The Texas Transportation Institute just released their 2009 Urban Mobility Report.  As noted in a JSOnline article, it turns out that “Milwaukee-area motorists spend far less time stuck in traffic than their counterparts in most similarly sized urban areas.”  In fact, motorists lost a little less time due to congestion in 2007 than they did in 1997.  This would seem to contradict the popular notion that we need expensive public transit solutions such as heavy, light, and commuter rail to counter the increasingly congested and sprawling environment we find ourselves in.

While the roadway delays in Milwaukee dropped slightly over the past nine years, the miles traveled continued to creep up, reaching 11 million miles per day in 2007.

In contrast, ridership and miles traveled on public transportation has dropped over that time frame.

Data put the number of passenger trips on public transportation at 74 million in 2000 vs. 48 million in 2007. The miles of travel on public transportation in a year dropped from 218 million to 154 million, according to the mobility report.

“That’s not too surprising, because we’ve been cutting service so dramatically,” said Peter Beitzel, who researches transportation issues as vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. “This trend has been going on for a long time, and it’s kind of disturbing.”

But is it really disturbing?  And is the reduced service causing folks to use their cars, trucks, and motorcycles, or is it simply a result of motorists preferring those latter options?  A cursory explanation might be that it’s precisely because it’s less time consuming traveling on the roadways that people are choosing that option over less convenient and perhaps more expensive options (especially when factoring in time spent waiting) like the bus.

The report also highlights several strategies for reducing congestion:

Get as much use as possible out of the transportation system we have.

Add roadway and public transportation capacity in the places where it is needed most.

Change our patterns, employing ideas like ridesharing and flexible work times to avoid traditional “rush hours.”

Provide more choices, such as alternate routes, telecommuting and toll lanes for faster and more reliable trips.

Diversify land development patterns, to make walking, biking and mass transit more practical.

Adopt realistic expectations, recognizing for instance that large urban areas are going to be congested, but they don’t have to stay that way all day long.

For those that are concerned about our congested highways (particularly the I-94 corridor between Milwaukee and Waukesha) and our continued subsidization of location decisions (no matter where people live), I hope we take these strategies into consideration before simply pushing for more highway spending or massive investments in public infrastructure such as high-speed rail.

You can read the congestion data report for Milwaukee for more detailed information.