The data that the maps are based on come from my friends at Inrix, a clever company based just outside of Seattle that measures traffic congestion using data from GPS tracking systems in commercial fleets. I’ve written about them before, and used their data in December 2008 to form the Forbes “Chirp Index,” a group of leading indicators with which we (fairly accurately) predicted that the recession would bottom out late in the summer of 2009.

After a couple of years of declining traffic congestion (due first to rising gas prices and then to rising unemployment), traffic congestion seems to be coming back. Growth in economic activity and stimulus-related road construction projects are bringing more people onto the roads and then slowing them down.

A minor tiff erupted in the comments section of my article; one commenter suggested that traffic congestion wouldn’t come back if only we invested more in public transportation. The next commenter wrote that public transportation hasn’t been proven to have any meaningful impact on traffic congestion.

Both commenters make legitimate, though incomplete, points. Public transit advocates tend not to talk of payoffs from transit investment in terms of immediate relief from congestion; after all, much of the housing and commercial space that’s been built in this country over the last 50 years is fundamentally incompatible with efficient transit schemes. The office-park worker who lives on a cul-de-sac will likely never be able to use even the most ambitious new transit system to commute–at least not as long as he lives in a housing tract and works in an office park.

That’s why transit advocates concede that new rail lines won’t immediately cut traffic on adjacent arterial roads. Rather, they say, transit systems encourage the kind of development that is compatible with transit use: walkable neighborhoods with a combination of townhouses, apartment high-rises, offices and shopping that are based around transit stations.

This kind of development is popular in places like Northern Virginia, where a well-run rail system links outlying areas to a massive job center in Washington, D.C. It takes much more patience to introduce these kinds of transit-oriented neighborhoods to cities with comparatively weak central business districts, like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, since people who live in them but don’t work in them may still have to drive to otherwise-inaccessible office parks.

So new transit networks in car-oriented areas constitute major investments in reorienting urban development over a period of decades, not a quick attempt to remove a few cars from highways. Traffic will come back this year–there’s no way around that–but sound investments now could mean that it will bring fewer headaches fifty years from now.

Many things have changed since then. There are the obvious shifts in the political and social landscape. There’s my move to New York, and, with it, the shift from Green Line to Q Train as my preferred mode of transportation.

Now, I humbly submit another change to that list: I have a new website. My old one, at home.uchicago.edu, is leaving the figurative dormitory in which it has lived for the last four years, and is standing on its own feet with its own address, www.jebruner.com.

I noticed a few things as I began to reëvaluate my website to prepare for its move. First of all, it was no longer at the top of the Google hit list for “Jon Bruner,” having been replaced in that spot by a website belonging to a North Carolina real estate agent named Jon Bruner. He promotes himself with this slogan: “Every community has at least one realtor like Jon Bruner. In ours……..it’s Jon Bruner!” This is embarrassing.

Then there was the fact that, since I last paid attention in aught four, my fake abstract on Queen had become something of an Internet micro-phenomenon, with as many as thirty people a day following links from obscure newsgroup posts (and, in one case, an alternative weekly in Mississippi) to read it. Most of the visits to my site were coming in via Google searches for “fat bottom girls,” “rockin’ world,” “fat bottoms,” and the like. Obviously, the abstract, and its frighteningly well-reasoned rebuttal, will remain on this site, as will other favorites from Dodd-Mead like The Thelmiad.

As for new content, I’ve decided to turn towards a particularly vexing phenomenon that I observe every time that I’m in Midtown: tourists, many of whom have spent thousands of dollars to travel to and stay in New York, flock to the Olive Garden on Times Square and The Gap on Fifth Avenue. I’ll be producing a short guide, to appear here soon, that will help tourists keep their attention on things that they can’t do in a mall in Des Moines.

In the meantime, take a look at the old favorites (only a few old favorites are here for now, but more will come) and help me beat out that North Carolina realtor by linking to my page and by searching for “Jon Bruner” and clicking on this website in the results. And tell people about this website; there’s a whole bright world of obscure newsgroups to conquer.