The Grass is always browner
James Lileks notes that people just love to tell stories about how bad they have it:
It's a reaction to the latest study, which puts our traffic in the Tokyo-New Dehli category, I guess. There are spots of the Twin Cities that have bad traffic, agreed. But right now I’m looking at this page of MnDot traffic cams , and it looks like a scene from some strange version of the apocalypse in which the cars experienced the Rapture and the people stayed behind. When these roads are choked all day, then we’ll have horrible conditions. For now we still have it pretty good. Really. If it makes you feel any better, people in Fargo are complaining about traffic these days. It’s worse than ever. Takes a fellow ten minutes to get to the other side of town. Ten! Right now someone in Antartcica is stuck behind another vehicle, thinking: this gets worse every year.
I have to admit though, having done the Maryland to Virginia commute for half a year a decade ago (and it hasn't gotten better since then), I'm very happy that I work out of home office, and that the commutes I do periodically have involve air travel.
Comments
Re: The Grass is always browner
[ anonymous] June 29, 2007 11:17:47.040
Comment by anonymous
Being a resident of downtown Minneapolis, I can honestly say I'm glad I don't have to face the commuter rush hours every day. It's true that most times of the day the traffic on the area's major highways isn't too bad, but that's probably true of the most congested areas of the country. However, that's not the problem. Something like 140,000 people commute (mostly by car) into downtown Minneapolis every day. If the area's economy is to continue to grow, its transportation infrastructure must grow with it. Can anyone imagine a New York or Paris or London without its subway system? And yet, the transportation system of the Twin Cities has not kept up with its growth over the last decade, thanks in part to people whose only goal is to cut taxes and strangle government. Well, there are some things that we need government to do, and to do well. Transportation infrastructure is one of them.
Re: The Grass is always browner
[ Rich Demers] June 29, 2007 11:22:00.021
Comment by Rich Demers
Sorry, I didn't mean to post that last comment anonymously. Once more I forgot to change BottomFeeder's setting for the comment poster. This isn't usually much of a problem, but I've been working with a lot of DEV versions lately.