Greatly expanding public transit capacity.

There are many occasions when adding more road capacity is a good idea, but no large region can afford to build enough to completely eliminate peak-hour congestion. Those roads would then be grossly underutilized during non-peak hours. Governments would have to widen all major commuting roads by demolishing millions of buildings, cutting down trees, and turning most of every metropolitan region into a giant concrete slab. But this “cure” is totally impractical and prohibitively expensive. The second approach would be to build enough road capacity to handle all drivers who want to travel in peak hours at the same time without delays. Limited road-pricing schemes that have been adopted in Singapore, Norway, and London only affect congestion in crowded downtowns, which is not the kind of congestion on major arteries that most Americans experience. For both these reasons, few politicians in our democracy-and so far, anywhere else in the world-advocate this tactic. The second drawback is that people think these tolls would be just another tax, forcing them to pay for something they have already paid for through gasoline taxes. Tolls would favor wealthier or subsidized drivers and harm poor ones, so most Americans would resent them, partly because they believe they would be at a disadvantage. Transportation economists have long been proponents of this tactic, but most Americans reject this solution politically for two reasons. That would allow more people to travel per lane per hour than under current, heavily congested conditions. If tolls were set high enough and collected electronically with “smart cards,” the number of vehicles on each major road during peak hours could be reduced enough so that vehicles could move at high speeds. Governments can charge people money to enter all the lanes on major commuting roads during peak hours. But three of them are politically impractical or physically and financially impossible in the United States.Ĭharging peak-hour tolls. There are four ways any region can try to cope with the mobility challenge. In fact, traffic congestion is worse in most other countries because American roads are so much better. Waiting in line is the definition of congestion, and the same condition is found in all growing major metropolitan regions. With 87.9 percent of America’s daily commuters using private vehicles, and millions wanting to move at the same times of day, America’s basic problem is that its road system does not have the capacity to handle peak-hour loads without forcing many people to wait in line for that limited road space. As household incomes rise around the world, more and more people shift from slower, less expensive modes of movement to privately owned cars and trucks. The second is that privately owned vehicles are more comfortable, faster, more private, more convenient in trip timing, and more flexible for doing multiple tasks on one trip than almost any form of public transit. One is that most Americans reside in low-density areas that public transit cannot efficiently serve. In the United States, the vast majority of people seeking to move during rush hours use private automotive vehicles, for two reasons. The same problem exists in every major metropolitan area in the world. That basic requirement cannot be altered without crippling our economy and society.

Why? Because efficient operation of both the economy and school systems requires that people work, go to school, and even run errands during about the same hours so they can interact with each other. Traffic congestion is not primarily a problem, but rather the solution to our basic mobility problem, which is that too many people want to move at the same times each day. Although governments may never be able to eliminate road congestion, there are several ways cities and states can move to curb it.

Commuters are often frustrated by policymakers’ inability to do anything about the problem, which poses a significant public policy challenge.

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