I recently made a trek out to the suburbs from my home in
downtown Chicago for an errand. This is a trip I have made hundreds of times
before and I prepared myself for the extra traffic as I was leaving at the
height of rush hour traffic.
Having the luxury of taking a train to work every day, it
has been some time since I found myself in the middle of a Chicago rush hour. I
was ready: CDs, bottle of water, change for tollbooths and my patience.
The trip was 44 miles each way, which takes about an hour
when traffic flows at a regulated pace.
As I set out at 5:30 p.m., the thick outbound traffic was
moving no faster than the standard 10 mph and I noticed the inbound traffic
crawled along at about the same agonizing pace.
As the congestion started to ease, I was eventually up to
regular highway speeds, but not before a good hour and only 10 miles had
passed. I finally reached my destination at 7:25 p.m., about what I expected as
the first leg of the trip clocked in just under two hours.
I took care of my errands and was back on the road 20
minutes later--7:45 p.m.
I took the same route back home, the same 44 miles. Only,
the traffic heading back into the city was not the same. In fact, it was moving
rather smoothly and I made it home in the usual hour.
Why the drastic difference in travel time? The reasoning is
fairly simple as I attributed the number of vehicles on the road in direct
correlation to the time of day.
There has got to be a way to take advantage of this traffic
congestion/ time correlation.
In these days of tight budgets and cutbacks, many U.S.
corporations are implementing creative incentives to keep employee morale high.
Perhaps a flexible hours-based incentive program should be
examined, as its benefits are innumerable. Not only would an employee cut the
amount of time spent in gridlock to and from the office by leaving an hour or
two later than usual, a flexible hours program also could have an effect on
traffic congestion as less vehicles are on the road during peek hours. This
could in turn lead to less stress on those who face gridlock every day, which
may lead to a more productive workplace.
Of course, a flexible hours-based program would include
rules limiting a certain number of vehicles in a program based on the number of
employees per company.
The point of the program would be to regulate the number of
vehicles on the road in order to keep traffic moving and not to stretch the
length of rush hour.
Or, we could just mirror London's congestion charging
scheme and charge every vehicle $8 to enter a major metropolitan area.
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