Mass transit key to unclogging roads

As we noted in this space Sunday, traffic congestion can give you a headache.

Certainly, if you live in Chicago's suburbs, you know firsthand what the suffering is like - the bumper-to-bumper idling, the tie-ups you try unsuccessfully to avoid, the cushion you have to build into your schedule if you want to be sure to get to work on time.

And that's just the suburb-to-suburb grind.

Just try to get to a play in the Loop on a weeknight. Or to a job in the city in the morning. Or, well, to drive into or out of Chicago at virtually anytime any more.

It's not rush hour these days; it's become almost any time of the day, and it's definitely not a rush. (Who put the "rush" into "rush hour" anyway? That's a misnomer if ever we heard one.)

In a report released Tuesday, the Metropolitan Planning Council explained the impact of traffic congestion in even greater detail, going beyond the feel of it to detail the cost of it.

And it's expensive. The planning council study estimated that $7.3 billion is wasted each year because of the traffic mess.

That's the cost in wasted gasoline, in recruiting expense to fill jobs left open by high commuting costs, in lost business due to clogged roads, in dollars spent responding to added air pollution.

A planning council release indicated that "for every hour a driver sits in rush-hour traffic in the Chicago area, he or she kisses goodbye $14.58. That's $3,014 a year, enough to cover almost 12 months' worth of groceries, fill up the average car's gas tank 46 times or take a family of four to Disney World twice."

The study also projected that if gridlock were eliminated, 87,000 jobs could be added to the economy.

"If nothing is done to solve Chicagoland's traffic dilemma, by 2030 we'll be squandering $11.3 billion a year due to traffic," planning council President MarySue Barrett said. "Excess congestion has infected the entire region's transportation network, and everyone from Kane to Cook should support and invest in solutions."

When it comes to solutions, let us reiterate the ones we encouraged Sunday, the same ones we've espoused many times frequently: The biggest priority is to focus on mass transit.

We simply can't continue to see the car as the transportation choice for everything, and particularly with motorists dealing now with high gas prices, many are more likely now to make use of mass transit if it met their needs.

To that end, the best investment we can make today is in convenient suburb-to-suburb train and express bus options.

The planning council report provides more impetus to what we've all known. As a region, we must get behind mass transit as never before.