To help ward off this sort of intervention, some large suburban businesses have moved to form traffic management associations (TMAs), which generally include corporate executives and developers as members. Typically, the associations promote van and car pooling.
”Most of the successful TMAs in the U.S. were formed in reaction to a gridlock situation, a 2-by-4 up-the-side-of-the-head situation,” says Ronald Winfrey, president of the Transportation Management Association of the Lake-Cook Corridor. ”What I`m trying to tell our people is we need to act before we get our own 2-by-4 up the sides of our heads.”
The three TMAs in the Chicago area include the Lake-Cook Corridor TMA, which has about 50 members; an East-West Tollway Corridor TMA, which has about 120 members; and Transpart, a north and northwest suburban TMA which has about 100 members.
So far, the associations have had little effect on reducing congestion. Transpart in particular has been a disappointment, despite the energetic efforts of its first executive director, Alyce Gorsky.
Playing a character called ”Dr. Transpart,” Gorsky put on a fake beard, surgical scrubs and a lab coat and handed out Pace literature at northwest suburban train stations in an attempt to promote alternatives to driving to work alone.
Last summer, Gorsky announced she was leaving the traffic management association, in part because she had tired of the long commute to Transpart`s Arlington Heights offices from her home in south suburban Evergreen Park.
Created in 1987, Transpart was envisioned as a public-private partnership that would work with developers, municipal officials and businesses to encourage car and van pooling in an area of the north and northwest suburbs covering 240 square miles and 1 million people.
”We sailed off on that course and ended up in total organizational gridlock,” said Barry Kennedy, formerly Transpart`s second executive director and now vice president of the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce. ”It`s beyond the scope of any single organization to tackle that large of a project. You need a coalition of organizations.”
The situation is not much more encouraging at the area`s other TMAs.
The Lake-Cook association has had some success with larger firms, but an effort last year to draw small- to medium-sized firms into the program failed because these firms felt they could not support the program to the same extent that bigger companies did.
As a result, the typical van pool participant at a smaller firm would have had to pay $70 per month for the service, or $20 more than workers at large corporations were paying, according to William Baltutis, the TMA`s executive director.
As a result, not a single person from smaller firms signed up.
The traffic management associations also have had little success in making car pooling work, although experts contend that one can realistically expect to enroll 15 to 20 percent of an area`s commuters in car pools if employers match up potential ride sharers and provide preferential parking.
But as the Lake-Cook association discovered, that is easier said than done. During its last ride-sharing drive, for example, presentations were made to 17 companies with 8,500 employees.
About 3 to 11 percent of each company`s work force showed up for the presentations, but only 205 people-about 1 percent of the workers in the Lake- Cook corridor-actually signed up for car pools.
”It`s a tremendous fallout rate,” says Rawling of the Chicago Area Transportation Study, which assisted the Lake-Cook TMA in the car pooling drive.
On the other hand, when CATS contacted the 1,050 employees of Sears`
catalog operation who are being transferred from downtown Chicago to Skokie and Northbrook, 405 of them applied for help with ride sharing, Rawling says. That response may have been due to the urgency of the move. To many employees of companies leaving Chicago for the suburbs, ride sharing often presents the only immediate way of holding onto their jobs, Rawling explains. ”When that happens, people must make very radical choices-whether to move their families to someplace closer to work, or buy another car, or quit one`s job, or make some kind of ride-sharing arrangement,” he says.
Given a choice, however, most suburbanites prefer driving their own cars, not locked into fixed schedules, able to work late and run errands on the way home.
Some people ”want to have their car to escape the company cafeteria during the lunch break, or to have the peace of mind that in the event of a family emergency, they can return home in a hurry,” says C. Kenneth Orski, president of Urban Mobility Corp., a Washington, D.C. transportation consulting firm.
”For others, the need to have a car is more direct. They need it to drop off and pick up their kid at the day care center, or to shop and do erands on the way home.”
Anyone who is a likely candidate for ride sharing probably is doing so already, according to Roger F. Teal of the University of California at Berkeley.
Commuting data from the National Transportation Survey of 1977-78 showed that after one subtracts people who already are car-pooling, particularly the 42 percent who are family members sharing a ride in the same vehicle, ”the base on which ridesharing programs operate is only 7 percent of all commuting workers.”
Car-pooling promotions ”are not likely to lead to major increases over the `natural` level of car pooling,” he concluded.
In addition, no amount of transit service or public-private cooperation may be able to overcome the biggest allure of the car culture-free parking.
Parking is so highly valued an amenity that developers routinely construct more parking space than actual office space in suburban office buildings.
Typically, developers set aside four parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of office space. Each stall measures 325 square feet. Thus, 1,300 square feet of parking is created for every 1,000 square feet of offices.
And once they have parking spaces, commuters are very unlikely to give them up.
Transportation Research Record, a publication for transportation planners, reported in 1987 the results of a study of two Los Angeles office towers, each occupied by a single corporate tenant and each containing a parking garage that charged a monthly fee of $100 per car.
One firm, Company ”A,” picked up $50 of each employee`s parking tab and up to $100 for car pools and van pools. The company also paid $15 a month to employees who used public transportation.
The other firm, Company ”B,” picked up $40 of each worker`s parking tab, and nothing else.
Despite the different incentive packages, an almost identical percentage of employees-52 percent for Company A, 51 percent for Company B-commuted by ride sharing or public transit.
There may be no greater lesson in the staying power of the car culture.
It is a way of life that is ingrained early in the minds of suburban children. Thomas-Cutilletta, Pace`s school program coordinator, knows that all too well.
Except for occasional visits to special education classes, the school program coordinator won`t even venture into high schools to teach teenagers the benefits of mass transit.
”I have the feeling I`d be laughed right out of the classroom,” she says. ”My personal opinion is by the time kids are 16 years old, they`re driving, and it`s a big status symbol to be driving this flashy sports car your pop just bought you.”
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NEXT: New boomtowns threaten to make the same mistakes as older suburbs.
HOW THE CAR TRIUMPHED IN SUBURBIA
1908 Henry Ford introduces the Model T.
1920 American house plans begin to include garages.
1924 The first modern shopping center, Country Club Plaza, opens in Kansas
City, Mo.
1925 Sears executives in Chicago decide to locate new stores in low-density
suburban areas, far from traditional downtown locations. One of their
aims is to provide convient parking for the rising number of American
car owners.
1933 The first drive-in movie theater opens in Camden, N.J.
1950 The post-World War II economic boom takes off, and per-capita
automobile ownership begins to rise. the first sections of the Calumet
and Kingery expressways open.
1951 The first section of the Edens Expressway opens.
1952 The first Holiday Inn opens in Memphis, Tenn.
1954 The first section of the Eisenhower Expressway opens.
1955 Ray Kroc opens his first McDonald`s outlet in northwest suburuban Des
Plaines
1956 Congress enacts the Interstate Highway Act, the key step in the
creation of a 42,500-mile national highway system for which the federal
government will pay 90 percent of the cost. The first enclosed,
climate-controlled shopping center opens near Minneapolis.
1958 The first sections of the Tri-State, East-West and northwest Tollways
open. The first part of the Kennedy Expressway opens.
1961 Oak Brook Shopping Center opens in west suburban Oak Brook. The first
section of the Dan Ryan Expressway opens.
1963 The first sections of the Interstate Highway 80-Moline Expressway and
the Interstate Highway 57 Expressway open. The fisrt section of
Illinois Highway 53 opens.
1964 The first section of the Stevenson Expressway opens.
1971 Woodfield Mall opens in northwest suburban Schaumburg.
1985 A rising number of suburban homes in Chicago and across the nation have
three-car garages.
1988 Reconstruction begins on a three-mile section of the Dan Ryan
Expressway. The reconstruction costs $210 million, topping the $180
million needed more than 25 years earlier to build the entire 11-mile
expressway.
1989 The North-South Tollway opens in Du Page County.
Chicago Tribune Graphic; Sources: ”Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States,” by Kenneth Jackson; ”Average Daily Traffic on Chicago Area Expressways, 1984,” by the Chicago Area Transportation Study,;
”Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis,” by Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade; ”Village of Schaumburg Community Profile;” Encyclopedia Americana.
