast would no longer be forced to merge with local traffic on the Capital Beltway to get through the Washington area. They’d have an easier route. And traffic on the Beltway, often a parking lot, would ease.
The Three Sisters Bridge crossing the Potomac above Georgetown would be another safety valve in today’s pinch. It would connect with a freeway on the Washington side and replace an ugly elevated highway. The North Central Freeway would be a new route into D.C. from Maryland. None of these was built.
Metro was once dubbed the “Great Society subway” because it was dreamed up in Washington and initially funded during the late 1960s. It was a wonderful idea. Its stations were beautifully designed. But like much of what government runs, it was allowed to deteriorate. And like its namesake, what it had promised to deliver, it no longer could.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
