Road rage.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: UP FRONT

I grew up on wheels. My family has a picture of me steering a big John Deere tractor when I was 4. Now, even though I'm old enough to know better, I still get excited about road trips. I plug in a vintage Creedence Clearwater Revival CD--Big wheel keep on turnin' / Proud Mary keep on burnin' / Rollin', rollin'--and crank up the bass. Reporting takes me from one end of the state to the other. Over and over.

But the fun is fading. Traffic is strangling this state, and not even money--North Carolina is spending $2.7 billion on highways this fiscal year--seems to help. Efforts to fix problems often seem to make them worse. Every business ought to be up in arms, if not over the safety and health of employees, then the bottom line.

I pondered this a few days ago as I sat like a fume-flummoxed lemming in a 15-mile-long traffic jam on Interstate 85 just north of Concord. I had crawled through Charlotte's morning traffic and reached what I thought was the open road--Big wheel keep on turnin'--when a solid wall of brake lights loomed ahead. Two 18-wheel-ers had wrecked in a construction zone near Salisbury. I inched ahead--two miles in 30 minutes--made it to an exit, swung southeast, then north on N.C. 49. More than three hours later, I completed my 118-mile trip to Gibsonville, near Burlington. That's nowhere near my record. A couple of years ago, it took me nearly five hours to get the 143 miles to Raleigh. Major accidents cut my average speed to about 30 mph. And the problem isn't confined to the interstates.

The most obvious reason employers ought to be concerned--outraged--is lost productivity. A Texas research institute calculated that Triangle drivers spend the equivalent of three workdays a year sitting in traffic jams. By 2020, they'll spend a third of their time on the road stuck in traffic...