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For all but a dozen or so of the U.S.'s 224 cities of over 50,000 population, the answer to the traffic problem is clear: more expressways. As E. H. Holmes, planning director of the U.S. Bureau of Roads, says, "Congestion isn't peaking up any more; it's spreading." Little more than 5% of all metropolitan traffic in most cities is bound for the downtown area; most of it is skirting the city. And for such as New York and San Francisco, the answer lies mainly in more mass transit facilities (although New York is preparing to build a 2.5-mile Lower Manhattan crosstown expressway; estimated cost: $100 million a mile). In San Francisco, where the city board of planners have refused since 1958 to allow any freeways to be built, the 75-mile Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) automated system of trains running at 90-sec. intervals is to be completed in 1971. Cost: $13 million a mile.
But the question there, as well as in any other city that tries to woo motorized commuters away from their cars, is whether anybody wants to make the switch. Thousands of drivers enjoy not being tied to the unyielding timetable and the often inconvenient station locations of the railroad. Said one New York commuter last week, as he waited immobile (and alone, as do 70% of New York's commuting drivers) in traffic: "The train's part of the city. My car's a part of home."
Toothless Laws
Of all the problems—solvable or not—that U.S. traffic has generated, none is worse than the shameful web of immorality and ineptness that has come to entangle the enforcement and the court procedures of traffic laws. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White last month startled a meeting of state bar association presidents in Miami with a stinging attack on traffic courts.
"If the 30 million violators each year are to mend their ways," said White, "it is wholly clear that we cannot tolerate the fix, that we cannot run traffic courts for revenue rather than for the purpose of influencing behavior, that serious violators must face judges. Their procedures should be upgraded and modernized to dispense justice on the one hand and to have the desired impact on the violator on the other hand."
Twenty-five states still allow the fee system in their traffic courts—meaning that the "judge," who might be a grocer, a barber, or even the local beauty-shop operator, is paid from the proceeds of fines. Some have been known to make $20,000 a year dispensing justice. The laws themselves are often unfair—or unenforceable. Speed limits that are set too low allow an officer to pick and choose when he should arrest someone. One of the greatest bluffs in U.S. traffic law is the New York City parking ordinance. Stern-looking green tickets, carrying a $15 fine, are issued by the hip-pocketful every day. At the moment, there are more than 900,000 outstanding tickets that have not been paid. The reason: before the clerk of court will issue a warrant for the car owner's arrest, he must have positive evidence that the owner himself parked the car.