Kicking Things Down the Road

For the last twenty years, my commute has taken me through the single worst stretch of road on the East Coast, and possibly the most traffic-blighted mess in the United States.  It's the stretch of Beltway from the Tysons Corner urban megaplex to the Bethesda, and it's consistently terrible.  North-South traffic on Interstate 95 mingles with the nearly never-ending DC Metroplex commute, and things snarl to a crawl for miles and miles.  When things are bad, it can add thirty to forty minutes

The solution that's been implemented over the last decade is to create variable cost High Occupancy Toll lanes, on which the cost varies depending on the amount of traffic.  When things lock up, it means you can pay over twenty bucks to travel five miles on the express lanes.  Unless you're on two wheels, which I still am as temperatures permit.

The challenge with those Express Lanes is simple...there's only so far they can go.  Heading East towards Maryland, they first dumped off just after Tysons, which invariably meant a snarled mess at the point when the Express and Hoi Polloi lanes merged.  For the last several years, the Virginia Department of Transportation spent $660,000,000 on a two and a half mile extension of those lanes, pushing them further East towards the Potomac and the American Legion Bridge.  During the construction period, things were as messy as one might expect, but now, finally, it's done.   So what's that done?

Traffic right at Tysons is now better.  But drive a mile or so eastward past Tysons, and if there's any volume things just lock back up again.  If you're on the Express Lanes, that merge during traffic has gotten worse during high volume periods.  Of course it has.  The choke point at the Potomac remains, and fixing that?  Lord have mercy.

The American Legion Bridge ain't gettin' any wider, 'cause rebuilding it would cost real money, not hundreds of millions but billions.  It would also require Virginia, Maryland, and the Federal government to play well together.   America just doesn't know how to do that sort of thing any more.  That, and we're driving more as we ever did.  So the traffic isn't any better, it's just that the snarls are a little further east.  Two thirds of a billion dollars, and what we get is the same mess in a different place.  It's like the kid who cleans his room by stuffing everything under his bed.  Is it clean and orderly?  No, not really.

The problem isn't that the road isn't wide enough.  It's that the system has reached the point where it no longer has the carrying capacity to function properly.  

I take great pleasure in cars and driving, but as a system of mass transit, there's nothing less functional than the personal automobile.  We can pave and expand and pave and expand, but we can't get around the inherent inefficiency and potential entropy of a car-based system.  That we've built our entire living and working infrastructure around the car only makes it worse, and for decades, we've put off changing course.  Rail?  Trains are SOCIALIST!  UNAMERICAN!  Railways had nothing to do with MAKING AMERICA GREAT!

But then again, that's kind of the point.  Efficient and well-designed systems leave less space for profit, and don't create the sort of irresolvable ambient malaise necessary to keep us constantly seeking, constantly buying, constantly trying to kludge together something that works.