Oh my god, you think I'm going to oppose someone proposing to build a coherent light rail system that I could actually use? With the existing BART/light rail infrastructure that Houston has, I literally cannot get to my job any other way than by driving there in a car. I have looked at the schedules myself and the dots literally do not connect for my location and schedule.
I would love for that to change, but it's not going to. The political landscape here simply will not allow it. So, yes, I am going to wrap myself in MUH HIGHWAYS FOR MUH CAR because there are no other options available to me. It's a choice between sitting in traffic for X amount of time on a congested highway and sitting in traffic for <X amount of time on a less congested, more built-up highway.
Okay, here's another way of thinking about it, putting aside the selective defeatism I already pointed out: MUH HIGHWAYS FOR MUH CAR is, undoubtedly, self-defeating even on its own terms; and likewise, support for expansion and better funding for transit is in your self-interest even if said transit is not currently a realistic option for you yourself to take.
Why? It's the
induced demand, stupid! Seriously, this is a well-documented phenomenon- you widen the roads to deal with "congestion", and it just makes the congestion worse as people move farther and farther out; take extra trips during rush hour; etc. Conversely, when urban roads go out of service– as in the Los Angeles shutdown a year or two ago that got everyone in a tizzy, or when San Fran tore down the Central Freeway and replaced it with a landscaped, at-grade boulevard– the prophecies of doom and gloom never come to pass!
It's not a "choice between sitting in traffic for X amount of time on a congested highway and sitting in traffic for <X amount of time on a less congested, more built-up highway" because that's not how more built-up highways work. You don't get that option. I realize that that's how you would intuitively expect them to, but it's pretty much just a settled fact at this point that your preferred approach is self-defeating.
Now, with that in mind, how
do you reduce congestion? Obviously one of the big helps here is going to be to take that pot of money currently earmarked for "congestion-reducing" road projects, and give it to that which is inherently space-saving in comparison to private cars– public transit. Obviously I wouldn't expect that the Houston bus system would ever be as large a share of the city's fabric as the MTA, the geography of the place forbids it... but if there were more routes, running more frequently, then it would eventually become a viable option for some folks, and take cars off the road. (And, eventually, spur infill rather than sprawl development, creating a virtuous cycle by which the geometry of the city becomes more efficient and less dependent on long-distance traffic jams.) Seriously, many of those new roads would not pass muster if DOTs properly accounted for induced demand; and while one might try to argue that they create wealth by opening up land for development, the vast majority of that sprawl has merely served to redistribute wealth away from the core, rather than actually
create anything new.
Surely you can see how this would benefit your commute, and the commutes of others, even if you're not one of those folks who makes the switch. (Surely you can also see Nix's point about being the change you want to see in the world and, to the extent that it's within your means, living close to work. It's the old saw– you're not stuck in traffic, you
are traffic.)
The other big thing, and the author of the quoted article seems more bullish on it as a congestion-reducing proposal than public transit, TBH, is congestion pricing. Now that's a proposal I wouldn't really advocate for in Houston right now, despite it being the straightforwardly economist-approved way of doing things (esp. one which charges mainly on peak commuting hours, so as to incentivize discretionary trips towards non-peak hours where the roads are clear). I would support it in NYC, but we have a much graver need and our strong public transit system means that equity arguments are basically just concern trolling rather than a real legitimate point, as they would be in your city.
But even if I'm not going to advocate road-pricing schemes for Houston at this exact moment*, the fact still remains that private automobile travel is ludicrously over-subsidized in many ways and we need to find ways of starting to roll those subsidies back, and redirect them to less wasteful ends. Not all at once– people will need time to adapt– but our environment, the fiscal health of our cities and states, our general sense of well-being, our economy all hang in the balance.
*I will,
absolutely, advocate raising the gas tax and indexing it to inflation, though–
a recent study in Germany pegged the optimal gas tax at $4.36/gallon. Obviously we can't exactly get there from here, but the gap is so yawning that we have a moral duty to take a baby step in the right direction, to try and narrow it a
little at least.
