Dallas builds highways. Others, gridlock

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Earlier this month, my wife and I spent a few days in Dallas. I had been there before, but this was the first time I got around the city not just as a passenger or a pedestrian, but also as a driver.

It was an education.

There was a lot of traffic, and nearly every destination seemed to involve a highway — frequently more than one. Waze would send us hurtling onto a freeway, then instruct us almost at once to get ready to exit to another. Often that meant crossing three or four lanes of fast-moving cars with little margin for hesitation. Miss your moment, and you didn't just miss an exit; you were launched onto an entirely different trajectory.

And the interchanges! The first time I glimpsed one of those vertiginous stacks of concrete — roadways braided together and soaring overhead in multiple tiers — I was awestruck. The High Five Interchange in downtown Dallas looked less like a familiar transportation system than a feat of extreme civil engineering. What impressed me even more was the calm competence of Dallas drivers, who navigated this airborne latticework as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They merged, exited, and soared with practiced ease, usually at 70 miles an hour.

For all its hyperactive complexity, there was an exhilarating efficiency to the traffic. Cars moved. Lanes appeared where they were needed, and the system had the capacity to absorb the volume. After the initial intimidation wore off, I realized I was having an experience I don't usually get at home: Driving in Dallas was not miserable.

The contrast between Dallas and Boston isn't just anecdotal. It shows up clearly in the numbers.

The latest Global Traffic Scorecard from the transportation analytics firm INRIX confirms what Boston drivers already know in their bones. Traffic in New England's most important city is among the most congested in America. INRIX ranks Greater Boston as the nation's fifth-worst metropolitan area for driving, with the average driver losing 83 hours a year sitting in traffic — the equivalent of two full workweeks squandered behind the wheel.

Greater Dallas, by contrast, ranks 19th. Rush-hour congestion there robs the average motorist of only 44 hours a year — five hours less than the national average. Expressed in dollars, Boston's sclerotic traffic costs a typical driver $1,529 yearly; the comparable figure for Dallas is just $810.

That contrast might strike some people as counterintuitive. The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, with more than 8.3 million residents, is far more populous than Greater Boston and continues to grow rapidly. It has more people, more sprawl, and far more vehicles. Yet highway congestion there is markedly less punishing.

Boston's traffic woes are so familiar that they have become a journalistic cliché. News stories refer to the city's "infamously clogged road network" or its "notorious road congestion," as though these were immutable geographic features, like the Charles River or the Harbor Islands. The assumption seems to be that traffic misery is simply the price Boston must pay for being Boston.

But congestion is not a law of nature. It's the predictable consequence of policy choices.

The most important difference between Boston and Dallas is not driver behavior, population growth, or geographical layout. It's the stark contrast in how the two regions think about highway capacity.

In Texas, planners and political leaders have operated on a straightforward premise: If a metropolitan region is growing, its transportation infrastructure must grow with it. Highways are treated not as moral failures or regrettable necessities, but as essential economic arteries. The result is a road network designed — sometimes extravagantly so — to accommodate demand rather than suppress it.

In Massachusetts, the governing philosophy has long run in the opposite direction. New highway construction is viewed with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. Adding lanes is dismissed as futile or counterproductive — or not considered at all. Instead, the emphasis is on reducing demand for driving and shifting trips to other modes of transportation.

That outlook is on display in the coverage of Boston's latest ignominious showing in the INRIX rankings.

"The congestion … comes as little surprise to some experts and advocates who've long clamored for leaders to wean the city and the state off its car dependence," the Globe reported. Typical of those experts and advocates is Reggie Ramos, the executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts, who insists that "the Boston area hasn't sufficiently invested in modes of transit that can take cars off the road." When policymakers in Massachusetts talk about relieving traffic congestion, what they have in mind is not making traffic move faster, but making driving less common. Congestion, in this view, is less a signal of insufficient infrastructure than a judgment about how people choose to travel.

But for the overwhelming majority of residents, driving their own cars is the only form of transportation that makes sense. No matter how much they are hectored to switch to mass transit, they have sensible reasons not to do so. That was true even before COVID-19 struck. Five years later, transit ridership remains below pre-pandemic levels.

For most workers, most families, and most trips, driving is not a lifestyle choice to be corrected but a practical necessity. Dallas accepts that fact and plans accordingly. Boston resists it — then expresses frustration when the resistance produces gridlock.

To be clear, this is not an argument for mindless sprawl or for replicating Texas-style interchanges along the Jamaicaway. It's an argument for intellectual honesty. A region that refuses to expand highway capacity while its economy and population continue to demand mobility will get exactly what Greater Boston has: chronic congestion, wasted time, and a daily tax on ordinary life.

One way to see how misguided Boston's approach to congestion has become is to imagine it applied elsewhere. When the price of ground beef or chicken rises, no Massachusetts official suggests people should be eating less, or sees higher prices as a way to nudge consumers toward vegetarianism. Costly groceries are understood as signs of supply failing to keep up with demand — a problem to address, not a policy lever to change the public's behavior. Severe highway congestion, which increases the cost of everyday life, is treated very differently. Instead of being recognized as evidence that roadway capacity has not kept pace with the region's needs, it is often framed as a tool for discouraging driving and reshaping behavior.

In practice, clogged roadways merely redistribute pain. People with the most flexibility — professionals who can work from home, people who can afford homes in Boston's nearest suburbs, commuters with off-peak schedules — adapt. Everyone else pays the price in lost time, stress, and foregone opportunities.

None of this means that Boston should aspire to Texas-style sprawl, or that every traffic problem can be solved by pouring concrete. Construction engineers in the 21st century have more sophisticated and sensitive options for expanding highway capacity than was the case a generation ago. But a modern metropolitan economy cannot function on 1970s highway capacity plus moral scolding. Dallas traffic does not move more smoothly because its residents are especially virtuous or more patient. It moves because its leaders accept growth as a fact and mobility as a necessity. To them, congestion isn't proof that highways don't work. It's proof that people need to go places.

Until Massachusetts decides that mobility is something to be enabled rather than discouraged, Boston will remain world-class in many things. But getting people where they need to go, when they need to go there, will not be one of them.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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