THE ROAD MORE TRAVELED

It is the year 2030. Your grandson is trying to drive through Lee County, Florida, to get to his job at the big hospital. He’s wearing a prescription dental guard which prevents him from gnashing and grinding his teeth at all the traffic clogging the highway. (In 2030, everyone attempting to drive in Lee County is wearing some kind of protective dental device to prevent molars from being ground down to the gums.)

While drivers complained way back in 2006 about traffic in Lee County, that now seems like the good ol’ days compared with the road rage epidemic of 2030. Signs along the road urge motorists to "drive friendly" to try to prevent the occupants of gun rack-equipped pickup trucks from shooting at cars that cut in front of them. (Even back in 2006, sophisticated towns like Fort Myers and Naples were referred to as "the redneck Riviera.")

Back in 2006, Lee Country was only the 49th most congested urban area in the USA. But in 2030, it is the 10th most congested. That means that in rush hour it takes 36% longer to drive across Lee Country than it does in non-peak times. The traffic mess in Lee County in 2030 is about the same as the congestion in Dallas back in 2006. (And Dallas in 2030 is now as bad as New York City was in 2006.)

Despite major road building programs completed since 2006, traffic has become much worse all across America. This has changed much of our lives for better and for worse.

Robbery is down because thieves can no longer make quick getaways in their cars. Last week in Chicago, two men who held up a 7-11 were pursued and caught in stalled traffic by a bicycle cop. ($800 bicycles are now replacing $40,000 police cars, ever since a news program showed a police car in pursuit of an escaped criminal who was stalled in traffic five car lengths ahead. The two cops sat for an hour eating doughnuts instead of leaving their car and walking up to the crooks and arresting them. A very red-faced Mayor Daley the Third cursed the media and vowed a major police department shake-up.)
Property taxes are down, since the need to fund public schools has fallen. School buses take so long transporting children to and from their houses that most children are being home-schooled. While home schooling is booming, the teachers’ union is upset because the home scholars are outperforming the traditionally schooled on the SATs.
Commuting to work takes so long that the McMansions of 2006 have been converted to neighborhood satellite offices which allow employees to work in an office atmosphere near their homes. Daddies, now home for dinner early, are finding it more difficult to dodge doing “female” house chores. “Macho” apron sales, endorsed by Peyton Manning III, are robust.
The big box stores declined due to traffic gridlock, giving rise to a rebirth of neighborhood strip centers, laid out more gracefully than the originals. As people walk to do their shopping, the nation’s rising obesity problem moves into reverse. Play dates decline because it takes parents too long to drive their children around. Kids now go out and play with whoever is around, pretty much as they did in prehistoric times (the 1930s and 1940s). Soccer dies as soccer moms disappear.
Oxygen bars abound because gridlock produces incredible amounts of carbon, CO2, sulphur and other threats to the lungs. Gridlock-generated smog begins to reduce the lifespan, thus solving Social Security before Congress gets around to acting.
The airlines and airports suffer, as getting to the airport requires more time than the actual flights themselves. Communications replaces transportation as corporations move fully into the business of moving ideas instead of bodies. A newfangled software program allows the salesman to shake hands with the purchasing agent by placing his hand on the screen. If the hand image is not returned, he knows the account is in trouble.
Flu epidemics decline as salesmen now press their screens instead of the flesh. As fewer and fewer people fly, cold and flu germs recycled through the plane land on fewer and fewer passengers. Parents give their screens big hugs instead of clutching their germy, runny-nosed kids to their breasts.

Is this just a horrible fantasy, or could the nation’s traffic problem have been solved starting in 2006?

According to one expert, it could. A preventative road build-out program started in 2006 could have preserved the 2006 version of the American way of life.

But the cost was estimated to be $533 billion.

Instead, history shows that back in 2006, the nation preferred to put the money into expensive military adventures.

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