We’re stuck in traffic and jammed aboard trains, and we really want to know if anybody has a way out of this mess, a road map for solutions within our lifetimes. I asked Richard Parsons, president of the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance, and Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, to define the problem, propose solutions and tell us how we would know if their ideas worked. Their routes to relief follow different maps.
— Robert Thomson
We’re stuck in traffic and jammed aboard trains, and we really want to know if anybody has a way out of this mess, a road map for solutions within our lifetimes. I asked Richard Parsons, president of the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance, and Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, to define the problem, propose solutions and tell us how we would know if their ideas worked. Their routes to relief follow different maps.
From Parsons: Ask any Washingtonian to define the region’s transportation problem and the answer is clear: Too much traffic congestion. The Texas Transportation Institute reports that we’ve even surpassed Los Angeles in our daily traffic misery. Congestion costs us in many ways: Wasted time, money and fuel; more frequent vehicle repairs; lost productivity and added stress from long travel times that are almost impossible to predict. Congestion also has profound impacts on our regional air quality, local economy and quality of life. Yet, reducing congestion rarely makes it to the top of our regional priority list.
Why? In part, because we’ve clouded the debate, allowing popular myths and wishful thinking to supersede sound research and expert analysis. A prime example is the myth that “we can’t do anything about traffic.” Nothing could be further from the truth, as we’ve witnessed with the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
Those who solve traffic problems for a living (trained urban planners and traffic engineers), tell us that we failed to build the transit and road capacity we needed to support the last three decades of population and job growth in our region. The spider web of transit and road connections that was supposed to link major urban and suburban centers was never built. Those missing links create most of the major choke-points we see today.
Experts tell us we can reduce congestion significantly in the next 20 years, if we set clear priorities around regional transit and road improvements that do the most to reduce congestion and improve travel times. Improving Metro’s reliability, adding highway capacity to remove bottlenecks; adding new suburb-to-suburb transit service like the Purple Line, Corridor Cities Transitway and bus rapid-transit systems; and continuing to concentrate housing and job growth within walking distance of transit stations are all part of the solution. There is no one silver bullet.
Assertions that we can solve all of our region’s problems with more transit and better land use, without major new investments in our regional highway network, are simply not supported by study data.
Just this year, the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board
’s “Aspirations Scenario” found the combined effects of more-compact, transit-oriented development and a new regional toll-lane and bus rapid-transit network on highways like the Capital Beltway would reduce total vehicle hours of delay in our region by 12.5 percent. They also found that higher-density, transit-oriented development by itself actually increases vehicle hours of delay. Previous studies by the Montgomery County Planning Board also show even the most aggressive smart-growth land-use policies, by themselves, have little impact on future travel demand. That’s why we need a holistic approach.
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