Traffic Congestion After the Pandemic

Some researchers from Vanderbilt University (and one from Cornell) asked what will happen to traffic congestion after the pandemic. If people reduced the use of transit for commuting, they concluded, congestion will get a lot worse, which is “detrimental to everyone’s commute.” Though they never say so explicitly, the implication is that we need to spend a lot of money supporting transit agencies to prevent that congestion.

Yet their paper is greatly oversimplified and ignores many things. Most importantly, people working at home are going to make a bigger difference to congestion than transit riders. Before the pandemic, more people worked at home than rode transit to work. If after the pandemic the number of people working at home on any given day is double what it was before the pandemic, then there would be less traffic even if no one rode transit.

In fact, the number of people working home is likely to much more than double. More than 40 percent of workers are working at home due to the pandemic, and at least a quarter of those say they expect to continue working at home after than pandemic. That would triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, half of those who expect to continue working at home say they will move to a different location, generally a suburb or smaller city.

The paper also ignores the fact that people adjust their behavior in response to congestion. One of the lead authors of the paper, Dan Work, was quoted as saying, “Road-building is an expensive proposition that doesn’t solve the underlying issue of high commute times in the long term.”

This claim is based on Anthony Downs’ “triple-convergence” theory, which is that people respond to congestion by changing their routes, the time of day that they commute, or their modes; when new roads relieve congestion, then some of them will change back and the roads appear as congested as they were before. (In fact, while they may be just as congested at peak hour, they are usually congested for fewer hours of the day.)
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If you believe that the presence or absence of new roads doesn’t make a difference for congestion, then it also must be true that the presence or absence of transit doesn’t make much of a difference to congestion. In other words, if you don’t believe new roads can relieve congestion, then you cannot possibly believe that transit relieves congestion.

More particularly, people will respond to any congestion after the pandemic in the same way they responded before. The economy is not going to recover overnight, but as it recovers people will decide what to do about congestion for themselves, whether by changing their routes, times of travel, or modes.

Some will respond by changing their work locations. Several company heads have already said they expect to move people from crowded cities to the suburbs or smaller towns. That will relieve congestion as much as letting more people work at home.

Transit is going to suffer a huge loss of riders. Instead of wringing hands over the future of this industry that was already obsolete and all but irrelevant (except as a tax burden) in most cities, it’s time to figure out how to reinvent it so it isn’t a money pit and is actually doing some good.