Bacon's Rebellion

James A. Bacon

Car(pool) Crash

State transportation policy has run off the road. Proposed remedies for congestion are not only expensive but rendered obsolete by changes in the way we live and work.

Lewis and Kathy James live in Chesterfield County and drive every day to work at the same location: the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the city of Richmond. If anyone were ideally suited to carpooling, it would seem to be a husband and wife who commute to the same office. But the Jameses rarely ride together. “We’re hoping that we won’t have to continue driving in our own cars,” says Lewis ruefully. “We’d like to save on gas. But our schedules vary so much that it’s not practical.”

Kathy designs the graphics for exhibitions, which means that long hours kick in as a project deadline approaches. When the exhibit opens and the pressure on her eases, Lewis’ job cranks up. An education coordinator, he frequently works late on teacher workshops and teen classes built around the new program.

All the while, the couple shares dropping off daughter Haleigh at day care, picking up groceries and running other errands. Driving two cars allows them to juggle all the demands more efficiently. “Early on, we got in the habit of dividing up the chores,” Lewis says. “I hope things will change.” But he’s not confident they will.

The frenetic pace of the James family is increasingly typical of the way Virginians live and work. In the workplace of the Knowledge Economy, jobs are less regimented than in the Industrial Era; salaried employees work more flexible, more erratic hours. Members of two-income families also find themselves running more errands to and from the office, a necessity that’s hardly conducive to riding with others. Meanwhile, the increasing geographic dispersal of housing and office centers, though not a factor in the James’ commuting decisions, makes it all the more inconvenient for those who might consider ride sharing.

It is little surprise, then, that carpooling is fast going the way of drive-in movies and gas-station attendants. Between 1990 and 2000, according to the latest U.S. Census, the number of workers in Virginia increased by 335,000 to 3.5 million. Over the same period the number of carpoolers shrank from 500,000 to 441,000.

The slow-motion carpool crash shows no signs of abating, despite significant public investment in HOV lanes and park-and-ride facilities, not to mention the jawboning of citizens to share rides. Although carpooling is indisputably a beneficial practice – it relieves rush-hour congestion by taking vehicles off the road – it is just as indisputably out of sync with powerful workplace and social trends. People will carpool less, not more, in the future, and there is little that public policy can do about it.

Virginia’s transportation system can’t keep up with the increasing population, much less the proclivity of that population to put everyone over 16 in his or her own car. Planners tell us that the system is under-funded by billions of dollars over the next 20 years and that traffic congestion, already intolerable, will get downright atrocious.

Over the past two decades, successive gubernatorial administrations have built a transportation system around a set of policies which, it is increasingly apparent, have run into a ditch. Under the ruling policy paradigm, the only way to solve traffic gridlock is to spend more money, whether on roads, mass transit or HOV lanes. But revenues are clearly inadequate to such a task. Even if approved by voters tomorrow -- no sure thing from the polls that I have seen -- the sales tax referenda in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads will fund only a fraction of those regions’ projected needs. And judging by the anti-tax sentiment the referenda have stirred up, these will be the last such tax-hike proposals we see in quite a while. 

Laying asphalt is a terribly expensive way to address traffic congestion because building more roads buys only temporary relief. As long as people are willing to trade commuting time for money, ameliorating driving conditions makes it easier for commuters to live farther away from work, typically in the exurbs where land and housing costs are cheaper. Expenditures designed to alleviate congestion create the conditions that eventually put more cars on roads.

The most commonly peddled alternatives to building more highways are to promote carpooling, primarily through HOV lanes, and subsidize mass transit. Those remedies slam into a different unpleasant and rarely acknowledged reality: the changing nature of work. Knowledge workers place a tremendous premium on personal mobility. Buses, trains and carpools do not provide them the flexibility to come and go as they must. Planners and pundits haven’t gotten the message yet, but carpooling is a relic of the old industrial order. Mass transit is looking creaky as well. Lavishing funds on rail and metro projects, as proposed in the Northern Virginia referendum, amounts to rolling the dice and praying that riders will materialize.

Virginians clearly must do something: If we fail to act, traffic congestion will get worse. But it would be downright ruinous to commit ourselves to billions of dollars of projects based on outmoded assumptions.

The long, steady decline of carpooling is a national phenomenon. In 1980, the most recent year for which the U.S. Census has been tracking the number, nearly 20 percent of all workers carpooled nationally. The percentage plunged to 13.4 percent in 1990, and then continued its descent to 12.2 percent by 2000.

Virginia has tracked the national trend. During the 1990s, carpooling’s “market share” in the Commonwealth has declined from 15.9 percent of all workers in 1990 to 12.7 percent in 2000. Public transportation, which offers scheduling flexibility for the commuter if not geographic flexibility, has nearly held its own in absolute numbers but still has lost market share, skidding from 4.1 percent of the working population in 1990 to 3.6 percent in 2000. (The patterns aren’t uniform statewide. Public transportation in Northern Virginia, which saw the introduction of the Virginia Railway Express between Fredericksburg and Washington, held its own better than in other regions.)

There may be some carpooling experts deep within the bowels of the Virginia Department of Transportation who are familiar with these numbers, but they have kept a low profile. The carpool crash has yet to enter the public discourse as a phenomenon worth understanding. 

I’m certainly no expert but I would propose a hypothesis for further investigation: The decline of carpooling is the direct consequence of changes in the way Virginians live and work.

In the Beaver Cleaver era when mothers stayed home in greater numbers, women performed many of the domestic chores during the day that working spouses squeeze in on the way home from the office. Certain errands cannot be avoided: groceries, dry cleaning, shopping for presents, hardware supplies, whatever. Meanwhile, working spouses frequently append to their commute other trips such as dropping by the fitness center or picking up the munchkins from day care. Carpooling does not permit much flexibility. Requests such as, “Hey, can you swing by Ace Hardware on the way home today? I’ve got to pick up some light bulbs,” don’t go over well with fellow travelers.

Even more important are the tectonic shifts in the workplace. In the industrial era, people punched a time clock. Working in shifts, millions of manufacturing employees workers timed their workday by the factory whistle. Carpooling was easy when everyone came and left together. But Knowledge Workers don’t keep regular hours. Sure, nominal office hours may be 8 to 5, but workflow comes in fits and spurts with slack time alternating with periods of furious activity. People constantly arrive early, work late, or dash out in the middle of the day to attend to personal business. Adding to the irregularity of commuting schedules, professionals also spend inordinate time schmoozing as part of the job – attending networking breakfasts, luncheons and cocktail parties before and after office hours.

Far from complaining, Knowledge Workers demand more flexibility, more ability to juggle their professional duties with domestic responsibilities, more offbeat hours. Indeed, the line between work and home is blurring as employees handle personal business in the office, then stay in touch through e-mail at home. For many, the distinction no longer exists. I recall a Northern Virginia speaker tell a Richmond audience how he had no qualms about leaving the office to attend his kid’s soccer game: He used a cell phone to stay in touch with the office and cracked open his laptop during halftime.

“Many people … arrive at a complex interweaving of work and personal life: working to meet the demands of the job, certainly, but in patterns attuned to their own creative rhythms,” writes Economic Developer Richard Florida in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class.[1] Artists, technicians, managers, professionals and others, whose jobs require creativity and the solving of complex problems, are rewriting the rules of the workplace. “From morning to night and from workplace to home," says Florida, "they intersperse bursts of work with chunks of personal time for exercise, errands, socializing, family time or just plain downtime.”

Florida does not explore the impact of this burgeoning class, which increased from 10 percent to 30 percent of the U.S. workforce over the 20th century, on commuting patterns. But the implications are obvious: The higher the percentage of “creative class” workers in a community, the greater the demand for personal mobility. Americans have a "love affair with the automobile" not because of Madison Avenue or some cowboy complex, as cynics have suggested, but because the demands of the creative work style make it difficult to work within the regimented framework of a carpooling schedule or even within the restrictive framework of mass transit.

The chart below, based on numbers extracted from Florida’s book, shows the percentage of “creative class” employees in Virginia’s metro areas.

Transportation planners can effectively remove this segment of the population from the ranks of prospective bus riders, transit takers and carpoolers. As the U.S. economy continues its relentless march towards a knowledge-intensive economic base, VDOT can count on steadily increasing numbers of solo commuters jostling for freeway space.

Ironically, metro Washington, which has made the greatest commitment to carpooling and mass transit, has one of the highest percentages of “creative class” workers in the entire country. If Northern Virginia aspires to world-class status as a technology center, it needs to re-think its expensive fixation with industrial-era transportation models. The region has maintained its ridership in these categories by devoting disproportionate resources to subsidizing them. If other Virginia cities hope to accelerate the transition to a knowledge-intensive economic base, they should likewise heed the imperative for personal mobility.

Few people would argue that personal mobility is a good thing. But there is little agreement on how to achieve it. Until Virginia's political climate changes, there is little appetite for raising taxes beyond what voters might approve tomorrow. Once you rule out strategies that cost more public money, here's what's left:

• Reform land use, halt sprawl. First and foremost, localities must reform zoning codes and other ordinances that promote Virginia's land-intensive pattern of development. Sprawl forces people into longer drives, while low-density development makes public transportation less attractive for those whose workstyles permit it.

• Promote redevelopment, utilize existing roads. The state should deploy existing transportation funds to encourage in-fill development and redevelopment of existing urban-suburban areas already served by roads. It makes no sense to continue building roads into the hinterlands when every metro area has vast networks of underutilized road capacity.

• Bring back the grid pattern of urban design. Congestion occurs when too many people spill out of unconnected cul de sacs onto a handful of arterial roads. Traditional grid street patterns distribute traffic over a larger number of roads. 

• Promote pedestrian-friendly urban design. Most new development is hostile to pedestrians and bikers. Believe it or not, more than 80,000 Virginians walked to work in 2000, and 40,000 resorted to "other" means, mainly bicycles – nearly as many the number who took public transportation! While the state has spent billions on public transportation over the decades, it spends virtually nothing on walkways. Meanwhile, VDOT regulations make streets utterly inhospitable to pedestrians and cyclists. 

• Promote telecommuting. More than 110,000 Virginians worked at home in 2000, almost as many as those who took public transportation.[2]  If Virginia can spend billions on public transportation, surely it could spend a few million experimenting with ways to promote telecommuting. If half of Virginia's solo commuters spent just one day per week working at home, it would take twice as many cars off the roads as all modes of public transportation combined.

• Boost capacity of existing roads. Install "smart" traffic lights, regulate access to Interstate access ramps for better traffic flow, step up accident-response teams, make construction and maintenance projects less disruptive.

• Let carpooling die a dignified death. Don't put it on life support -- let it go. Convert limited-access HOV lanes to toll roads where anyone can pay to bypass congestion. Experiment with time-of-day pricing to raise revenue and maximize utilization.

Those looking for simple, one-size-fits-all solutions will not find them. Some of the changes listed above can be implemented quickly, others will have to be phased in over decades to make an impact. But they all share two virtues: They respect Virginian's desire for personal mobility, and they make do with existing public resources. No tax increases necessary.

-- November 4, 2002

[2] According to official U.S. Census numbers, the number of those who worked at home increased a meager 6,700 over the 1990s -- from 103,400 to 110,100 -- a number at odds with the shift in the economy towards a contingent workforce as described in Free Agent Nation. Scrutiny of the numbers indicates a reclassification that took about 15,000 - 20,000 employees in Norfolk -- most likely Navy personnel -- out of both the "work at home" count and the "total worker" counts.

Adjusting for that methodological change, it looks like the number of people working at home increased statewide from about 85,000 to 110,000 -- or 25,000 in total, for an increase of roughly 30 percent. Now that's a trend!