Jobs and cars

Our opinion: Traffic in and out of Saratoga County is increasing even faster than the overall population. Economic opportunities have their own steep cost.

It hardy requires looking up the census data to see what an anomaly Saratoga County is, one of the few places in upstate New York that’s been growing for the past few decades. Just look at the slow crawl of traffic on the Northway, especially at rush hour.

Between 120,000 and 130,000 cars a day are on a highway that was built for a region of smaller towns when farmland and open space were only beginning to give way to suburban sprawl. Traffic peaks on the Northway and nearby Route 9 at almost 150,000 cars a day.

Twenty years ago, average daily traffic on the Northway heading in and out of southern Saratoga County more like 77,000 cars.

We might have seen it coming. Today’s Saratoga County population of about 220,000 is 20 percent higher than it was 20 years ago and 43 percent higher than 30 years ago. And it’s not like Americans are driving much less.

The result is that increases in traffic are more than double the rate of population growth.

So, overdue solutions, anyone?

Speak up — before more people driving more cars make the Northway resemble, oh, Long Island. Even if the rate of population growth in Saratoga County slows a bit, as it has in the past decade, it still remains the epicenter of the region’s prospects for better jobs.

The most obvious solutions, alas, are also the most unlikely. A wider bridge over the Mohawk River would be a costly, long-term undertaking. And public transportation is a limited option, with money for the construction of light rail service simply not available.

Reason for encouragement comes in a more practical, yet more modest form, namely the Capital District Transportation Authority’s pursuit of more park-and-ride lots and consideration of more express bus service.

You would think the bus would be a more appealing option for Northway commuters, especially if the CDTA succeeds in getting preferential treatment over other traffic — like being able to travel on the highway shoulder in congested areas like the stretch between Exits 7 and 8.

Yet only about 1,260 people a day use the existing park-and-ride lots. Almost all of them are commuters, but few are heading to jobs in Saratoga County. Some 85 percent of them work in Albany.

That leaves transportation planners trying to find ways to make all those cars and trucks move more efficiently. The simplest, and least controversial, would involve message boards that change the speed limit and steer drivers away from the Northway during heavy traffic.

The more ambitious ways of managing traffic would be decidedly less popular. They include carpool lanes, traffic lights that limit how many cars can enter the Northway at one time and even tolls for an express lane.

Something to think about while you’re crawling along in highway traffic, or watching those who are. This is what growth looks like, rare sight that it is upstate.

4 Responses

  1. Charlie says:

    The better solution, move downtown state offices out of downtown. It is the 21st century, we have the internet, telephones, cell phones, and all kinds of ways to communicate without having to walk across the street.

    Cities developed due to the lack of communication mediums and the need to converse. Cities are a medieval phenomena that have lived their useful existence.

  2. Victor Blackthorne says:

    What makes you think that traffic is a problem? People choose where they want to live. If some find that there are more desirable places to live they will move. In neither case are their traffic problems more than a local concern. However it is possible to test my theory by examination of the public response to announcing that the state is going to improve traffic flow and air emissions and pay for these traffic improvements by levying a surcharge on charge on commuters.

  3. R says:

    @Charlie, I would have to disagree with your assessment. Despite the advances in communication, urban areas continue to be a magnet for folks, especially the Millennial generation like myself, because of the increase social interaction it allows and the inherent sustainable nature of cities. I think Generation X did a great job of building the foundation for the internet, which has allowed folks to access information and communicate with others from anywhere, but you are starting to see my generation move back to the days of socially conversing face to face with the development of peer-to-peer websites, that range from the facilitation of car-sharing to the organization of in-person food swaps, book readings, or educational sessions from respected peers in the community. Even in my office, we’ve started to divorce ourselves from utilizing our intranet to communicate with a colleague a stone throw away and get up and communicate face to face. The internet has done some wonderful things, but I think many folks want to get back to art of interacting face to face, because the pendulum has swung so far to the side of anonymous communication online or through the 1’s and 0’s of computers, that you can go to the super market and have someone checking you out who can’t properly converse with you because they haven’t been able to develop the necessary social skills due to their over reliance on the internet. Furthermore, moving state offices out of downtown and across suburbia will not address the solution at all, especially for Saratoga County, because they will have to still leave Point A (Saratoga County) for Point B (Albany, Rensselaer, Schenectady). I know that a few offices were moved to Wolf Road, which has resulted in a lengthy commute by those state workers, not unlike heading downtown, thus not alleviating the situation. Living where you work is the only solution that makes sense, otherwise, significant taxpayer dollars will have to be used to accommodate suburban sprawl.

  4. william says:

    I think that the Northway is ok but people need to leave their homes early to void the traffic backs. This might help out with their time on the highway.