People used to have mainly 9-5 jobs, which meant that you could count on traffic patters being about like this:
-&-9 AM: People leave home, drive to train station or direct to work
-11:30 to 12:30 PM: Lunch time-some people leave office for lunch
4:00 PM-5 PM: The evening rush hour-people leave office, return home.
Now, it seems that there is continuous traffice all day! I have observed that traffic on Rt. 128 (the ring road around Boston, MA) starts at around 6 AM. continues heavy till around 10 AM. There is a break-then it starts agian around 2 PM, continues heavy till around & PM.
So what is going on? Are people working flex time? Or are people making such long commutes that they are on the road for hours?
Something tells methat this is the root of our high energy consumption: it is so expensive now to live in urban areas 9where many of the jobs are) that you HAVE to drive hopurs tobe able to afford a house!
People still mostly have 9 to 5 jobs, although flex time is making an impact.
The roads that the pols continually refused to update are finally so overloaded that, even if you live fairly close, you still need to leave super-early to get to work on time. I only live 12 miles from my job, but it usually takes 30-60 minutes to get there, regardless of whether I take the freeway or surface roads.
Add to that those who have done as you said, and moved to the boonies to get affordable housing.
At 2 PM, the schools let out, and parents (both of whom have to work to pay the bills) who have arranged to do so leave work to pick up the kids and take them wherever they’re going. The backup from this catches the folks who skip out of work by 4 or 4:30, and Rush Hour has to last long past dinnertime just to get all the cars through.
Plus you have employers cutting back on both staff and salaries, so the people who are left doing twice the work for half the pay and need to stay late have to either suck it up or go jobless.
A lot of people live in New Hampshire and commute into Boston. Some may have flex time. Others (especially high tech which is big in Boston) may not work traditional 9-5 hours. Also, many people will leave early or later in order to try to beat the rush. Generally, I noticed that Boston traffic would get congested from around 7 - 10am , then almost nothing, then busy again around 3 - 7 pm then light again. That seems pretty typical to me.
I don’t know how you would fix the problem. By necessity, most of a companies personal and equipment need to be in close proximity (IOW the same building or complex) but people can live spread out wherever they want. Unless you plan to force people to live in corporate housing, expect that there will be traffic congestion as people converge on business centers in the morning and dispurse to the residential neighborhoods in the evenings.
128 is actually lighter now than it was two years ago, at least from the North Shore to Burlington. It certainly does seem to last for a long time though, doesn’t it?
Part of the reason is people moving as far as they can stand to commute away after the bubble burst. The housing market stayed hot, but it’s much harder now to get a job that will pay enough to live near the Hub. Another part is the very high number of non traditional jobs that exist along the 128 corridor. I work pretty close to a normal schedule right now, but that is highly unusual for me, and very rare for people in my field.
The solution might lie in adding light rail along 128, I know if I could reasonably take public transportation to work I would. I have no idea how many people would follow that… after all there are still quite a number of people who drive to work in the Hub itself, and I’ve never understood that.
It’s definately down from what it was during the peak of the boom. I’d argue that it’s actually up from a couple of years ago because of the improving economy. But, that’s just my observation.
More people in the high tech market can work flex time. Lots of people I work with come in late or early to beat the traffic. However, there is still a majority who work fixed schedules something like 9-5.
Route 3 just opened the third lane this week. That will help some more people from NH come and clog up the 128 belt!
I agree that there should be other places besides Boston where the trains head to. There should be more options so that you could take a train into the 128 belt jobs.
It’s too bad that the telecommuting boom, which never actually happened, was blindsided by the rise in outsourcing. Telecommuting would have alleviated the traffic problems caused by population growth, but now most of us are relieved when our employers say they don’t believe in working from home, and that you need to be onsite to work effectively.
It would help if you didn’t use the worst driving clusterfuck city in the United States as an example. Traffic density is getting higher in relation to both the number of people alive and also the number of drivers per household.
When I was young, a 2 car household was unusual. Now 1 car households are rare. In the early 70’s you could easily cruise at 100 mph on the interstate because of the limited cars on the road. You always drove in the right hand lane and moved to the left lane just to pass.
I gave up commuting 16 miles to Boston in 45-60 minutes and moved 800 miles south. Now I live in the middle of a city of 95,000 and reverse commute 11 miles in 13-16 minutes, 7 miles of which are at 70 mph on an Interstate. The inbound a.m. backup creep is 4 miles long. Have seen 128 or S.E. Xway traffic only on holiday visits for many years now. Location, location, location. Maybe some undergrads should consider going into traffic engineering or transportation planning. Looks to be a growth industry.
