BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.” –David Letterman

The same could be said for Washington, DC. Do you ever get the feeling that some people are deluded into believing traffic laws weren’t meant for them?

Take bicyclists, for example. Rarely do their bikes have lights, reflectors, fenders or license plates. They don’t have to signal turns or wear helmets. They zip through stop signs and red lights, ride the wrong way down one-way streets and swear at you if you get in their way. They hold up traffic, dart between sidewalks and streets, and come at you in the wrong lane of traffic like they were playing a suicidal game of chicken.

There are some bus drivers who think they have been granted similar privilege. They can turn from the wrong lane, and fail to signal when they stop. They are allowed to pull into traffic at any time. And God bless those UPS truck drivers who double park in rush hour.

Some pedestrians believe they are shielded from law enforcement and bodily harm. They jaywalk, violate green arrows for turning vehicles, walk through red lights, and dart into the street between parked cars. I particularly admire those who do that at night.

I wish DC police would enforce the laws. If they did, the streets would be a little safer to walk and ride on.

But traffic law-breakers aren’t the real problem on DC streets.

Next to crime, the real problem is gridlock, a familiar term in Washington. The streets and highways of the nation’s capital are a monument to mismanagement, misguided thinking, and failed policy decisions that have cost the region’s residents their tax dollars, their health, and their sanity.

Washington is once again the most congested city in America, according to the annual report of the Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute. Schock-a-roo, eh. There’s a lot of money wasted confirming for us what we already know. It’s so amazing how much money is spent restating the obvious, without any result ever coming from it. But I digress.

The study said that the average Washington commuter wastes an incredible 67 hours and burns 32 gallons of gas each year stuck in traffic, at a cost of $16.79 per person-hour. That’s more than $1,000 a year. How many meals will that put on the table? How many mortgage payments or monthly rent checks is it? How many fees for children’s sports events, braces, or school books?

Nationally, we waste 2.9 billion gallons of gas in gridlock. At $4 per gallon, that’s $11.6 billion a year. What could the country buy with $11.6 billion?

That also translates into 631 pounds of CO2 spewed into the atmosphere. How many people with emphysema does that affect? How much more difficult does it make it to breathe for teenagers on the soccer field or the elderly walking to the grocery store. What does it do to the environment?

Back to DC. The scientists working with A&M say that travelers in Washington have to allow for 3 hours for a normally 30-minute trip on average once in every 19 days. That is based on a formula they devised in which you multiply a DC trip by 5.72 to account for rush-hour traffic as opposed to the national multiplier of 3.

Think about the impact those hours on the road have on family life? What does it do to the persistent tension and anxiety felt by those who commute on a daily basis? How about over 20 years? What does it do to worker productivity? What are the effects on our relationships with each other? In the workplace? On the road? In the home and neighborhood? Does it contribute to psychological problems, maybe in use of prescription medicines or alcohol?

None of the costs of these outgrowths of gridlock are itemized in the A&M study. Society turns a blind eye to the real damage done by gridlock. Calculating the real costs would destroy most of the preconceived notions city fathers who sit on urban city councils have about the value of bikes, trollies, and buses.

Answering a lot of those questions would force cities and social engineers to rethink the whole approach to transportation and mobility in this country, particularly in Washington DC. They would likely find that their solutions are part of the problem, not the cure to congestion.

The old, collectivism progressives who have run this city without challenge or interruption for 50 years of home rule have had only one approach to getting around the city—force people out of their cars and onto bicycles, into buses, and down into the subway system. They have persistently refused to make it easier for motor vehicles and the commuters who depend upon them to get around, side-by-side with mass transit solutions. They have stubbornly refused to add lanes of traffic in redevelopment corridors such as New York Avenue, but they will spend millions taking up driving space with extravagant boulevards with trees and shrubbery you and I can’t afford to plant in our own yards.

The pollution congestion has caused, the physical and mental damage it has done to millions of commuters, the cost to families whose lives are disrupted by intolerable and mind-bending delays, the enormous cost to society in wasted energy, wear and tear on automobiles, and the lives and limbs endangered by unsafe driving conditions, created by tormented, road-raged motorists, is just unconscionable.

In the face of all of that, the District of Columbia just recently closed off a lane of traffic on one of the city’s busiest streets, L Street, for the exclusive use of bicyclists. The new bike lane remains mostly empty, of course, morning after morning and evening after evening.

What logic, what metric, what politics or economics could convince anyone that policies accommodating hundreds of bicyclists, at such an incredible expense to hundreds of thousands of motorists, the environment, and the economy are good government?

The District of Columbia is pretty good at justifying its actions. Their government manual is an old book I was introduced to in debate class: How to Lie with Statistics. No doubt they have some justification for half-empty buses, the bike paths, the boulevards, and the utter lack of expansion for vehicular traffic over the last half-century.

But the excuses don’t change reality. The Washington, Virginia, and Maryland metro area is in a traffic congestion crisis. And the A&M study confirms that traffic is going to get worse and not better. It seems safe to say now that the social experimentation has not worked. People aren’t going to leave their cars for a mass transit system in much larger numbers than they are now, particularly for a system now plagued by breakdowns, under-funding, accidents, fights, and increased consumer costs. Nor are Maryland, Virginia, and DC commuters going to hop on their bikes and peddle to work in large enough numbers to justify the damage they do to the environment and the economy, or the toll they take on the human condition, slowing traffic and endangering themselves and motorists.

Nope. I don’t see it. I’ve been driving in DC for 35 years. I ride the metro, but not a lot. My wife is a regular bus rider. My daughter and son-in-law are avid bicyclists as are some very good friends. More peddle power to them. But none of them alters the facts or the realities of mass transportation that our political leaders refuse to recognize. Cars are in our foreseeable future, more so than buses, bikes, and subways. It may be too late now after decades of neglect, but DC should accept that reality and accommodate it before the worst happens, instead of forcing people onto and into modes of transportation they don’t want and can’t use. They will force people and businesses and government agencies to stop coming to DC.

Who knows? Maybe that is the ultimate, devious strategy: Move the capital to Topeka.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.