Traffic increases, along with Post traffic reporting quality

A Texas Transportation Institute study says that traffic has increased in the Washington area. Annapolis-based Post reporter Ashley Halsey III, who took over the regional traffic beat in the Post’s recent reorganization, covers the issue this morning, in a nicely balanced article that avoids assuming that more freeways is the only solution, or casting the issue in terms of frustrated drivers versus the government.

In fact, Halsey does enough research to recognize that another study earlier this year, by MWCOG, came to the opposite conclusion. COG’s Ron Kirby told Halsey that widening some freeways might address bottlenecks, but that better solutions to the region’s congestion include encouraging people to live closer to work and building better transit. Rail lines, after all, move many more people more quickly than highways do.

Hopefully, along with Robert McCartney’s renewed attention to transit, Halsey’s coverage will continue to portray transportation as a multi-faceted issue affecting users of all modes of travel. Lena Sun does an excellent job of covering Metro issues, but when a newspaper assigns one person to the transit beat and another to the traffic beat, it’s often too common for the traffic reporter to focus only on the immediate desires of motorists. They primarily interview drivers, and especially the frustrated ones; they go to AAA first for quotes; and they fall into the understandable but dangerous frame that anything getting in the way of each driver moving wherever they want, as fast as they want, is an attack on freedom.

It’s true that building more roads, writing fewer parking tickets, and keeping bicyclists and pedestrians out of the way would make some frustrated drivers happy. However, building a train line so that some of the people on the road can switch to the train would also alleviate the pressure. Helping more people live closer to jobs would reduce the number of cars competing with the angry driver for space. If more people walked or bicycled, fewer would be driving.

Many of these options cost less money, and the impatient motorist probably doesn’t want to pay more taxes, either. These are just not the options the average driver instinctively suggests. But a good journalist doesn’t automatically accept the frame that one neighbor first recommends. A good journalist tries to represent the needs of all readers and give some higher-level perspective on a topic.

Halsey also injected a bit of that perspective in last Thursday’s article on highway safety. That article reported on a study by the Transportation Construction Coalition, which found that highway design contributes to many crashes. Halsey didn’t fit in interviews with anyone who could have explained that widening and straightening curves can actually decrease auto and pedestrian safety by inciting speeding and making roads less friendly to walkers and cyclists, but he did point out that the Transportation Construction Coalition is “an industry group that advocates for boosting spending on road construction.” We’ve become so accustomed to reporters uncritically regurgitating talking points from organizations with a financial interest in certain policies that it’s become a surprise when an article actually points out the potential conflict of interest.

Not all articles about the congestion study avoid “windshield perspective.” The Express story takes the common frame of using the pronoun “you” to represent drivers stuck in traffic, and claims the congestion worsened “despite massive spending on highway renewal.” As BeyondDC points out, there’s no evidence that the spending contributed to lower congestion; induced demand would tell us that the spending probably increased the congestion instead by driving development farther out along those roads. That article lists Halsey and the Post as the byline, but the same phrases don’t appear in the Post piece. Was that another version by Halsey, or the work of the Express editors?

In fact, we’ve spent $2.4 billion on the Wilson Bridge and $700 million on the Springfield Interchange. We’re spending $3 billion or more on the ICC, $2 billion on HOT lanes on the Beltway in Virginia. Add in I-395 HOT lanes and these projects total about $8-10 billion, enough to build a couple new subway lines or pay for a lot of streetcars, light rail, and BRT.

Perhaps Halsey’s more balanced conception comes from the fact that he himself uses roads in more than one way. Halsey cycles recreationally, and unfortunately suffered a bad bicycle crash a year and a half ago. He wrote about the five crashes he’s experienced, saying,

Five incidents. Three times I was driving, twice I was riding.

About once a week somebody says, “You’re not riding that bike again, are you?”

Nobody ever asks if I’ve resumed driving.

Yet my 33-mile commute into Washington is a whole lot more dangerous than anything I’ve ever done on a bicycle.

Halsey is no anti-car radical who won’t drive and can’t understand the plight of drivers; he actually has a longer auto commute than most in the area. (It’s too bad we no longer have a commuter train from Annapolis for him and others to ride.) At the same time, he doesn’t necessarily see a road’s mission as solely accommodating auto commuters at the highest possible speeds. He realizes roads are multimodal because he utilizes various modes. It’s like having a personal technology reporter who actually uses smart phones, Web browsers, e-book readers, search engines, and DVRs.

The Post has that. It’s about time for the road coverage to do the same, and move away from the incendiary ledes of the recent past. Now if only the Fairfax beat reporters actually spent real time experiencing both urban and suburban places.