I mean, am I the only one who is putting one and one together to get two? Here’s my take.
In any urban area there is a lot of traffic; I live in a small town, and nonetheless every morning and night there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic with people trying to get to or from work. But how bad is it really? According to a 10-year-old study released by the Texas Transportation Institute in 1996,
Commuters in 1/3 of the nation’s largest cities spend more than 40 hours a year, one workweek, in traffic jams. The most congested city is Los Angeles, where drivers wait an average 65 hours a year bumper to bumper. In Washington, D.C., the figure is 58 hours, and the cost per capita of traffic jams $820 per year. The total cost of congestion for the 50 urban areas studied is approximately $51 billion.
In 2003 the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) re-examined the on-going Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) study and found that:
On a daily basis, Americans are experiencing longer delays, longer periods of congestion, and the spread of congestion across more and more of the nation’s roadways. This study of 75 urban areas, ranging in size from New York City to areas with 100,000+ population, suggests that traffic congestion will continue to worsen as the number of vehicle miles traveled continues to grow. The APTA quoted the following 2003 statistics from the TTI:
· Each person traveling in peak periods wastes, on average, 62 hours a year -- nearly eight full working days -- in congestion delays.(*1)
· Urban travelers can now expect to encounter congested roadways during seven hours of the day.(*1)
· Congestion is becoming more widespread, experienced by nearly 60 percent of urban roadways in 2000.(*1)
· Congestion is no longer confined to our largest metropolitan areas. As long ago as 1997, two-thirds of peak-period traffic was congested in areas of 500,000 or less. (*2)
Review the works cited and read the full article here.
This increase in lost hours per year isn’t an exact linear curve, but if we apply a little math-a-magic to the trend we can interpolate that we’re increasing by roughly 4 hours per year in lost time. That means today, in 2006 we’re up to 74 hours lost per year and by 2010 we’ll be losing 90 hours a year to traffic jams!
Back to the CNN articles and their question of why is oil at $72 a barrel? (And the underlying question: what can be done about it?) Well, if each and every one of us spends 74 hours a year in our cars at a dead stop, and worse starting and stopping every 15 seconds as we creep along toward our final destination… man, I need a math genius to help me out here: how much gas is wasted, not in getting from point a to point b, but lost in-between the two?
Well, why? Why are we okay with spending an extra 74 hours a year in our cars? And what is the leading cause behind this “time tax”? My hypothesis: it’s the point a to point b mentality. And I say “mentality” for a very specific reason: it’s not really point a to b. For arguments sake, lets say that I live in a suburb of Seattle. In order for me to get from home to work, then, I have to get in my car and travel out of my neighborhood to get to an arterial, which will then lead me along a circuitous route to a freeway; and this process must happen in a very specific and limited timeframe. I then travel this freeway with two hundred thousand of my closest friends and strangers to make it to an exit that leads to an arterial that drops me in a neighborhood where I spend too long looking for a parking space… just so I can begin my day.
Well, at this point I’m pretty fed up with my state government for not providing adequate transportation routes, so I call up my congress person, my senator, my newspaper, and I write a scathing blog about how unjust this system is to my quality of life. So, with much capitulation the State of Washington starts adding a new lane to my freeway, which for the next two years will actually TAKE a lane of traffic away from me and make my commute even more miserable. And by the time that two years has passed and the freeway is now one lane wider, population density has surpassed the intended relief and the net gain is zilch.
Hey, is anyone else seeing that adding new lanes to an old road system isn’t getting us anywhere? Take gas and the price of oil completely out of the equations for a moment: 74 lost hours a year: that’s the standard American worker’s allotted vacation, spent in traffic. Even at a nickel a gallon gas, I’m not okay with that. Roads are a one-dimensional solution that will never work. Now, air-scooters (same video again)… hey, there’s an idea that’s as exciting as it seems far-fetched. Well, I say far-fetched because we don’t have them yet, even though just about every futuristic movie ever made has something or another flying around (and probably using gasoline, I might add.) But while people and governments alike are spending millions and billions in research money to find a cheaper fuel alternative and the politically career extending “oil independence”, such a solution is no solution at all, and nobody but nobody has addressed this reality.
Here’s my question: If today by waving my magic wand I could reduce every ten minutes you spend commuting down to one minute: I.e. a 10:1 ratio, would you be willing to pay $10 a gallon for gas? I know I would. My time is infinitely more valuable to me than the price of sweet crude and worth a great deal more money to me than cheaper gas. Ironically, if such a course of action were pursued the overall usage of gasoline would decrease. If my 60-minute commute turns into a 6-minute commute, well then I’ve only burned 6 minutes worth of gas, and so did my 200,000 friends… and that’s a lot of gas being saved. Maybe "Air scooters" aren't the best solution, but something along those lines, something that puts us back on the "shortest distance between two points" again, because 10 cents a gallon increase is a platry price to pay for getting my 74 hours back a year.
Well, that’s my 2 cents.
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