Month: November 2015

You Can’t Build Your Way Out of Traffic Congestion

Hank Garfield

Nbat

Imagine that:
An endangered bat
Got in the way of a highway that
Shouldn’t ever be built.

It’s a lot easier to live with the consequences of bad poetry than of bad traffic planning. When I read that a proposed extension of Interstate 395 could be held up, or perhaps derailed completely, to protect the habitat of the northern long-eared bat, my sympathies naturally lay with the furry little night fliers. It could be a case of the blind leading the shortsighted.

The proposal in question is a bypass that would steer truck traffic away from residential streets in the Bangor, Maine area, by linking the Interstate Highway System to Route 9, a two-lane highway between Bangor and Calais that leads to the Canadian Maritimes. It might seem like a good thing to get the trucks out of town, but like most road expansion proposals, this one rests on a foundation of shaky assumptions.

In 2008, for the first time since the 1950s, Americans drove fewer miles than they had the previous year. Part of this was due to a spike in gas prices, but part of it was also due to a growing consciousness that we cannot continue to saturate the world with automobiles and automobile infrastructure. People are looking for alternatives.

We see evidence of this growing movement in the push for pedestrian-friendly downtowns, bicycle lanes, and improved public transportation. There is renewed interest in train travel. Long-distance trucking companies are having difficulty finding young drivers.

Yet public policy continues to promote more road building, which in turn encourages more driving, which exacerbates already dire environmental and economic problems.

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For decades traffic experts have observed the capacity of more highways to simply breed more traffic. “If you build it, they will come,” is the bleak truth confirmed by science and history. “Generated traffic” is the professional phrase used to describe traffic generated by increased roads.

In other words, you can’t build your way out of traffic congestion, because as soon as you build a new road, new drivers will show up to quickly fill it to capacity. We’ve seen this happen time and again. Interstate 495 around Boston has worse traffic than the city it was built to steer traffic away from. Building new roads encourages people to drive instead of seeking alternatives. It’s an unimaginative approach that no longer works, and in fact creates its own problems, from suburban sprawl to air pollution to loss of animal habitat to reduced quality of human life.

Instead of paving the way for more cars and trucks, we need to focus on creative, forward-looking solutions that reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and thus reduce the need for new road construction. Were challenged to maintain the roads and bridges we already have. Why add to a problem of our own making?

For similar reasons, the long-discussed east-west highway across Maine is a bad idea whose time has passed. The ports of Atlantic Canada are already linked to the American heartland by rail, over much the same route. Moving freight over long distances is much cheaper by train. “Intermodal” transportation, in which truck trailers can be directly loaded onto and off of rail cars, saving trucks for shorter, local trips, is the wave of the future. The American Association of Railroads has estimated that if just 10% of current truck volume were shifted to intermodal, more than a billion gallons of fuel would be conserved each year.

I remember when a Canadian passenger train plied that route, with stops in Brownville Junction and Greenville in the wee hours of the night. In the morning you’d be in Montreal. Franklin Roosevelt came up to Eastport on the train on his way to Campobello. Cars and trucks haven’t ruled for very long. We should not plan future transportation projects on the assumption that they will rule forever.

More importantly, Maine must not yoke its future to wasteful and costly modes of transportation when better alternatives are just over the horizon. We need to stop building new roads and fix the existing ones. We need to stop yanking up railroad tracks to create recreational trails. We need to continue the movement away from a car for every adult American.

Every road not built encourages us in a better direction. So I say bravo to the bats, for hanging in there.

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Football May Sell More Cars, but Baseball Delivers the Goods

Hank Garfield

NewYork

Salvador Perez, the indestructible Kansas City Royals catcher, was named most valuable player of the recent World Series, and was rewarded with a new Chevy Camaro. I believe the MVP of the Super Bowl gets a car, too. The car remains a powerful symbol in the American psyche.

But putting the subject of cars aside for the moment – were the Royals not magnificent? A team without sluggers or superstars, they singled and sacrificed their opponents to death. They stole bases. They took advantage of every error. They were relentless. Though they dispatched the New York Mets in five games, each victory was filled with drama.

The most dramatic moment, and the most controversial, was when Mets manager Terry Collins let his headstrong pitcher, Matt Harvey, change his mind about taking him out after eight shutout innings. The rest is history. Walk, double, relief pitcher, weak ground ball, error – two runs, tie game. The Royals went on to win, and clinch the Series, in extra innings.

My girlfriend thinks it’s a morality play on hubris. Harvey was striking out a lot of Royals, and doing gorilla yells as he came off the mound each inning. The crowd was eating it up. Collins had already decided that his closer, Jeurys Familia, would pitch the ninth. Harvey talked him out of it. By the time Familia got into the game, two batters later, the Royals had scored and put the tying run on second with nobody out. Harvey, my girlfriend says, should have let manager and reliever do their jobs, instead of taking it all upon himself.

No pitcher ever wants to come out of a game. And good pitchers are praised and valued for that tenacity. Jack Morris won game seven of the 1991 World Series for the Minnesota Twins with a 10-inning shutout. He argued with his manager to stay in that game. People forget that Morris got lucky when a base runner fell down on what would otherwise have been a run-scoring double in the eighth or ninth inning. Had that run scored, the Twins would have lost, 1-0, to the Atlanta Braves.

And then that manager would have been criticized, just as Collins is, for leaving his pitcher in too long. There’s no guaranteed outcome. That’s the beauty of baseball.

In the final game of the 1995 World Series, Tom Glavine was pitching a one-hit shutout, and the Braves were up 1-0 on the Cleveland Indians going into the ninth. On TV, the announcers debated whether manager Bobby Cox should bring in closer Mark Wohlers to get the last three outs. Glavine was dealing. But that’s why you have a relief specialist, one broadcaster said. That’s what you pay him for: to nail down close games.

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I’m a fan of complete games. But it’s a call the manager is paid to make. Johnny Cueto went the distance in the second game of this World Series, only because the Royals had built a safe 7-1 lead. Orel Hershiser nailed down the 1988 Series for the Dodgers with two complete games, and Morris, pitching for the Tigers, went the distance twice against the Padres in 1984.

I fell asleep before the end of Cueto’s masterpiece. But I remember the Morris, Glavine and Hershiser games well, because I watched them all from the West Coast, where the games start, and mostly end, at reasonable hours.

Television is doing its best to kill baseball. Is it too much to ask to watch a World Series game during the day, at least on the weekend? I know that football sells more cars (see how I worked back around to that?), but come on. Football’s popularity is no excuse to bury postseason baseball. Playing the World Series entirely at night has already alienated a generation of kids. It’s now beginning to discourage even longtime fans like me.

The Royals, though, were worth lost sleep. They won with small ball, and late inning rallies. Salvador Perez, who popped up to end last year’s World Series, was the hero of this one. His team staged two hugely entertaining postseason runs, culminating in a championship.

It’s just a shame so much of it happened while much of America slept.

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