For D.C. commuters, does car equal convenience?
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Version 0 of 1. Dear Dr. Gridlock: It’s not so much “love of cars” that determines commuting choices as love of convenience. Love of convenience drives many choices, from apps to packaging. The convenience of getting into your car when you want to and driving to a parking space near your workplace is unbeatable. Computer-guided cars will eventually lead to half-width commuter lanes and cars. You don’t need an eight-foot-wide, four-passenger vehicle to have convenience. You can have that convenience with a car half as wide as your current one. And half-width cars mean twice as many lanes, three or four times as many parking spaces. — Peter Vergano, Gainesville The “love of cars” quote is from the newspaper headline on a column I wrote about our sluggish progress in creating car alternatives such as bus-only lanes. It’s difficult to pry a commuter’s fingers from the steering wheel and engage their interest in other options. In survey after survey, we see that solo driving remains the most common way for people to get around, in the D.C. area and nationwide. This past week, the Kogod School of Business at American University released a survey of 20- to 34-year-old members of the millennial generation in the D.C. region. It found that this younger generation, like its recent predecessors, is inclined to drive alone to work. [10 things to know about travel in 2016] Is it a love convenience that spans the generations? I think it depends on how you define “convenience.” What I’ve learned from travelers is that they rarely are driven by some sort of transportation ideology. Whatever their generation or geography, they tend to do what works best for them under the circumstances. A millennial who lives in Silver Spring and just got a job with a tech company in the I-270 corridor probably is going to drive to work, not because the millennial loves the convenience of driving that ghastly route but because the car alternatives seem so limited. Meanwhile, if you live on Capitol Hill and work in Foggy Bottom, you may put up with delays on Metro’s Orange, Blue and Silver lines for the sake of avoiding crosstown traffic and the expense of owning and operating a car. We sometimes see travel choices couched in political ideology. That happened last fall when some Virginia legislative candidates who oppose tolling Interstate 66 inside the Beltway tried to portray Arlington County as a bicyclist theme park bent on extorting admission fees from hard-working drivers from the outer suburbs. Arlingtonians drive solo at a lower rate than commuters in other suburbs, but it’s still just a bit below 60 percent. Similarly, millennials who drive aren’t traitors to their generation based on some notion about how they’re supposed to behave when they travel. Like their predecessors, they’re making what seem like the best available choices on a range of goals that involve housing, work, travel, family, recreation and entertainment. Sam Schwartz, the former New York City traffic engineer who popularized the term “gridlock,” is a baby boomer with a lot of hope for evolving travel habits of millennials. In his book, “Street Smart,” he doesn’t portray the rising generation as wiser or wired differently. But they are making their travel choices in a world that’s different from the one the baby boomers confronted. It’s no longer as simple as, “Do I drive or take transit or bike?” Car-sharing services, app-based operations such as Uber and Lyft, and bus services that base their routes on immediate demand are opening up new options. Meanwhile, online travel sites have gone beyond predicting travel times for cars or trains. Millennials, simply by virtue of their youth, will be around for an age in which the app asks only where they want to go, and it answers with a best route that might include a bus ride, a train ride and a shared car ride — all paid for once the user clicks the “accept” button. For those who felt like prisoners of their commutes, this will be liberating. “We became miserable behind the wheel of our cars,” Schwartz said. “The car commercials are just not realistic.” A new generation, tuned to the digital information age, will be looking for accessibility to travel rather than to a particular mode of travel. Looming over any such vision of the future is the impact of the driverless car. Vergano’s letter alludes to some of the ways the entire travel environment might adapt to the new technology. There are many uncertainties, but it’s unlikely the advent of the driverless car will overwhelm all these other changes and create a new golden age of personal autos and solo travel. “Don’t turn over the central city to autonomous vehicles,” Schwartz warned. “If we saturate our streets with them, we will have done nothing for mobility.” The evolution of urban transportation won’t just be about different equipment yielding the same result in congestion. Dr. Gridlock also appears Thursday in Local Living. Comments and questions are welcome and may be used in a column, along with the writer’s name and home community. Write Dr. Gridlock at The Washington Post, 1301 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or email drgridlock@washpost.com. |