Commuters' wasted time in traffic costs $121B

[Alan C.]

Commuters' wasted time in traffic costs $121B

An annual study of national driving patterns shows that Americans spent 5.5 billion additional hours sitting in traffic in 2011.

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute released a report Tuesday that found Americans are adapting to road congestion by allowing, on average, an hour to make a trip that would take 20 minutes without traffic. The Urban Mobility Report also says clogged roads cost Americans $121 billion in time and fuel in 2011.

It also determined that the 10 most congested cities are Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, New York-Newark, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle.

The report is one of the key tools used by experts to solve traffic problems.

"Experts" solve traffic problems. Yeah.

I remember my dad complaining about traffic when I was a child back in the 1970s. There has been little to no improvement since then.

Posted under economics for two reasons: tragedy of the commons and central planning.

[Magnus]

Can you believe that I was almost an urban planner?  True story. 

I can't even imagine what my inner anarchist would have done if I had woken up in the middle of an urban planning career.

[SimonF]

I wonder if a lot more of us would be telecommuting or going on bicycles if the state would stop subsiding roads for rent seeking employers. Still, the tax on fuel must be something of a disincentive and keep sme pf the traffic volume down.

How do you envisage transport in a free world? Building roads would be a lot more challenging and far more costly if all land were privately owned, yes?

[Magnus]

I imagine that urban space would, in the absence of statism, would be constructed to serve a far higher level of population density than it is now. 

If you look at medieval towns all across Europe, they follow a similar semi-chaotic pattern (with the exception of the towns that were built in unusual places, like on top of mountains, or the swamp than is now Venice).  The streets are irregular, and the blocks are small enough to access on foot.  There are alleyways and side streets that are too small for anything other than pedestrians. 

The main problem with living in a high-density area has essentially been solved, and is something that hasn't been a problem in the West for over 100 years -- sanitation.  The development of the germ theory of disease is one of the most important intellectual achievements in world history (it's right up there with the theory of evolution, private property, logic, arable farming, weaving, nitrogen-fixing fertilizer, written language, etc.). 

With the advent of modern sewerage, a high urban density is simply not the threat to health and safety that it was for the prior 2-3,000 years.  And it's relatively new -- the germ theory of disease (although postulated by scientists much earlier) did not gain wide, popular acceptance until the late 1800s, which was not all that long before the development of the other major technology affecting urban design -- the internal combustion engine. 

Cars (and roads for cars) were heavily subsdized by the State from their inception (and still are). They were the impetus for the modern idea of the "comprehensive development plan" (which is the current euphemism for statism in the field of construction).  And, of course, with cars, the State's cronies, insiders and other beneficiaries made sure that outlying, ex-urban land was easily accessed by subsidized roads, which conveniently happened to rapidly increase the land values of that property, which also conveniently happened to be owned by those very same cornies and insiders.  This simple, corrupt mechanism (get the peons to pay to inflate the State's frriends' land prices) is one of the main reason for urban sprawl.  It's the reason that the words "developer" and "scumbag" are almost synonymous.

So, because of the timing of these two inventions, there has not really been much of a period in Western history where (a) modern santitation greatly increased the health and safety of dense urban life, while (b) cities were also designed primarily for pedestrians and bicycles. 

The few cities that were developed in the late 1800s, prior to the automobile but after the acceptance of modern sanitation practices, are (not surprisingly) very livable.  The ones that survived the process of levelling and re-building urban space according to the needs of cars are some of the most popular tourist spots in the Western world.  People love to walk around and just passively experience what it's like to be in a pedestrian-friendly, low-automobile urban space.  They are tucked away in small areas, like parts of central London, Amsterdam, Venice, New Orleans, the university towns in the UK, old San Francisco, downtown New York (before the advent of the uptown grid), and a few small isolated neighborhoods here and there that survived the wrath of the urban planners. People travel all over the world just to see these places, and daydream about living there.

So, I suspect that, without the engine of the State driving the layout of cities and towns, they would look a lot like these vestigial, archaic places that people flock to.

[SimonF]

Thanks for that input Magnus.