Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What To Do About It

Introduction

In 1811, the state of New York laid out much of Manhattan on a grid, with most streets meeting at right angles and blocks as narrow as 200 feet. One hundred and sixty years later, this grid became a source of apprehension among the city’s traffic managers. Too many auto drivers ran yellow lights, only to block intersections because of standing or slow-moving vehicles in the next block. If enough drivers blocked cross traffic at enough intersections, traffic managers realized they could end up with a situation in which no one could move. Two city engineers, Sam Schwartz and Roy Cottam, called this fearsome possibility gridlock.¹

Urban freeways are very different from city street grids. Because freeways do not form a grid and lack intersections to block, by definition they cannot become gridlocked. Even so, the term gridlock is now commonly applied to all serious traffic congestion. The technical term for such traffic is level of service F, with F clearly representing flunk.²

Millions of commuters and other travelers suffer level of service F every weekday. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, congestion in American cities wasted 4.2 billion hours in 2007.³ This figure is nearly five times as much as 25 years before.⁴ The institute’s numbers focus on commuters and don’t even count the costs to businesses, such as the cost of operating more trucks to deliver products in congested areas than would be needed if roads were not congested.

Why do we put up with this? If our cell phones refused to put calls through because the network was busy, we would change carriers. If our high-speed internet service stopped working because too many other customers were using it, we would change internet providers.

One reason we accept congestion on highways is that the government has a monopoly on roads:we can't simply decide to use another highway provider’s roads. Some of us can decide to ride transit instead of drive, but the government has a monopoly on most transit as well. Partly because of that monopoly, transit for most people simply does not work as well as driving, even on roads at level of service F.

Fifty years ago, Americans boasted of having the best transportation system in the world.⁵ Today, that system is breaking down. Average urban traffic speeds began declining in 1995 for the first time in our history.⁶ Bridge collapses and closures generate worries about deteriorating infrastructure. The last real revolutions in transportation technologies—superhighways and jet aircraft—are more than 50 years old. Transportation funding is increasingly politicized, wasting tens of billions of dollars each year on highly visible but little-needed projects. All these problems are exacerbated by a powerful anti-mobility coalition that blames modern transportation for numerous social ills that can allegedly be cured only by reducing personal travel.

Planners and policy analysts have offered many proposals for dealing with this growing congestion: light rail, congestion pricing, compact cities, high-occupancy/toll lanes, high-speed rail, traffic signal coordination, and intelligent highways and vehicles, among others. Some of these proposals will do better than others at relieving congestion, and Gridlock will suggest how we can determine which work best.

The real problem, however, is not technical but institutional. The federal, state, and local government agencies that build and operate our transportation systems have become masters at spending large amounts of money. Yet when addressing problems like congestion, pollution, and safety, they are almost totally dysfunctional. In some cases, Congress has given the agencies so many different and conflicting goals that the simple idea of safe, efficient transportation is almost forgotten. In other cases, the agencies themselves have given up on fixing congestion or even decided that they want more congestion, and they are willfully increasing it in the name of a vague goal they call livability.

Congestion is really just a symptom of this dysfunctional system. So Gridlock’s main focus will be on institutional questions. How did transportation agencies change from ones trying to relieve congestion to ones accepting or even promoting congestion? How valid is their view and how much is simply a result of perverse incentives designed into their budgets? How do we change them back? Should we try to reform the agencies or completely abolish them?

If I bring a prejudice to these questions, it is that transportation decisions are best made by individuals who pay the full costs of their choices—a prejudice justified by both theory and experience. My personal transportation preferences are for cycling and trains, but—unlike some—I don’t expect taxpayers to subsidize those preferences any more than if I liked hot-air balloons or miniature submarines.

As an economist who believes in the benefits of free markets, I am tempted to simply argue that we should privatize our roads and transit systems. As an American with faith in the original intent of those who wrote the Constitution, I am also tempted to argue that we should at least abolish federal transportation programs and leave transportation to state and local governments. These are useful ideas and may happen someday.

But I am also a pragmatist who realizes that, except in times of dire emergency, political change tends to be incremental. This book will offer a variety of incremental changes at the federal, state, and local levels that will significantly improve our transportation systems without foreclosing the option for more drastic changes later, should such changes become necessary or feasible.

Any book like this runs the risk of rapidly becoming dated. Between the time I finish writing and the day this book reaches print, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will present its proposal for the next reauthorization of federal transportation spending, the Obama administration will announce which states will receive grants for high-speed rail, and several states may decide to increase gasoline and/or other taxes for transportation. Yet many of the proposals this book make in chapters 10 and 11 will be as valid 20 years from now as they are today or would have been 20 years ago.

These proposals revolve around three simple concepts. First, most of the benefits of a transportation system go to those who use it, so they should be the ones to pay for it. A user-fee-driven transportation system is inherently fair and more likely to be efficient than one funded out of taxes because transportation providers will be forced to design systems to please the users, not systems aimed at capturing the largest share of tax dollars.

Second, when dealing with the social costs of transportation such as pollution, it is essential that we find the most cost-efficient way of reducing those costs. Given a choice between a project that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of $10 a ton and one that reduces emissions at a cost of $10,000 a ton, choosing the latter means forgoing 999 tons of emission reductions for every ton abated.

Third, mobility advocates must support and promote new technologies that can revolutionize transportation, particularly personal mobility. These new technologies include various sorts of intelligent highways and intelligent vehicles that can reduce congestion and increase average travel speeds. Higher average speeds will, in turn, make more jobs and other opportunities accessible to more Americans, which will replicate the enormous economic benefits that have resulted from previous technological revolutions such as the automobile, superhighway, and commercial jet air service.

These simple ideas seem logical and reasonable. Yet they encounter extraordinary resistance from many of the officials who plan, run, and tax us to fund our transportation systems. As a result, the federal, state, and local governments spend close to $200 billion a year on transportation systems that are increasingly failing to do what most people think they should: provide mobility for people and freight to efficiently and safely move around the country. With the help of this book, I hope we can turn it around so that, 25 years from now, Americans will not have to face the same congestion we suffer today, much less congestion that is five times as bad.

1. Land of Mobility

The United States is the most mobile society in history. In 2006, the average American traveled 18,700 miles, equal to three-fourths of the way around the circumference of the earth.¹ That’s more than twice as much travel as the average European and nearly three times as much as the average Japanese.² Our freight systems also moved 15,000 ton-miles of goods per person.³ That’s nearly four times the per capita movement of goods in Europe or Japan.⁴

We Americans 0aren’t mobile because sinister oil companies or evil automobile manufacturers forced us to triple our per capita driving since 1950. Airlines did not twist our arms and force us to increase our personal air travel by nearly 40 times since 1950. We are not victims of bad urban design. We are mobile because mobility gives us access to better jobs, a wide array of low-cost consumer goods, broad social and recreational opportunities, and many other benefits.

The benefits of mobility are huge and undeniable. The most tangible benefit is to our personal incomes. Increased travel speeds allow people to reach more potential jobs in a given commute time. Research in France found that, for every 10 percent increase in travel speeds, the pool of workers available to employers increased by 15 percent. This gives employers access to more highly skilled workers, which in turn increases worker productivity by 3 percent.⁵ Similarly, research in California has found that doubling the distance workers can commute to work increases productivity by 25 percent.⁶

Economists estimate that construction of new highways contributed to nearly one-third of the rapid economic growth the United States enjoyed in the 1950s and a quarter of the growth in the 1960s.⁷ The growth wasn’t generated by construction jobs; it came from the increased mobility offered by new roads. It may be no coincidence that our economic growth slowed as highway construction tapered off in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mobility also reduces our consumer costs and gives us access to a wider diversity of consumer goods. The typical grocery store in 1912 had 300 different products for sale.⁸ Today, the average supermarket has more than 30,000 products, and many sell well over 50,000.⁹ Moreover, the costs of groceries, clothing, and other goods, as a share of personal income, have typically fallen by more than 50 percent since 1930.¹⁰

Thanks to our mobility, most Americans enjoy much better housing than they did a century ago and better than most other people in the world today. Mobility not only increases the income available for housing; it allows us to reach areas where housing, and the land it requires, is more affordable.

The most intangible benefit of mobility may be the thing many Americans say they value most: freedom. Mobility allowed blacks to escape oppressive conditions in the South in the 1920s and 1930s. Mobility was a fundamental part of, and perhaps a necessary prerequisite for, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve always viewed automobiles as freedom rides,` says Washington Post writer Warren Brown, because shared automobiles allowed blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, to boycott local bus service after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man.¹¹ Mobility also played an important role in the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s: as American families went from owning one car to two, more women joined the work force and demanded equal rights. You wouldn’t believe how owning their first car frees women, says University of Arizona transportation researcher Sandra Rosenbloom.¹²

No matter where you are in the United States, you owe almost everything you see around you to mobility. If you live in a major city, your access to food, clothing, and other goods imported from outside the city depends on mobility. If you live in a rural area, your access to the services enjoyed by urban dwellers, such as electrical power and communications lines that are installed and served by trucks, dependsonmobility.Ifyou spend your vacations hiking in the most remote wilderness areas, your ability to reach the trailheads depends on your mobility.¹³

One way to appreciate the advantages of the mobility we enjoy today is to look back at American mobility during the past two centuries. The following vignettes of 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, and 2000 are based on the best available records from those years.

1800: Humans and Horsepower

Average travel speed: 3 miles per hour

Average mobility: 1,500 miles per year

Per capita GDP: $1,200¹⁴

Thirteen years after America’s constitutional convention, land mobility had not significantly advanced beyond the mobility enjoyed by Eurasians a thousand years before. No new inventions had truly revolutionized land-based transportation technology since the development of the stirrup by the Chinese around the third century AD and its adoption in Europe about a thousand years before the American Revolution.¹⁵

Virtually no living person in 1800 had ever traveled faster than a horse could run. A top racehorse can carry a light rider faster than 40 miles per hour for short distances. But most riders rarely exceed 30 miles per hour, and average horseback riding speeds over any great distance are more like 3 to 4 miles per hour. Horses pulling wagons or coaches were even slower: Forget the high-speed stagecoaches of Hollywood movies; a 20-mile trip over rutted and rocky roads could take all day.¹⁶

In 1800, fewer than 6 percent of people in the 16 United States lived in cities or other clusters of 2,500 people or more, the Census Bureau’s present-day definition of urban .¹⁷ America produced an average per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of about $1,200 a year (adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollars), a 0.7 percent annual increase from the estimated $625 per capita GDP produced in 1700.¹⁸

Most of the nation’s 3 million rural residents were probably farmers, and most of them must have owned horses. Men were more mobile than women, but the average adults probably left their farms no more than twice a week. A three-hour roundtrip at three miles per hour, twice a week, is about 1,900 miles per year. Counting children, personal travel probably averaged around 1,500 miles per year. Whether on foot or horseback, average speeds were about three miles per hour.

The harbingers of the first transportation revolution had already appeared, however. John Fitch demonstrated the first steamboat in America before the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. By the next year, he was operating the nation’s only commercial steamboat service between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey, a distance of about 18 miles. However, he had gone out of business by 1800, and no new commercial steamboat operations would begin for several more years.

1850: The Canal, Steamboat, and Rail Revolutions

Average travel speed: 4 miles per hour

Average mobility: 1,600 miles per year

Per capita GDP: $1,900

Five new technologies revolutionized transportation between 1800 and 1850. The first, of course, was steamboats. By 1850, more than 300 steamboats were operating on the Delaware, Hudson, Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi, and other American rivers. Close to 200 more boats, many of them steam powered, plied the Great Lakes.¹⁹ Steamboats did not travel much faster than horses, but they could move a lot of freight and people at a much lower cost.

The second revolution was canals. America’s first obstacle to westward settlement was the Appalachian Mountains. Canals were the solution, and the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, was followed by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and several more. By 1850, America had built about 5,000 miles of canals, mostly in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

Third, various entrepreneurs or government agencies also built a number of roads across the mountains. These included many private toll roads as well as the National Road, a free road stretching from Maryland to Illinois. These roads constituted only a minor revolution, given that the only really new technology they used was Macadam pavement, developed in 1820.

By mid-century, canals and wagon roads were being eclipsed by the fourth revolution, railroads. In 1830, the nation’s first steam locomotive ran on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, whose cornerstone had been laid in 1828 by Charles Carroll, the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence. By 1850, more than 9,000 miles of rail lines—whose trains typically averaged between 10 and 30 miles per hour—crossed the 30 American states.

The fifth revolution was the horse-powered streetcar. Operating on rails, horsecars gave patrons shelter from the elements and smooth rides on the otherwise unpaved or poorly paved city streets of the era. The first American horsecar began operating in New York City in 1832, and by 1850 they could be found in scores of cities.

The first four revolutions had a much bigger impact on American freight transport than on passenger travel. The Erie Canal, for example, reduced the cost of shipping from Buffalo to New York City by 90 to 95 percent, which in turn increased the volume of products shipped at least ahundredfold. The canal effectively gave any farmer or manufacturer within reach of the Great Lakes access to America’s largest markets as well as possible foreign export.

For most Americans, however, a trip on a steamboat, canal, or steam train was a rare treat. In 1839, Ulysses Grant considered himself the best traveled boy in Georgetown, Ohio, where he went to high school, because he had been east to Wheeling, Virginia [about 240 miles], and north to the Western Reserve [about 240 miles], in Ohio, west to Louisville [about 140 miles], and south to Bourbon County, Kentucky [about 70 miles], besides having driven or ridden pretty much over the whole country within fifty miles of home.²⁰

For the journey to his 1839 appointment at West Point, Grant started on horseback, then used steamboats, canals, trains, and stagecoaches. He was most impressed by the train. I thought the perfection of rapid transit had been reached, he later wrote. We travelled at least eighteen miles an hour, when at full speed, and made the whole distance averaging probably as much as twelve miles an hour. This seemed like annihilating space. Even as late as 1850, however, such a journey would have been considered unusual.

In 1848, the Boston and Albany Railroad redefined the idea of speed when it ran a special train the 26 miles between Boston and Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 26 minutes. Reporters cowered in fear on the floor of the passenger cars, as this was the first time in history any group of people had ever traveled a mile a minute and lived to tell about it.²¹

Most of the 85 percent of Americans who lived in rural areas probably traveled only a little more in 1850 than their parents or grandparents had in 1800. For the 15 percent who lived in cities, the horsecar was an improvement over walking. But the fare was more than most people could pay on a regular basis. For those people, moving from the country to the city was probably a step backwards in mobility, at least as measured in miles per year. Few city residents could afford to maintain a horse and stable, so walking or the horsecar were their only choices.

Per capita GDP had increased by about 0.85 percent per year from 1800, slightly faster than the preceding century. The opportunities for personal mobility were greatly improved, but other than people in the transportation business, only a few could regularly take advantage of those opportunities. Typical 18-year-olds leaving their east coast homes to travel west on the canals, railroads, or steamboats might find an adequate living farming, but they would rarely be able to return to visit the families they left behind.

1900: Railroads and Streetcars

Average travel speed: 8 miles per hour

Average mobility: 2,000 miles per year

Per capita GDP: $5,000

The steam railroads that had begun to replace steamboats, canals, and horse-drawn wagons in 1850 had nearly completed their revolution in American transportation by 1900. The nation’s 45 states and three contiguous territories now had more than 21 times as many miles of rail routes as in 1850, for a total of 193,000 miles.²² In 1893, the New York Central awed the nation by operating the Exposition Flyer 960 miles from New York to Chicago in just 20 hours, for an average speed of 48 miles per hour, including stops.²³

The railroads created a demand for coal, high-quality steel, and heavy machinery, and at the same time provided the means to transport such materials around the country for use by other industries. As a result, America was beginning to produce as much as Europe despite having less than a quarter of Europe’s population.

Still, as in 1850, this incredible transportation revolution had a much greater impact on freight transport than on passenger travel. Americans traveled a phenomenal 16 billion passenger miles by rail in 1900, but this amounted to just 210 miles for each of the 76 million residents. The main reason was the cost: rail fares averaged 2 cents a passenger mile, equal to about 50 cents today.²⁴ Since real incomes averaged only about one-seventh of what people earn today, this cost was prohibitive to most people.

More than 60 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas, and most of them traveled little more than their counterparts had in 1850. Although most farm families made periodic trips into town or to relatives, writes historian Michael Berger (quoting a 1915 magazine article), such journeys were often ‘an experience to be classed with the hardest work.’²⁵ As a result, rural life, especially for women, continued to be lonely and isolated. No burden has ever set quite as heavily on farming and upon the farm family as has the curse of isolation and loneliness, observed a writer looking back from 1927.²⁶

Other innovations had a greater effect on urban passenger travel. At this point, 30 million Americans lived in urban areas, and most of them had access to at least two new modes of transportation not available in 1850.

The first, velocipedes—two-wheel, human-powered machines, appeared in the United States in the 1860s but were impractical for most people. America’s first real bicycle craze began with the introduction of the safety bicycle, a chain-driven, rear-wheel-drive bike, in the 1880s. These bikes were physically very similar to the single-speed bicycles that have become popular among city residents today. Bikes were mainly used by young people, but even so they led to the first major movement for better rural roads since the railroads eclipsed roads in the 1840s.

The other urban transportation revolution was the development of the electric streetcar, which also occurred in the 1880s. This mode of transportation was so economical compared to horsecars, cable cars, and other forms of mass transportation that, by 1900, electric streetcars trundled around some 500 to 800 American cities at an average speed of about 11 miles per hour, counting stops.²⁷

A few big cities, such as New York and Chicago, also had elevated rapid-transit lines. Separated from pedestrians, horses, and wagons, the Chicago El averaged 13 miles an hour, including stops.²⁸ Eleven to 13 miles an hour doesn’t sound like much today, but it was a huge advance over three-miles-per-hour walking speeds.

Still, not everyone could afford to regularly ride the streetcars or elevated trains. In 1902, the earliest year for which data are available, streetcars made 5.8 billion passenger trips. Transit ridership grew at about 10 percent per year in the early 1900s, so ridership in 1900 was probably less than 5 billion. If a typical commuter took two trips a day 300 days a year, and no one rode transit except for commuting, transit would have carried about 8.3 million commuters. This suggests that less than a third of urbanites were regular transit riders, and the rest used it only occasionally.

The average bus transit trip today is a little under four miles long. In terms of speed and other service characteristics, the streetcars that dominated in 1900 were most like buses today, so transit trips probably averaged about four miles. For a regular commuter working six days a week, that amounted to 2,400 miles a year. Average urban travel for all urbanites combined must have been a little less, about 2,200 miles per year. Adding in the 210 miles of intercity rail travel (cited above) brings that total to a little over 2,400 miles a year. If rural travel was about the same as in 1850 plus the occasional train trip, total average travel was about 2,000 miles per year.

Those who could afford to do so—mainly families of white-collar workers—used streetcars for shopping as well as commuting. In 1900, most groceries were sold at public markets with individual stalls for produce, meat, coffee, and other products. The average public market might have between 500 and 1,000 different products for sale. People would take the streetcar to the market, select their groceries with the assistance of a clerk, then pay the vendors to deliver the food so they could ride the streetcar home without being laden with purchases.

The nation’s first automobiles appeared a few years before 1900. By 1900, more than 250 companies claimed to be making motorcars.²⁹ Most, however, built just a few cars, so only about 8,000 cars were on American roads that year, or roughly one for every 1,000 people.³⁰ Thus the automobile was little more than a toy and not yet a major contributor to personal mobility.

The average increase in personal mobility since 1850 was small— perhaps a 20 percent increase in average distances traveled—and not evenly distributed. Still, it represented a major boon for those who could afford transit or intercity rail. A quadrupling of urban speeds meant people could access 16 times as many jobs and other resources. The railroads had far more than quadrupled intercity speeds. Mobility improvements for both freight and passengers directly or indirectly accounted for most of the 1.9 percent annual increase in per capita productivity since 1850, and that was twice the rate of the previous half-century.

1950: The Automobile Revolution

Average travel speed: 24 miles per hour

Average ground speed: 23 miles per hour

Average mobility: 6,900 miles per year Per capita GDP: $12,000

Along with two world wars and a great depression, the years between 1900 and 1950 witnessed two transportation revolutions that had a far bigger effect on personal mobility than any that had come before. Henry Ford’s mass-produced automobile brought mobility to the masses. Commercial air service, used only by the wealthy and elite at this point, was nonetheless growing rapidly as well.

The 1920 census was the first to find more Americans