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Keller @ Large: Traffic Solution Needs To Be Top Issue In Governor's Race

BOSTON (CBS) - While I have been following the saga of the toll booths coming down on the Massachusetts Turnpike, I hadn't actually treated myself to a firsthand look until Wednesday night, when I drove to Framingham during the afternoon rush hour.

Check: Traffic Updates

If you can call what I was doing "driving."

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It is amazing to see the toll booths gone, and the state seems to be making short work of the job, a commendable contrast with some of our slow-motion sagas like the Route 128 Add-A-Lane project down Needham-Randolph way, now approaching it's 14th year. And the excruciating traffic jam I sat in from Newton to Natick did seem to have been caused by a breakdown, not the toll booth work.

But the traffic was still horrible. A fifteen-minute ride instead took an hour.

And when I finally fled the Pike, Routes 30 and 9 were every bit as bad.

Come to think of it, the traffic around here has been noticeably horrible all year long, with expanding rush hours that now often overlap and atrocious in-town congestion in places and at times where I've never seen it before.

Don't get me started on what it was like to go up and down the Cape this summer.

What is going on?

All the repair work doesn't help, but let's face it, there are simply too many people driving too many vehicles at the same time on roads that cannot smoothly handle the volume.

It's bad for business.

It's bad for the environment.

And it can't be good for commuter mental health.

Maybe we should make this problem – and its solution – a top issue in the 2018 governor's race.

Listen to Jon's commentary:

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