Many meetings to attend this morning, but I had to post this asphalt-worshipping nugget in its entirety right away. NOTE: This not a parody; this column was actually printed in the newspaper.
By the way - what is this "Reason Institute" that McIlheran evidently holds in such high regard? The ExxonSecrets website sheds light on where they get their funding:
Corporate Donors in 1999 included: American Farm Bureau Federation, American Forest and Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, American Plastics Council, ARCO Foundation, BP Amoco, CA Building Industry Association, Chemical Manufacturers Association, Chevron Corporation, Chlorine Chemistry Council, Clorox, Coca-Cola, American and Continental Airlines, Daimler Chrysler Corp, Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical, Edison Electric Institute, ENRON, Exxon Mobil, FMC Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Kimberly-Clark, Koch Industries, Koch Materials, Eli Lilly, Microsoft, National Air Transportation Association, National Beer Wholesalers, National Soft Drink Association, Pfizer, Inc, Philip Morris, Procter and Gamble, Shell Oil, Sun America, Union Carbide Corporation, United Airlines, Western States Petroleum, Watson Land Company, Whole Foods Market, Winston and Strawn.
Hmmm... Car manufacturers, petroleum concerns and chemical companies believe we NEED MORE HIGHWAYS? My goodness!
More later ...
Planning as if people's time mattered
By Patrick McIlheran
Mary Peters, picked to be the new federal secretary of transportation, did something exciting: First thing, she said highway congestion's a problem.
This is refreshing. It was like hearing theologians denounce sin. They're supposed to, sure, but if you remember the 1970s, they all seemed to give up the fight as hopelessly square and talked politics instead.
Ditto road planners and congestion. As long as I can remember, any talk of how Milwaukee's rush minute grew into a rush hour has been, "We can't build our way out of congestion," which meant we'd better get used to brake lights and buy a bus pass.
We could turn every third street into an expressway, goes the line, and cars would still fill them. Eventually, we'd have 17 SUVs each and use amphetamines to stay up all night driving to keep ahead of the pavers.
We didn't have to. The pavers gave up, or the planners got tired of being tackled by NIMBYs on the way into public hearings. We've had some new lanes and a few new roads, but since the population's been increasing faster, and since it insists on buying cars and moving, congestion's been worsening.
It doesn't have to, suggests a new study. A think tank, the Reason Foundation, toted up how much congestion the nation's drivers will suffer by 2030, then reckoned how much it would cost to expand roads enough to reduce it, rather than cope with it. About 7.7 billion more hours a year would be frittered away on the brakes if nothing's done. It would cost $21 billion a year to fix it, which the authors point out is about 15% of what we're going to spend on roads anyhow.
More locally, the study predicts that even in slow-growth Milwaukee, where it now takes about 21% longer to travel somewhere during peak times, things will jam to the point that it takes 35% longer. That's what Boston or Minneapolis lives with now.
Our cure is commensurately cheaper: about $1.2 billion total over the next 25 years, the study's authors say - about 6% of what regional planners already say they plan to spend between now and 2035. It's about $2.70 per hour of your time saved.
None of it amounts to paving over Story Hill, either: The study's lead author, David Hartgen, who teaches transportation at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, says some would be more freeway lanes added when the roads are rebuilt, but a lot would be retimed traffic lights, more left-turn lanes and so forth. They're "not very sexy," he says. But "in total, they make a huge difference."
Local planners seem to be singing from the same hymnal.
"Our projections show that we're not simply permitting congestion to go unabated," says Kenneth Yunker, deputy director of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.
Specifically, Yunker says planners call for a 20% increase in lane-miles on metro Milwaukee freeways. In the planned rebuild, just expanding transit and managing traffic still meant a doubling of congestion, he says, so planners looked at adding capacity to roads. They now think they can get congestion below 2001 levels by 2035, says Yunker.
The plan comes under fire from anti-highway activists who fault it for spending about twice as much on roads as on transit. Yunker at times sounds defensive about adding lanes at all, noting that even in Portland, the light-rail utopia, planners envision a similar expansion of freeway capacity.
Yunker need not be defensive, nor Portland: As transit carries less than 5% of trips in metro Milwaukee, outpaced by bikes, it's eating more than its share of public money already. Even if ridership doubled, reversing a half-century of declining market share, its dent on congestion would be almost unnoticeable.
Bus lines are worth keeping for those who use them - those who can't drive or those who work downtown and don't stop for groceries or to pick up the kids. But even on rails, they won't displace many cars soon.
Which means the message of the past 30 years, that we can't build our way out of congestion, is out of gas. The result of that thinking, congestion, has real costs - it eats people's time, it limits their work and home choices by making travel hard, and it makes it tougher for businesses to move goods.
It's encouraging, then, to hear the nation's road chief talk about fixing congestion. What Peters can do and how much she means it isn't clear, but there's one more hopeful sign:
Peters was an adviser to the project behind the study suggesting congestion is curable.
Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist. His e-mail address is pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com
Comments