Traffic Jams & Sea Levels (Part Two)

A traffic jam is kinda like a bomb going off…

This is The Environment Report. I’m Lester Graham.

According the the last report from the Texas Transportation Institute traffic congestion in the U.S. causes more than four-billion lost hours stuck in traffic… nearly three-billion gallons of wasted fuel.

And the worst…. phantom traffic jams. You know, when traffic slows downs or completely stops… and when you finally get to the end… there’s no wreck, no closed lane… nothing.

Well, a team of mathematicians has figured out these phantom jams are a lot like detonation waves produced by explosions. Morris Flynn is the lead author of the report published in the online edition of Physical Review E.

“You have a single person who taps on their brakes. The driver behind them will over-react, hit their brakes just a little bit harder than the person in front. And this disturbance is just cascaded all the way back so that eventually you get this very rapid deceleration.”

And… voila… phantom traffic jam.

Solutions: more lanes on the highway… and automated warning signs that tell drivers about slowed traffic ahead.

OR…. get more people on mass transit. Flynn says he just takes his bicycle to work.

((((STING)))

Scientists say climate change is causing sea levels to rise. Communities around the Chesapeake Bay people are getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with the changes… rather than fight them.

AMB: Kids planting sound.

It's been raining in Woodland Beach. The community is just off of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The ground here is so soft you sink into it. Mud is everywhere. And that's just fine with the volunteers planting native grasses on a sloping hillside. Stephen Hult is trying to keep things in order.

AMB: And when we plant them we want them all the way down. I'm telling everyone twice.

Hult heads up shoreline restoration projects for the local property owners association. And there’s a lot of shoreline to restore.

ACT: The shoreline in parts of the community since the 1930s have eroded 20 feet. Year to year, one barely notices, but if you look at aerial maps of what it used to be like compared to what it is, it really is quite dramatic.

There's been tons of erosion here. The land all along the mid-Atlantic coast is also slowly sinking. Combine that with global sea level rise and you get erosion in overdrive.

Hult says the community is trying to restore the beach with rock and dirt and sand and grasses to hold it all together. This is what's called a living shoreline.

ACT: We have now, with this project it will be well over half a mile of living shorelines that we've installed.

It's a relatively new concept, a more natural approach to the gnawing problem of shoreline erosion. Living shorelines create buffer between the water and homes. They are kinda like the tidal wetlands that used to be here before property owners started building sea walls, also called bulkheads.

Jana Davis is associate director of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. It's one of the organizations funding this shoreline restoration. And Davis also happens to live here.

ACT: It's a wonderful alternative that provides just as good shoreline protection while also providing a lot of really important habitat benefits that a bulkhead or rock sea wall does not provide.

Good for wildlife… and she says, it's adaptive in the face of sea level rise.

ACT: If sea level were to rise another foot for example. The marsh could kind of migrate inland, whereas if you had a bulkhead obviously there's no migration because it can't move.

But most of the people with bulkheads are NOT buying it. They want to protect their property from the sinking land and rising water, and a lot of them don't think a bunch of rocks and grass are going to cut it. Kevin Smith is chief of restoration services for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

ACT: There's many places you can go and look at miles of shoreline and not see any natural shoreline at all. It's all armored off.

Smith met me at a nature center along the bay. A few years ago a stretch of bulkhead here was replaced with a living shoreline. The natural ebb and flow of these shorelines has made some property owners skeptical. They want the shoreline to stay put.

ACT: If these types of projects don't protect that shoreline from erosion then homeowners are not going to want to do it.

But Smith insists these projects do work...and long term they're going to be more sustainable and more flexible than bulkheads… which over time will lose the battle against the constant pounding of the rising sea. For the Environment Report, I'm Tamara Keith.

Biologist say bulkheads are a losing battle against the constant pounding of a rising sea.

That’s The Environment Report. I’m Lester Graham.