March,  2000 -- At the beginning of the new millennium, the environmental community and allied social planners are ratcheting up their war against road construction and the automobile.

But proponents of choice in mobility and the highway lobby are plotting their own strategies to keep the automobile and our highway system at  the center of U.S. transportation policy.

That's because despite whatever social planners attempt -- and despite every federal, state or local program intended to reduce dependence on the auto and get drivers off the road -- the automobile is gaining in popularity and importance.

This is especially true among lower-income women and U.S. minorities, who are abandoning mass transit systems as their economic status improves, it was revealed at the Driving America National Conference on Mobility, held in late 1999 in Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the American Highway Users Alliance -- and supported financially by a variety of companies and national associations with interests in preserving the automobile as the core of the nation's transportation system -- the conference demonstrated both the threat and the weaknesses posed by the anti-auto lobby.
 

Women, minorities and cars

Lower-income women and minorities -- not America's middle class -- will be responsible for what growth in automobile use takes place in the next decade, said keynote speaker and nationally renowned transportation statistician and analyst Alan E. Pisarski.

"In the future, a large part of the growth in travel is going to come from women, minorities and immigrants to America joining the mainstream of the population," Pisarski said. "They're going to become more like the rest of the nation in their travel habits, and that means access to an automobile."

This means that while we can expect a moderation in the tremendous growth in traffic and highway congestion that we've been experiencing, social equity demands that we not place roadblocks in utilization of the automobile by lower-income individuals as they increase their incomes and adopt a mobile lifestyle.

The explosion in auto use and road congestion over the past four decades has been fueled mostly by the "Baby Boom" population segment, which began to reach driving age in the early 1960s, and now is reaching retirement, Pisarski said, "working its way through the age structure like a lab swallowed by a boa constrictor."

As retirement lifestyles aren't built around daily commutes at particular times, the retiring Baby Boomers will decline as a percentage of the growth in congestion. Being better-off financially, they will disperse away from urban areas. Instead, what will drive new congestion patterns will be what Pisarski called the "democratization of mobility", as racial and ethnic minorities increasingly join the majority of automobile owners.

As the available pool of suburban employees shrink, and as the better-paying jobs, and most of the job growth, is taking place in the suburbs, these new lower-income owners will use their cars to reach suburban employers not accessible to them via mass transit. Joining them will be the new wave of immigrants already washing the United States' shores.

"Future increases in induced travel wil come largely from getting personal vehicles into the hands of minority poplations," Pisarski said. "This is a fact to be celebrated, not condemned," especially by those who already have such mobility, he added.

National "transportation demand management" (TDM) strategies for limiting auto use include congestion pricing, in which an individual must pay a fee to drive at a preferred time; confiscatory fuel taxes which are meant to discourage driving; and a reduction or outright ban of road construction.

Other strategies to curtail auto use include limits to residential lot sizes; zoning to encourage higher population densities in new housing developments; "green zones" like those in Portland, Ore., which preclude new development in outlying areas; and tax breaks for core city rehab, all of which have been articulated by Vice President Al Gore in his "Smart Growth" initiative.

But Pisarski points out that any federal transportation policy designed to control auto use will have tragic consequences for these women and minorities attempting to improve their lifestyles. Because the auto is the gateway to higher-paying jobs, restricting auto use will close doors to them.

"It's a situation of last-in, first-out," Pisarski told Expressways Online. "It's clear to me that if someone is going to raise the bar to auto use, and make it more expensive to someone just reaching the threshold of being able to afford an automobile, it's going to push them out of the system."

When asked, Pisarski stopped short of stating whether a mobility-restricting policy that would disproportionately bar women and minorities from car ownership could be construed as sexist or racist. "It could be that way inadervertently," he said. "But when we talk about equity of transportation in public policy, this has to be considered. Policies that are aimed at making transportation more expensive in pursuit of whatever goal, has to be questioned on equity grounds."

Pisarski also said that federal policies that would favor spending more on mass transit by shortchanging highway spending would be especially cruel to the growing population of women, minorities and immigrants who will be gaining automobiles.

"I find it very distressing," he said, "because in many cases this boost in mass transit funding has become a political football in which government players are vying for program dollars, but in fact it's a cruel hoax on people who are trying to make a living and gain opportunity. They become the football in somebody's federal program game. Many studies have shown that for these women and minorities, to get out to the jobs in the suburbs, where they need to go, they are very much hurt by efforts to push funds into mass transit programs which will not help them."
 

Changing urban forms favor autos

Pisarski's contentions were backed up by the findings of Dr. Genevieve Giuliano, professor, School of Policy, Planning and Development, University of Southern California. She documented the decentralization and dispersal of urban areas both in the United States and abroad. And while this decentralization is driven in large part by the availability of autos to people who want to disperse, that in no way makes decentralization any less valid.

Giuliano stated that around the world, urban areas are decentralizing as population and employment shifts to suburban and exurban areas. Population is dispersing as densities decline, and population and employment become less clustered. This was driven by the enhanced mobility the auto brings.

She pointed out how even though the population of the entire five-county L.A. metro region has grown from 11.5 million in 1980 to 14.5 million in 1990, Los Angeles County's share of population fell from 65 to 61 percent, and share of employment fell from 69.8 to 64.7 percent, of the area total during that period.

This is reflected in Europe, in which the metro Paris population grew from 8.2 million in 1968 to 9.3 million in 1990, but the city's share fell from 31.6 percent to 23.1 percent of the total in that same period. She cited similar declines for London, Zurich, Amsterdam and Oslo.
 

Europe relying more on roads

Her findings undermine a contention of the anti-auto crowd in the United States, who never stop repeating that if this country only had the fine and extensive mass transit systems of Europe, only had the very high gasoline taxes of Europe, or only had the excellent intercity and high-speed passenger rail systems of Europe, U.S. citizens would not have to rely on the internal combustion-powered auto as much as they do.

Well, they have those systems in Europe, and auto use is skyrocketing, observed Christian Gerondeau, president of the Union Routiere de France, or French Road Federation. He demonstrated that the growth curve of road vehicles in Europe from 1910 to 1990 -- while not at the same volume as in the U.S. -- very closely reflects the growth curve in the United States over that same period.

In the meantime, he observed, European governments run extremely high tax surpluses from road use, while having to subsidize rail and transit. In Great Britain, new road construction has all but stopped due to environmentalist ("Green") pressures.

But other countries, like France, are quickly expanding their road systems. "Many of you may be surprised to learn that in Paris, we have nearly as much motorways as in Los Angeles," Gerondeau said. These capacity improvements include innovative designs which will handle large volumes of traffic with minimal environmental impact, such as multi-level tunnels.

Truck traffic is exploding in Europe and is multiplying economic activity and prosperity on the Continent, he said. As in the United States, in European countries since the 1960s and 1970s, the air is cleaner in terms of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and lead, and the number of traffic-related deaths has steadily declined while the persons-traveled per kilometer has skyrocketed.

Based on Gerondeau's remarks, supporters of expanded highway construction can take heart in that instead of the United States follow Europe in terms of mass transit, high gas taxes and high-speed rail -- as the anti-road lobby would prefer -- Europe actually is following the United States in terms of highway use.
 

Air cleaner, not worse

Lost in the environmental agitation is the fact that air quality in the United States has tremendously improved since 1970, even as traffic and economic activity has exploded, said James M. Shrouds, director, Office of Natural Environment, Federal Highway Administration.

"The conventional view is that not much progress has been made in clean air," Shrouds said. Increases in vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) is the culprit, and more control of auto use is the solution. These theories were built into the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which encouraged cleaner cars and vehicles, cleaner fuels, and traffic demand management techniques.

Problem is, the data show that violations in National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) in metro areas across the country have plunged in every category. For example, the average number of "exceedences" per monitoring site for carbon monoxide fell from 40 in 1975, to zero in 1993, where it has stayed. And average exceedences for ozone fell from just over 37 in 1975 to only two in 1994 and 1995.

Between 1970 and 1996 -- while U.S. residential population grew 29 percent, the gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted for inflation doubled, and VMT exploded 125 percent, highway-related carbon monoxide emissions fell 40 percent, volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions plunged 58 percent, and particulate matter emissions 10 microns or less (PM 10) dropped 38 percent (excluding fugitive dust from roads).

"The bottom line is that mobile sources have made great progress in reducing emissions," Shroud said. This is evidenced by declines in NAAQS violations, he observed. "And emissions have been reduced despite increases in population, vehicles and VMT," he added.

These reductions will continue to increase in future years due to new technologies coming on line. And while traffic control measures may make small, localized contributions to emission reduction, the vast bulk of the reductions have come from improved vehicle technologies and cleaner fuels.
 

There is hope

While the nation probably will not be able to "build itself out of congestion", there is hope for moderating traffic congestion, said Timothy J. Lomax, research engineer and author of Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University's Annual Mobility Study.

Lomax said more roadway capacity, transit, special use lanes like those provided for high-occupancy vehicles, and even bicycle and walking paths will moderate growing congestion. However, road patrons and transportation agencies must forget the concept that congestion can be eliminated, because recent experience has shown adding capacity slows, but not eliminate, the growth in delays.

That's because in the same period, the number of drivers, vehicles and VMT outstripped the added capacity. For example, since 1985, using a county-wide sales tax, the Phoenix metro area (Maricopa County, Ariz.) has been able to triple the size of the freeway system, add HOV lanes, ramp metering and provide incident management (roving tow trucks).

Despite all that, the average annual congestion delay to drivers actually increased from 30 hours in 1988 to 35 hours in 1997. "If you look at how delay-per-driver numbers have grown nationally, staying close to even is progress," Maddox said.

Paradoxically, anti-road advocates state that a road that fills to capacity shortly after it's constructed is a failure. "People say that if you build a road and it fills up right away, it's not doing any good," Maddox said. "But think about a road is built that doesn't fill up," Maddox said. "That's called corruption."
 
 

'Bottleneck' Report Pinpoints
Nation's Congestion Hot Spots

Just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush -- and in conjunction with the Driving America National Conference on Mobility last month in Washington, D.C. -- the American Highway Users Alliance blitzed the nation's news media with a white paper identifying the nation's worst traffic bottlenecks, and their influence on drivers and the environment.

"Unclogging America's Arteries: Prescriptions for Healthier Highways" was prepared for AHUA by Cambridge Systematics, Inc., and catalogs highway chokepoints where drivers experience delays practially every day of the week. The report projects these bottlenecks' impacts on accidents, air quality and travel time over the next two decades.

"Traffic congestion has become a major problem on many of our highways, and it's occurring at predictably overcrowded spots," said AHUA president and CEO Bill Fay. "Freeing these bottlenecks is a critical starting point for curing the gridlock on our roadways."

According to the study, the nation's 18 top bottlenecks are located in nine metro areas: Albuquerque, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C. In addition to these 18 trouble spots, the study found that fixing nearly 170 traffic bottlenecks nationwide will, over the 20-year life of the improvements:

o Prevent nearly 290,000 crashes, including nearly 1,150 fatalities and 141,000 injuries

o Cut pollution at the bottlenecks by nearly half

o Slash emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas, by nearly 71 percent, and

o Reduce delays by an average of 19 minutes per trip, and nearly 40 minutes per day for commuters who must negotiate the bottleneck twice in one day.

The full report is available at no charge in portable document format (PDF) from AHUA's web site.
 
 

What is the American
Highway Users Alliance?

The American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) is the successor to the Highway Users Federation for Safety and Mobility (HUFSAM), and is a nonprofit advocacy organization promoting safe and uncongested highways and enhanced freedom of mobility. It was founded in 1932.

Goals of the organization include road and bridge investments that will save lives, clean the air, promote economic growth, improve America's quality of life, and protect its freedom of mobility.
 Some 220 member corporations, small businesses, national trade associations, and state and local nonprofit organizations that represent over 45 million highway users comprise AHUA.

They're located at 1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500, Washington DC, 20036, voice (202) 857-1200, fax (202) 857-1220, web site http://www.highways.org/. Bill Fay is president and CEO.
 

Portions of this article originally appeared in journals of the Associated Construction Publications.