One of the Nation’s 20 Worst Commutes is in Hampton Roads
HR Partnership | February 21, 2010
Bumper-to-bumper traffic is America’s collective nightmare, and like the movie Groundhog Day it repeats on a daily basis.
Congestion consumes billions of gallons of fuel, wastes hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity and causes billions of stress headaches. Yet over 100 million automobile commuters each day feel like they have little option. “We put so much of our national wealth and our identity into the whole motoring thing,” says James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere, “that we can’t imagine doing something different.”
Anthony Downs, author of Stuck in Traffic has identified four reasons for America’s congestion problem, also applicable to most European and Asian economies:
- first, most of us work during the same hours of the day;
- second, the country’s economic success has allowed households to buy multiple cars;
- third, there are more people now than when most roadways were conceived;
- fourth, more cars means more accidents which means more delays.
In other words, this problem isn’t going anywhere. …
