Five Myths About Traffic

This Memorial Day weekend, nearly one-third of Americans will hit the roads. Congestion in major cities will increase 200 percent, and life satisfaction levels will plummet 50 percent. Actually, I just made all of those statistics up. Then again, the numbers you hear breathlessly brandished on drive-time radio in the run-up to the holiday are equally meaningless, based on randomly sampled surveys and historical forecasts. No one knows exactly how many people will travel this weekend, nor how bad the traffic will be. We can just assume: many, and worse than usual. As Americans sit congealed on a brake-light-bathed stretch of tarmac, there will be ample time to consider five myths about this problem of our own making.

1. More roads = less traffic.

This is the granddaddy of all traffic myths, one still held dear by the average driver and certain precincts of state highway offices. More funding for more roads is on the way in Texas, where the governor declared that residents are “tired of being stuck in traffic.” On Memorial Day, it will assume the stature of an intuitive truth: If they just built more roads, we’d be home by now.

Read the rest of the story at the Washington Post.