Disappearing Act
The Seattle area is unwittingly adding to an already impressive collection of counterintuitive congestion case studies with summer construction on I-5, the primary freeway through the city. The folks at Sightline have summarized the emerging results of the traffic nightmare that wasn’t, including commentary from both Seattle papers. The bottom line is not surprising: despite the loss of three lanes in some locations, traffic on I-5 is moving as well, if not better than normal. It turns out that not even the most hard core alternative transportation advocates understand how well people adapt to fundamental changes in the transportation network. Seattle has experienced a drop of 50,000 cars per day on I-5 without adding meaningful capacity in any other part of the system, including public transit. Where did everyone go? Frankly, I don’t believe that is a question worth spending much time in search of an answer. The more pressing question for Seattle specifically, and other cities as well, is what other supposedly essential aspects to our transportation system could we do without, especially when the cost of replacing or upgrading bridges, viaducts and the rest of our crumbling car enablers is nearly incalculable?
Humans are creatures of habit and our habits are hard to break. Not even mind-numbing congestion shakes us out of our attachment to our cars. Yet, as the examples of the Summer Olympics in both Atlanta and Los Angeles demonstrate, loud proclamations by local governments and media outlets seem to, at least temporarily, rouse us from our stupor. Maybe we've been focused for too long on infrastructure and not enough on public pleas. In debates about tearing down unsightly highways or how much new road construction is necessary to meet growing demand, the discussion always assumes that the only way to remove road capacity is to add at least the same capacity elsewhere. This dynamic is clearly evident in Seattle, where the debate over whether to rebuild the viaduct hinges on how to add capacity for the estimated 110,000 cars that use the viaduct each day. The reaction of everyday car drivers to I-5 construction demonstrates that not only can the current system absorb substantial diverted traffic, but that trying to prescribe the alternatives in advance is as fruitless as trying to build additional roads to manage congestion.
Air travelers, it seems, are slowly grappling with their own bad habit. The summer of 2007 has been a disaster for air travelers, with crowded flights and record delays. The beneficiary of this dysfunction has been Amtrak, which has experienced a 6% increase in passengers in 2007, and a 20% increase in passengers on its Acela route, which covers the Boston – New York – Washington, D.C. corridor. Amtrak’s resurgence has occurred in spite of meager federal support and an archaic rail network that leaves the organization at the mercy of private rail companies, from whom Amtrak leases access to our precious rails. That Amtrak is benefitting from the airlines' incompetence is particularly ironic given decades of subsidies that dwarf any money flowing to Amtrak, in the form of airport construction and air traffic control to the airlines. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, the airlines have their unabashed hands out again, seeking an investment in air traffic control equal to 30 years worth of subsidies to Amtrak to once and for all clear the crowded skies over the Northeast. Hmmm, spend more money to ease congestion. This argument sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?