Fix the commute, lessen traffic.

I hate traffic. One thing I do not understand is how millions of people per day drive themselves to work. In driving your own car to work you are:

• Incapable of doing anything other than driving for the duration of that commute. I know that when locked at a standstill the RIM shareprice rises as yuppies the world over start firing out emails on their Blackberries, but passengers can do this as well and are not a danger to public safety.
• Increasing car insurance. The more motorists, the more accidents, more insurance premiums (before we even begin discussion of aforementioned Blackberry).
• Using fuel. Which is starting to get a little pricey, isn’t it? Supplying you with fuel is how the Saudis, Iraqis, Iranians, et al. stay relevant.
• Adding to the commuting population, so therefore you are your own worst enemy
• And contributing to global warming. Your grandchildren will be thinking of you when they are slapping on SPF 200 in order to repair the dykes that they all hide behind, before the next hurricane its.

So it consumes time, energy, international relations capital, money, and thats before we discuss the stress of driving through a gridlock. You do this in order to: have to luxury of driving to work in your own car.

Well. I’m sure that balances somehow.

Here is a brilliant idea of how to fix the commute, and I hope it is just the beginning:

I’m all for putting more vehicles on our roads. As long as they’re coaches | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited

George Monbiot

• But few measures would go so far towards meeting his goal of “improving the capacity and performance of the existing transport network” than persuading people to switch from cars to coaches. The M25 has 790 miles of lanes. If these are used by cars carrying the average load of 1.6 occupants, at 60mph the road’s total capacity is just – wait for it – 19,000 people. Coaches travelling at the same speed, each carrying 30 passengers, raise the M25’s capacity to 260,000. Every coach swallows up a mile of car traffic. They also reduce carbon emissions per passenger mile by an average of 88%. So one of the key tasks for anyone who wants to unblock the roads while reducing the real social costs of carbon must be to make coach travel attractive.
• Storkey’s key innovation is to move coach stations out of city centres, to the junctions of motorways. One of the reasons long coach journeys are so slow in the UK is that – in order to create a system that allows passengers to transfer from one coach to another – they must enter the towns along the way, travelling into the centre and out again. In the rush hour you might as well walk.
• Instead of dragging motorway transport into the cities, Storkey’s system drags city transport out to the motorways. Urban buses on their way out of town, he proposes, keep travelling to the nearest motorway junction, where they meet the coaches. By connecting urban public transport to the national network, Storkey’s proposal could revitalise both systems, as it provides more frequent and more viable bus services for the suburbs.
• The coaches would never leave the trunk roads and motorways. Some services would constantly circle the orbital roads; others would travel up and down the motorways that connect to them. You would change from one coach to another at the junctions. Just 200 coaches on the M25, Storkey calculates, would ensure an average waiting time of between two and three minutes. They would be given dedicated lanes and priority at traffic lights, disentangling them from the cars that now hold them up and force them to bunch.
• With faster links to the motorways provided by dedicated urban bus lanes, and relief from the need to find a parking space, this could bring the overall journey time to below that of car travel. At rush hours and on bank holiday weekends the public system could be very much faster. It might even be made comfortable. Double-deckers could increase the leg room without losing much fuel efficiency, and why shouldn’t every coach have TV screens and power points? Storkey’s system costs next to nothing. It requires no new roads, no railway lines, no major public subsidies. If the land now occupied by coach stations is sold, it could be self-financing from inception. It’s a much better use of private money, too: capital investment in coaches is roughly 10 times more efficient than the same investment in cars.