A national study showing traffic congestion worsening in the Chicago region prompted urban planners to warn Tuesday that solutions to gridlock will remain elusive until elected officials and the public rally behind new strategies.
For the fourth straight year, the Chicago region and northwest Indiana ranked second worst in the U.S. for the amount of extra time commuters add to their trips due to traffic delays.
The Chicago area has held the No. 3 ranking in the highest annual delay category since 1991. However, the extra time spent commuting for each individual traveler during peak hours was 30 hours per year back in 1991. In 2005, the most recent available data, the figure was 46 hours — the equivalent of a workweek — per person.
Ideas that have helped manage traffic in cities from London to New York include expansion of toll roads, peak-hour travel fees to encourage some people to hit the road at less-busy times, mass-transit improvements such as point-to-point express bus service and creating public-private partnerships to help pay for new infrastructure.
But as traffic continues to build up and back up on Illinois roads, state lawmakers and the governor are engaged in an age-old fight over whether to impose tax increases and add gambling casinos as the linchpin of financing transportation.
“Here we are beyond the 11th hour struggling to get by without a new [state] capital program to address congestion in northeastern Illinois and facing another mass-transit doomsday,” said Tom Murtha, senior planner for strategic initiatives at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
“What we need to do is convince people that there are real solutions that move traffic at higher speeds and help pay for the gains as well,” Murtha said.
Proponents say by taking a diverse approach to the problem, many untapped options are available to squeeze additional capacity out of the transportation systems instead of going directly to the most expensive and slowest alternative of building new roads.
The “low-hanging fruit” that hasn’t been fully picked ranges from doing a better job coordinating traffic signals to restricting the volume of traffic trying to enter already packed expressways to moving vehicles faster on the road by reducing the number of drivers and increasing the ranks of bus and train customers.
Amid the stalemate over what course to plot in Illinois, a national study released Tuesday found commuters face increasingly unpredictable travel times for the trips they make every day in the Chicago region and northwest Indiana.
The Chicago area has consistently ranked as one of the most gridlocked U.S. metropolitan regions on a variety of criteria used to measure congestion, travel delays and the capacity to handle more traffic, said the study, the “2007 Urban Mobility Report,” issued by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University.
Wasted time and fuel cost the Chicago region $4 billion annually, said David Schrank, an associate research scientist at the Texas Transportation Institute who co-wrote the mobility report.
Chicago-area commuters already lose a total of more than 203 million hours a year in traffic delays, the study found. L.A. and New York had the highest annual delays. Following Chicago were Dallas-Ft. Worth-Arlington and Miami.
The study’s authors noted excessive fluctuations in how long it takes Chicago-area residents to commute, requiring people to as much as double the time they allow for peak-hour trips.
“When things get bad in Chicago, they get really bad,” Schrank said.
Transportation and urban planning experts said the release of the report comes at an opportune time for Illinois.
“The first thing this report reinforces is the need for the legislature and the governor to resolve the transit crisis,” said William Baltutis, executive director of the Transportation Management Association of Lake-Cook. “It’s one more reason why we need a long-term funding resolution for mass transit.”
The association works with Pace, Metra and businesses to promote wider use of shuttles and van pools to connect workers with commuter trains. Shuttle Bug ridership increased 8.5 percent from 2005 to 2006, Baltutis said.
A consensus has emerged among transportation professionals that building more roads is not the solution.
Michael Bolton, deputy executive director at Pace, predicts that when the 12.5-mile extension of Interstate 355 in Will County opens in November, it will be immediately clogged with vehicles stretching from I-55 to I-80.
Lower-cost alternatives to going on a construction binge include using expressway shoulders to carry traffic during peak hours; changing the traffic flow of arterial streets during certain hours to serve traffic entering and exiting the downtown; and operating express buses, such as Pace’s plan to serve O’Hare from the south suburbs.
Other ideas in the planning stage in the Chicago region include running more commuter trains to serve reverse-commuters who work in the suburbs; using technology to more efficiently manage traffic lanes to minimize congestion; modernizing the freight rail infrastructure to make room for more passenger trains; promoting land-use policies that encourage use of mass transit; and adding bicycling routes.
The price of going with the status quo would make today’s congestion seem like the good old days, the experts warned.
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LONG HAUL
The Chicago area has held the No. 3 spot in the highest annual traffic delay category since 1991.
The Chicago region also retained its No. 3 ranking in other categories in an annual traffic study by the Texas Transportation Institute.
Area travelers each used 32 gallons of additional fuel each year due to traffic, wasting 142 million gallons annually.
Traffic-related expenses cost each person traveling during peak periods more than $900 a year that would have otherwise been saved if roads were more free-flowing.
