11/04/97- Updated 12:30 AM ET

'Cross-commuting' yields tense travel

ATLANTA - Every morning, like millions of other commuters across the country, Dana Hamby is stuck in traffic.

Bottleneck after bottleneck strangles the roads along her 14-mile commute, which typically takes 1 hour and 15 minutes. If it rains, the ride can take more than two hours.

But Hamby isn't headed downtown. With the transformation of suburbs from bedroom communities to bustling business centers, she's among the 39 million American commuters who live in the suburbs and work in the suburbs. She's found what millions of those commuters are realizing: You can't get there from here.

Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America II, says those 39 million commuters traveling from suburb to suburb are more than double the number commuting from suburb to downtown. But the freeway systems built after World War II were designed to funnel commuters from suburbia to their jobs downtown and back at the end of the day.

Those superhighways are now useless to workers who live in one suburb and work in another. Their "cross commute" often takes them over roads that are woefully inadequate for the traffic they bear.

Compounding the problem is the dispersed nature of suburban jobs. It's difficult for workers in a suburban neighborhood to form a carpool because they're no longer headed downtown; most likely they're headed in a number of directions. Mass transit is difficult to use for the same reason. As a result, both carpooling and transit ridership are trending downward nationwide.

A new study by the Texas Transportation Institute estimates that road congestion cost the nation $53 billion in wasted time and fuel in 1994.

Yet even as suburbanites complain about the traffic, they're evoking environmental protection laws and going to court to fight road projects in their neighborhoods.

"Suburbanites have a schizophrenic relationship with road building," says Robert Cervero, professor of urban planning at the University of California at Berkeley. "They want better roads on one hand, but not in their backyards. As a result, not much is getting built."

Plans scrapped

That's the case in Atlanta.

The city's beltway, Interstate 285 (known locally as "the Perimeter"), turns into a virtual parking lot during peak travel times, prompting cross-commuters to use local streets and back roads that not so long ago were quiet country lanes.

But plans for a second loop around Atlanta farther out, dubbed the Outer Perimeter, were scrapped because of public opposition. Georgia's Department of Transportation is now studying whether to build a quarter of the proposed beltway through Atlanta's northern suburbs where gridlock is the worst. Even that will be difficult to build as the region struggles with worsening smog.

New roadways also have been blocked in other areas by opponents attempting to slow the spread of suburban sprawl, as well as by environmentalists who say they'd damage watersheds and wildlife habitats.Among them:

• In Maryland, officials dropped plans for a six-lane highway connecting the suburban regions outside Washington and Baltimore because of environmental impact.
• Construction of a second loop around Houston 28 miles from downtown has been tied up for more than two years after the Sierra Club and Audubon Society sued, claiming its environmental impact hadn't been thoroughly reviewed. A new study is under way, though opponents have threatened to continue the legal battle to block the proposed 177-mile Grand Parkway project.
• In Illinois, two proposed extensions of the state's tollway system near Chicago have been delayed because of a legal battle waged by opponents claiming the new roads would accelerate development on suburban fringes.

If this trend continues and congestion worsens, suburbs will find it harder to lure new businesses and residents.

Patterns have changed

"One of the main reasons people moved out to the suburbs was to get away from gridlock," says John Henry Walton, spokesman for Citizens for Safer Highways. "But now even those areas are getting clogged. Who wants to spend two hours stuck in a car every day?"

Freeway builders of the '60s and '70s didn't envision the traffic patterns of the '90s.

Suburb-to-suburb trips now account for 44% of all commuting, Pisarski says. That's a bigger percentage than traditional suburb-to-city trips or reverse commutes from city to suburb.

"The historical notion of the Ozzie and Harriet commute from the suburbs to the city is no longer dominant," Pisarski says. "The action today is from suburb to suburb. And that's putting new kinds of demands on the transportation system."

Traffic problems tend to be the worst on metropolitan beltways that loop around large cities. In the five most gridlocked cities - Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco-Oakland, Miami and Chicago - commuters spend as much as 71 hours a year stuck in traffic, according to the Texas study.

Highway departments are taking steps to move traffic more efficiently. They're adding lanes for "high occupancy vehicles" to encourage carpooling, and installing cameras and electronic sign boards to monitor traffic flows and alert drivers to congestion.

Companies are responding by letting employees work from home by computer or offering flextime schedules so they can avoid rush hours.

But those changes haven't improved conditions significantly for most drivers in Atlanta or other major cities.

Last summer's deal to balance the federal budget by 2002 has put a financial squeeze on all sorts of federal projects. As a result, a five-year transportation funding bill tied up in Congress isn't expected to unleash a bonanza for new roads or mass transit systems.

"Capacity is not keeping up with demand," acknowledges Gloria Jeff, acting chief of the Federal Highway Administration. "But more asphalt is not the answer."

For years, Atlanta tried to ward off traffic problems by building more miles of highways per capita than any other urban area except Kansas City - more than 1 freeway mile per 1,000 residents, according to the Urban Land Institute, a research group.

But the region's explosive growth and its historic bias against mass transit have pushed congestion to a crisis point. The Atlanta Constitution recently called gridlock the city's "most miserable feature of life."

"It's the worst I've seen in 20 years," says Bart Lewis, researcher for the Atlanta Regional Commission, which is responsible for transportation planning in the area. "You go a foot and you stop, you go a foot and you stop."

All those miles of pavement enticed residents to move farther out in search of cheaper land, bigger homes and greener space. Meanwhile, only suburbs in Fulton and DeKalb counties have linked into the city's rapid-rail and bus lines, known as MARTA. Regional transit isn't available to commuters in six other quickly growing counties, including populous Gwinnett and Cobb.

"People didn't feel mass transit was important," complains Richard Simonetta, MARTA's general manager. "Now the Atlanta region is 100 miles across. That is huge. And it's difficult for mass transit to work when everything is so spread out."

As a result of the area's sprawl, Atlantans now drive an average of 35 miles a day, more than residents of any other city.

"People here are tied to their cars," says Richard Tucker, president of the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. "We need to discourage it but we don't know how."

Georgia officials have proposed new commuter rail service for the Atlanta area. But funding for the project may depend on whether the car-addicted region cleans up its air pollution problem.

Atlanta and 13 surrounding counties have had to shelve plans for dozens of transportation projects while officials try to meet a federal deadline in 1999 for lowering ground-level ozone levels.

Rather than alleviating congestion, opponents say that more roads would attract more growth, more cars and make smog problems even worse.

Painful steps

If it fails to meet federal ozone standards in two years, the 13-county area stands to lose as much as $600 million a year in federal transportation funds. That would put the brakes on most highway expansion projects and worsen traffic tie-ups.

But reducing road congestion and pollution will require new kinds of cars and more mass transit, experts say.

Atlanta area officials are discussing a shift to cleaner-burning fuels and higher-tech cars. State transportation planners have proposed construction of six new commuter rail lines. And more painful steps, such as mandatory ridesharing for commuters one day a week, also have been suggested.

But local officials doubt that mandatory carpooling could ever be enforced, a sentiment shared by commuters despite all the gridlock.

"I don't see how they'd regulate that," says Hamby, a 30-year-old office manager. "Who wants to carpool? I need my car to run errands at lunch."

Without her car, Hamby has no way to get around. There are no buses, trains or subways running between her Cape Cod-style home in Marietta and her job in a high-rise office park, Perimeter Center in Dunwoody. Sidewalks and bicycle paths are few.

"It's so frustrating," Hamby grumbles, her car inching down a clogged street past subdivisions and malls. At one key intersection, traffic is backed up for two miles as a six-lane road shrinks to four lanes.

Behind the wheel, she puts on makeup and studies the Bible to occupy the time.

By Carol Jouzaitis, USA TODAY

Contributing: Scott Bowles

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