Yesterday I attended a meeting at the Washington Council of Governments in Washington DC; a regional planning organization very much like the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission, except that it covers local governments that cross state boundaries. Being an afternoon meeting, I decided to make the trip to DC and back in one day.
The trip, each way, took about five hours, though in each case the last two hours covered only 20-30 miles of the total trip. Even coming into DC at 10:30, I hit traffic snarls around Arlington and sat in lines of cars that crawled along at 5 miles an hour, burning gasoline as they sat idle along 66 and 395. Coming home, cars puttered along I-66; it took an hour and a half to get from the DC/Virginia border to Manassas. Nearly half of the time 400-some-odd-mile journey was taken up going a distance no longer than that between Salem and Christiansburg. And I wasn't even driving during peak traffic times.
Even with access to the Metro, busses, a plethora of formal and informal Park and Rides, and active (and free) carpool programs like RIDE Solutions, DC drivers still love their cars. Love them enough, apparently, to spend an enormous amount of their day sitting idly in them while paying $3.00 a gallon for the privilege of going nowhere.
Obviously, congestion is going to be a function of population, and in an area the size of DC its going to be unavoidable. Nonetheless, there's still a lot of room to mitigate it's severity there. In Roanoke and the New River Valley, we're pretty proud of our almost nonexistent congestion problems; unless there's a Tech game or accident on I-81, you can get between the respective valleys in no more than 30 minutes or so, and within them it generally takes 20 minutes or less to get from one side of town to the other. It's worth remaining vigilant, though; if our region grow like its leaders hope it does (and it certainly has the potential to), it could be possible to taste a little of that DC traffic here. Making use of our alternatives now - Valley Metro, the SmartWay, Blacksburg Transit, carpooling and bicycling - lay the foundation for smooth driving in the future.