If you have ever read a news story about congestion, “smart growth,” development, mass transit, or any of a thousand other topics involving how we get from Point A to Point B, odds are great that you have heard somebody spouting such politically correct bromides as “we can’t build our way out of congestion.”
There always follows a recommendation that more tax dollars be spent on things like subways, buses, bike paths, bicycles, car pooling, etc. etc., even though mass transit and its associated transportation fads account for only about one of every 10 trips taken by Americans every day.
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There is a certain logic to this bromide. Build a new road and congestion-crazy commuters will naturally flock to it and soon all that has been accomplished is to create bigger traffic jams. Right?
Well, according to the latest edition of the highly respected Texas Transportation Institute’s annual mobility study, the truth is that it is quite possible for local and state governments to build enough roads to not merely keep pace with congestion but to even reduce it:
“The analysis shows that changes in roadway supply have an effect on the change in delay. Additional roadways reduce the rate of increase in the amount of time it takes travelers to make congested period trips. In general, as the lane-mile “deficit” gets smaller, meaning that urban areas come closer to matching capacity growth and travel growth, the travel time increase is smaller.
“It appears that the growth in facilities has to be at a rate slightly greater than travel growth in order to maintain constant travel times, if additional roads are the only solution used to address mobility concerns. It is clear that adding roadway at about the same rate as traffic grows will slow the growth of congestion.”
Go read the full report, which you will find here. There are qualifiers on the TTI report, chiefly having to do with the need for balance in transportation solution planning. But the bottom line remains: Mass transit advocates for the past several decades have sucked up billions of dollars needed for new road construction and spent them instead on costly boondoggles that like Washington’s Metro subway provides subsidized transportation for well-paid government’s civil service and contract workers.
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