Section 1Congestion is a measurable, recurring cost
The numbers are not abstractions. INRIX's Global Traffic Scorecard found the typical U.S. driver lost 43 hours to congestion in 2024 — more than a full work week — at an estimated national cost of over $74 billion in lost time. The Texas A&M Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report puts total annual delay at roughly 8.8 billion hours, with more than 4 billion gallons of fuel burned going nowhere.
That cost lands hardest on the people with the least flexibility: shift workers who can't telecommute, parents stitching together school and care schedules, tradespeople who bill by the job, and small businesses paying drivers to sit in queues. The Washington region consistently ranks among the most congested in the country, and Montgomery County's arterials and interstates carry a large share of that burden.
Section 2Roads are the backbone of everything else
Road capacity is not just about commuters. Roughly 72 percent of U.S. domestic freight tonnage moves by truck. Every ambulance, fire engine, school bus, delivery van, contractor, and — yes — every transit bus depends on the same road network. When that network is saturated, everything on it slows down together.
- Commuters: about seven in ten Americans get to work by private vehicle (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey).
- Freight and deliveries: goods movement is overwhelmingly road-based, and congestion costs are passed straight to consumers.
- Emergency response: response times rise with congestion; capacity is a public-safety issue.
- Transit itself: county buses run on county roads. A gridlocked road network fails transit riders too.
Section 3Where expansion makes sense
We do not argue for paving everything. We argue for fixing what is measurably broken. The Federal Highway Administration's bottleneck research shows that a large share of congestion is recurring and concentrated at specific chokepoints — interchanges, merges, and short constrained segments. Those are exactly the places where targeted capital investment delivers the most relief per dollar.
In Montgomery County, the candidates are not hard to find: the I-270 corridor, the American Legion Bridge approach, and the arterial intersections that back up every single weekday. These corridors have been studied for decades. The data exists. What has been missing is the will to act on it.
Section 4Answering the induced-demand argument
Critics respond to every widening proposal with two words: induced demand — the observation that new capacity attracts new trips. We take the point seriously, and we draw the opposite conclusion from it.
If a new lane fills up, that is not evidence the lane was pointless. It is evidence of suppressed demand: trips people wanted to make — jobs taken, customers reached, family visited — that congestion was previously rationing away. A transit advocate would never call a new rail line a failure because it attracted riders. The same logic applies to roads.
Our position in one sentence
Judge every corridor on its own data — traffic volumes, travel times, safety records, growth forecasts, and lifecycle costs — and build where the numbers justify it, with published before-and-after measurement so the public can hold the project accountable.
Section 5The standard we propose
- Identify recurring bottlenecks with continuous traffic data, not anecdotes.
- Publish the analysis: volumes, delay, safety, forecast growth, and full lifecycle cost.
- Compare alternatives honestly, including operational fixes such as signal timing and interchange redesign.
- Build where the benefit-cost case is strong, with maintenance funded up front.
- Measure outcomes after opening and report them publicly — the same standard we demand of every other mode.