About That Commute...

My brother and I often lament how much harder it is to travel around our home town (the NYC metro area) now than in years past. Our most commonly used artery across the decades - the Belt Parkway - seems an eternal parking lot nowadays despite a massive infrastructure project that completed a few years ago.

This doesn't affect us as it used to, since we ceased our commuting ways when we retired from the restaurant business, but we still plan our travels back to the "old country" around anticipated and expected traffic jams. While there are many ways to skin the New York metro area traffic cat, and apps such as Waze are of great benefit, the fundamental problem of too many people moving around at once remains (even though New York's population has declined a bit last couple years).

Roads are, as a simple matter of present-day fact, a "public good" that's managed by the government we empower and the people we elect to head it up. Given how fundamental travel is to our lives, "public servants" should be focused - nay, fixated - on making our travels as easy as possible.

The benefits are myriad - and not just to us as individuals. There are a finite number of hours in a day, and the amount of time we have available to spend commuting to and from our jobs is limited. The distance we can travel in that time is dependent on many factors, including the degree of congestion we routinely encounter during those commutes. That distance constitutes an effective "radius of employment," i.e. all the jobs available within our commuting time, and the larger that radius, the greater the number and variety of jobs we can choose from.

That, in turn, speaks to economic productivity. The more jobs we have to choose from, the more apt we are to find one that we excel in, and the greater the wealth we create in doing that job. The more candidates for a job a company can find within commuting radius, the more able it is to hire the most productive for that job. Thus, even apart from the personal liberty aspects of this, there's rational reason in improving our mobility.

Alas, rational reason is an alien concept in governance.

Instead, we get a whole lot of "for our own good" management displacing "service." NYC's traffic flow met the pint-sized Napoleon named Michael Bloomberg, who hated cars and the freedom they provide, and who appointed another car-hater to head the city's Department of Transportation.

Suddenly, Broadway got shrunk to two lanes wide, bicycle lanes sprung up everywhere, parking spaces were deleted... and the outer boroughs' traffic patterns remained neglected. Similarly car-hating Manhattanites rejoiced, but those who had limited or no alternatives bristled under the efforts to make their already-difficult commutes longer. And, as always, the outer boroughs get little attention.

Managing transportation in a congested and hard-bounded place such as New York City obviously involves trade-offs, decisions about how best to allocate resources, and solutions that improve things in the aggregate. That's not how our Best-and-Brightest usually operate, though. They can't help but incorporate agendas into their calculus. They have outcomes they themselves would prefer to see, even if those outcomes fall short of an optimal, unbiased end-state. Social engineering trumps transportation engineering, prioritizing what would produce "benefit" above reducing the combined commute time for all who travel through, in, and out of their domain. Inevitably, "green" and social-justice considerations are added to the olio, and winners and losers are decided by those who know what's good for us better than we do.

The ultimate goal is to cajole us into living closer to each other, on a smaller overall footprint, so that we can get around on foot, bicycles, or via public transportation.

They call it 'smart growth,' and Robert Poole, the director of transportation policy at Reason, ably takes it down here.

Another, more recent problem with long commutes lies in the reluctance of workers to return to their offices after the pandemic lockdowns. While the motivated are certainly able to be as (more, even) productive working from home (WFH), there's a reality that many who WFH aren't as productive as they are in an office setting. Furthermore, all the local businesses that rely on those who commute to work suffer. Commuting time is lost productivity, but WFH can be as well.

No matter what, our economy and society benefit if our ability to move about is facilitated. That this leaves our liberty in our hands, rather than curated by our betters, upsets and offends those betters, and it's a big part of why they do unto us instead of serving us.

It's the same refrain. Our public servants don't really serve us as much as they try to manage us. That so many of them do their best work in figuring how to elude the limits of the Constitution they've sworn to uphold and defend tells us what we need to know.

Proper road management should be about getting us moving about more freely, not about making driving so miserable we alter our behaviors. My now-occasional sojourn on the Belt Parkway is 38 miles long. Without traffic, it's a 45 minute trip - of no major consequence. Via public transportation, it's over two hours under ideal circumstances, meaning that’s not a viable option. Nowadays, it's routine that traffic adds 30 unpleasant minutes, and oftentimes even more, to that trip, and such congestion is an increasing part of city life.

It's no wonder people leave.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.