Overview

Peak-hour traffic congestion has become a major problem in most US cities. In fact, a majority of residents in metropolitan and suburban areas consider congestion their most serious local problem. As citizens have become increasingly frustrated by repeated traffic delays that cost them money and waste time, congestion has become an important factor affecting local government policies in many parts of the nation. In this book, Anthony Downs looks at the causes of worsening traffic congestion, especially in suburban areas, and considers the possible remedies. He analyzes the specific advantages and disadvantages of every major strategy that has been proposed to reduce congestion. In nontechnical language, he focuses on two central issues: the relationships between land-use and traffic flow in rapidly growing areas, and whether local policies can effectively reduce congestion or if more regional approaches are necessary. In rapidly growing parts of the country, congestion is worse than it was 5 or 10 years ago. But Downs notes that the problem has apparently not yet become bad enough to stimulate effective responses. Neither government officials nor citizens seem willing to consider changing the behaviour and public policies that cause congestion. To alleviate the problem, he argues, both groups must be prepared to make these fundamental changes.

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9780815719236

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Reviews

If you read only one book about traffic every five years, make it this one. --Planning This study should lay to rest, in prose understandable to all, various popular but erroneous 'Sunday supplement' proposals for 'solving' urban congestion problems. This, in turn, should permit public policy to better focus on the key problem, civilizing the automobile so as to make it a more acceptable participant on the urban scene. And above all. readers should have a better basis for differentiating the useful from the banal among the many different proposals now offered for relieving urban congestion. --John R. Meyer, Harvard University Timely, factual, decision and policy focused...as always, Anthony Downs guides us to the future with more livable communities and healthier environments. --Marcy Kaptur, United States House of Representatives

Author Information

Anthony Downs is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His specialties are housing, real estate, real estate finance, metropolitan planning, demographics, and transportation. His books include New Visions for Metropolitan America (Brookings/Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, 1994), and Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion (Brookings, 2004).

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