Stuck in Traffic – How to Fix It
COST Commentary: The brief comments below by Peter Samuel, founder of TOLLROADSnews, are about Maclean magazine’s recent lead article (Stuck in traffic: Our rush hours rank with the world’s worst. Here’s how to fix it) by Andrew Coyne’s (National Editor of Canada’s Maclean’s magazine.) Coyne addresses the daily distress of millions of Canadians as they face nationwide work commute times averaging more than one hour. This paragraph is from the Maclean article:
” We’re not imagining things: traffic really is getting worse. Statistics Canada reports the average time spent commuting to and from work nationwide increased from 54 minutes in 1992 to 63 minutes in 2005. In a year, that adds up to about 32 working days spent sitting in traffic (five more than in 1992). And that’s the average. In Calgary, it’s 66 minutes; in Vancouver, 67; in Toronto and Montreal, it’s now up to nearly 80 minutes a day. For one in four Canadians, the two-way commute takes more than 90 minutes.”
While Canada’s average daily two-way work commute increased 9 minutes from 1992 to 2005, the US average has increased 5.6 minutes from 1990 to 2009 to 50.4 minutes total and the US average has actually dropped by about more than one-half a minute from 2000 to 2009.
Canada has attempted to address congestion with massive expenditures on mass transit as a number of US cities have, and are attempting, without success. The Maclean article addresses pragmatic and effective transportation solutions to improve Canadian mobility. These are some of the same solutions which have shown promise in the United States but are not widely used at this point. These solutions would also provide cost effective solutions for Austin’s congestion.
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Canada’s Maclean’s magazine has cover story pitching for tolls, congestion pricing
By Peter Samuel, Tollroadsnews
Posted on Tue, 2011-01-11 15:49
* maclean’s
* toll advocacy
Canada’s leading weekly newsmagazine Maclean’s has a cover story strongly pushing tolls and congestion pricing. Headlined “Stuck in traffic: Our rush hours rank with the world’s worst. Here’s how to fix it” the piece by feature writer Andrew Coyne is a hard-hitting advocacy of tolls, toll lanes, variable prices and congestion priced zones.
There’s a page detailing the massive costs being incurred in congested traffic in Canada and the toll it takes of time and tempers, and the futility of politically correct non-solutions (transit, bicycles etc) then says:
“(W)e can solve (congestion). That our cities have failed to do so is not due to lack of proven alternatives, but in willful defiance of one… that has an impressive expert consensus…but is already having notable success in other cities around the world…”
“We do not have to suffer this daily indignity, in other words. It is not natural or inevitable that urban traffic should move with the speed of industrial sludge. It’s not often true of other social problems, but when it comes to traffic, there really is an Answer.”