There is more to politics than the contributor/lobbyist/legislator chain. There is more to taking the high road than attacking highway construction or emphasizing road safety over road funding diversions.

The critical missing links in this chain are the citizens, most of whom drive. Moreover, the driving patterns of the citizenry have changed radically since 1970, and this has placed an overwhelming burden on our highways, roads and bridges. The resulting congestion offers a built-in constituency for roads.

Landmark research in 1987 -- and updated in 1996 -- by Alan Pisarski, for the Eno Foundation for Transportation, established fundamental changes have taken place in how American drivers use their roads.

This report, Commuting in America (later Commuting in America II), found that the fundamental basis of "rush hour" had changed. No longer were most drivers commuting from suburb-to-downtown; instead they were traveling suburb-to-suburb. More and more working people were driving to work alone, and were using mass transportation less.

And because the commuting infrastructure in most metropolitan areas is aligned in a hub-and-spoke pattern -- with downtown as the hub -- the existing infrastructure could be considered obsolete under the new commute patterns.

In the meantime, the crushing new load of commute traffic in suburban areas was causing gridlock in areas which lacked adequate capacity. Miles-long backups on two-lane blacktop roads during rush hour in remote suburban areas now are commonplace, even as municipalities close the few alternate routes to through traffic during rush hours.

The phenomenon of "trip chaining" is another element of why roads are so crowded in urban and suburban areas, and is a clue to why car pooling, HOV lanes and suburban mass transit have been disappointing failures.

Trip chaining is the linking of many trips into one, in which the evening rush hour drive is not just from office to home; it's from office to drycleaners to snack shop to junior high to day care to tee ball practice. Such "garbage trips", as they are derisively called by some transportation planners, make it impossible for planners to pigeonhole driver behavior into neat categories that validate theoretical models.

This behavior also makes time-driven suburban drivers -- the soccer moms and dads -- a potential pro-highway constituency. They have been well-represented by the aggressive and powerful American Automobile Association, of which many are members, but also will support environmental groups.

These groups position themselves as defenders of wilderness and wildlife, but in reality vast amounts of their cash go to Washington to support anti-highway, anti-development and limits-to-growth legislation like efforts to fight presumed global warming.

Environmental groups would fight fearsome traffic congestion through "demand management" strategies. Among others, these strategies include