Getting out of gridlock: thanks to the highway lobby, now we're stuck in traffic. How do we escape?

E: The Environmental Magazine, March-April, 2002 by Jim Motavalli

Jerry Nichols, a musician, nurse and beer-brewer who lives in suburban Connecticut, has a long morning commute that can double if traffic is bad. His solution is unique to him: Zen-like detachment, simply tune it out," he says. "The traffic can be swirling around me, people can be yelling, honking their horns, and I hardly even hear it."

We need coping mechanisms like these, because commuting times are getting longer for many Americans. Tracy, California, a former farming community, is about 60 miles east of San Francisco. Because housing prices in San Francisco are some of the highest in the nation, Tracy has been absorbed into the city's suburban commuter corridor. For the tradeoff of a four-bedroom house for $800 a month, Tracy's commuters travel an average of 58 miles one-way to work.

In other news, pregnant women in Atlanta are increasingly having their babies in the car because of traffic jams on the way to the hospital. In a city with expansive suburbs and average 34-mile-a-day commutes, many mothers-to-be just can't get to a medical center fast enough.

It can't go on like this, can it? In the new millennium, when the futurists said we'd all be wafting to work in sky cars, we're decidedly earthbound. According to Katie Alvord's book Divorce Your Car, a third of the average city's land is devoted to serving the car, including roads, service stations and parking lots. In 1970, Americans drove a trillion miles per year; it's been more than two trillion a year since the mid-1990s. There are more than 220 million registered automobiles in the U.S. alone, and their numbers will soon overtake the human population.

As cities sprawl farther into distant suburbs, an hour a day in the car has become the national norm. The average family takes 10 car trips a day, mostly for shopping, socializing or recreation. For every 10 travel miles, nine are taken in a car. As Alvord puts it, this isn't love, it's addiction.

Despite the fact that the national interstate highway system is fully built, governments spend $200 million every day constructing, fixing and improving roads in the U.S. What do we get for our money? The National Transportation Board predicts that delays caused by congestion will increase by 5.6 billion hours in the period between 1995 and 2015, wasting an unnecessary 7.3 billion gallons of fuel. Seventy percent of all daily peak-hour travel on interstates now occurs under stop-and-go conditions, and a measurable "rush hour" will soon be a thing of the past.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY

One of the major barriers to the fledgling automobile industry at the turn of the century was the poor state of the roads. One of the first highway lobbying groups was the League of American Wheelmen, which founded "good roads" associations around the country and, in 1891, began lobbying state legislatures.

Many of America's roads were private and funded by tolls. One such early road was the 45-mile Long Island Motor Parkway, built in 1908 and entirely financed by the racing enthusiast William K. Vanderbilt, Jr. The toll collection plan fell short of expectations, and he gave up his road in 1938 in lieu of back taxes.

The Federal Aid Roads Act of 1916 encouraged coast-to-coast construction of paved roads, usually financed by gasoline taxes (a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one). By 1930, the annual budget for federal road projects was $750 million. After 1939, with a push from President Franklin Roosevelt, limited-access interstates began to make rural areas accessible.

There wasn't necessarily anything sinister about all this. Highways were seen by many as just one aspect of the technological progress that would make life easier for all. In his book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, David Gelernter argues that the General Motors (GM) Futurama exhibit, which took fair-goers through the imagined world of 1960, complete with a 14-lane Express Motorway that would crisscross the nation at 100 miles per hour, was wildly popular precisely because of the freedom and mobility the interstate highways promised.

Some modern historians, Gelernter says, suggest "that the Futurama exhibit was the launchpad of an evil GM scheme to foist highways on an unwilling public--and that is absurd." At the same time, however, there were vigorous protests against new highways in many cities, precisely because some people could see beyond the glitter to the roads' ultimate impact on neighborhoods and life in general.

If private cars were going to dominate American transportation after World War II, they needed newer and better roads to run on. GM also stands behind the creation of the National Highway Users Conference, otherwise known as the highway lobby, which became the most powerful pressure group in Washington.

GM President Charles Wilson, who became Secretary of Defense in 1953, used his position to proclaim that a new road system was vital to U.S. security. He was assisted by Federal Highway Administrator Francis DuPont, whose family was then the largest GM shareholder. Congress approved the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956. "The greatest public works program in the history of the world," as Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks called it, was on, and with it were planted the seeds of our current gridlock. In 1956, 72 percent of American families owned a car; by 1970, when the national road network comprised 30,000 miles, 82 percent owned cars, and 28 percent had two or more.