Traffic is getting worse.

I live in what the Texas University transportation survey claims is the second worst traffic congested area in the nation. In other surveys, one of our neighbourhoods has one of the worst commutes with an average time of 45 minutes. I would love a commute that short, and I live five miles closer.

I currently work in Washington DC, so I do not drive that much anymore. I take the train and on average my door-to-door commute can run anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes depending on a number of factors. The advantage to this is I can work or rest or read over 70 minutes of the trip. This makes the travel bearable.

Today, in fact as I write this, I am not taking the train but driving. I left the house at 8 and in 32 minutes, I have traveled a little less than 5 miles. No accidents, no sun glare, no snow, no wet roads. The road is a basic artery with a half a dozen stoplights and I am still four miles from the interstate and a mile from another major artery. And this is a normal traffic day. There are no reported accidents, yet traffic is crawling.

The problems are complex. There are too many cars all going the same way and too few roads that go that way. Unlike California, Virginia only has a few major arteries, and even fewer feeder roads. Neighbourhoods are mostly dead ends, so large volumes of vehicles are dumped straight onto the main thoroughfare which handles both local and through traffic.

Second, there a few options to driving. I once answered a survey that asked "If it was illegal to drive to work on code red air quality days, what would I do?" I told the survey person that it was a null question. At the time I was working in the Tyson's Corner area and there was only one way to get to work. My survey choices were ride a bike (unsafe on NoVA roads), take public transit (no local link from my enclave to the nearest hub that could get me there) or walk (also unsafe and impractical given the distances). If you are fortunate enough to work in DC and live in close proximity to a limited number of transportation hubs, then getting to work has options, but few are quite so lucky.

One argument that is often put forward by those that have a short view is "move closer to your job." This is a flawed argument on several levels. First, it assumes you can afford to live in the area where you work or you want to live in the area where you work. There are a number of factors that go into choosing a home and I would argue that location in proximity to shopping and quality of schools is just as important if not more so as commute distance to work.

The second flaw assumes either that you will work for the same company your entire career, that your company will not move, or move you. In the modern business world, these are all wild cards, and with most people working for a minimum of three companies throughout their life on average it is unreasonable to expect that you would move each time unless there are over-riding concerns. In the Metro DC area where job transitions are more prevalent, the argument unravels completely.

One of the issues with traffic is the costs. Most of these costs are hidden, buried deep in budgets and lost in corporate financial systems. In 1990, there were 190 million vehicles registered in the United States and that was 23 million more than the number of licensed drivers with an estimated cost of over $300 billion dollars not born by drivers in the way of fees and taxes. At almost 2 percent of the total area of the United States paved over, it costs almost $200 million per day just to maintain the road networks, with more than 250,000 miles considered to be in poor condition. And yet there does not seem to be enough road surfaces as we are sitting in traffic at rush hour. And rush hour is even a misnomer as it is not almost a constant migration starting in the wee hours of the morning and running through almost the dark of the night. Traffic is so heavy that even routine maintenance cannot be done in safety or effectively enough to last.

There are solutions to the problem, but the solutions require political will and a sacrifice of such a monumental level that it is more likely we will run out of oil before we give up the automobile we have become so enamored with.