Traffic Mayhem

"Ready for a session of 'hurry up and wait'? Get in your car and get out on the freeway system. You will go nowhere fast..."

Today I am going in for a maintenance treatment for my neuropathy. The clinic is in St. Louis Park and I need to take Highway 169 to get there. And I am not look forward to it at all. Oh the treatment will be fine - it is the drive I am dreading. AND, my appointment is at 9:30, which should be after the morning rush is over. But based on my recent experience with that drive, the traffic will still be very tough.

Now I bring this up for only one reason. This morning in the paper, there was an interesting article about the horrid traffic conditions in cities all around the country. Including our Twin Cities and surrounding burbs. The article in the paper has identified the culprit(s) for this nagging problem - cheap gasoline and an improving economy. And therein lies the real problem. Why people have no time for the main stream media. Because you never get the real story.

So here is the real story. First off, prior to the Great Recession, gasoline was about $1.80/gal. Today, with the price of oil VERY depressed at less than $40/barrel, the price of gasoline is around $2.50/gal. That is not cheap - that is normal for where it should be. I would consider gasoline to be "cheap" for these days should it hang around the $2.00/gal range.

Now here is the fact which is even more twisted from the article. Improving economy? With the workforce participation rate at record lows? This past July, US News and World Report had a great article on this subject. Nothing many of us had not heard before. 62.6%. That is the percentage of Americans who are either working or looking for a job. An historic low. That leaves a whopping 94,000,000 Americans who are neither working nor looking for a job. Even though the U3 unemployment number is "low", the number of people outside of the workforce is alarmingly "high".

THIS is what the article SHOULD have addressed. Let us pretend for just a minute we had a normal workforce participation. If we did, the U3 number would be much higher. That is just the way this economic funny math works. Next (and this is the punchline), our traffic infrastructure would really have revealed itself. Revealed itself for how inadequate it has become. In many parts of our metro during rush hour, slow traffic would become even slower and grind to a stop.

Why? Simple really. Our roads have become the red headed stepchild of the Met Council. They hate our roads. Our cars. Our mobility. So new road construction is grossly underfunded, year after year. We the people, who pay all the taxes, are left with nothing but gridlock. Gridlock now, with more serious gridlock in the forecast for the future. Met Council's solution? Have everyone live downtown in vertical housing, and take the LRT to all businesses which by then will have moved into the city. Hey Met Council! Wake the "bleep" up! That ain't gonna happen! It is not how we want to live and work!

I have to wrap this up now. I need to get ready for my hour plus drive to St. Louis Park A drive which this time of day should take about half that long. Since I am retired now, I don't have to put up with much traffic. But our kids and grand kids will. And they are really getting the short end of the stick. All I can say to them is sorry - sorry we screwed this up so bad.