Source of Homewood’s traffic issues
Homewood is a small 8.301 mi² city with 25,000 people that is 3 miles south of Birmingham’s business district. The majority of people who work in Birmingham’s business district live to the south. When thinking of Birmingham regional population, Homewood is near the center, and has a small set of land, and thus has a relatively small population. As you travel farther away from the central business district, there is more land, and thus more population. Because of the way Homewood is positioned, the larger population that lives to the south and travels to the north must pass through Homewood daily.
Graphical representation
Birmingham Business District is where we have office buildings, medical facilities, and car lots. However, people do not live in this area. They live in the circles bordering it.
Median commute in Birmingham is 10 miles. Which means that 50% of people travel fewer than 10 miles on a commute, and 50% of people travel farther than 10 miles. 10 miles from the central business is at 459 in Hoover.
Ridge and valleys are the defining characteristics of Birmingham. These ridges aren’t the classic 12,000ft alps, but are 500ft, incredibly steep, and three sets of them are packed within 7 miles. Just south of Birmingham is Red Mountain, then Shades Mountain, then Double Oak Mountain. There are subtle rises and dips even in between the larger mountains. Cars traveling up and down these hills create inefficiencies in travel. Some of our friends who moved to Birmingham said “My car gets 5 fewer mpg in here than where we moved from.”
Homewood is 2 miles south of the Birmingham Business District. Not only is it just south, it covers the souther surface of it. That means, that all travel in a southern direction must go. As you can see with the diagram of roads, the majority of major roads travels go south and east. Non-coincidentally, that’s the direction that people have chosen to live.
Birmingham growth is overwhelmingly southward. Birmingham has not grown evenly across the concentric circles. In cities around the world, you see non-symmetrical growth due to earth features like water (NY / SF) or mountains (Denver / Zurich / LA). Birmingham doesn’t have huge mountains, but you’d expect the mountain ranges to encourage growth outward from valleys. Since Birmingham growth doesn’t follower path of least resistance, you’d expect, given similar living conditions, equal growth out from the business district. I’ve got my own philosophies about directional growth, but that’s for another article.
When people don’t live where they work, they have to travel. 10 miles is the median commute distance for Birmingham. The typical commuter to the Birmingham Business Distract travels from the outer most band in our illustration and drives to the downtown area.
Everyone commuting to the Birmingham Business District goes through Homewood. 25,000 people live in Homewood; 400,000 people live south of Birmingham. This causes the city to explode to 200,000 people from (and 200,000 cars because one-driver-to-one-car) during morning and evening commutes.
All roads split from Homewood. With 200,000 cars moving through Homewood, the roads become saturated quickly. Accidents, downstream slow downs, and generally too many cars causes traffic to stall for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening.
Homewood is the bottleneck, but Homewood is not the problem. The problem is that unrelenting growth that happened southward. When someone chooses a larger house in Shelby County, they know the commute is going to be painful. It is not Homewood’s responsibility to ease the pain of the people who make that choice.
