Traffic will always rise unless we start funding alternatives to cars
Adding more lanes will never permanently fix traffic
Recently in Gainesville, the city has done something that should be fairly unremarkable. We took a small stretch of road that was four lanes and cut it down to two. In place of the two former car lanes, the city added wide, semi-protected bike lanes. There are some valid design questions around this particular bike lane, but the fact that the city did it at all is pretty incredible. All too often, cities, including Gainesville, will opt for more car lanes, even though there is a wide body of research that shows that adding more car lanes doesn’t solve traffic problems.
You don’t even need to read the research to know that though. If you drive, you know. Traffic has gone up. Year after year, decade after decade especially. The overall US population continues to grow and more of that population has moved to metro areas in the last 50 years. If you drive, you may have noticed there are more roads now and many of those roads are wider with more lanes. And yet, still traffic.
Year after year, especially in places like Florida where the suburbs sprawl much further than they should, cities/states/counties build more roads and more lanes. Eight lane roads, some with three left turn lanes (!!), can be found in many Florida counties. Have they solved traffic? Turns out when you build more roads and more lanes, you are making it so that only a car can get you to where you need to go. When you incentivize cars as the only transportation means, you will see more cars on the road. So despite the increase in lanes, despite the increase in roads, traffic persists.
For some reason, transportation departments and many politicians see this as an unsolvable problem. But the solution is rather straightforward, even if the execution might take some time. We have to build in a way that incentivizes other means of transportation. The way to less traffic is to have less cars on the road.
How do we do that? We have to give people places to easily walk or bike to so that the car is not seen as the only means of transportation. For starters, let’s not build strip malls and shopping centers with acres of parking between shops and roads. If we need to have parking, build behind the stores and move the storefronts to be off the sidewalks. Make sure you build sidewalks everywhere too! Remove beg buttons at crosswalks and automate walk signals. Build more dense housing. Having so much land dedicated to single family housing is why we have so much sprawl in the first place. Build an interconnected network of protected bike lanes and/or multimodal trails to provide cyclists with safe options. The good news is building out multimodal trails and protected bike lanes are some of the cheapest transportation infrastructure options but yield some great and obvious benefits.
We need to invest heavily into mass transit options in every city in the US. In most cities, that’ll mean building out bus-rapid transit systems since those can plug in most easily with existing infrastructure and are generally more budget friendly than building out something like light rail. In cities with existing rail infrastructure, lean way the fuck into it and build out that network even further. Don’t convert rails to trails. Convert roads to trails. Take away lanes of traffic while providing people with different transportation options. This is key. We can’t have an all-stick approach to replacing cars. We need to provide people with better options than driving. If we make driving difficult but don’t provide alternatives, we just end up with a pissed off populace.
Do even some of that and you’ll start to see traffic drop. Do all of that and you’ll find that we’ve got a much more livable city with less need for cars to take us everywhere. The remaining drivers will find their driving experience to be a lot safer and a lot more pleasant.
For decades, we’ve tried to build our way out of traffic by increasing both the number of roads and the size of roads. It doesn’t work. When we stop incentivizing cars as the only means of transportation, we’ll find our roads less congested and our communities healthier.
If you clean up the language, this would make a great Letter to the Editor at the Tampa Bay Times. People from all over the country get their letters published. This is worth sharing in an area that has no clue about what to about traffic.