Do Highways Cause Traffic Congestion?

A good system uses signals that are timed together so that the flow of traffic remains as constant as possible. Auto-restricted zones are areas where cars aren’t allowed at all, usually to facilitate pedestrian traffic or preserve a historic district in a city or town. Turn prohibitions mean you can’t turn at specific intersections or points on a road, which channels traffic into alternate routes. Another way to control traffic dispersal within the city is to institute turn prohibitions and auto-restricted zones.

That’s a pretty simple explanation — too many cars in ­one place causes traffic. Unfortunately, the underlying reasons for too many cars in one place at one time are more complicated. City planners, civil engineers, environmental advocacy groups, homeowner associations, politicians and the general population can have a significant impact on how we address traffic congestion. University departments and civil engineers dedicate hundreds of hours and require millions of dollars in funding to understand how traffic congestion forms and what can be done about it.

You can’t always predict where these disturbances will occur, but they still heavily impact traffic flow. In the next section, we’ll learn about cities and highway traffic. Bad weather might cause some drivers to maintain a slower driving speed out of concern for safety. A study by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) in 1999 found that over 31 percent of the highways in the U.S. Road work might shut down one or more lanes, requiring drivers to shift over into open but crowded lanes. It’s easy to imagine construction, an accident, or a cop giving a traffic ticket causing congestion — drivers slow down either to change lanes or engage in a bit of rubbernecking as they try to see what happened.

Some of these cities are looking into new methods of land use, creating high-density shopping and residential areas that are bike- and pedestrian-friendly. As bad as traffic is in the United States, it’s much worse elsewhere in the world. It will take vigilance and a willingness to make adjustments for these communities to have a real impact on traffic congestion in the future. Reducing traffic congestion requires tough and sometimes unpopular decisions from the government level all the way down to the individual driver. As the problem increases, you’ll likely see government officials look more carefully at their choices. Ideally, these communities will encourage people to travel without getting behind the wheel. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to help alleviate problems in the short-term.

These sort of adjustments are expensive, time consuming and controversial. Other studies say that in many circumstances, widening the road can greatly reduce congestion. The debate raging between people who believe widening roads causes more congestion and those who say it helps motorists get to where they’re going faster is more than a decade old. Critics of highway expansion products cite a theory called latent demand, which says that as a highway expands to allow the same number of drivers through faster, other drivers — who previously avoided the highway because it was such a hassle — will choose to join other highway drivers. In the next section, we’ll look at congestion on city streets. Several studies suggest that increasing the width of a road only increases the volume of cars without addressing congestion.

Many people are reluctant to give up the freedom they have when driving their own car. If your city has a good public transportation system, you can always use it to reduce your impact on congestion. In the next section, find out what cities have the worst traffic. But just like carpooling, using public transportation means giving up some of your freedom and flexibility. Even though car manufacturers produce cars today that emit much lower levels of pollution than older models, air pollution from traffic is still increasing. Carpooling means aligning your schedule with other people and scheduling any errands or side trips after you get back home.

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