I like author Malcom Gladwell. 

Outliers, Blink, and of course the book that is everyone’s purview daily – Traffic.

I vividly recall Malcom performing a CA road-test to find out what happens in the digital world when a heavily traveled route suddenly becomes less traveled: within a matter of hours, traffic siphoned from more heavily traveled roads, finds its way to the on-ramp of the less traveled route until it reaches capacity. In 2019 traffic is like water – it finds a way.

Occasionally, I’ll be driving on the Technology Belt (Route 128) that encircles Boston and reflect on the volume of traffic compared to say – 1980. That was back when if you absolutely had to leave Boston (and weekday commuter traffic behind) you had to exit the city by 3pm. Predictable. Today, the only thing that’s predictable is there will be too many cars traveling on too few roads every weekday between 6am and 10pm.

Question: Where are all of these cars and drivers coming from? I was watching CNN this weekend and the ticker-tape at the bottom of the screen caught my eye:

“…US auto-loans reached their highest level in recorded history (89 million)… auto-loan delinquencies over 90 days reached an historical high (7%)…”

Question answered.

Hmm…. perhaps traffic might be easing a bit in 2019. Then again, perhaps we’ll see more cars sold to more people driving on what are essentially the same roads.

I’d bet on the latter.

Best,

Mark