November 20, 2009

Is a hair of the dog the way to cure a drunk? Of course not, and more asphalt is no remedy for the hangover from a 50 year binge of auto-dependent sprawl development.

But more asphalt and more traffic is what we get from Montgomery County's failed Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance. The measure of good transportation, under this law, is how many cars can move through street corners. The more traffic that can get through, the more the corner has "improved." A cloverleaf overpass that blights surrounding neighborhoods is the biggest "improvement" of all.

Day by day, this so-called "growth policy" makes developers add lanes to roads near new buildings. This is medicine that treats only the symptom and aggravates the underlying illness of traffic congestion. Walking to train stations and bus stops becomes difficult and dangerous, so more people drive. Economic incentives push new development into outlying areas where commutes are long and transit is hard to reach. Cars move faster through the newly widened streets, and then create more jam-ups a few blocks down the road.

The growth policy doesn't work because it is based on a false diagnosis of the traffic plague. It rests on the premise that a few congested intersections — or, at worst, a few busy "policy areas" — are surrounded by underused roads where rush-hour drivers see open roads. But of course our traffic congestion is not an isolated problem; it is a regional disease. Its cause is too much driving, not a localized lack of road capacity. A law that forces people to drive by pushing new buildings far away from transit stations and making streets hard to cross just creates more traffic and more backups.

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