Sitting In Traffic Is A Problem Worth Solving
Plus! Hear/See YIMBYs on WAMU/DCist and read me on GGWash
Before diving into this week’s post on traffic, I need to share a couple of exciting media hits for YIMBYs of NoVA. Please check them out!
Margaret Barthel from WAMU/DCist interviewed Jane, Aaron, Peter, and myself in Arlington, Fairfax, and Alexandria about YIMBYs of NoVA and our ambitions for political influence. Hear and read the coverage on WAMU or read it on DCist.
That story links to an op-ed I wrote in Greater Greater Washington titled Let Fairfax County grow. The map by my YIMBY compatriot Jason Schwartz shows in pink areas of the county that permit no more than twelve residential units per acre. Fairfax County is the slowest-growing DMV locality. It needs more housing!
I stumbled on an unfortunate segue from Fairfax’s sprawl to the definitional insanity of trying to tame traffic by adding more car lanes. County government has a $100 million proposal to add a partial ring road around the notorious Seven Corners intersection. The yellow section would wipe out Hong Kong Pearl Seafood Restaurant, probably the best dim sum in NoVA, and a swath of garden apartments, the kind of market affordable housing folks eagerly romanticize. Eden Center, the east coast’s largest concentration of Vietnamese businesses, sits north of the yellow section, presumably untouched by the plan. That may be because Eden sits within Falls Church City. I would join the harsh backlash against any attempt to raze Eden.
Maybe the ring road is a step toward a street grid that helps the area redevelop to be less car-centric. If that is the true goal, the county should be open about it. If the garden apartment residents had to move today, they would basically have nowhere to go, due to the simple lack of housing supply and of affordable housing. Committed affordable buildings have long waiting lists. Market rate affordable housing is cheap due to its low quality. Older garden apartments and, indeed, massive complexes like Southern Towers will eventually have to redevelop, and we currently do not have a credible answer. I do know that my family treasures Hong Kong Pearl. It is one of a few places that to me embody Northern Virginia’s greatness. The business seems successful. Its current space is huge. I hope it can find a new one, if it has to.
Seven Corners really is dysfunctional and needs to be redesigned, that much seems clear. But congestion is the underlying reason the county is proposing to spend nine figures to pave over homes and businesses. On the other, other hand, I doubt any informed observer believes the plan will solve local traffic. The problem will persist no matter how much we add lanes, so I think we should examine our resignation to it.
Thanks to urbanism, I can no longer sit in heavy traffic without feeling ridiculous. There the kids and I were Saturday afternoon, crawling south along the highway into the District. The dysfunction of the scene struck me. I once again asked myself, is this a practical transportation system? Is this the best we can do? Then I noticed we were passing Minnesota Avenue Metro station. I voice to texted my frustration to a confidant involved with WMATA. She lamented expensive housing near the Metro.
Before I get sucked into that issue, take a step back with me and appreciate the absurdity of our primary transportation system. Everyone fully expects it to be crippled twice daily by commuters, sometimes late at night, and semi-randomly on the weekend. That sometimes describes Metro, but always describes the DMV’s roads.
You might think of our highway system as built to accommodate peak volume, but it demonstrably does not. Peak volume overwhelms it! And each additional car in the system exponentially increases travel times. Because the only price on congestion is time wasted, most of us regularly plunge into the stream of cars knowing it will be a bad experience. This is the essential nature of car dependency: often driving is by rights the worst option and we have no feasible alternative.
In our interview, Barthel asked me what NIMBY arguments if any I find reasonable. I responded that I have my own skepticism of transit in the U.S. We do not have a track record of efficiently managing capital projects or operating train systems. My friend Peter, a transportation expert, interjected that the U.S. does not fund transit adequately, which I assume is true, but that underlines my point: U.S. transit is subpar.
I then noted, however, that cars kill about 40,000 people in America annually, which Barthel seemed to know well. ‘Could you imagine if transit killed 1,000 people in a year?’ I noted. ‘There would be mass outrage and congressional hearings.’ Put that all together and I see a straightforward case for political leaders to make driving safer and less wasteful while also doing the hard institutional work of creating world-class transit and protected cycling infrastructure, which e-bikes have given way more value.
Questioning automotive dependency is not a demand for scarcity or poverty, it is a demand for something affirmatively better. The classic chart below shows cars really are far more dangerous than transit. They also fuel a sedentary lifestyle that feeds directly into leading causes of death in our country. Topping the current list are heart attacks, cancer, COVID-19 (which has significant comorbidities), and accidents, which obviously include car crashes. Forcing people to do something more dangerous than anything else they would ordinarily do is a very strange state of affairs, yet here we are.
We actually do have a remarkably elegant policy solution to congestion: Pricing it. This is the rare policy supported by economists of all stripes, internalizing the massive externality of time wasted in traffic. Low-income people cannot afford the charge? Pay them the difference! Implementation would be expensive? Privacy concerns? Singapore implemented a congestion charge in 1975 with literal slips of paper displayed on dashboards. Please do not tell me that with all of our country’s wealth and godlike technological prowess, we cannot figure something out. The answer can surely be less invasive than current surveillance of smartphone users.
The primary impediment to congestion pricing seems to be political, not technical. The average American believes, sitting in their car, in traffic, that their use of the road is free, and moreover that although they have to drive, driving is a form of freedom.
Certainly, there are different dimensions of freedom. And land use is a major factor. “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink,” observed [*checks notes*] Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich. “They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.” Mandated sprawl spreads people out such that many can only connect with each other by car. Congestion pricing still has value in that setting, ensuring people who must drive are able to do so. As noted, the policy can be means tested, so everyone can still get to work, the emergency room, or just across town to see a friend. Still, driving is not inherently prosperous and often squarely a cost. Want to buy a house? Drive until you qualify!
Time and land are our scarcest resources. A car sitting in traffic is arguably the ultimate waste of both. Manhattan leading the way for our country, as it should, on congestion pricing is encouraging. More people are starting to see a better way to live, as I have over the last couple of years, which gives me hope for the future.
If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, do reach out at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested to me by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.