Link to article from the Washington Post

Photo courtesy The Washington Post

Before diving into a thicket of transportation data and questions, a hefty new federal study makes a traffic projection that could get a chuckle, even from folks in Nebraska: Omaha, the new Los Angeles.

That’s by 2045, the study says, when traffic congestion in Omaha (current population of 435,353) could be just as bad as it is in L.A. (current population of 10 million).

The provocative prospect of gridlock in the heartland sets the stage for a 316-page document produced by the Transportation Department and released Monday by Secretary Anthony Foxx.

With Capitol Hill still in a rugby scrum over how to find fresh cash to pay for transportation, Foxx and his staff have spent almost 18 months compiling a futuristic look at how the nation will fare if the ways in which people and goods get from place to place evolve just as they did in the 20th century.

“We’ve been planning like it’s 1975,” Foxx said last month in an address at the Transportation Research Board’s annual convention. “In a real sense, our transportation system hasn’t caught up with the 21st century.”

To read more, please click on the link above.