The only thing that will work is to move federal agencies out of Washington. There is no room to widen the Beltway R.R. 270 without tearing down neighborhoods. I changed jobs to cut my one way commute from 2 hours to 15 minutes.
True. The best solution is for people to live closer to their jobs. From a planning perspective, this puts a premium on two things: preserving and enhancing the older, closer-in suburbs; and building integrated, mixed use suburban edge cities with housing, retail and recreation in close proximity to job centers. The smarter suburbs are figuring this out. It's crazy for people to be clogging the beltway commuting from College Park to Rockville, or vice versa. Both are fine places to live, if you work there.
I live on Capitol Hill, which is a transportation outlier because we are so centrally located. Fewer than half drive to work; many are able to walk, the biking presence is strong, and we are well served by busses and metro. That's the model towards which the suburban towns and edge cities should be building. If you live in Urbana, work in Urbana or Frederick; don't try to schlep into DC and expect the State of Maryland to drive arterial roads through other people's closer-in neighborhoods to shave a few minutes off your commute. Go around the beltway and pick your example. The car-centric model of the 60's and 70's was built around the idea of long distance automobile commutes. This ends up producing Tysons, to take perhaps our most notorious example.
Tysons has a daytime population over 100,000, and 97 percent of them drive in. This is laughably bad planning, given that Tysons, historically, was just a road junction between McLean and Vienna that became strategic real estate when the beltway was planned. Tysons sits smack in the middle of endless miles of upscale, Northern Virginia bedroom communities, but it takes heroic efforts to get there without hopping into your car and clogging the beltway, Route 7 or Chain Bridge Road. Fairfax County is now on a 50 year plan to remediate this mess, beginning with the new Silver Line Metro stops, but Tyson's is so moated by arterial roads that reclamation will be difficult. This is a model of what newly developing suburbs need to avoid.