Wonder why you wasted ten minutes sitting at traffic lights this morning? Guess what: no one cares!

“Two-thirds of 378 traffic agencies in 49 states don’t actively monitor traffic lights, or they simply respond to problems as they occur, the Washington-based Institute of Transportation Engineers reported.

… A study by a Maryland researcher last year found that 35% of the nation’s traffic agencies had not retimed their traffic signals in 10 years. That means they haven’t responded to business and residential growth that affects traffic patterns, says Philip Tarnoff, director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Maryland.”

The article goes on to cite projections that for about $1b / year, traffic delays could be reduced 15% - 20%, travel time cut up to 25%, fuel consumption about 10%, and emissions about the same. Even reducing these numbers — because the traffic engineers have an agenda too — the savings would still be significant.

(To get a sense of scale, federal and state highway revenue was ~$124b in 2004, not including bond financing (link). Capital and maintenance outlays were about $105b.)

So why not divert under 1% of roads spending for a significant improvement in traffic flow? Because no one — at least no one in a position to do anything — has any motivation to do so. There is no constituency for faster traffic flow. The cost of waiting at too-long red lights is in time and not dollars, so it’s mostly invisible. Electoral power is diluted because people may transit a half dozen towns on their way to work — and they have a vote in only one.

But there is a lobby for more road projects — construction firms and unions, both of whom give generously to state and federal legislators who can throw more funding their way. These folks have a
dis
incentive to see traffic problems eased — after all, a 10% reduction in traffic delays could ultimately mean a 10% reduction in road spending — and that would be bad, wouldn’t it?

Since we’re not going to make every road a toll road any time soon (a demand-side solution), maybe what’s needed is a Prop-13 style cap on fuel and highway taxes. That could force more efficient use of funds, not more of the same. It would be analogous to when the big power companies realized they should encourage energy conservation so that they could avoid building more hugely expensive power plants.

Better yet, let citizens allocate their gas tax funds to a menu of possible projects. Let me choose to take $4 of my ~$400+ in annual gas taxes and spend it on fixing stop light timing. For me, that $4 would buy twenty-five or more extra hours of free time annually — the best investment I would make all year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 11:18 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.