Around this time of year, many of us are feeling overwhelmed by congestion.

Tis the season for traffic.

Fa la la la …blah.

Yes, I am talking about annoying, frustrating traffic punctuated by bad drivers and pedestrians who are oblivious to DO NOT WALK signs that are there to stop you from being maimed by the—bad and good drivers.

Bah humbug.

Now I wish I had good news for you regarding this vexing topic.

I don’t. There are no quick fixes and solutions will require us to think differently; never an easy thing.

But I do have a few things for you to consider.

First, you are not sitting in traffic, you are traffic. We all contribute.

Second, traffic never gets better.

That may sound defeatist, but if you believe David Edmondson, a transportation planner and a consultant with the Edmondson Planning and Design firm in Washington D.C. building more lanes and more roads won’t solve the problem, in fact, it makes congestion worse.

The culprit is something called induced demand.

Here’s what Edmondson recently wrote in a cheery little article called “Why Traffic Never Gets Better.”

“In 1962, (economist) Anthony Downs wrote that there is a Fundamental Law of Highway Congestion: no matter how much road is built, the highway will end up congested again. In decades since then, the United States has undergone a massive experiment in expanding most major roads, leading to an additional conclusion: there is a Fundamental Law of Traffic Congestion impacting both highways and major roads. In both cases, congestion will return to previous levels about 5 years after a widening. This is the phenomenon known as induced demand.”

Researchers looking at this issue use a measure called “lane-miles” to get at how much road is being built. A lane mile is the length of the road multiplied by how many lanes it has—a mile of two-lane road is two lane-miles, for instance. Add another two lanes to that stretch and you’ve built another two lane-miles.

 

Studies differ on exactly how much new driving is induced when new lane-miles are built. But they all hover at around a 1-to-1 ratio: a 1% increase in lane-miles results in a 1% increase in driving. But some studies show a worse ratio. The more lane miles, the worse that traffic gets.

Double ugh.

So sorry asphalt contractors, we can’t pave our way out of this conundrum.

Here’s Edmondson again.

“Why this occurs is relatively straightforward. Traffic demand is based on the immediate cost of driving: gas plus travel time. Reduce the time it takes to drive somewhere, and that trip becomes cheaper. People drive more because it now costs less. But as more people choose to drive more miles, the cost of driving settles back to where it was originally. Congestion is where the road system hits equilibrium, its happy place. Congestion always wins.”

Double ugh.

“Congestion always wins” is a terrible slogan. I do not recommend that future candidates use it.

But yet we keep adding lanes despite 62 years of research that says it doesn’t work.

Why?
Because some people believe widening does relieve congestion and others believe that if you add bike lanes and transit improvements alongside the widened roads, congestion will improve.

This indicates that politicians and engineers are still debating science, or they don’t trust the studies.

One researcher who has studied the issue said this in a New York Times story in 2023.

“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history.”

Makes sense.

But does that mean there are no answers?

Before we trot out the usual solutions: mixed use development that enables people to avoid trips, investments in mass transit, congestion tolling etc., let’s acknowledge that not everyone considers congestion a problem. Some urban thinkers consider congestion a good thing.

Blasphemy!

Ok, wait a second, let’s unpack what these heretics are saying before we condemn them.

Charles Marohn is the influential founder of the Strong Towns movement. We once hosted him in Delray Beach where he gave an interesting talk on his views before a packed crowd at Northern Trust on Atlantic Avenue.

He never calls congestion a problem.

“It is clearly not,” writes Marohn.  “Within our places — on our streets — congestion is an indicator of success. As Yogi Berra reportedly said: “Nobody goes there anymore because it is too busy.” Indeed. The most successful places are full of congestion. On the roads we build to travel between places, congestion signals many things but, for me anyway, it primarily indicates America’s cultural — and the engineering profession’s technical — misunderstanding of the systems we have built.”

Ok, Chuck Marohn, you have our attention.

Mr. Marohn believes we have created a system of roads destined to fail us. His answer: “the only way to deal with it and still have a successful economy is to address it at the source. We need to absorb those trips locally before they become a flood. Instead of building lanes, we need to build corner stores. We need local economic ecosystems that create jobs, opportunities and destinations for people as an alternative to those they can only get to by driving.

For nearly seven decades, our national transportation obsession has been about maximizing the amount that you can drive. Today, we need to focus on minimizing the amount you are forced to drive. If we develop a system that responds to congestion by creating local options, we will not only waste less money on transportation projects that accomplish little, but we will be strengthening the finances of our cities. We can spend way less and get way more in return. That’s the essence of a Strong Towns approach.”

In other words, Marohn’s solution is to turn soulless roads into streets, so instead of building speedways we build places that include a mix of uses.

In other words, do what Delray did to U.S. 1.

Here’s more Strong Towns thinking from Mr. Marohn.

“When I suggest that we convert our STROADS back into streets — changing unproductive transportation corridors into platforms for growth and investment — the pushback I get is that congestion will become unbearable. If we narrow those lanes, bring back the on-street parking, take out the turn lanes, remove the traffic signals, slow the automobile speeds and welcome a more complex urban environment, somehow we wouldn’t all be able to rapidly get to where we want to go.

To this I say: AMEN!

We have spent untold amounts of wealth reducing the time spent in the first and last mile of each auto trip. The result: a nation of fragile and unproductive places, an economy subsisting on financial meth and other desperation moves along with a built environment that forces (let me emphasize that to reinforce the notion that having only one option in a marketplace is quite un-American) FORCES nearly all of us to drive everywhere we need to go.

If we began to unwind this system, converting those nasty STROAD corridors into wealth producing streets, we would have congestion, of course, but in this case, congestion would simply be another word for opportunity. And not the type of opportunity that benefits the global corporation that can purchase toilet paper for 0.005 cents over cost, ship it around the world on subsidized transportation systems using subsidized energy all while protected by the U.S. military. I’m talking about opportunity for real people in real neighborhoods.

Need a gallon of milk? In an America of Strong Towns, you can get in your car and drive or — if the cost in terms of your time or quality of experience is worth more to you than you would choose to give up in dollar wealth — you can walk down the street to the corner grocer. Today that is considered quaint, but stop wasting enormous sums of money fighting congestion and now that becomes a real choice. Am I going to sit in my car for half an hour on clogged streets to save two dimes on milk or will I just walk up the block?”

Intriguing.

Of course, none of this happens overnight. Or without significant political will that pushes back against NIMBYism and old ideas.

P.S. Some of this thinking can be employed to battle the lack of housing.

Want to keep your big box?

How about letting people live next door to the box? Or how about converting all those one-story post offices to mixed use by allowing people to live above that use?

Regardless, we need to change our approach to congestion and begin to embrace some new ideas.

Meanwhile, be careful out there. And please don’t walk on red.

Have a wonderful New Year and thanks for reading.