How Traffic Jams Are Made In City Hall

The bad logic and failed policies of transportation planners

Ted Balaker & Sam Staley from the April 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 9)

The council says it aims to enhance "transportation choices" and to "improve the ability of Minnesotans to travel safely and efficiently through the region." So far, so good. The council goes even further: "To a growing number of metro area residents, traffic congestion ranks as the No. 1 livability issue. It affects the length of their daily commute, the times of day they choose to make trips, and the amount of time they sit in traffic, even where they choose to live and work."

 

But is the Met Council really focused on reducing congestion? Its stated goal isn't to solve the problem; it merely calls for "slowing the growth in traffic congestion and improving mobility" (emphasis added). In other words, traffic will continue to get worse, just not as much worse as it would if the council did nothing. The Met Council also has priorities besides congestion: reducing the number of people living in single-family homes, preserving open space, limiting sprawl-and increasing transit use.

 

During the next 10 years, the Met Council is planning to invest $4.2 billion in the highway system and $1.4 billion in transit facilities. In other words, the region's primary transportation planning agency has decided to spend 25 percent of its budget on mass transit. But transit accounts for just 2.5 percent of all trips in the region, whether they're for pleasure, taking kids to school, going to the supermarket, or commuting to the office. Less than 5 percent of the Minneapolis-St. Paul region's population uses public transit to get to work, and that share is declining: According to U.S. Census statistics, the number of passengers using mass transit increased slightly in absolute terms between 1990 and 2000, but its market share fell by 12 percent.

 

The Met Council hopes to double bus capacity by 2030 and greatly expand its light rail line and commuter train system. It also intends to boost transit use from 74.9 million passenger trips per year to 150 million by 2030, even though the current trend projects virtually no growth in use and even though transit lost market share from 1990 to 2000, according to the Census Bureau's decennial data. The Met Council expects 574,625 new jobs to be created in the area by 2030. But even though the vast majority of Minneapolis-St. Paul's population travels to work by car, the planners improbably expect per capita road use to decline.

 

The council does plan to expand the road system. It will add 300 additional lane-miles of freeway, or about 12 lane-miles per year. That works out to about three miles of a two-lane (in each direction) freeway each year. That's well below the expected growth in travel demand.

 

The net result? Without road improvements, highway congestion is expected to increase from 28 hours annually per traveler in 2001 to 40 hours in 2030. With the improvements, congestion should "moderate" to 37 hours in 2030. Congestion would be 32 percent higher than in 2001, rather than 42 percent higher without the improvements. "Just to keep pace with these [highway] needs," the council's 2030 Regional Development Framework says, "would add $4.7 billion to current plans for the next decade" above the currently planned spending.

 

For most regional planning agencies, automobility and congestion relief simply are not high on the priority list. Sometimes they aren't on the list at all. Portland, Oregon, distinguished itself among its peers when it made a conscious decision in the mid-1990s to let congestion approach gridlock because it feared that otherwise fewer people would use the transit system. The drive to reduce sprawl creates a conflict of interest, too, since congestion relief makes it easier to commute long distances.

 

To make "more effective use" of the road system, the Met Council believes it has to get people out of their cars. That's unfortunate, especially since the agency admits congestion is many residents' "No. 1 livability issue." The council is spending 25 percent of its transportation funds on a solution that, at most, might improve the quality of life for 5 percent of the population, and it will do nothing for people like Sue. Even transit users might not be better off, since they will be spending more time commuting than if they used a car. Drivers will definitely be worse off. They will be spending much more time stuck in traffic in 2030 than they did in 2006.