Taking a different road.

A couple months back I wrote something that most everyone knows all too well--the choking traffic in Los Angeles is not a mere annoyance. It alters work and life, and not for the better. You probably know commuters who routinely leave home before dawn or finger at work until 8 p.m. Maybe you don't venture far from home to enjoy shows or restaurants because it can be a traffic ordeal, even in the evenings. I wrote that I eat at my desk more than I should because a lunch meeting can be a day slayer, thanks to the drive.

Of the suggested solutions I've gotten since, my favorite is a book sent by the folks at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles. The book's central proposal is a solution so obvious that it made me slap my forehead.

The solution: build more roads.

Somehow, we've bought into a kind of conventional wisdom that goes something like this: Driving cars is bad, and driving from the suburbs is especially bad. We all must change. We need to live in denser, more urban housing and use public transportation. Therefore, building roads only encourages bad behavior. As a result, we've built fewer roads in recent years.

Trouble is, except in extremely dense Manhattan, the dense urban model simply doesn't work in America. Even though the United States has spent a boatload on mass transit, fewer people use it than in the early 1960s. The fact is, as any nation's wealth increases, more people drive. That's true even in Europe. And most people prefer to live in a single-family house with some grass around them; they don't want to live in a mixed-use building next to a noisy train station.

It may be a politically incorrect to say, but driving is not as bad as it is made out. Cars allow people to go when they want where they want. That flexibility is one reason American businesses are the strongest and most adaptable. Throw in the automotive advances of the recent past, the hybrid technology of today, and other advances in the future, driving is and will be far more energy efficient than it used to be, and safer to boot.

Instead of trying to remake American cities into mass-transit hubs, the book posits that it makes far more sense to simply build more roads. It would be faster, cheaper and far more effective.

Congestion is a problem not because it can't be beat but "because our leaders stopped fighting it," the authors wrote. "During the past two decades, driving overall nearly doubled, but our roadway system increased only 4 percent."

The idea that Los Angeles already has too many roads is silly. The city has the least amount of pavement per capita than any of the 10 largest American cities. And the idea that building roads is expensive is silly, too. It is cheaper than most any other solution.

Building more roads is the book's central premise, but the book offers other solutions. Among them: creating express lanes that drivers would pay to use; transforming more surface streets into one-way traffic-ways; and synchronizing traffic lights.

The book is called "The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It." The authors are Ted Balaker and Sam Staley, both at the Reason Foundation. The book is a great reminder that we don't have to spend a big chunk of our lives twiddling our thumbs in traffic. We only need to remember that we can build our way out of this choking traffic mess.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].