Congestion and its Discontents

Abstract

The title of this paper is taken from Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents,” (1930) and it is considered to be one of his famous works. Freud’s book central theme was that “the conflict between sexual needs and societal mores is the source of mankind’s propensity for dissatisfaction, aggression, hostility and ultimately, violence.” What can Freud’s view on the conflict between sexual needs and societal mores contribute to the understanding of congestion? The author of this paper believes that congestion has a tendency to bring out powerful instincts in people full of satisfaction of which is incompatible with social life. Congestion is an endemic problem in American cities. Yet the remedies to congestion are not obvious. Should cities do nothing, build more roads and highways, institute pricing, reorganize the layout of communities so that we are less dependent on automobiles, induce a shift from single-occupant automobile to carpooling and public transit, encourage telecommuting, revise the green-field development and redevelopment processes to encourage and/or enable carpooling and public transit? This paper examines how capacity, operations and demand strategies have been used to address congestion. It begins with a discussion of various perspectives to congestion and then describes some historical background on urban congestion. The next section discusses alternatives to highway capacity expansion and the paper concludes with a discussion of the prospects for the application of these strategies for addressing future congestion.

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