The SoSA Perspective

Urban Mobility???????

I was recently perusing the 2007 urban mobility report issued by the transportation researchers at Texas A and M University. Yes, I know that’s pretty weird, but I travel a lot and have a lot of time to read. Like when I’m trying to drive through Richmond, or Nashville, or anywhere in or near Washington DC. I used to get mad at the congestion, but now I have achieved enough enlightenment to recognize a chance to catch up on reading when I see one. Which brings me back to the mobility report.

According to the report we spend 4.2 billion hours of travel time each year “stalled in traffic”. This delay, sitting idling, or creeping along at a furlong per fortnight, burns up 2.9 billion gallons of gas each year. The cost of all this in wasted gas and lost time at work is about 78 billion dollars a year! I’m just guessing here but it seems to me that with gas as expensive as it is, maybe we ought to take the train, or the bus….. and if our illustrious “leaders” had any sense they’d be advocating building more public transit instead of trying to pave us out of our transportation problems.

The point of this tirade is that we’ve got an “oil shortage”, an ongoing “oil crisis” in this country and everybody knows it’s going to get worse. We can’t afford to feed our poor people, fix our broken schools or even maintain the bridges on our existing interstate highway system, and yet we can throw away nearly 80 billion dollars a year sitting in traffic, watching incontrovertible evidence that we’ve just got too *#^* many cars on the road! In response to all this our fearless leaders advocate building more highways. What solution suggests itself to you? My humble suggestion is that we begin by throwing these halfwits off the train so we can build more tracks.