RALEIGH – I’ve got some scintillating reading for you on America’s transportation problems and how best to address them.

Yes, scintillating. I’m talking mesmerizing, page-turning, life-changing, can’t-put-it-down-till-you-study-the-graphs material. Since I have no reason to believe my fascination with commute times, traffic flows, land-use patterns, and trips-per-day statistics is unique, I must assume that CJO readers want to know all about them, too.

My first recommendation is the third edition of Commuting in America, put out by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, part of the National Research Council. It is rich with the sort of data that policymakers here in North Carolina and beyond should master before dreaming up new ways of building archaic technology with our tax dollars. For example:

• Traveling to and from work constituted only about 16 percent of all daily trips per person in 2000, down from 20 percent in 1990. That doesn’t mean people are working less, or traveling less for work, of course. It means that they are traveling even more for other purposes, and throughout the day. Work commutes still play the most significant role in congestion at peak times, of course.

• Almost half of all commutes are suburb-to-suburb. Only 19 percent are what is misleadingly called the “traditional” suburb-to-downtown commute. About half that percentage are actually commuting in “reverse” – people living downtown but working in the suburb. Transportation policies based on a hub-and-spoke model for travel and commuting are about as relevant as transportation policies based on proximity to blacksmith shops.

• Driving alone is more common today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Carpooling is declining in significance in most places. Telecommuting is a more common means of solving the problem of daily highway commutes than mass transit is in many places, and it is growing while transit use as a share of total trips is mostly staying level or declining.

My other recommendation for transportation-policy reading is a new book by two friends and colleagues of mine, Ted Balaker and Sam Staley. Both are affiliated with the Reason Foundation in California, Balaker as an investigative journalist and Staley as an economist and urban-policy specialist. The book has a long and descriptive title – The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It.

Two chapters are deserving of particular attention. In “Ten Myths about Car-Crazy Suburbia,” Balaker and Staley employ facts and reasoned arguments to debunk such notions as suburbia causing health problems, transit solving congestion problems, and highway construction not alleviating traffic problems. In a more constructive vein, they list “Ten Congestion Busters” that form an efficient and effective response to the transportation challenges of the 21st century. Three of the ideas involve building new highway capacity: adding lanes, improving arterials and intersections, and employing creative ways to finance and build roadways. The other seven ideas address the crucial but often-overlooked need to manage highway systems better: aggressive incident monitoring, high-occupancy toll lanes to manage peak demand, more one-way streets, more efficient traffic signaling, ramp metering, parking-price reform, and incentives for telecommuting.

“The notion that we cannot build our way out of congestion is wrong,” the authors conclude. “It’s wrong historically and it’s wrong technically. Projects in the United States and around the world show us over and over again that we have the engineering capabilities to build new capacity and manage existing networks more efficiently.”

Indeed, Balaker and Staley reveal that even France has lessons to teach America about market-based transportation solutions. Scintillating, I tell ya.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.