There are few hours above the red line, but we pay mightily for them in infrastructure.

Noting the exceptions of those few cities stuck in permanent rush hour, peak is the hour that rankles.  When angry citizens gripe about congestion they are not thinking of 10 a.m. or 10 p.m.; they are concerned about the hours in the morning and afternoon when most of us still go to a job. 

When DOT or public works widens a road or constructs a parallel facility, they are doing so to address, naturally, the times when those roads are fullest.  Here is an excerise you can do at home.  Go to your local public works or DOT website and get traffic counts by hour on a large road, maybe a U.S. highway.  Plug those trips by hour into a spreadsheet and create a line graph and it should look like the illustration here of U.S. 90 in Tallahassee, Florida.  Are there two peaks in yours, with maybe a smaller one at lunch hour?  Sure there is.

U.S. 90 in Tallahassee is being widened right now.  This $90 million project includes 4 miles of two additional lanes or 8 lane-miles.  That’s more than $10 million per mile and once that capacity is consumed—as it always is—to increase the capacity once again will be vastly more expensive. 

Transit may not be the easiest way to go shopping at the grocery store or Home Depot, especially in the South and West where densities are low overall.  But for most people in the non-retail/restaurant sector, the work trip will be at the same time, from the same origin, to the same destination, along the same path 240 times per year; the shear predictability of the work trip makes it perfect for transit: learn the schedule once and you are golden.  We can build a lot of great transit infrastructure for $90 million and adding capacity to a transit project would mean the cost of vehicles and drivers, not the right-of-way acquisition ($50 million dollars of the above price tag), concrete, asphalt, permitting, environmental mitigatation, labor, etc. that characterizes a road project.

Road widenings are done for the peaks, the points over the dotted red line in this graphic, what I call the hundred million dollar line, which means these resources are intended to correct deficiencies during only 4 or 5 hours of the day.  These are precisely the same times when transit is most effective at delivering service, a great example for you to use in your community in explaining the importance of transit infrastructure and funding.