Motor Vehicle Traffic Staggers the Mountain States

Growing traffic and all the ramifications associated with this troublesome trend is a vast problem throughout the Mountain time zone and in the Mountain States. Every state in the region is dealing with serious troubles in this area and the problem is not only in metro areas but also in fast growing smaller areas like Rifle, CO, and Butte, MT. The problems in metro areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, El Paso, Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, Denver, Billings, Boise, Salt Lake, and Grand Junction are well known. Improvements and expansion of highways and roads as well as construction of new freeways is probably needed, but probably will not occur to the extent required due to high costs of not only construction, but also the legal and environmental costs of even planning a highway or expansion. A universal switch from a cents per gallon based gasoline and fuel tax to a percentage based tax is needed in all states, municipalities, and the federal government; New Jersey is one but of a few states that has this kind of basis of a fuel tax. Increased diesel fuel taxes for the trucking industry are also desparately needed. Clearly the one big answer is mass transit, with light rail; passenger rail; and additional bus service. Employers need to be mandated to require and facilitate car pooling and not just the 8-5 weekdays white collar employers. Distribution traffic such as semis and other trucks need to be eliminated or strongly curtailed from being on roadways from 6:30am to 9am and from 3pm to 7pm. The increasingly high price of fuel will make sprawl less attractive, and property taxes and developer fees must be adjusted to do that even more. Heart of the city property must be redeveloped for greater mixed used and multi-resident purposes. Preservation efforts will need to be minimized and tracts of land with older commercial and industrial property near city cores needs to fast tracked to redevelop for residential and more diverse commercial needs. All commercial developments need to be a minimum of three stories with parking included in the building itself. Finally, surface parking lots need to be taxed at seriously higher rates to force them to be developed. An living environment and neighborhoods like in communities in the Northeast US and Europe is the ideal and public policies that are forward thinking is the way to achieve that goal.
=
http://www.newwest.net/magazine/article/the_long_and_crowded_road_traffic_in_the_new_west/C555/L555/
=
*****