Garnering public support for appropriate levels of transportation investment will require rebuilding a trust that has waned over the years as the federal transportation program has become more complex and convoluted. The public’s mistrust in the ability of government to deliver recognizable transportation improvements wasn’t born overnight.

Robert Crandall’s recommendation, “Feel the Pain,” to make every Member of Congress drive themselves to work and to require those living within 500 miles of Washington to commute to their home districts via automobile is a humorous illustration of the serious problem at hand. Every Member of Congress represents a district with a variety of constituents coping with varying levels congestion concerns, but our problems go beyond the everyday frustration and inconveniences. Families often struggle to get kids to school, sports and other activities on time. There is a serious impact on businesses whose bottom line is impacted when deliveries of goods and services are delayed due to traffic. Also over looked are the needs of law enforcement and medical responders that lose critical life-saving minutes in emergency situations. While it is disingenuous to suggest that passing a transportation bill will solve all of our traffic problems, a federal bill, properly implemented, can support and enhance system reliability and make our transportation program more efficient and travel more reliable.

This week, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) released their 2011 Urban Mobility Report, which demonstrates the staggering costs that congestion imposes on our society. But there is even more to consider than the costs of congestion on our economy -- the staggering economic impact of crashes on our nation’s roadways. AAA’s Crashes versus Congestion report, scheduled for release next month, offers an even more sobering statistic. The actual cost associated with crashes is more than double the cost of congestion. So while congestion has a bottom line impact, policymakers need to be reminded that safety does as well.

Instead of venting inside our cars and “tilting at windshields”, AAA is urging motorists to take a moment, compose their thoughts, and tell us what they would like to see done. As part of our Making America Stronger campaign, AAA is asking the traveling public to share “Just One Thing” that they would like to see done to improve their travel experience. These are the stories that policymakers need to hear and AAA will continue to rely their messages to policymakers on how to make their transportation experience safer and better. Go to our website and add your story to the dialogue.

Is not the basic premise of the question — that spending more money can significantly reduce urban traffic congestion— a bit superficial? Calculations made for central London indicate that road capacity there would have to be multiplied some twenty times to accommodate all the traffic that seeks to be there with neither congestion nor road pricing.

Free markets deal with excessive congestion by raising prices, and the resulting revenues can then be used to expand the congested facilities.

Most roads are not in the market economy, but there are remedies that can be applied even when governments run them. Bob Poole and Ken Orski, both respected members of this panel, proposed creating urban networks of HOT lanes that would be priced electronically at levels designed to reduce congestion to desired levels. They reckoned that such networks in eight US cities could be provided for $60 billion, much of which would paid for by the users.

The federal government has tried to distance itself from distance-based road–use charges, but determined local authorities could use them to reduce urban congestion.

In my experience the underlying premise that traffic doesn’t drive or motivate elected officials is wrong. Whether it’s the Washington Metro Congressional delegation or local business groups, reducing traffic congestion is one of the principal reasons behind the strong support for Metro and other transportation programs. Perhaps because Washington, D.C. has recently been designated as the region with the worst congestion in the United States there is no disconnect between traffic congestion and the priority federal, state and local leaders place on transportation programs. But that is not the whole story.

Like other major cities in the United States, the Washington, D.C. region struggles with the same issues all metropolitan areas face – lack of adequate funding, lack of planning and lack of consensus on how to best address congestion and the deterioration in quality of life and economic damage it creates. Along with those “traditional” transportation issues, housing and land use policy need to play a more prominent role in the discussion. Recognizing the diversity of outcomes citizens in the DC region are looking for, a coalition of the region’s local governments recently approved a “Region Forward” growth vision emphasizing four areas for making progress: prosperity, livability, accessibility, and sustainability.

Transit – the best option for getting people out of their cars for the typical commute trip – faces many of the same challenges that highway advocates do. Due to the lack of capital investment in Washington Metro and many other transit agencies in the U.S. face our own gridlock issues – overcrowded trains, aging railcars and old overworked escalators. At some of our busiest station train platforms our customers are experiencing the transit version of a traffic jam. Our current capital program, a 6 year, $5 billion dollar rebuilding effort only addresses half of our capital needs inventory. And the work we are doing does not include any expansion plans. With the traditional resources available, we simply cannot afford it.

Simply adding more lanes of highway to accommodate all those frustrated commuters only addresses one dimension of the complex issues that help create policy and funding gridlock. Increasingly, transportation funding advocates are going to have to show how new investment addresses not only congestion, but the broader issues transportation investment needs to address as well, whether that means better access to jobs, more and healthier transportation choices, safer routes to school, or a cleaner environment.

There are no quick fixes to the problem. Harnessing commuter frustration to drive smart transportation policy is an essential part of the equation, and broadening the conversation about the benefits transportation investment can deliver may be a key part of it. It will take every one of those commuters sitting in their cars listening to the traffic report to get involved and help drive regional consensus among our elected officials to solve the problems -- but they’ll need reminders of ALL the benefits in play, not just those they’re experiencing at the moment. Federal, State and local policy that supports Metro rail and bus will allow us to continue to play a key role in solving the problem.

In my experience the underlying premise that traffic doesn’t drive or motivate elected officials is wrong. Whether it’s the Washington Metro Congressional delegation or local business groups, reducing traffic congestion is one of the principal reasons behind the strong support for Metro and other transportation programs. Perhaps because Washington, D.C. has recently been designated as the region with the worst congestion in the United States there is no disconnect between traffic congestion and the priority federal, state and local leaders place on transportation programs. But that is not the whole story.

Like other major cities in the United States, the Washington, D.C. region struggles with the same issues all metropolitan areas face – lack of adequate funding, lack of planning and lack of consensus on how to best address congestion and the deterioration in quality of life and economic damage it creates. Along with those “traditional” transportation issues, housing and land use policy need to play a more prominent role in the discussion. Recognizing the diversity of outcomes citizens in the DC region are looking for, a coalition of the region’s local governments recently approved a “Region Forward” growth vision emphasizing four areas for making progress: prosperity, livability, accessibility, and sustainability.

Transit – the best option for getting people out of their cars for the typical commute trip – faces many of the same challenges that highway advocates do. Due to the lack of capital investment in Washington Metro and many other transit agencies in the U.S. we face our own gridlock issues – overcrowded trains, aging railcars and old overworked escalators. At some of our busiest station train platforms our customers are experiencing the transit version of traffic jam... Our current capital program, 6 year, $5 billion dollar rebuilding effort only addresses half of our capital needs inventory. And the work we are doing does not include any expansion plans. With the traditional resources available, we simply cannot afford it.

Simply adding more lanes of highway to accommodate all those frustrated commuters only addresses one dimension of the complex issues that help create policy and funding gridlock. Increasingly, transportation funding advocates are going to have to show how new investment addresses not only congestion, but the broader issues transportation investment needs to address as well, whether that means better access to jobs, more and healthier transportation choices, safer routes to school, or a cleaner environment.

There are no quick fixes to the problem. Harnessing commuter frustration to drive smart transportation policy is an essential part of the equation, and broadening the conversation about the benefits transportation investment can deliver may be a key part of it. It will take every one of those commuters sitting in their cars listening to the traffic report to get involved and help drive regional consensus among our elected officials to solve the problems -- but they’ll need reminders of ALL the benefits in play, not just those they’re experiencing at the moment. Federal, State and local policy that supports Metro rail and bus will allow us to continue to play a key role in solving the problem.

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Americans spend about 4.2 billion hours a year sitting in traffic, and that frustration is something we all know well. Yet, it does not make the strongest case for federal investment. Traffic congestion can seem a very local or individual issue – if we want our particular commute to improve, we look to our cities, counties, or even states for solutions such as bonds, tolls, HOV lanes, and other measures to improve the roads and expand our travel choices. That may be why we saw so many states successfully pass bonds to finance transportation projects last year.

Regardless, the case for a greater federal investment in our aging and crumbling infrastructure is stronger than ever. America’s roads and bridges are in desperate need of repairs and modernization.

ASCE’s 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure graded the nation’s roads a “D-”, bridges a grade of “C”, and transit a grade of “D”. With nearly one-third of roads in poor or mediocre condition, a quarter of the nation’s bridges either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, it is not hard to see why the nation’s surface transportation system is in a state of decline.

In addition, each year we delay costs us billions in lost economic growth. A recent American Society of Civil Engineers’ economic study found that doing nothing more than maintaining current federal funding levels for our surface transportation system will actually cost our economy more than 870,000 jobs and suppress the growth of GDP by almost $900 billion by the year 2020. Businesses will have to pay an additional $430 billion in transportation costs and exports would plummet by $28 billion.

While we emphasize safety and our economy when it comes to promoting a greater federal investment, targeting congestion and bottlenecks should be a key component of transportation policy reform. Prioritizing bottlenecks, employing traffic management technology on our highways, expanding travel options, and developing performance measures that track volume and congestion levels will go a long ways towards alleviating congestion. Lost in the discussion is the role that transit can play in alleviating congestion in urban areas. We should use the latest data from the Texas Transportation Institute to not only highlight the congestion problem, but to give us a sense of where we need to focus our efforts.

This is a great question, which underscores the disconnect, common throughout society, of problems that impact a great many but have no focused constituency and problems that impact relatively few but have a closely focused constituency. The former problems tend to be ignored, while the latter get solved.

Traffic congestion is a fine illustration, as is food safety. Traffic congestion impacts almost everyone, wastes enormous amounts of energy and costs the economy vast amounts when measured by lost productive time. I think almost everyone cares deeply about food safety. But because there is no way for individual citizens to focus on how to reduce traffic congestion, and because the mechanics of how to assure food safety are not part of most people’s daily life, politicians ignore both.

These problems exist primarily because we have no integrated planning mechanism. Congress recently passed a major change to the food safety laws, which those in Congress opposed to regulation regard as overreaching. In the current climate, that has made it easy for Congress to reduce funding for the FDA below what is needed to properly administer the new program. Few citizens know anything about the matter, and it is likely to lie dormant until the next food crisis, at which time there will be much finger pointing about who is at fault.

The same can be said about traffic congestion. Energy independence and more jobs are high on the list of national goals, and both would be advanced by increasing gasoline taxes and using the proceeds to better fund repairing and expanding our highway system. Unhappily, since there is no plan to accomplish those goals, and because there is lots of ideological opposition to raising taxes on anything, the problem of traffic congestion gets less attention than issues which are easier to reduce to ideological slogans.

One way to attack the problem is to expect the Secretary of Transportation to create a plan and articulate the penalties associated with failing to implement it. It we had a plan which compared the cost of time wasted and excess energy consumed with the cost of fixing the problem, the issue of whether or not to invest in our infrastructure would be thought of quite differently. The average citizen has no way of knowing how his or her individual inconvenience is mirrored in the country as a whole, and since the Administration does little or nothing to highlight the problem, and makes no effort at all to deal with energy independence, it’s difficult for Mr. and Mrs. America to focus his or her representatives on getting the problem fixed. So we get bogged down in discussions about “government spending” which have very little to do with the issue of what we should be investing to achieve energy independence and avoid the costs associated with excessive congestion.

One excellent way to solve the problem would be to compel every member of Congress to drive themselves and to require those living within 500 miles of Washington to commute to their home districts by road. Doing so would allow us to sell a large number of vehicles and reduce the number of government employees, thus making a contribution to the effort to cut government spending. It would also underscore for “our representatives” the importance of better planning and the huge energy and time losses associated with traffic congestion.

I’ll bet implementation would promptly lead to better planning and a much sharper focus on the importance of developing an appropriate funding mechanism for our highway system.

During my 15 years as a DOT official I became convinced that the public has a difficult time relating failure to alleviate congestion or undertaking a road project with a lack of transportation funding. Rather the blame is usually directed at the agency for failing to give their project sufficient priority or a feeling that the agency is simply incapable of meaningful action. Rather than lobbying the legislature for more funding the public will lobby the agency to give more attention to their favorite project. One possible solution, at least at state and municipal level is to identify the projects and timing of implementation that will be pursued following an increase in funding. This is more difficult at the federal level where decisions are not at the project level but rather at the program level.