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Community Corner

Widening Route 22 Won't Fix Our Traffic Problems

A better solution: invest that money in LANTA.

Bruce E. Davis of the Route 22 Coalition brings us the   from the 2000s that should have been put out of its misery when the housing bubble popped.

Mr. Davis has long been an advocate for widening Route 22 to a 6-lane freeway between 15th Street and Airport Road, but Ed Rendell's "fix it first" policy for infrastructure mercifully ended that idea's prospects for a while.

But now, Tom Corbett's Transportation Funding Advisory Commission appears to have put the issue back in play, and local sprawl boosters are giddy.

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In a Morning Call opinion piece, Mr. Davis wrote:

Within the [Commission's] report are comments that have put the widening of Route 22 to six lanes between the 15th Street and Airport Road exits back in play. As noted by the commission, state Transportation Department planning has been based for the past decade on a "maintenance first" approach, aiming to fix existing infrastructure before building more highways and bridges or adding bus and train service. It was an essential focus, given funding constraints and a focus on public safety, but it comes with a long‐term price. Safety improvements, long‐term total reconstruction, and congestion relief have been deferred, making this work more costly in the future.

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For too long, Pennsylvania has been limited in its ability to add capacity, which encompasses widening certain roadways and bridges (think Route 22) to improve safety and reduce congestion and adding missing links to highways to improve traffic flow. The state has deferred needed improvements and is falling behind other states in the competition to attract new businesses. The problem can only be solved by overhauling our approach to funding and delivering infrastructure and services.

The claim that highway widening decreases congestion is simply wrong, and it's wrong for pretty simple economic reasons of supply and demand. A forthcoming paper by University of Toronto professors Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner in the American Economic Review goes so far as to call it a "law" that adding road capacity increases congestion.

Congestion happens when too many cars try to use a limited supply of road space at the same time. Drivers pay the cost of congestion with their time if the road is free, or with money if the road is tolled. Route 22 is free, so drivers are now paying the cost with leisure time or work hours.

Expansion doesn't offer a permanent solution to this problem. It's like loosening your belt to try to lose weight. Increasing the supply of road space reduces congestion temporarily, briefly reducing the cost of driving. But the lower price creates more demand, filling up the new lanes with more cars.

People who now take local roads will find it quicker to take the highway. People who now avoid highway driving at rush hour will go on frivolous trips to the mall at peak travel times. Mr. Davis suggests this project will "attract new businesses," but it seems not to have occurred to him that these businesses' employees will also use the highway to commute to work. Cheap supply creates its own demand.

Traffic congestion lowers the region's productivity and makes people sad, so it's very important for people working at the nexus of government and development to be thinking about ways to move people around the region more quickly and efficiently.

Widening Route 22 is probably the least cost-effective way to achieve this goal, and it's not even going to work. Different estimates have put the cost of this project at between $100 million and $320 million. If people are ready to plunk down $320 million, that money could go a lot further if it was spent on ways to reduce the ratio of cars to people.

You can do this two ways--increase the quality and frequency of public transportation, and end zoning policies that promote . 

The second option is likely to be the most effective and costs no taxpayer money at all. As for the first option, $320 million would go a long way toward really , but I would imagine that a number of the most important routes in the Valley could have a bus picking up passengers every 10 minutes with a much smaller investment.

A 10 minute wait between buses would get you much more congestion reduction than widening 22, and yet if a lawmaker proposed spending $100 million on new buses, this would be ridiculed as a wasteful boondoggle.

The weirdest part about Davis' column is that he understands exactly how decrepit Pennsylvania's infrastructure is, and how poorly funded its transportation budget is. The Governor's transportation commission's report only raises $2.5 billion, but Mr. Davis thinks the need is closer to $3.5 billion.

And yet he seems not to realize how badly this weakens his case for spending $320 million the state doesn't have on a project that won't decrease congestion.

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