It’s not something I normally do, but earlier today I had the opportunity to visit a San Antonio coffee shop with my wife. I’m on what I’m calling a “sabbatical” while I’m between jobs — essentially I’m taking August off, we’re going to travel and then after Labor Day I’ll start with my new company.
But I was reading an article on Politico today about the recent rise in rail travel on Amtrak and it got me excited. I absolutely love trains and rail travel. This is definitely a product of growing up in Chicago and using the “L” to get around to most places in the city. When I was in London and Paris recently, getting to ride their respective Metro train services was one of my favorite experiences. I also have fond memories of taking the Hiawatha Amtrak line from Milwaukee to Chicago and back again while attending college.
These memories and experiences with commuter and passenger rail, both here in the US and in Europe, always cause me to bemoan how dominant car travel is here in America. I, for one, hate commuting (unless by foot or by bike) and hate how necessary using a car to get around is. San Antonio’s public transit system, VIA, is mediocre on a good day, and the city is criss-crossed by highways and interstates, lending itself to poor air quality and neighborhoods that are segregated from key areas of San Antonio by these ugly blights of modern construction.
It’s only getting worse here in the Alamo City, as well. Texas is a huge promoter not only of oil and gas industries, but also expanding roads and building more highways. The thinking is that adding more lanes to a congested highway will ease that congestion and lower travel times, but that logic is flawed and continues to be proven wrong. Induced demand, coined by Anthony Downs in 1962(!), back when highways were first being run through cities and towns across America, is the idea that traffic congestion will always rise to meet maximum capacity. Adding additional lanes to an already jam-packed freeway seems to make sense, but soon….the freeway is just as congested as before.
This all got me thinking about how much waste is caused by congestion in cities across the country. Turns out, there’s a Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the real BTS, that has data showing annual wasted fuel due to congestion. I’ll be taking a look at this data in more detail and maybe dove-tailing some of my findings with some other transportation related data.
The data includes information on 105 metropolitan areas across the US, ranging from “Small”, “Medium”, “Large” and “Very Large” cities for the years 1982–2020. Seattle, WA and San Antonio, TX are classified as “Large” metropolitan areas, for example, and Tuscon, AZ and Tulsa, OK are classified as “Medium”. I’m specifically interested in Texas’ metropolitan areas, so that’s what I’ll be looking at in this analysis.
Filtering the data down to only cities located in Texas leaves us with 10 cities: Austin (Large), Beaumont (Small), Brownsville (Small), Corpus Christi (Small), Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (Very Large), El Paso (Medium), Houston (Very Large), Laredo (Small), McAllen (Medium) and San Antonio (Large). Below is a picture of the state highways in Texas which includes the cities mentioned above.
Let’s take a look at every Texas city in this data set and see what the trends are looking like.
Every Texas city included in the data saw the amount of gallons of fuel wasted due to congestion rise since 1982, the first year data was collected. Houston and Dallas are the largest metro areas included in the data, followed by San Antonio and Austin. All 4 of those cities saw fairly notable increases in the few years before 2000. Interestingly, every city saw a sharp decrease in 2020, which saw COVID lead to drastic shutdowns of society, which in turn led to many people not having to drive to work and get stuck in terrible traffic.
Data is not available for 2021, so I can’t know for sure if the amount of gallons wasted due to congestion increased to pre-pandemic levels. Going off of gut feeling, I’m willing to bet that it did, especially in a state like Texas, which resisted lockdowns and generally tried to continue on with life as if nothing was happening.
The summer is always the season of construction and major roadway projects are underway here in Texas, many with the goal of expanding lanes and making it more accessible for cars. This focus on cars, and not people, will continue to clog San Antonio’s air with harmful pollutants, divide neighborhoods from economic opportunity, and continue to cause San Antonio drivers to waste money on excessive driving.
