I’ve been reluctant to write about traffic woes in metro Boston, since I never experience any problems myself.
I live on a small cot in the Banker & Tradesman newsroom, where I work seven days a week, 24-hours-a-day.
Yes, I’m part of the "working at home" trend that, frankly, doesn’t give a hoot how jammed the commonwealth’s highways are. More and more of us work from home; and more and more of us (despite the best efforts of the "anti-sprawl" police) move to the suburbs, three miles from a well-groomed office park, where we make money and prosper in a sterile, amoral, short-commute kind of way.
All of this is a long way of explaining – in a sophisticated, cerebral, public-policy kind of a way – why I want us all to stop fussing about the traffic.
"Traffic jams" have been with us for decades, but it’s only in the past 20 years or so that mass-transit freaks and union highway construction workers and assorted crybabies have started treating a traffic backup as one small step removed from the Black Plague.
Mentally stable people might look at the auto concentration in such places as Boston and Atlanta and San Francisco and proceed to break out the champagne, because the traffic glut is a sign of economic prosperity and the popularity of the regions. It is a symbolic reminder that we are like little ants – scurrying around in our own best interests, but in the end, adding to the region’s wealth and the prosperity of the many (even those who work from home).
The French economic philosopher Bastiat used to call it, "the miracle of Paris." Everyone would wake up each morning, spring out of bed, venture out in their own self-interested, profit-seeking kind of way – and then come home. The miracle? Everyone in Paris got fed.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
For lack of anything better to do, Governing magazine commissioned a study, released in July, of the nation’s "Worst Friday Afternoon Commutes."
Boston was only 13th-worst in the country, which I think is an economic development failure that should prompt the state to appoint a task force to identify reasons why Honolulu and Baton Rouge have a worse ride home at the end of the week than we do.
Looking at the list, the Friday afternoon nightmare is almost a perfect marker of economic vitality and success and the growth of the computer-dork/financial services economy. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Connecticut’s New York City suburbs, San Jose – they’re all on the list of "worst" commutes. Would you rather live in Cedar Rapids? You could probably commute on a horse.
Yes, yes, starving graduate students can compute a "cost" associated with sitting there in despair on Interstate 495, or the Mass Pike or Commonwealth Avenue, but that cost is something to be wrestled with by the employees and employers. As Governing pointed out, flexible hours are part of the order of the day, especially for the high-tech outfits.
And one suspects that the Friday crunch is particularly bad because many folks are on their way "out of town" for a weekend in the country, or by the shore – disrupting the "normal" traffic patterns, which are already bad enough. A crisis? No, it’s folks on their way to the Cape or the Berkshires. Godspeed, in a slow, sluggish, triumphant sort of way.
If you’re superstitious, and are unusually upset at Boston being the 13th-worst commute on Friday afternoons, you might prefer the general "worst gridlock" report, also out in July, from the GPS outfit TomTom. It found Boston to be the 19th-most-congested city in America. If the avalanche of such studies and reports seems murky on occasion, it might well be because, as the traffic engineers often suggest, gridlock and congestion is often due in large part to stupid drivers and road construction designed by civil engineers on April Fool’s Day – as opposed to sheer numbers of honking cars.
Yes, yes, I know, we should all ride bicycles or experience the delights of mass transit. In the meantime, stop complaining. It’s only a car ride.
