Road to nowhere

From soaring fuel costs to lost work hours to increased greenhouse gases, transportation gridlock is like slow-drip torture on the economy, gradually sapping its productivity. No one enjoys traffic congestion. Like the Canadian weather, it's a subject of eternal complaint. Like the weather, everyone has a personal story of hardship. Also like the weather, it seems to be getting worse. So how much is traffic congestion really costing us? And what can we do about it? In March, federal Transportation Minister Lawrence Cannon released the first comprehensive attempt to put a price tag on congestion in Canada. The top-line figure: gridlock costs the nine largest urban centres in Canada $3.7 billion per year. The figure represents the sum of the time lost sitting in traffic (at an average rate of $28 per hour during working hours), plus the extra gas wasted and the greenhouse gases emitted. And while $3.7B might seem a big number, the Transport Canada method was deliberately conservative. For the purposes of the study, traffic was considered to be uncongested if it moved at 70% of the posted speed. In other words, there is no recorded loss in time, fuel or greenhouse gases as long as you are going 70 km/h on a 100 km/h expressway.

The US takes a more stringent view of congestion. The Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University has annually calculated the cost of traffic delays for 85 urban centres in the US, using a similar approach to Transport Canada's. However, the TTI starts the bill the moment traffic is no longer able to travel the posted speed. The latest figure is about US$63B in congestion costs - a much larger figure than Canada's on a relative basis. Since 1982, when the TTI began measuring congestion, the average delay per rush-hour traveller has increased from 16 hours to 47 hours per year. In other words, American commuters spend more than a full workweek every year sitting in their cars, going slow.

(Canadian Business 060605)

You know what I think? I think we need more cars. More personal vehicles! Two for each man, woman, and child! There is such a justifiable need for everyone to have their own vehicle. It's completely expected and normal, isn't it? It's completely normal to sit in traffic gridlock. Good grief.