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

Today new toll rates went into effect for vehicles traveling on the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike.  Yes, I travel on both of these roads every week and I hate tolls.

These are not small increases.  On the Parkway, the price at most booths will rise from .35 to .50 or an almost 43% increase.  Where else can you raise your prices by 43% and get away with it?  The Turnpike is just as bad where the average ride will increase from $1.20 to $1.70 or an almost 42% rise.

photo credit: bovinity

Many drivers will continue to ride these roads and pay the increases since there are not many options.  Others will attempt to avoid the tolls and look for free alternatives.  This will result in more congestion on these roads and increase the already bad traffic.  Ultimately this means longer commutes with more wasted time and gas.

So why the increase?  These additional revenues are to be used to fund various construction projects at a cost of over $8 billion.  Yes, $8 billion, plus committing another $1.25 billion for a tunnel to Manhattan.

Am I the only one who thinks this is an incredible waste of our money?  Just what we need in a bad economy, higher commuting costs.