Last week, the LA times reported some surprising – although not unexcpected – news that Metrolink ridership is at an all time high, while “traffic on California freeways dropped 1.5% over last year – the equivilant of a billion fewer milles traveled.” The culprit of all this according to the article, seems to be the outrageous gas prices, which “jumped 15.5 cents last week to 4.588 a gallon” in California.
Breaking this news down, there are a couple positive angles to this news. Wearing my capatilist hat, less traffic sounds great! As long as I can continue to scrap up the cash to pay for gas, I’ll be able to get around town faster, with less wasted idling in traffic too boot! Wearing my Enviromentalist hat, ditto! Less traffic and less cars on the road means less oil consumed and less greenhouse gas emissions. Beautiful!
Where things get a bit blurry, is when I put on my economist hat. An article printed just the very next day, explained that California’s unemployment rate has reached %6.8, which is the 5th highest in the nation. Could the good traffic news be a biproduct of higher unemployment? because more people have nowhere to work?
Brian Taylor, a transportation planning expert and UCLA Urban Planning Professor (where I got my M.A.) discussed this exact connection in a paper he wrote called Rethinking Traffic Congestion. In it, he proposes that “traffic congestion is evidence of social and economic vitality; empty roads and streets are signs of failure.” In many ways, I agree with this proposition, and so, while I don’t like traffic, and while I would love to see people drive less, I just hope it’s because they’ve found a bicycle to be more fun, or public transit more convenient, and not because they have nowhere to go…. This trend is worth keeping an eye on.
- Eco-Angeleno
