Crosstown Traffic

This week has been eventful because I was made aware of, and then used connections to attain, a new temporary gig! The gig is for a social research company, and my role so far has been to read short written responses to survey questions and code them. The subject of the survey is the difficulty of transportation within the State of Washington. Survey responders were asked "What is the most urgent transportation issue facing your local area/your region/outside your region." I have 40 codes to use to categorize responses, which range from "traffic congestion in Seattle," to "roads," to "I don't want any of my money going to projects in Seattle where I don't use them." The survey had just a couple over 5,000 respondents.

In any event, after taking on two of these questions in the last two-and-a-half days and upon coding some 3,500 responses on Friday I think I have some thoughts about transportation policy that are worth sharing.

One of the interesting things about the responses to the survey is that I feel like you get several different responses looking at the same problem. One of my codes was for "traffic congestion," but I also had codes for "increase public transportation," and "widen lanes/expand freeways." The first one of the three I think really represents what the problem is, and the last two are potential solutions.

To really get into it, though, we have to think about who uses the transportation systems that we have and how they are used. While it seems fair for the person from Eastern Washington to be upset about his/her tax money getting spent in Seattle to fix roads, it becomes a significantly less salient point if we can show that a more efficient transportation system will allow goods to be delivered from farm/factory to market at less cost. If Wenatchee apples are sitting on a truck in Seattle traffic, that truck is burning fuel and the carrying company has to pay its driver. That's money that could otherwise be given to the Orchard manager or the folks working the farm, and that's pollution that affects the population as a whole.

Now we could try to add more lanes to increase highway capacity, but if we do that and make the highway more efficient for everyone, we're likely to simply fill that capacity with more drivers looking to take advantage of it. If that happens, we're back to square one. To make the most of what we have, we'll need to reduce the amount of traffic on the roads. I think we're pretty unlikely to be able to reduce semis that are transporting raw materials or consumer goods, so that leaves us with trying to reduce traffic by getting cars off the roads, or getting more people to carpool together.

The funny thing, I think, is how drivers get frustrated that their money goes to non-road projects. I can't quite figure out why a driver should be upset about gas tax money going into paying for bike trails. Every bicyclist is, in fact, not a car; every time you pull a car off the road and turn it into a bicyclist or a public transit user, you make the highway more efficient. Now it's possible in certain cases that being careful around bicyclists can make driving less efficient, but in that case why don't we build trails and such for the bikers that are off the roads? I'm pretty sure bicyclists don't really enjoy the danger of sharing the road with cars just as much as drivers don't seem to enjoy sharing the road with bikes.

The key is the efficient use of funds. If we're building bike trails that nobody uses, then we should stop doing it. I should be careful about that statement, actually. It's possible that we can build a trail that doesn't work simply because it's not well-integrated into the system, or not well-integrated into peoples' travel routes. If that's the case, we should seek to support it and study if integrative efforts increase the number of users of that trail.

It strikes me that this is a problem with public transportation, as well. A line that goes from SeaTac to Downtown may be useful in that it should reduce some traffic in that corridor (although how many times have YOU used public transportation to get on/off a plane trip? I've almost always been dropped off or picked up at the airport by friends), and it gets folks in south Seattle to baseball or football games, which is nice for me when I try to park for free in the few areas around SODO I can still find free parking, but light rail itself won't fix the problem.

There needs to be a well-integrated system that uses Metro to get to and from the rails in a timely fashion, and the rails themselves need to be expanded to make cross-city trips a legitimate possibility and also help people get to their destinations on the other side of Lake Washington. I'm happy to put my tax money into light rail, though, even if it never comes to West Seattle, in the hopes that enough people will ride it for me to be able to use the roads a little easier. Of course, it would be nice if it came out this way, too, and I could take advantage of it in the more traditional fashion.