Opinion: Transit Tuesday: Gridlock notes from all over.

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Stuck in traffic? Why not try passing the time with today’s editorial on making carpool lanes work the way they’re supposed to? If you’re looking for hundreds of recommendations on how to get over the traffic mess, you can also check out columnist Steve Lopez’ bottleneck blog.

A recent OpEd on solving the gridlock problem with innovative road projects, meanwhile, garnered a spirited response from readers. John E. Boyden avers, ‘I think that any solution to the gridlock problem that involves accommodating more cars is insane.’ Lisa Ann Carrillo opines, ‘To our leaders I can only say, no more studies, no more proposals and no more talk. We need action now. Pick any one of an even longer list of studies over the last half a century and implement it. Just do it!’ In reply to a recent Times story about plans to build a Waldorf-Astoria in Beverly Hills, Doug Weaver asks, ‘Does the thirst for profits always have to trump responsibility and restraint?’

The other day, Matt Welch questioned an almost universal assumption that you will find underlying most of the comments at the bottleneck blog and the letters section: that building more roads causes more people to drive. This belief has become so popular that it’s hard to imagine any way to step outside it, but there is a surprising lack of evidence to support it. According to this report (PDF) from the Federal Highway Administration, ‘[O]ver the last 20 years vehicle miles of travel (VMT) on U.S. roads have nearly doubled while lane miles have increased only about four percent.’ The level of drivership in the United States, in other words, has expanded at a pace totally unrelated to the rate of roadbuilding. If anything road construction has lagged usage patterns by an astronomical degree.

The flipside of the more-roads-more-congestion argument is that we need to spend more on public transportation to reduce traffic. Again, though, revealed preference renders this a questionable claim. The U.S. Census Bureau has shown steady declines (PDF) in the percentage of commuters who use public transportation ever since it began keeping such data in 1960. During that period, spending on public transportation hasn’t decreased, or held steady, or even risen slightly. It has massively increased.

I have my own beefs with an autocentric culture--one of the big ones being that wherever things are designed for drivers, walkers get hosed. Your odds of strolling down a street that turns out not to have a through exit for half a mile, of not being able to turn a certain corner because the sidewalk has vanished or is blocked by mud-covered utility boxes, of getting a pedestrian right-of-way light that changes in less time than it would take Roger Bannister to get across the street, of not being able to walk your kids to the playground, of just generally having an unpleasant walking-around experience, all increase massively the more driverly the local geography. I don’t like that experience, but I also can’t argue with a massively demonstrated preference for cars and driving by my fellow citizens. It might be ‘insane’ to design transportation policy with the assumption that people like to drive and always will like to drive, but that’s the way things are in this here modern world.