![]() That’s what the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) has been trying to push with its Region Forward plan and the related “What Would It Take?” scenario (PDF). To do that, we need to concentrate future growth around existing hubs with more residents, jobs, and multimodal transportation. Technology can help people get around more easily, but there are bigger-picture policies as well to help people not have to drive so far in the first place. The real solution is to reduce dependence on long commutes So, at 5:45, you’re shaved and showered and your computer presents you with your travel options for today. So, your computer goes out and finds the VRE train schedule and the bus schedule, and here’s the Metrorail schedule and where it drops you off. Say you’re commuting in from Manassas: Your computer looks at your calendar, sees that it’s a regular commute day and that the weather’s going to be terrible so traffic is going to be bad, and there’s already been a big crash on I-66. ![]() But he also suggested how technology can remind drivers when transit might be a better option: Lomax did talk about squeezing more cars on the road through technology like car automation that can run cars closer together. We need to figure out how to use our existing capacity smarter.” This year, Lomax told Halsey, “It’s going to be hard to figure out how you scale up to make it accommodate another million people, 20 or 25 percent more travel demand. Perhaps responding to the criticism Lomax received for his one-sided push for road construction, he seems to have softened his tone somewhat. “That we are congested is not news, but TTI’s report does tremendous damage, because they fail to recognize the primary cause of our congestion and imply that we could simply widen roads to build our way out of the problem,” said Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, about the 2012 report. Tim Lomax, a co-author of the report, told the Post’s Ashley Halsey III in 2012, “You can do little things like stagger work hours, fix traffic-light timing and clear wrecks faster, but in the end, there’s a need for more capacity.” What does this mean for public policy and the Washington region? TTI’s data is often used to justify spending money on new freeway capacity, since congestion sounds bad. However, because of greater sprawl, Nashville commuters spent an average of 268 hours that year commuting, while the average Portland commuter spent 193 hours. For example, in the 2012 report, TTI ranked Portland as worse than Nashville, with a Travel Time Index (TTI) of 1.15 for Nashville and 1.23 for Portland. That’s because just about everything I wrote then is still relevant.)Ĭritics like Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute and Joe Cortright of CEOs for Cities have pointed out these problems each time TTI releases a new study with an accompanying press blitz, but TTI continues to focus on the same metrics. (Note: This post is a revised version of one I wrote in 2011. But it’s the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation. Which city has worse roads? By TTI’s methods, it’s Denseopolis. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work. On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn’t bad. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. The report, from Texas A&M University, looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves.
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