Traffic congestion keeps getting worse in the largest U.S. metro areas. In her latest column on Substack, Smart Growth America President and CEO Beth Osborne asks whether congestion is the real goal of our transportation policy and outlines a playbook for maximizing it that looks a lot like current practices. She then lists congestion’s “benefits,” showing how traffic fuels the industries that profit from making it worse. Read the column below and then subscribe to Beth’s Substack.
Every single one of the 100 most populous metro areas has experienced increasing congestion, decade after decade—even when they are losing population and adding highway capacity (see: Congestion Con). This is no easy feat.
Many mistakes have been made both in the public and private sectors, across different levels of government and different agencies, and through many successive leaders. In fact, much of what we do to address congestion seems to just make it worse. So I decided to treat this as a thought exercise:
What if we brought everyone together in order to maximize congestion? In other words, if we were trying to create the most congestion with the fewest number of people, what would we do and how would it be different from what we are doing now?
A Congestion-Maximization Playbook
A field manual to achieving the greatest amount of congestion possible for your region
Traffic congestion is growing across the country and has been for approaching a century. This has required a lot of people doing their part to optimize their community for congestion. While most cities are making great strides, none have reached their full congestion potential. There is more work that we can do.
What follows is a congestion checklist. It will be a long list, but there are a few themes in terms of what has been done and must continue. We must:
- Limit coordination between land use and transportation because it tends to lead to more and longer trips for people to accomplish their daily needs —a fundamental element of congestion;
- Discourage people from getting out of their car by making the travel environment hostile and dangerous; and
- Avoid checking the predictions or assumptions that have gotten us here to prevent any learning, innovation, or change.
As Daniel Burnham famously said, “Make no little plans.”
The “benefits” of congestion
Congestion actually supports multiple priorities, a fact that is too often overlooked. For example, the safety benefits of congestion are underappreciated, with pro-traffic strategies left off lists such as the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) proven safety countermeasures. Increased congestion lowers vehicle speeds, reducing the risk of crashes, especially those that lead to fatalities and serious injuries. Unfortunately, this safety benefit might create a rebound effect, making more people comfortable walking or biking and undermining the goal of maximizing congestion. However, if regions focus on the other strategies in this playbook, this problem will be overcome by other efforts to discourage all walking and biking. Eventually, this approach will bring crashes with non-drivers to zero because there will be no non-drivers.
Additionally, there are quality of life benefits from congestion that are often overlooked. For example, with the increased travel time from congested roads, families can spend dedicated time with one another in the car, having uninterrupted conversations as they wait for traffic to ease forward. Further, driving in congested conditions provides people with the freedom and time to think and reflect, or use their time in other productive ways, like taking business calls or listening to music, audiobooks, and podcasts.
Further, congestion is often treated purely as an economic drag, but every hour a commuter spends idling in traffic means more fuel purchased, refined, and delivered through a supply chain that employs millions of Americans, from refinery workers to pipeline technicians to the gas station attendants ringing up the sale. Higher fuel consumption driven by stop-and-go traffic translates directly into revenue for energy companies, tax receipts for state and federal governments through fuel taxes, and sustained demand for the extraction and refining sectors that anchor entire regional economies.
Congestion also reshapes consumer preferences in ways that ripple through manufacturing. Drivers who have to drive more and farther gravitate toward larger, more powerful vehicles that offer more comfort and space, as well as a greater sense of safety and control in unpredictable travel conditions. This shift supports higher-margin vehicle segments for domestic automakers, sustaining assembly line jobs, parts suppliers, and dealership networks that depend on selling larger and upgraded models rather than economy cars.
Finally, congestion is one of the clearest and most politically durable justifications for infrastructure investment, building public and legislative will to fund new highways, interchange redesigns, and new lane construction—projects that employ construction crews, engineers, surveyors, and material suppliers for years. In this sense, congestion functions as a demand signal that keeps an entire transportation construction and engineering ecosystem employed.
So how do we do this, you ask. Where is my checklist? Stay tuned over the next few weeks for checklists covering several sectors: active transportation, housing, roads and streets, vehicles, transit, and zoning. In the meantime, feel free to share your ideas for inclusion.
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