Reducing Traffic and Increasing Gas Efficiency

I was reading up on cities and problems within them and here's my summary concerning the above.

Large urban areas are plagued with gridlock, especially cities with sprawling suburbs. Most residents feel the solution to the traffic issues would be expanding the freeway system. Even though this sounds good it would be costly, take a long time to complete, and would persuade street users to switch to the "new" freeways. Cities are trying to change resident lifestyle habits rather than building or improving all the freeways. Here are the things we could all do (and cities want us to do) to reduce traffic and increase our gas efficiency.

1. Work close to home or move closer to work.
With more residents moving to suburbs and suburbs expanding further and further out from the cities core people are commuting further to work. This means people are staying on the roads longer. This not only puts a dent in your wallet because of gasoline and car maintenance, but also means that you are spending more time on already congested freeways. Working closer to where you live means using less fuel and remaining on congested freeways for shorter periods of time.

2. Carpool.
We all know how this works. Your drive with other commuters put less cars on congested roads and using less gasoline.

3. Drive during off-peak times.
Another strategy that cities would like residents to use is to travel to and from work (or other places) at off peak times. This means that even though we have the same amount of traffic it is spread out during a longer period of time making it less congested. Not only does this make everyone's commute shorter but if you drive at an off-peak time you probably will be in your car for a shorter amount of time and in smoother traffic, which will conserve gasoline.

4. Have commercial deliveries completed during off-peak times.
Same idea as #3 but about deliveries. Deliveries usually interrupt the flow of traffic and keeping these out of peak hours would improve the flow of traffic during those times.

5. Drive fuel efficient vehicles.
This doesn't improve traffic, but when you are going to purchase your next vehicle try to get one that is somewhat fuel efficient. This will help our gasoline consumption


Other things you can do or help your city do:
-walk to close locations (your friends house down the street, lunch at work)
-ask your city to have unnecessary stop signs removed.
-ask your city to optimize its traffic lights to keep the flow of traffic moving during peak hours.
-Try to work from home or telecommute on some days.

For more about Fuel Efficiency you can check out FuelEconomy.gov

Posted by: monica / 4/22/2006 03:04:00 PM (permalink)

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