Well, you think our traffic is bad?  According to TreeHugger.com, “1,466 New Cars Added to Beijing Streets Every Day”.  At this rate, they will add well over 100,000 cars in the first 3 months of this year.  Yikes!

While reading the story on  TreeHugger, I found the original source for this information is Reuters.  In their piece about Congested Beijing, they mention an interesting tactic that has been implemented.  To reduce congestion, they introduced rules based on the license plate numbers to remove a fifth of the cars each day on the roads.

Now, at first this seems a little crazy, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  We may someday have to resort to a conservation scheme based on license plate numbers.  Do you remember odd-even gas rationing of 1979?  I do, that was the year I got my driver’s license and it was not pretty.

The Beijing plan is interesting in that they target only a fifth of the cars each day.  So if you figure a 5 day working week, then you would only have to leave your car home just one day each week.  Could you get a ride, use mass transit or work from home that one day?  If everyone could follow this simple rule, we would immediately reduce our daily traffic and gas consumption by 20%.

We need to explore simple ideas like this while we still can.  If we wait, then we will be forced to take more drastic measures in the future.  The time to act is now, are you ready?

photo credit: poeloq

I read an interesting article on The American Prospect web site this weekend.  The article entitled “How the Stimulus Screws Commuters” makes the argument that Congress is missing a big opportunity by not putting enough funding into public transit.  By spending most of the transportation money on highways, they are not doing enough to help the environment.

Currently there is $27 billion proposed for highway projects that will create new jobs and address our aging roads.  Now I wrote a post last month called Transportation Headaches that examines how massive spending is not the answer to our problems.  This will create jobs, but I have a tough time with the argument that we will “save” money with this kind of spending.

The stimulus package also wants to allocate 11.5 billion in tax incentives for automobile purchases.  I understand the desire to help the Big 3 Automakers, but I don’t think putting more cars on the road is really the answer.  If the automakers had invested more research on alternative fuels, maybe they would be offering better cars today.  They were happy making big profits on SUV’s and we were too happy to buy them, but times have changed and they need to change with them.

Yes, the primary goal of the stimulus package should be to stimulate the economy.  So while road work and automobile purchases could provide a spark, they will not light a fire to long term growth.  I would rather see more money put into projects that would help our economy and our ecology.

When gas prices rose, so did transit ridership.  Investments in mass transit, alternative energy and reducing traffic should be our main focus.  We could boost the sagging economy while also addressing climate change.  That is the type of spending I could support, what about you?

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

On Wednesday, AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) and TRIP (A National Transportation Research Group) jointly released a new report.  The report titled “America’s Top Five Transportation Headaches – and Their Remedies” identifies our transportation problems and their proposed remedies.  The problems are:

1. 25 percent of the major roadways and nation’s bridges are in poor condition
2. Congested roads, highway and transit systems are overburdened
3. An unacceptably high rate of traffic crashes and fatalities
4. Increasing demand is stressing the transportation system
5. Rising costs for both drivers and highway construction

The first problem is clearly a safety issue and definitely needs our attention as evidenced by the Minnesota bridge collapse.  The second problem leads to many economic headaches and impacts our daily quality of life.  Problem three is confirmed with over 41,000 lives lost on our roads in 2007.  Problem four can be seen in a 23 percent population increase since 1990 and a 41 percent rise in vehicle traffic since 1995.  Finally, the fifth problem estimates that drivers are losing $249 billion each year due to traffic while construction costs have spiked 55 percent in the last 5 years.  This report states that we need to double our current national transportation investment to significantly improve transit.

Well that is incredibly scary, but fortunately the report also includes proposed remedies.  The proposed remedies are:

1. Move ahead with ready-to-go transportation construction projects
2. Putting unemployed workers back on the job
3. Demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the cost of improvements
4. Use the most cost-effective construction techniques and materials
5. Follow a long-range transportation investment strategy

The first remedy requires over $75 billion of additional funding for approximately 6,000 transit projects that are in the pipeline.  The second remedy estimates that every $1 billion invested would result in almost 27,000 jobs.  Remedy three simply states that we just need to show how much we will “save” by spending all of this money.  Remedy four recommends if we work smarter with improved materials we will get better return on our investment.  Finally, the fifth remedy is to plan smarter both now and in the future.

Now is it just me or is there really just one remedy in this list?  If we spend more money, we can fix these problems.  I think this report states the obvious and does not offer any real solutions.  So why have I devoted such a long post to this report?  Because it absolutely backs up all the arguments I have been making for Pay4Rides.  My proposed Passenger Energy solution directly addresses each of the 5 problems without massive spending.

Go ahead and look at my previous posts under the Red category and let me know if you agree:

Traffic - we are heading toward unbearable gridlock
Roads - ease burden on troubled bridges and roads
Mass Transit - limited schedules and routes with no flexibility
Cars - lots of cars cost lots of money
Energy - break our oil addiction

After reading this report, I think the biggest headache is in my own head.  Does anyone have some remedies for that?

We need to ease the burden on troubled bridges and roads

When the Minnesota bridge crossing the Mississippi River collapsed during an evening rush hour, it caught the Nations attention.  Considering there are over 600,000 bridges in the US, it should serve as a real wakeup call.  Unfortunately there currently are not sufficient funds to perform all the necessary maintenance and repairs to prevent this from happening again.

photo credit: Mordac

This bridge disaster is a prime example of our crumbling infrastructure.  Recent studies found one quarter of the nation’s bridges have been classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.  Building new bridges is extremely expensive and the National Highway Trust Fund is severely under funded at present.

Weakening bridges and deteriorating roads could all benefit from reduced traffic through Pay4Rides.  It has been over a year since this tragedy, but have you seen any real action to adress this serious issue?

We can not build our way out of this

When you think of new construction as a solution to our traffic problems, first take a look at Boston’s epic construction story called the “Big Dig”.  Originally estimated at a price tag of $2.6 billion, the final cost soared to a staggering $14.8 billion.  The project has incurred criminal arrests, escalating costs, death, leaks, and charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials.  Planning for the project began in 1982, while construction started in 1991 and was finally completed in 2006.  This has been the most expensive highway project in U.S. history.

photo credit: frankh

WIth our current economic woes, many cities are finding it difficult to maintain our existing roads, never mind new construction.  More then a year after the bridge collapse in Minnesota, the AP finds there has been very little progress with repairs around the country.  Their review found that just 12 percent of the repairs have been performed on each state’s 20 most-traveled bridges with structural deficiencies.

Pay4Rides would help reduce the load now and give us more time to perform all the necessary repairs.  Maybe then we would not need so much new construction?