Matt Frye's story gives little solace to Transportation Commissioner Carol Murray. Commissioner Murray sees big problems ahead and the more people who live far from work, the harder it is to come up with solutions.
When I think about my job and how to help people get from place to place, I can't think about today and tomorrow. I have to think about the decades ahead.
And looking out two decades, the road forecast isn’t rosy. Our best guess is that our population will grow by about 1.1 percent. But the amount of passenger car and truck travel is expected to go up more than twice that .. maybe as much as 3 percent.
Business as usual is not sufficient to meet the challenges ahead. Business as usual means we let houses and businesses and schools go up in the same kinds of places we’ve been putting them up for the past forty years. Business as usual means you build more roads, which attracts more development, which adds new traffic, which clogs the roads you just built.
Whether you like that vision of the future doesn’t really matter. The real deal killer is that we don’t have the money to pay for it. We can’t maintain the roads we have and add the capacity to handle more vehicles – not with the number of dollars we could hope to have on hand even in our most optimistic moments. By our estimates, we’re looking at a 50 billion dollar gap over 20 years.
Transportation Commissioner Carol Murray. (Courtesy NH DOT)
So what’s the solution? In a lot of ways, I think we need to take some lessons from the past. New Hampshire’s towns and cities originally developed with real town centers and Main Streets where people, usually the store owners, lived above the shops. Schools, homes, factories, the post office, they were all close to each other. The effect on transportation was obvious. 35 years ago, 70 percent of children walked or rode their bikes to school. Many people could walk to the post office.
Now, we made the car indispensable for just about everything. We can’t recreate the past but we can let it inspire us to do better. We can look at new ways to reinvest in our downtowns. Do you have vacant second, third and fourth floors above the stores on Main Street? Cities all across America are finding that empty-nesters want to live in apartments that are close to work and the things they need.
Has the cul-de-sac become the layout for new subdivisions in your town? That’s guaranteed to increase traffic.
Above all, we the people who deal with transportation – and notice I said transportation, not just roads and highways – need to work side by side with those of you who decide where the houses, and businesses, and public buildings will go. We’ve known for decades that land use and transportation are joined at the hip. But we haven’t acted that way.
We need to start doing that. With the help of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, I’ve just finished nine meetings with citizens all across the state, looking at what sort of transportation and land use future we want to have. We need to continue that process and do it more and more.
Business as usual has spread us out all over the place. It’s tough to walk, it’s tough to ride a bike, it’s tough to take a bus or train when everyone is so spread out. There was an economy and efficiency of space in the traditional town. If we head down this new path, we can get back to those ideals.
It won’t happen quickly. It won’t happen next year. But if we start now, in a decade, we’ll see the difference.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
Talk about timely.
Just last night, my husband and I were examining our spending on gas and were both astounded by the several hundred (almost $500) we spend monthly- even more astounding because I do not commute to a job daily. So this morning, we decided to run an experiment (one of many in our lives) and try to cut our gas bill by 25% next month. To do this, we talked about switching cars depending on who is driving farther, having my husband car pool with someone 2 days a week, trying to take the free shuttle (Advanced Transit in the Lebanon area). In coordinating our experiment, I realized that the route schedules in the fringe areas (Canaan) were sorely minimal and even in populated areas, some of the conveniences were removed (stops at the very popular and congested Centerra Plaza) rendering the service completely useless for my husband's commute. So the bus drives right past the driveway to the plaza without so much as a stop at the end. It seems to me that a large part of a solution to this growing problem would be to increase funding to these services and put the convenience back into them. If they aren't convenient, people aren't going to talk about how wonderful it is and the services won't grow. A certain momentum is required to make a venture such as this successful.
I certainly appreicate the interest reducing commuting in New Hampshire. I commute from Manchester to Keene 3 days per week. Unfortunately, my profession is subject to the ups and downs of defense spending. As a result, I've had to move about 4 times in the past 20 years just maintain gainful employment. I personally don't see moving closer to a job as a realistic menas of minimizing commuting unless your employment situation is very stable. This is difficult to find in the engineering profession. In other states where this issue has been recognized is to build toll roads or turnpikes that link cities to airports or other cities. This also serves to remove the large semis from the smaller country roads (thereby preserving the roads) and allows for better traffic flow through the smaller 2-lane towns.