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Automobile commutes are fine in smaller cities. As cities increase in size, however, car-centric planning reaches the point of diminishing returns. The DC area is far past that point. It is the fourth largest Combined Metropolitan Statistic Area in the U.S., after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. (For transportation planning, the combined statistical area is the proper frame of reference; we have people commuting into DC from Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Winchester and Easton, MD on the Eastern Shore.) The idea that we can solve our transportation woes by building more arterial roads and cramming even more cars into the core is nonsensical.

There are things that could be done to alleviate traffic. We need better lateral movement around the outer ring suburbs. We need more places for local traffic to cross the interstates, which now act like rivers. But basically, people need to live closer to their jobs and get used to taking the train. That's easier said than done. Since the 1950's, we've been planning and building suburbs for automobile commutes, and they are too dispersed, at this stage, for efficient rail service. This leads short-sighted people to demand hair of the dog solutions: more asphalt to prolong the death agonies of an outdated system that is collapsing under its own weight.

Here's the rub. The better long term solution, again, is for people to live closer to their jobs. That means a planning emphasis on restoring, maintaining and enhancing the livability of closer-in neighborhoods. In the District itself, gentrification is on steroids, but less than ten percent of the metro area's people live in the District proper. The inner-ring suburbs are also densifying and gentrifying, with many local variations on the pattern. What we should avoid is major new road construction that destroys or degrades reviving, close-in neighborhoods. We need to start seeing these older areas as the solution, not a traffic impediment to be paved over for the convenience of people with long distance commutes. Neighborhoods should be managed for the benefit of the people who live there, not suburban cowboys who are desperate to shave five minutes off their three hour commutes.

For too many decades, the roadbuilders have smashed through residential neighborhoods, taking on-street parking, sidewalks and tree plats to create additional traffic lanes. The roadbuilders have poisoned too many neighborhoods by turning civilized streetscapes into commuter racetracks. The roadbuilders have gotten away with too many high speed highways with too few crossings, which chop local communities into pieces and destroy neighborhood shopping districts. Etc., etc.

The commuters can drive to a parking garage in the suburbs and ride a train, as opposed to driving into the central city and looking for parking there. That's not hard to understand. Over time, it will change the way the outer ring suburbs are developed. And that's fine. Almost ten million people live here. We are way past the point at which DC can function like the sleepy little southern provincial city that it once was. People in the District laugh at suburbanites with their brutal commutes. And as gentrification prices the welfare careerists and gangbangers out of DC, the problem demographics will migrate to the suburbs as well. The suburbs don't want to plan for this, but that's not my problem. The days of DC being used as the regional dumping ground are over.