L OCAL LIVING
District
17 DC
Well-traveled drivers rate their trips dr. gridlock
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
ROBERT THOMSON
Travelers from the
Washington area tend to get around — around the world, that is — and they’re constantly comparing local conditions with what they see elsewhere. In their eyes, we don’t always look so good.
Dear Dr. Gridlock: I have been driving in 49
states and 15 foreign nations, spending the most time behind the wheel in Germany, Japan, France and Switzerland. Germany and Switzerland were the most pleasant. Despite the high speeds, a feeling of complete safety and enjoyment was possible. In the United States, I found
that Minnesota was the most pleasant. First, the roads are clean, and there is no junk tossed out the window, trashing the roads. Second, drivers actually stop to allow pedestrians to cross at crosswalks, and pedestrians use the crosswalks. The best public
transportation by far was in Hong Kong.
JAMES R. CAMPBELL Arlington County
DG: I always invite our well-traveled readers to make these comparisons. We recently had a discussion in which a letter writer asserted that California drivers and pedestrians are more courteous to each other [Dr. Gridlock, June 10]. When travelers comment to me, California often wins out in anecdotal evidence of good behavior. There are studies attempting to compare transportation experiences, but they have their limits. Last week, IBM released a Commuter Pain study targeting 20 cities around the world and attempting to gauge the physical and emotional toll of getting around. (Washington wasn’t one of the cities.) On the upper end of IBM’s pain scale were Beijing, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Moscow. At
ONLINE 6
Robert Thomson is The Washington Post’s Dr.
Gridlock. He is online Mondays at noon to take all of your transit questions. For up-to-the-minute traffic reports from The Post’s transportation team, go to
blog.washingtonpost.com/ getthere.
MOBILE V
When you’re on the go, you need the latest information on Washington area traffic,
weather, news and more. Now you can get it delivered right to your mobile device from
washingtonpost.com. And help us keep up by sending information and tips on what you’re experiencing so we can investigate. Depending on your device or preference, you have a few options: K To receive text messages, text “LOCAL” to WPOST (98999). You’ll get no more than about 7 messages per week. K To TXT us about something you’ve seen, send the word “DCALERT” and your message to WPOST (98999).
2008 PHOTO BY GREG BAKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A traffic-clogged street in Beijing, which was at the upper end of a commuter-pain scale in a study of 20 cities around the world released last week by IBM. Washington was not one of the cities.
the low end were Stockholm, Melbourne, Australia, Houston and New York. The study notes that some of the cities on the high end of the pain scale have experienced a stunning growth in traffic in recent years, while cities where the survey respondents felt less pain tend to have had more time to get used to their bad traffic and travel conditions. For the study, IBM said, it surveyed 8,192 drivers in 2008 and 2009. Broad comparisons, whether in studies or anecdotes, are fun but difficult to interpret. We make much of the national congestion reports presented by the Texas Transportation Institute, the one that usually shows the D.C. area ranking near the top in traffic congestion. But even there, I find it difficult to sum up the experience of an entire region. Sure, we’re Washington commuters for most surveys. But we’re likely to define ourselves as Orange Line riders, MARC passengers, 15th Street bike lane users or Columbia Pike pedestrians. Many commutes are so long that we cross over categories, making generalizations about experiences even more difficult.
One interesting aspect of
surveys is how they seek to measure the pain of getting around. The IBM survey focused on these 10 factors: commuting time, time stuck in traffic and agreement that the price of gas is too high, traffic has gotten worse, start-stop traffic is a problem, driving causes stress, driving causes anger, traffic affects work, traffic is so bad the driver stopped and decided not to make the trip because of bad traffic.
Drivers, how would you rate your trips based on those 10 factors? What have you done, or what can you do, to make that part of your life better?
GRASS-ROOTS HELP? Dear Dr. Gridlock:
Reading your column is a session in constant frustration for me as I see the growing dissatisfaction with a Metro system that once functioned so well. I visit other cities and am jealous of their commuter train systems that run seven days a week. I have bitter feelings on what happened to our country’s train system as the highway system grew. Are there any grass-roots support groups for the
improvement of public transportation or train travel? If nothing else, it would give me fellow travelers for commiseration.
CLAUDIA SUMLER Baltimore
DG: Having lived in New York before moving to Washington in 1988, my benchmark for grass-roots transportation organizations is the Straphangers Campaign, which has long fought the good fight on behalf of New York’s subway and bus riders. It attempts to hold the transit leadership accountable through such efforts as an annual State of the Subways report. It rates the subway lines on such factors as cleanliness of the cars, chances of getting a seat and service regularity. In other words, many of the things that travelers care about. We don’t have a grass-roots
support group in that league, working on behalf of any category of travelers. Many civic groups that get
involved in local transportation issues do so because they are opposed to a particular project. I’ll cite just a few in the D.C. area that consistently seek to
PRINT S
Dr. Gridlock appears Thursdays in Local
Living and Sundays in the Metro section. Send e-mails for publication to:
drgridlock@washpost.com or write to Dr. Gridlock 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071 Please include your name, community and telephone numbers.
improve travelers’ conditions, though I could mention others. One is the Action Committee for Transit, based in Montgomery County, which lobbies for maintenance of current transit services and expansion into new areas. Another group pushing for improvements in transit service is
MetroRiders.org. The Metro Riders’ Advisory Council has many dedicated volunteer members working on behalf of riders, but it’s an arm of the Metro board rather than a grass-roots organization. One transportation advocacy group that I’ve admired for years is the Washington Area Bicyclists Association. It lobbies quite effectively for the causes of cyclists, while also stressing education and responsibility. What grass-roots groups do you think I’m leaving out?
THE WASHINGTON POST • THURSDAY, JULY 8, 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70