Gridlock!

By Stephen Koepp

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation -- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here . . . Nearly every American hungers to move.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Remember when getting there was half the fun? When driving was a breeze and flying was a cinch? No longer. Gridlock has gripped America, threatening to transform its highways and flyways into snarled barriers to progress. After returning from their summer jaunts, many travelers are looking back in anger at odysseys through potholed streets, jam-packed freeways, bottlenecked bridges and overstuffed airports. Now they face another season of grinding commutes: in many U.S. cities, the rush hour has grown into a hellish crush that lasts virtually from sunup till sundown. For U.S. businesses, the meter is running. Companies are losing money as employees fritter away their hours in a transportation standstill. Messengers fail to deliver important documents on time. Sales representatives miss their plane connections and are unable to show up for the big pitch. Even expensive private jets get caught in holding patterns, leaving subordinates in limbo while their bosses circle overhead.

The congestion, which is certain to grow worse in the coming decade, is hampering Americans' cherished mobility and changing the way they travel and do business. Instead of boasting I Get Around, the tune they are wailing nowadays is Don't Get Around Much Anymore. Consider:

-- The Detroit Tigers baseball team lost an important asset last week when its newly hired outfielder, Fred Lynn, failed to qualify for postseason play. Reason: he got caught in a traffic jam. Lynn was playing in Anaheim, Calif., for the Baltimore Orioles when he accepted Detroit's offer late Wednesday afternoon. But to qualify for the playoffs under league rules, he had to join the team, then in Chicago, by midnight. The Tigers chartered a jet for Lynn at Ontario (Calif.) International Airport, but rush-hour congestion reportedly stretched his 35-minute drive to an hour and 15 minutes. That proved a costly delay: Lynn's plane did not reach Chicago airspace until 12:10 a.m.

-- The trucks that deliver Dean Foods products in the Chicago area were getting caught in such relentless traffic tie-ups that the company's drivers ply the highways in the middle of the night. Many truckers leave for their rounds between 2:30 and 4 a.m. Says Larry Smith, chief of Dean's trucking subsidiary: "By getting drivers ahead of the traffic, we believe we can reduce our cost and increase our productivity by 50%."

-- Bridget and Tom Hotchkiss of Evanston, Ill., who returned in July from a slow-moving car trip to the Maryland shore with their sons Tommy, 6, and Patrick, 3, vow never to do it again. Says Bridget: "Ever since we got home, the boys have been playing a new game. They get out all their big trucks and all their cars. I hear them saying, 'Let's play Traffic Jam.' "

-- Hutchins Kealy, a management consultant, figured that a 9:20 a.m. flight from Detroit to Toronto would get him there in plenty of time for his 11 a.m. appointment. The normal flight time is about one hour. But because of airport congestion and a flat tire on his plane, he sat on the runway all morning. Despite his protests, flight attendants refused to allow Kealy and his luggage off the plane, and he was more than four hours late. "I could have rented a car and driven there instead!" he declares. Alas, poor Kealy, you would probably have been stuck in traffic on the Ambassador Bridge, one of the choked passageways connecting Detroit with Windsor, Ont.

-- Traffic on the Long Island Expressway, which carries weekenders from New York City to the Hamptons resort communities, has become so bad that the wealthy, and even semiwealthy, rent seaplanes to get to their houses faster (fee for a 90-mile, one-way trip: up to $130 a head). Result: local harbors and bays are infested with swarms of aircraft, which East Hampton officials are threatening to ban.

Gridlock is more than just an irritant. The epidemic of slow-motion sickness is costing the U.S. billions of dollars in lost productivity and wasted fuel. It is polluting the atmosphere with hydrocarbons, spoiling some Americans' taste for travel and influencing where families choose to live and work. Says T. Allan McArtor, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration: "Gridlock is not an alarmist theory. It will happen unless we take immediate action."

The reason for the congestion is the rapid growth in airplane and auto traffic, which is partly the result of deregulated airfares and six straight years of economic expansion. Airline passenger travel has nearly doubled in the past decade, from 240 million trips in 1977 to 447 million last year. U.S. motor vehicle travel reached 1.9 trillion miles last year, an increase of 27% from 1977. Americans operate 181 million cars, trucks and buses, also up 27% from a decade ago.

But during this time, the U.S. has failed to expand its system of roadways and runways. No completely new major airport has been built since 1974, when Dallas-Fort Worth was completed, despite the rapid expansion of U.S. air traffic. "We simply have too much aluminum and not enough concrete," says the FAA's McArtor. Of the 3.88 million miles of roads in the U.S., 92% was built before 1960.

Not only are there too few highways and airports, but also many existing ones desperately need upgrading. "America is falling apart, literally," declared Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in an essay in the New York Times. He pointed out that declining U.S. spending on public works, from 19.1% of total government expenditures in 1950 to 6.8% by 1984, "is as serious a national problem as the budget and trade deficits."

The worsening congestion raises troubling issues for the 1990s. Should more highways be constructed, or will that only invite more auto traffic and suburban sprawl? How can people be encouraged to leave their cars at home and ride mass transit? Where can new urban airports be sited so that their noise and spread will be tolerated by neighbors? The situation has created an urgent need for innovative solutions, and some are already on the horizon: double- decker freeways, airplanes that can take off vertically from landing pads, and 300-m.p.h. trains that ride on magnetic fields.

Since traffic jams are almost synonymous with urban growth, they have been building for a long time. (The term gridlock apparently came into common use in New York City during a transit workers' strike in 1980, when a surge of commuter autos paralyzed Manhattan's street grid.) Congestion on two-lane highways in the 1950s hastened construction of the 42,797-mile interstate system, which will be officially completed in 1991 (estimated final cost: $108 billion). But the interstates eased overcrowding only temporarily. Says Transportation Secretary James Burnley: "It's not a problem that will be resolved in a final, permanent way in my lifetime."

Gridlock is spreading to suburbs, exurbs and medium-size cities that seldom experienced it before. Highway bottlenecks are occurring on once lonely stretches like I-70 about 60 miles west of Denver, where throngs of cars bearing ski racks turn the interstate into a virtual parking lot each winter. North Kendall Drive, a suburban Miami thoroughfare described as a "road to nowhere" when it was built some 20 years ago, is now almost as choked as Manhattan streets. The number of airports considered by the FAA to be severely congested, meaning they suffer from annual flight delays of 20,000 hours or more, is expected to increase from 18 in 1986 to 32 by 1996 if no action is taken.

In a sense, auto and airline congestion are parallel problems, each with its own causes and remedies, but the two forms of gridlock intersect in a harmful way on the bottom line of U.S. businesses. Congestion is helping boost the total cost of moving people and goods, which amounted to $792 billion in the U.S. last year, or 17.6% of the gross national product. Delays and disruptions can quickly spread inflationary price increases through the economy. Case in point: gridlock can play havoc with the just-in-time inventory system, a popular Japanese-style management technique in which manufacturers bring in parts at the last minute rather than stockpiling large quantities.

The finite resources of time and fuel are squandered as autos and aircraft stand motionless on their concrete slabs. Air-travel delays in 1986, according to FAA estimates, created $1.8 billion in extra operating expenses for airlines and cost passengers $3.2 billion in lost time. As for motorists, the Transportation Department calculates that in 1985 vehicles on U.S. freeways racked up 722 million hours in delays, a number that is expected to rise to 3.9 billion hours by the year 2005 if no improvements are made. (Today's average motorist will spend an estimated six months of his lifetime waiting for red lights to change, according to a study by Priority Management Pittsburgh, a time-management consulting firm.) All that stop-and-go travel wasted nearly 3 billion gal. of gasoline in 1984, or about 4% of annual U.S. consumption, according to the latest Transportation Department estimate. Last year planes waiting to take off or circling for a landing used some 500 billion gal. of jet fuel, about 3.6% of 1987's total.

Executives say they are spending too much valuable time waiting on the taxiway. In a poll of 461 members of the Executive Committee, a group of presidents and chief executives, 36% said they have lost job efficiency because of air-travel delays. To be sure of arriving on time at a meeting in another city, many business travelers take the precaution of flying the night before their appointment, saddling their company with the additional cost of a hotel room.

Commuters who drive to work often show up too tired or too irritated to function effectively. Chronic exposure to traffic congestion, according to a study by Psychologist Raymond Novaco at the University of California at Irvine, tends to give drivers "an increase in baseline blood pressure, lowering of frustration tolerance, increase in negative mood and aggressive driving habits." The outbreak of freeway violence in California last year, when more than 100 freeway shootings and rock-throwing incidents took place, was not an aberration. On one Sunday last month, five separate highway shootings occurred in Oregon and Colorado.

Civic leaders in congested cities have begun to understand that their traffic problems will drive away business. For one thing, companies in gridlocked cities have trouble luring employees from other locales. "Today the relative ease or difficulty of commuting and parking is a major factor in the choice of employment," says Donn Knight, vice president of the Government Employees Insurance Co. in Chevy Chase, Md. Some Los Angeles manufacturing companies have fled to less congested cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix, and corporations have moved their headquarters from New York City to Dallas and Orlando. Says Sigurd Grava, professor of urban planning at Columbia University: "Congestion can play an important role in the life and death of a city." When Oregon Governor Neil Goldschmidt, a former U.S. Transportation Secretary, got caught in a traffic jam in Seattle, he took the occasion to get out of his car and pass out his card to other stranded motorists, extending a tongue-in-cheek invitation to move to his less-crowded state.

The one consolation for U.S. businesses is that companies in competing industrial countries have similar problems. In Western Europe, where air travel increased 8% in 1987 and is expected to jump more than 7% this year, terminals have become mob scenes. At Munich's airport one day this summer, congestion prompted officials to cancel 27 of Lufthansa's 59 domestic flights. A prime cause of the crunch is Europe's fractured air-control system, which is composed of 42 separate civilian control centers, plus additional military jurisdictions.

Auto traffic too is increasingly gridlocked, from West Germany's autobahns to the streets of Paris. Despite Europe's efficient trains and subways, rail service is gradually losing customers because the past half-decade's prosperity has enabled so many people to buy cars. Governments have launched costly road-building programs, but new highways like London's two-year-old M25 beltway have quickly become just as jammed as the old routes.

Japan is also suffering relentless traffic tie-ups on its narrow streets. In the past decade, the number of registered vehicles in Tokyo has jumped 49%, to 5.2 million, but roads have been expanded only about 4%. Everyday traffic is called tsukin jigoku, or commuting hell. Even so, most Japanese look upon the crowding as a traditional problem that poses no grave threat to their country's productivity.

American business executives wish they could say the same. Their workers are increasingly caught in traffic because commuting patterns have changed drastically in recent decades. The interstate highway system was originally designed to carry motorists primarily from city to city; its beltways were constructed mainly as bypasses for long-distance travelers. Local commuters, by contrast, generally moved in and out of urban downtown areas in a radial pattern, along the paths of mass transit and major thoroughfares. But the majority of work is no longer downtown: the suburbs contain 60% of current metropolitan jobs and 67% of all new ones, according to the Transportation Department. As a result, many workers commute from one suburb to another, and they crowd onto the beltways because mass transit and other roads are not well developed along those routes.

At the same time, the movement of women into the work force has produced a second commuter in most households. A suburban, two-income family typically owns two cars for the parents and often a third car for teenagers to take to school or the mall. In the affluent Washington suburb of Fairfax County, Va., the number of autos has increased almost 84% since 1975, nearly three times as fast as the population growth of 31%.

For many suburbs, the beltway serves as Main Street, lined with office buildings, shopping complexes and Cineplexes that attract more and more home buyers. The Washington Beltway is a notoriously clogged 64-mile loop that carried an estimated 466,000 vehicles a day in 1976 and now handles 735,000. The average speed for Beltway commuters driving across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from Virginia suburbs to Maryland communities is currently 23 m.p.h., down from 47 m.p.h. in 1981.

In a sense, the interstate system's big, broad freeways invited today's congestion. When the interstates were built, 90% funded by the U.S. Government, most suburbs viewed them as all the highway they would ever need. Coalitions of environmentalists and taxpayers defeated plans for additional major arteries in San Francisco, Boston and other cities in the 1960s and '70s, when they would have been cheaper to build. "Highway expansion was perhaps the first victim of the not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Now we are paying the piper," says Jose Gomez-Ibanez, a professor of public policy and urban planning at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

As it turned out, the interstate system proved a much greater stimulant to suburban development than anyone expected. As houses in the inner rings of suburbs became more expensive because of their proximity to jobs, developers began building outer rings of more affordable houses. For suburbs that have been intensively built up, it is too late for additional major highways. "Once development occurs, it is anathema to government to pave over someone's house," says Denton Kent, Fairfax's deputy county executive for planning and development.

Transportation experts generally agree that in most cases a huge highway- building program is not the answer. "We cannot pour asphalt and concrete on the ground fast enough, and in the face of today's political and social environment, I am not sure that people would accept it," says Robert Farris, chief of the Federal Highway Administration. As a practical matter, the cost of buying up suburban houses worth at least $250,000 apiece for a right-of-way would be prohibitive.

Then what can be done to keep traffic moving? Existing highways need to be rebuilt and repaved so that they can carry more volume. The Road Information Program (TRIP), a Washington research group, says federal surveys have estimated that 62% of the 2.1 million miles of paved highways in the U.S. need some form of rehabilitation. In many cases, highways should have extra lanes or wider shoulders so that broken-down or damaged cars, which trigger about 60% of bumper-to-bumper slowdowns, can get out of the way. In the northern suburbs of Los Angeles, planners are studying ways to build a double-decker section of the Ventura Freeway.

But road rebuilding is a budget-busting enterprise. A stretch of Chicago's long-neglected Dan Ryan Expressway that is being rebuilt and widened in places from eight lanes to ten will cost $210 million for just three miles of road. Illinois is getting 90% of the money from the U.S. Government, but that source is not expanding. Federal highway outlays -- financed mostly by gasoline and other excise taxes -- increased from $6.1 billion in fiscal 1977 to $12.8 billion in 1987, barely keeping up with inflation. TRIP estimates the cost of repairing the 278,400 miles of highways in poor to very-poor condition at more than $164 billion. That means state and local governments have to raise daunting amounts of cash.

Also costly to fix are America's crumbling bridges. Many are too narrow or corroded to handle the load of traffic from connecting roads. The 1,850-ft., four-lane Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit with Windsor, Ont., which seemed spacious when it opened in 1929, suffers daily backups, pinching the flow of trade between the U.S. and Canada. Federal surveys indicate that 42% of the 573,928 bridges more than 20 ft. long need to be rehabilitated or replaced, at a total cost of more than $50 billion.

Until cities can revamp their streets and highways, they will have to work harder to manage the traffic flow. Authorities in Los Angeles, Chicago and other metropolitan areas have installed electronic sensors in the pavement to get a continuous reading of traffic speed and volume. When a highway becomes clogged, controllers can adjust the timing of stoplights on the on-ramps to reduce the flow of vehicles. In Virginia traffic supervisors use remote TV cameras installed along stretches of I-66 and I-395 to spot breakdowns, to which they immediately dispatch tow trucks that dispense free gasoline if a motorist needs it. Chicago's highway authority operates a huge mobile crane, dubbed Mad Max, that can lift up to 60 tons, and has moved obstacles ranging from semitrailers to a 500-lb. runaway pig.

To a great extent, traffic misery is what Americans get in return for preferring their cozy vehicles to mass transit. "We've made a massive commitment to autos, especially those with only one or two people in them. Now we're paying the price," says Richard Kiley, chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority for the New York City area. Gridlock has inspired some cities that once spurned mass transit to launch bold new building programs. Los Angeles, which tore up its streetcar tracks during the '50s, broke ground in 1986 on a $5 billion transit system that will include a four-mile-long subway from the downtown civic center to MacArthur Park and a 22-mile-long rail line from downtown to nearby Long Beach.

Yet mass transit is no cure-all and often proves inefficient in America's sprawling suburbs. Many critics question whether subways and other heavy-rail systems can be effective anywhere but in a few very densely populated cities. Even Washington's clean and efficient 70-mile-long, $7 billion Metro subway, which carries almost 500,000 riders a day, meets only 70% of its operating expenses from fares.

Since the major complaint about rail systems is that they do not take riders where they want to go, some experts believe the better mass-transit investment is an extensive network of buses. Says Transportation Secretary Burnley: "They can be rerouted overnight to meet changing transportation patterns. We have got to have the emphasis on flexibility." Buses work especially well when they can zip along freeways in high-occupancy lanes that are restricted to buses, vans and car-pool vehicles. During the morning rush hour on Virginia's I-350, two high-occupancy lanes carry an average of about 33,000 commuters, a bit more than the four regular lanes, yet in only one-fifth as many vehicles.

To get cars off the highways, businesses and government need to find more ways to discourage driving. Since fuel is relatively cheap, a greater gasoline tax would be in order. Another step is to restrict more lanes to car-pool vehicles, since the average passenger car now carries only 1.3 riders for trips to work. The U.S. even gives drivers a tax loophole, which should be abolished. MTA Chairman Kiley points out that under federal law, employers can give their workers tax-free compensation for parking, with no cap, while contributions for mass-transit are limited to $15 a month. In Manhattan, where parking can cost more than $350 a month, the policy can mean a lucrative subsidy for drivers.

Air-travel delays are expected to become chronic in the next decade despite stepped-up efforts by carriers to keep planes on schedule. The Transportation Department says that during June, the 13 major airlines managed to operate 84.3% of their flights within 15 minutes of being on time, the best performance since the Government began publishing the statistics last September. (The worst figure was 66.4%, in December 1987.) But one reason for the improvement was that the airlines simply added minutes to their flight times. Says Herbert Kelleher, chairman of Southwest Airlines: "If anybody thinks the problem has been solved, they are wrong, and I'll tell you why. Sure, you are on time, but it is taking you twice as long to fly from A to B."

That is the inevitable consequence of the shortage of airport capacity. Such facilities as New York's LaGuardia and Boston's Logan were built in an era of smaller, propeller-driven planes, which could use relatively short runways. Hemmed in by development, such airports will have trouble handling any significant increase in traffic. As a result, "we're heading for one of the most dramatic cases of peacetime rationing this country has ever seen," declares Philip Bakes, president of Eastern Air Lines. Says Clifton Moore, chief administrator of Los Angeles International: "There may be a time when you will have to book a flight well in advance, or pay someone for a black- market ticket." Rationing of sorts is already beginning at Boston's airport, where officials have tried to shoo away small aircraft by quadrupling the landing fee to as much as $100 a visit, while reducing the charge for passenger jets.

Some airports could accommodate more planes at off-peak hours if they were not restricted by noise complaints from residential neighbors. Washington's National Airport, which is booked solid during the day, allows only 13 flights between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Late-model jets like the Boeing 757 and 767 are half as noisy as the early 727s, but hundreds of the older planes are still rattling suburban windows.

More airports are needed, but finding a site with willing neighbors is nearly impossible in most cities. The first completely new airport since 1974 will be Denver's, which voters in nearby Adams County approved in May. Denver's current airport, Stapleton, was built to handle 18 million passengers a year, and is swamped by 35 million. The new $3 billion airport is expected to accommodate 50 million by the mid-1990s. Colorado Governor Roy $ Romer, who campaigned for the new airport, made an economic appeal. Said he: "This airport is our one and only chance. We can become the transportation hub of this country."

Because new airports are financed by gate fees, airlines have sometimes been reluctant to support them -- the added cost would mean higher fares or squeezed profits. But the major carriers have formed a lobbying group, Partnership for Improved Air Travel, which among other things is urging the Government to lead an airport-building program similar to the interstate- highway push.

Airports take years to build, but other remedies for congestion may help in the meantime. The FAA is experimenting with a finely tuned radar that will enable airports to land planes on closely spaced parallel runways, even in bad weather. Some airports are building high-speed runway turnoff lanes so that a jet can move out of the next plane's way before coming to a full stop, thus boosting a runway's capacity. The FAA is exploring the possibility of opening military airfields for civilian use, among them El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, near Los Angeles. Boeing and Bell Helicopter are developing aircraft that can take off vertically from a landing pad, then fly like an airplane on trips of up to 300 miles.

A formidable alternative to both the auto and airplane is coming: the magnetic-levitation train, or maglev. Supported and propelled by the force of powerful electromagnets, the streamlined maglev could reach speeds of 300 m.p.h. or more. West Germany and Japan are developing prototypes based on different operating systems. One proposed high-speed maglev route in the U.S. is a 230-mile-long link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a five-hour auto trip that the maglev could cover in about 70 minutes.

Breaking gridlock will take all the ingenuity the U.S. can muster, especially in a time when the nation cannot afford to buy millions of yards of concrete to pave over the problem. Says Burnley: "Because we are a free country, people are able to change their travel patterns overnight. So the challenge is to be able to think more creatively." But meanwhile, taxpayers and travelers will have to shoulder the cost for a prudent amount of highway patching and airport building. The longer such work is postponed, the more chronic the gridlock will become. If America still hungers to move, it will have to pay the fare.

With reporting by Gisela Bolte/Washington, Thomas McCarroll/New York and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles