Photo by winged photography on Flickr.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that a Prince William County subdivision has the longest average commute in the nation. The piece factually describes the routines of the residents as they cope with such a long commute. However, it unintentionally ends up being a scathing commentary on the suburban living arrangement.

One of the primary criticisms of car-dependent suburbia is that affordable housing is very far from job centers. First, a subdivision is developed on top of a piece of wilderness. Over time, a cluster of strip malls open up on the nearest arterial road. Perhaps a few office buildings that are surrounded by seas of parking lots open up near the strip malls. An edge city is born. However, the arrival of the jobs and amenities drive up the demand, and consequently the price, for the housing. For the past sixty years, local government’s approach has been to build another greenfield subdivision farther away from the jobs center, instead of more housing in walking distance of the jobs. As a result, writes Eric Weiss in the article,

Open Meadow Lane [as with so many subdivisions, named after the things they paved over] is in one of the many new developments off Linton Hall Road in western Prince William County. Census figures show that its residents have an average one-way commute of 46.3 minutes, compared with the national average of 25.1 minutes. … The 46.3 minute average is longer than commutes in the New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago areas. Three other Washington area communities made the top 12: Fort Washington and Clinton in Prince George’s County and Dale City, also in Prince William.

What these communities have in common is their distance not only from the District, the region’s traditional jobs core, but also from the suburban job centers that have emerged over the past 30 years. It illustrates just how many Washington area workers have embraced the tradeoff between a long commute and affordable suburban living. The crisscrossing across the region from home to work to home again is one of the key reasons why the Washington area has the second-worst traffic congestion in the country, behind Los Angeles.

Without naming it, Weiss is describing the Favored Quarter, the slice of a post-suburban metropolitan region with the bulk of infrastructural and economic investment. In our region, the Favored Quarter is the west-northwest quadrant. Housing in the Favored Quarter is the most expensive in the region because of its proximity to jobs, proximity to amenities, and social standing. Housing outside the Favored Quarter is less expensive, but also comes with the steep price of being far away from jobs and amenities. Three of the four communities cited in the Post article are located approximately on the exact opposite side of the region from the Favored Quarter. In the case of the western Prince William community, they are behind a bottleneck on the closest suburban arterial road that routinely backs up.

This puts a significant burden on the quality of life for those who reside in car-dependent suburbia outside the Favored Quarter:

Kelly Lutz, 40, also loves the neighborhood, although she acknowledges the downside of traffic and long commutes. Linton Hall Road has grown from two lanes to four and intersects Route 29 near Interstate 66, which is the only way out of the community. The area is one of the region’s largest bottlenecks.

“It takes away from family time,” said Lutz, who stays home with her two children. Her husband, Matt, leaves for his job at the Pentagon at 5 a.m. and often doesn’t get home until after 7:30 p.m. Sometimes the commute is 90 minutes one way.

“He stays late to miss the traffic,” she said.

It affects her as well. Lutz said she has developed elaborate strategies for shopping, running errands or meeting friends. A 10:30 a.m. appointment in Tysons Corner, 30 miles away, for example, requires that she leave home no later than 9:15.

Many people also move to car-dependent suburbia in search of better schools. Yet many new suburbia-dwellers soon find that many others had the same brilliant idea. They find that the schools are already crowded as soon as they move in. Many parents consequently opt to pay the tuition for a private school. Ironically, many parents who reside in the urban core District of Columbia opt to do the same in light of the less than perfect reputation of the DC Public School System. How odd. Apparently you can’t just flee the city and expect everything to magically work out:

“They build, build and build,” she said. One of the reasons the family moved to the outer suburb was the school system. But now the schools are so crowded that she sends her children to private school. Her eldest is in seventh grade, and they are looking at other communities for high schools.

What is the state and local governments’ solution to the twin challenges of too-large distance from jobs and overcrowded schools? Is it to concentrate growth in walking distance of transit infrastructure that connects to jobs? Maybe attract some jobs and then encourage walkable development adjacent to them? No. They opted to build more and wider roads.

Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, said the county and state have moved forward on a number of major road projects that have made commuting easier.

Building more and bigger roads seems was the answer to everything during the past sixty years. Is there a lack of affordable housing? Build roads. Are schools overcrowded? Build roads. Have a cold? Forget chicken soup. Build roads.

There’s a problem with that approach: it has been a colossal failure. We have built more and wider roads and traffic congestion has only increased. Schools on the fringes of the region are still crowded as soon as they open up. People live even farther from their jobs than ever. Vehicle Miles Traveled increased until 2008, when the historic increases in gasoline prices, combined with the economic downturn, finally reversed the trend. Those increases in VMT over the decades meant more imported oil, and more carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere. We were, and continue to spend more money on foreign oil, while spewing more pollution into our air, worsening the amount of time we spend in traffic, taxing our infrastructure, and moving our residences farther from jobs. Usually when you spend money you expect a good or service. I can only think of one word to describe spending money to make your life more miserable: insane.

Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” According to Einstein’s definition, Weiss’s article showed that our national transportation policy has been, for the past 60 years, downright crazy.

Cavan Wilk became interested in the physical layout and economic systems of modern human settlements while working on his Master’s in Financial Economics. His writing often focuses on the interactions between a place’s form, its economic systems, and the experiences of those who live in them.  He lives in downtown Silver Spring.