By Dr. Khaled Abdelghany
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-646662.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Another rainy morning with the usual nasty traffic, and the same question again with the same blaming tone - this time from a new young co-worker: "Can you guys do something? It took me two hours to arrive here.". To her, I am the professor who teaches and does research in transportation engineering, and may be the only person she knows in this field.
"I wish I could," I answered. I felt her frustration. It took me the same two hours to get to work that morning. If it were not for my classes later, I was ready to call it a day and head back home at 10:00 a.m.
There is no doubt traffic congestion is a significant threat to our nation's economy, environment quality and social integration. Traveled miles have doubled in the last two decades. On the other hand, few of the transportation infrastructure projects we were supposed to build 20 years ago are being built today. We might have overlooked the need for these projects due to the lack of adequate planning. Or, we might have invested our limited funds on the wrong projects as a result of poor decision making. Whatever the reason is, the result is a severely congested transportation system that makes us suffer on daily basis.
The latest statistics indicate the average time lost due to congestion per year is equivalent to one entire work week. We also burn three billion gallons of fuel a year while sitting in traffic. The total cost of traffic congestion is estimated close to 80 billion dollars a year.
Traffic congestion is also a main cause of air quality degradation in most urban areas. During rush hour, vehicular emissions contribute up to 70% of the total pollutants in the air. At the social level, strong evidence indicates stressful long commutes could lead to less wellbeing families.
Based on these numbers, I would say our nation is engaged in another war that exhausts our resources and limits our growth. And we are not doing much to win this war. The congestion threat requires a new team work mechanism that we obviously lacked over the past decades:
All stakeholders including legislators, policy and decision makers, federal and local officials, planners, engineers and researchers would have to contribute. They would have to have a clear understanding of the magnitude of the congestion problem and a determination to face it with little conflict. The mechanism would encourage creativity and innovations while bounding their risk, reward successes and account for failure. Most importantly, this new teamwork mechanism would respect the public and care for the next generations.
When this mechanism is in place, only then will my answer to the question "Can something be done?" confidently be "a lot is being done".
Dr. Khaled Abdelghany is an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at SMU, doing research in advanced traffic management systems and Intermodal transportation networks.
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