{"id":595,"date":"2009-07-10T08:09:59","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T12:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/commuting-waste-quantified.html"},"modified":"2009-07-10T08:09:59","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T12:09:59","slug":"commuting-waste-quantified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/commuting-waste-quantified.html","title":{"rendered":"Commuting Waste Quantified"},"content":{"rendered":"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.oregonlive.com\/environment\/index.ssf\/2009\/07\/portlandarea_drivers_get_an_ho.html\">\n<img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" border=0 width=240 height=319 src=\"http:\/\/blog.oregonlive.com\/environment_impact\/2009\/07\/medium_GS.41ROAD108.jpg\"><\/a>\nPortland, Oregon comes out well on\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.oregonlive.com\/environment\/index.ssf\/2009\/07\/portlandarea_drivers_get_an_ho.html\">\na recent study of transportation in the U.S.:<\/a>\n<blockquote>\nWithout mass transit, the average Portland area commuter would spend five hours more a year in rush-hour congestion, costing the region $98 million a year in lost time and wasted fuel, the Texas study says.\n<\/blockquote>\nThe Texas study is the\n<a href=\"http:\/\/tti.tamu.edu\/infofor\/media\/feature.htm\">\nUrban Mobility Report 2009<\/a>\nfrom the <a href=\"http:\/\/tti.tamu.edu\/\">Texas Transportation Institute<\/a>.\nIt quantifies what we lose from commuting:\n<ul>\n<li>The overall cost (based on wasted fuel and lost productivity) reached $87.2 billion in 2007 \u2014 more than $750 for every U.S. traveler.\n<li>The total amount of wasted fuel topped 2.8 billion gallons \u2014 three weeks&#8217; worth of gas for every traveler.\n<li>The amount of wasted time totaled 4.2 billion hours \u2014 nearly one full work week (or vacation week) for every traveler.\n<\/ul>\nThe study recommends strategies for dealing with it:\n<ul>\n<li>Get as much use as possible out of the transportation system we have.\n<li>Add roadway and public transportation capacity in the places where it is needed most.\n<li>Change our patterns, employing ideas like ridesharing and flexible work times to avoid traditional &#8220;rush hours.&#8221;\n<li>Provide more choices, such as alternate routes, telecommuting and toll lanes for faster and more reliable trips.\n<li>Diversify land development patterns, to make walking, biking and mass transit more practical.\n<li>Adopt realistic expectations, recognizing for instance that large urban areas are going to be congested, but they don&#8217;t have to stay that way all day long.\n<\/ul>\nFortunately, Lowndes County is not a large urban area, so it doesn&#8217;t have to be congested.\nNote that none of the recommendations include &#8220;just build more roads.&#8221;\nTwo of them involve public transportation.\nAnd land development patterns that include services next to subdivisions\ncould help a lot.\nI attended a recent Valdosta City Council meeting in which inhabitants\nof one subdivision were bitterly complaining because the developers wanted\nto put a few stores on a lot next to the subdivision.\nMaybe as the price of gas goes back up they&#8217;ll discover the attraction\nof walking to the store to get eggs and milk&#8230;.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Portland, Oregon comes out well on a recent study of transportation in the U.S.: Without mass transit, the average Portland area commuter would spend five hours more a year in rush-hour congestion, costing the region $98 million a year in lost time and wasted fuel, the Texas study says. The Texas study is the Urban [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[1101,1951,1948,1956,3,2,1950,1953,1952,1810,1955,1954,1957,45,1949],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-bicycle","tag-bus","tag-commuting","tag-congestion","tag-georgia","tag-lowndes-county","tag-mass-transit","tag-oregon","tag-portland","tag-rail","tag-texas-am","tag-texas-travel-institute","tag-urban-mobility-report-2009","tag-valdosta","tag-waste"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-9B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}