Today’s News & Observer includes a front-page article on traffic congestion, prompted by a national report released earlier this week by the Texas Transportation Institute.  So does the US Department of Transportation, which funded the TTI report, have a plan to address congestion?  Yes, it does; the plan is outlined in detail in the just-published July/August 2007 issue of the Federal Highway Administration’s magazine Public Roads.  Unfortunately, USDOT’s ‘Congestion Initiative’ is an object lesson in how not to solve congestion.

The purpose of the Initiative is “to reduce congestion in the short term and to build the foundation for successful longer term congestion reduction efforts”, and it is built around these six “areas of interest”: (1) relieving urban congestion in several model cities; (2) expanding private ownership of the transportation system; (3) using technology to manage the existing system more intricately; (4) building some big new corridor projects; (5) finding solutions (currently unknown) to ease freight bottlenecks, especially at our national borders; and (6) expanding airport capacity.

What’s wrong with these?  Approach #1, trying out solutions on model cities, is a good idea; unfortunately, the proposed solutions –

"congestion-pricing demonstration supported by enhanced transit services; increased use of telecommuting, flex scheduling, and other travel demand strategies; and deployment of advanced technologies"

– don’t (with the exception of transit services) address the underlying systematic causes of congestion, just the symptoms.  Poor land use planning will continue to create worse congestion, and these responses resolve it by reallocating quality of life away from current holders to whoever has the most money or time to spend to gain a higher level of service.  

Of the other approaches, #2, #4, and #6 are all variations of a single strategy: build more capacity.  But that’s what has gotten us into the mess we’re in: building capacity without an underlying plan for how we intend transportation and land use to shape each other.  #3 is a variant of the view that where we can’t build anymore, we can turn to technology to save us by eking out marginal efficiency gains from the existing hodge-podge system.  That’s surely true in some cases, but there’s a real trade off between efficiency and resilience.  You know this from your own life: if you plan really carefully, and have great communications tools, you can fit more meetings and decisions into a single day of work.  But – and you probably also know this from experience – once your day is super-full, if anything slips, it will throw the entire schedule out of whack.  Using technology to tightly couple parts of the transportation system in hopes of extracting greater efficiency has the same downside.  

‘Area of interest’ #5 is the most revealing, in that it isn’t a solution at all – it’s a recognition that a solution is needed, and FHwA doesn’t have it.  It’s revealing because our transportation system has two major goals (along with several less dominant goals): moving people (to and from work, school, shopping, entertainment); and moving goods.  There’s a giant disconnect between those goals and our national and local processes for planning, maintaining, and expanding our transportation system.  On the ‘moving people’ side, the real solution is better integration of comprehensive land use planning and transportation planning.  Instead, traditionalists (including, apparently FHwA) are focused on easing symptoms.  On the ‘moving goods’ side, the real solution has to do with the balance between distant supply chains and local production, and the progressive choice is less clear (though carbon regulations will bring this into much sharper focus over the next few years).  Because there isn’t (yet) a well articulated progressive vision for freight, it is still safe for traditionalists to admit that they don’t have an answer for freight.

What one policy change or action would you recommend USDOT take to help reduce traffic congestion?