This is what kills me about the suburbanites. They make the tradeoff to live far away and have long commutes in exchange for having a larger yard and fewer neighbors. Fine. But then having moved far away and facing longer commutes they act like the urban areas should basically be turned into highways for their benefit. Screw that. Sit in your car for 90 minutes each way, listen to your podcast, spew pollution and enjoy every minute of it. That’s what you chose.
That's the nub of my own parochial issue. There is a point of diminishing returns on the automobile commute. That's not a fixed number; it depends on local topography, natural barriers like rivers, mountains or a coastline, and whether or not an older city has a compact downtown or is an automobile age place built for sprawl from the beginning. Whatever that point is, however, once a city grows beyond it, commutes will only get worse. Roadbuilders can't possibly keep up. We need to be talking about mitigation and adaptation, not "solutions."
The key adaptation will be for people to live closer to their jobs. This gets quite complicated in practice, as it means stepping away from the maximal spatial segregation enabled by the automobile in favor of more mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods with high densities oriented around transit lines. Newly arising cities, and newly emerging edge cities in existing metro areas, have a chance to build smart from the ground up. There will be a lot of rezoning and rebuilding to bring this about in already-urbanized places. But either way, living closer to one's work will start weighing ever-heavier in the calculus.
Voucher the schools to allow middle income folks to escape failing urban school systems without having to move, and residential realignment would be supercharged. (And the realighment, in turn, would eventually improve the urban schools, which are a lagging, not a leading, indicator of neighborhood quality.)
My first rule, therefore, is DO NO HARM to existing, close-in neighborhoods. These are inhabited by people who have already made the sensible decision to live close to their work. They shouldn't be compromised for the benefit of people who live 30 miles out and want a speedway to downtown. No more turning neighborhood streets into high speed, limited access expressways. No more new lanes that destroy neighborhood shopping districts by eliminating all the on-street parking. No sacrificing of public parks so that suburban cowboys can cut three minutes off their two hour commute. No more expressways through residential areas that can't be easily crossed every couple of blocks; people should be able to get around their own neighborhoods by foot or bike, and kids should be able to walk to school.
Want a better solution for something like the I-66 and I-270 corridors into DC? Take away a traffic lane and run a commuter rail line along the route. DC used to be ringed by trolley line suburbs where the drill was to walk to your neighborhood stop and catch the train. Metrorail provides this service in its various locations, but it is extremely expensive to build underground lines. We would be better served to start withdrawing traffic lanes and repurposing the reclaimed rights of way for rail.
Just in my corner of the city, we have extraordinary turnaround neighborhoods along H Street N.E., around and just north of Union Station, along M Street S.E., and along the SW Waterfront. Basically, the whole perimeter around historic Capitol Hill is getting posh. The whole riverfront on the east side -- both the Anacostia and the Potomac -- is going to be golden. For a lot of the people in these new neighborhoods, a car is simply more trouble than it is worth.
This isn't going to work for everyone. But if we want to address congestion on the highways, the first priority should be to get as many people off the highways to begin with. NOT more traffic lanes and commuterization of what used to be attractive, liveable neighborhood streets. Again: DO NO HARM.