If the title couldn’t be any more obvious. Highways and roads in metropolitan areas across the country are at or above capacity and the problem is only getting worse. Living in the Northeast, I do experience traffic, but it’s nothing compared to what other areas of the country see. The worst, according to this article on CNN, are Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, and Dallas. The only one of these that is surprising to me is Washington as it does have a pretty good public transit system, though the beltway can be pretty rough and a lot of the jobs in the area are not actually in the city. The others are large sprawling southern and western cities that don’t have the best public transportation systems. But this isn’t about those cities, this is about the larger problem at hand. The country’s roads are filled to capacity and we can’t simply keep increasing the number of lanes on the highway. In some cases, there’s no room to increase the size of the highways (such as in the densely populated Northeast). In other cases, it’s just a futile effort. The more you increase the size of the highway, the more people will use it.
There is one good fix that should be considered everywhere – better public transportation. In most of the large cities around the country, there are commuter rails, subways, buses, streetcars, etc. The problems many of these systems face is that they’re overcrowded or they’re not used enough (because of the stigma that it’s the poor man’s transportation and people like their cars) or they’re not efficient or they don’t provide a good service. In the case of Providence, RIPTA provides great service to parts of the city and not so great service to others. All buses stop at around midnight, yet bars are open until 2 (this problem also plagues Boston). People are forced to either take cabs or drive (sometimes drunk). The biggest problem is the headways. The buses come every half hour or every 20 min if you happen to live on one of the better lines. That’s not good enough in a city as densely populated as Providence. Some of the lines (like the one that goes by my house) don’t run on Sundays. It just doesn’t make sense. Providence could also benefit from better commuter rail service. Currently, we only have commuter rail to/from Boston. It’s going to be extended to Warwick by the airport and then possibly farther to Wickford. Any densely populated metropolitan area should have commuter rail service from the other nearby metro areas. They should also have public transit within the city that a person would have to wait no more than 10-15 min at most for a bus or train (subway or streetcar).
The problem that most of these transit authorities have is a lack of funding. Our country is severely auto-centric. Our federal government should be putting more money to support the public transportation systems around the country and increase the usage and coverage of them. The state governments should be doing the same. The benefits of doing so would not only decrease the amount of time people spend and gas people use sitting in traffic, but it’d also provide serious environmental benefits as well. The best answer to the traffic problems is public transportation. I urge anyone who cares (and if you don’t care, you should) to support public transportation and contact your senators and representatives, both in Washington and in your state legislature, and urge them to support it as well.
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