Traffic congestion is an issue faced all across the globe. Even here in Montgomery County, our ever-expanding population, namely driving population, leaves us with further increasing drive times and many climate issues from increased numbers on the road.
Many suggest “widen the roads” or “remove bus lanes” in areas with severe traffic, but those proposals are not the solution. They tend to cause things to get worse as expanded roads will fix the issue temporarily until people begin adjusting their commute to use the more open, new road to work or school.
The same issue comes up with removing the bus lanes. Any relief gets immediately counteracted by a ramped-up interest in the free road. Removing bus lanes also brings up the issue of inadequate public transportation, which is an issue that has plagued our area — as well as the United States as a whole — for a long time. The United States was once heralded as the hub of high tech transportation and travel infrastructure — such as the roads and railways. In a fall from grace of sorts, much of the infrastructure suffered from underfunding and poor maintenance work. This trend is found all across the nation.
The solution to the traffic issues facing us today does not come with the changes mentioned above but rather with capital investment in our already existing infrastructure. It is through a combination of changes going from the lowest level and up that we will be able to have optimized traffic. Instead, the easiest changes that we can make as a county are to optimize traffic light times to the traffic pattern that occurs in their vicinity. By having more congested areas have faster timings, a lot of that traffic congestion may get alleviated. More progress can come as a result of constant adjustments based on the time of day, year, and with consideration of events and activities occurring in the area that might cause an increase in traffic demand that may need a faster response and timings than currently available.
More long term changes that we can make include improving our public transportation infrastructure and signage. The issues surrounding public buses mainly stem from having buses that have too many stops on their line. This requires them to make multiple stops that, over time, contribute to increased traffic. One solution to this issue may be to distribute stops across more bus lanes as to not have bus lanes that have an incessant amount of stops on their commute.
Adopting and improving cycling lanes would also further decrease traffic jams. Having separate lanes for bikes has been proposed and experimented on all across the high-density municipalities and streets of the world — Copanhagen, Amsterdam, and Oslo for instance — and has exhibited great promise as being a good investment. The traffic flow of cyclers and drivers on the road is entirely different: separating them greatly improves the overall traffic flow on the roads.
When it comes to the aforementioned point of signage, their importance comes as acting deterrents to drivers entering high traffic roads. Having more signs that indicate bad road conditions in the way of long wait times long before they enter those roads would be incredibly helpful in dissuading more drivers from entering those roads. While this only works if there are multiple routers that drivers can take to get to their location, this would work well for the areas that can make this change.
Long-term solutions — somewhat unlikely to be implemented in Montgomery County — include toll roads (such as the Inter-County Connector) and increasing available forms of public transport and their quantity. These changes are unlikely: they bring massive changes in the local infrastructure with them. While toll roads will bring in more money for the county, they are unlikely to be welcomed warmly by the county’s residents. Additionally, implementing them in places that won’t end up fixing the congestion issues too well are hard to scope out. The addition of another form of public transport brings problems too as this would be taking even more road space from drivers that will divert the traffic issues elsewhere.
Both proposals, however, have positives that merit mentioning. Road tolls have had a long and positive record as functioning as a road deterrent. It forces drivers to either pay the toll fee or take a different road to avoid the said toll. Given the options, many tend to take an alternative road. This will help with traffic as drivers now have a deterrent from taking the usually congested roadways and to branch out in taking other roads to get to their destinations. Adding more reliable and readily available public transportation would also help because it would decrease the number of people using rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft, decreasing traffic even more.
There is no “one size fits all” solution to traffic. Every locality will have different needs and will have different solutions that cater to them better than others. Adding tolls to Fenton Street in Silver Spring, for example, would not be a good idea while that specific solution might work great elsewhere, such as along the Capital Beltway. We need to work our way up through the solutions: to make the most efficient use of our funds to combat our traffic issues.
Article by Yeabsira Moges of Wheaton High School
Graphic by Charles Wang of Walter Johnson High School