By William C. Vantuono

y daily commute to Railway Age's lower Manhattan offices from my home at the New Jersey seashore is fairly routine. It begins with a ten-minute drive to New Jersey Transit's Manasquan station on the North Jersey Coast commuter rail line. Every morning, I listen to CBS's NewsRadio 88, with "Traffic and Weather on the Eights."

The content of NewsRadio 88's every-ten-minutes traffic report is usually as predictable as the drive to the train station: Twenty-minute delays at the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. A jackknifed tractor-trailer on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Construction delays on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. An accident on the George Washington Bridge, with associated "rubbernecking" delays. Sun glare causing motorists to slow down on the eastbound Staten Island Expressway. Heavy volume and slow-going on the New Jersey Turnpike, etc., etc. I'm sure other radio stations around the country are reporting similar traffic problems during the morning rush hour.

And then, a word of reassurance: CBS's traffic reporter, observing the morning mess from several thousand feet up-a safe distance-in a helicopter, ends the update with "Mass transit is on or close to schedule."

"On or close to schedule." I'm so used to hearing it that I speak the words, almost mockingly, in unison with the radio, as if to say, "No kidding." It's just another routine morning rail commute, the kind where I can count the number of delays in any given month on the fingers of one hand. Where my time belongs to me.

Pity the poor people doing a slow burn in traffic.

It doesn't surprise me that American motorists prefer to hide themselves in sport-utility vehicles, minivans, and luxury cars, complete with a premium sound system with a compact disc changer and a cassette thrown in for good measure, six-way power seats with memory, leather upholstery, two-zone climate controls, tinted windows, and a cell phone. If you're going nowhere fast, you might as well be comfortable, isolated from the intimidating asphalt jungle.

In 1999, American motorists in 68 urban areas wasted seven billion gallons of fuel sitting in traffic, according to a new study by the Texas Transportation Institute. That's enough gas for me to drive 280 million miles, or 583 round-trips to the moon. Put another way, at $1.25 a gallon, those same seven billion gallons represent enough money to construct 400 ten-car commuter trainsets with locomotives, each with the capacity to transport nearly 1,000 people, and upgrade 5,000 miles of existing freight railroad right-of-way to accommodate passenger services.

The average motorist in Los Angeles spends 82 hours a year in traffic jams, according to TTI research.

Washingtonians don't fare much better: They spend 76 hours annually idling away their time.

The numbers are comparably high for other major metropolitan areas: Seattle, 69 hours. Atlanta, 68. Boston, 66. Detroit, 62. Dallas, Houston, and San Francisco, 58 each. Miami, 57. Not surprisingly, most of these regions have plans to build passenger rail systems or are upgrading and expanding what they already have.

New Yorkers, who have access to one of the most comprehensive passenger rail networks in the country, still spend 38 hours each year stewing in traffic, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project. That's more than double the 15 hours tabulated in 1982.

What's more disturbing is that, since 1982, while the New York metropolitan region's population has increased only 3%, highway miles grew by 18%, and vehicle-miles increased 43%. New Jersey motorists, for example, drove 1,000 more miles in 1997 than in 1982, according to the state's department of transportation. The main reason for this increased travel demand? Poor planning and sprawl-type development, where offices complexes are built with little regard to traffic patterns or accessibility to public transportation.

Clearly, the answer to the looming threat of perpetual gridlock is not building additional highway miles. That's like buying larger clothes to combat a weight problem. Passenger rail, the transport mode that, at least from my experience, is almost always "on or close to schedule," is a better solution. But an efficient rail system has to be part of an overall development plan that doesn't spread homes and businesses around in random fashion.

After nearly eight years of writing this column, it's encouraging to see that transportation planners in more and more regions are coming to the realization that laying steel rail makes more sense than pouring concrete.