(The following editorial by Rob Zaleski was posted on the Capital Times website on May 17.)
MADISON, Wisc. — If you’re heading to Colorado Springs or Virginia Beach or even Omaha, Neb., this summer – I assume some people go to Omaha – you might consider leaving your vehicle in the garage and booking a flight instead.
Or taking Amtrak.
Why? Because all three of those medium-size cities have joined the long list of U.S. metropolitan areas where rush hour gridlock is a daily ordeal, according to a new report by the Texas Transportation Institute. Or, in technical terms, where the average motorist is delayed at least 20 HOURS a year by rush hour traffic.
(Among the leading traffic hells, by the way, is Chicago, which last week – in an attempt to reduce the number of accidents on its freeways – passed a law banning drivers from using hand-held cell phones.)
Not that this is particularly surprising. Transportation experts have been warning for years that as the U.S. population continues to mushroom, we’re going to see more and more medium-size cities added to that list.
More worrisome yet, a lot of those cities are going to shell out billions of dollars building giant beltways and expanding other roads in a desperate attempt to alleviate the congestion – even though studies have shown that will merely create more congestion, notes Scott McDonell, a Dane County Board supervisor and co-chair of Transport 2020, which has been meeting since 1999 to devise a regional transportation plan.
In light of all this, one can’t help but wonder how long Madison has before it becomes the second Wisconsin city (after Milwaukee) on that list.
McDonell agrees, but emphasizes Madison isn’t at a crisis point yet – although he is worried about the dramatic increase in rush hour congestion downtown.
“But we can’t keep studying this forever, that’s for sure. It’s not like Monona Terrace, where you have all the time in the world,” he says, adding that we need to have some kind of rail system up and running within a decade or we’ll be in serious trouble.
One reason we need to act, he says, is because, instead of continuing to grow linearly – an absolute necessity if a transit system is to work – Madison’s population is starting to creep around the lake and sprawl out in all different directions.
“We also need Middleton and Sun Prairie to keep developing tight, and then you’ll have a nice straight line that you can keep adding (rail) capacity to,” he says. “But if our growth just kind of goes here and there, we’ll lose that opportunity.”
McDonell happens to agree with Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk that, were federal transit dollars suddenly to become available, we should first invest in a starter commuter rail system linking Middleton, downtown Madison and the near east side. As opposed to Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, who favors trolleys or streetcars.
“I’d love to put a parking ramp in Middleton and give every UW employee free or discounted parking in that ramp” and have them take a commuter train to downtown Madison, McDonell muses.
That’s not to say he’s anti-trolley, says McDonell, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and whose father was head of the National Capital Planning Commission.
“I think of commuter rail as a hammer and trolleys as a wrench,” he says, meaning that if a transit system were designed right, the two would complement one another.
The sad reality, however, is that there’s very little federal transit money available right now, McDonell says. “So having an argument about this isn’t as painful as it could be if we had John Kerry in office vs. George Bush.”
Indeed, McDonell – like most transportation experts across the country -is astonished that, with congestion worsening by the day, the Bush administration is trying to kill Amtrak.
“They claim they’re not really trying to kill it, they’re just turning it over to the states,” he says. “But it’s just a classic way of killing it in the dark. Because they know the states can’t afford to fund it.”
Amazingly, there’s a fair number of people out there who agree with the president – people even here in Madison who argue that passenger rail is a waste of taxpayer dollars because nobody uses it.
But, McDonell notes, “you have those people in every city before they build light rail or other transit. And then as soon as you put it in – Portland is a good example – the same people start complaining that the system isn’t being expanded fast enough.
“I mean, once it’s there, nobody doubts its value.”
Now, the only question is, how does Madison get there?