There's a section in the San Jose Mercury News called 'Roadshow' where readers can write in for answers to their questions about anything relating to the roads in Silicon Valley. A common question is "My commute along highway [blah] has gotten very slow lately. When is this road going to get widened?" More often than not, there is a plan to widen said road. Public policy in California seems to focus on adding extra lanes almost as if it's a requisite solution to congestion. But it's neither requisite nor is it a solution. Here's why.
In the 1980s they built a huge orbital motorway around London called the M25. At the time it was hailed by the British tabloid press as a 'traffic jam-buster' and 'the end of congestion in London at last.' Within a few years it became known as 'the world's longest car park (parking lot)' and a 'complete disaster' as well as an infinite number of other negative descriptions. It was this monstrosity that propelled the concept of 'induced traffic' into the collective consciousness of the average Brit.
With Induced Traffic, adding extra roadspace leads not to a reduction in congestion, but an increase in traffic which in turn leads to an increase in congestion right back up to the same levels as it was at before the new roads or extra lanes were built. No sooner do you build a road than it fills with vehicles.
Reasons? There are many. People who live close to their place of work (usually in a city) frequently have to pay more for their property. To take advantage of cheaper property, they move out of town. Growth further away from town leads to an increase in traffic, leading to extra demand for roadspace. So the road is given extra lanes supposedly to ease congestion from the outlying location. The commute temporarily gets a bit quicker. People living in town want to take advantage of cheap property further out as well as the quicker commute from there. So they move out in huge numbers, and hence the traffic to and from the remote location increases at peak time. A vicious circle.
Bay Area gridlock was supposed to result from the refusal to re-build the elevated freeways that had collapsed in San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake. It didn't happen. The motorists who were supposed to clog up the city's streets ended up making other arrangements. They took alternative rooutes, rode their bikes, took the bus, took the tram, took the BART, took the cable car.
So it's obvious that roadspace has no correlation with good traffic flow. If it did, Los Angeles, where a full third of the city's surface area is dedicated to roads, highways and parking lots, would be the least congested city in the world. It isn't.
Solutions?
Well for one thing, roads are free at the point of use. In other words, this limited resource is rationed out by queueing as opposed to price, something that should have disappeared with the Soviet era. The congestion charge in London has been a huge success. Before it was brought in, traffic in London proceeded at the same average speed that it had done 100 years previously when it was propelled by horses. Charge people for the privilege of getting into central London and they start making sure that the journey is absolutely necessar or else they use more efficient mass transit.
However, mass transit only works efficiently when urban density is above a certain level. In low-density Silicon Valley, getting around by public transport will take you two to three times as long as driving. This sort of low-density sprawl is fairly typical of California. Why? Well it's kind of a long story, but to cut it short, after WWII it was decided that industry (which was pretty dirty in those days) should be moved from residential areas. The policy worked and was a gret success. But then the planners got a bit carried away with it. They decided to seperate everything from everything. Houses go here. Shops got here. Offices go over here. Industry goes back there. Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules took hold and we were left with a situation in which the suburbs replaced the traditional urban environment. Now, when a suburbanite runs out of milk, he has to strap himself into a three-tonne vehicle and create a cloud of pollution to take himself to the nearest 'convenience' (sic) store. Whereas someone in an older city like San Francisco usually just steps out of his apartment and walks to the little grocery store across the street.
All these different uses, shopping, living, working, playing, are something that we all do at different times of the day. Put them out of walking distance of each other, and you give the people a huge amount of driving to do just to meet basic daily needs. Widening roads to accomodate them just spreads everything out further, another vicious circle.
So let's get back to basics and build our cities in the tried and tested way they have been built since time began, i.e. put everything close at hand. That's kinda the whole point of cities anyway.
Let's have a fairer tax on fuel so that the full cost of motoring is included in the price of petrol. US motorists only pay a third of the cost of road-building through their gas taxes, the rest comes from federal income tax. Cut income tax, increase petrol tax. Furthermore, use that tax to invest more in efficient mass-transit and less in inefficient roads.
Currently Amtrak is expected to pay for both rolling-stock AND railway infrastructure. It is not a level playing-field with the federally-subsidised interstate freeways. Let's level it. Let's have proper subsidies for railway infrastructure and open up the railway operations to privatisation and competition. With the tracks and signalling paid for by Uncle Sam, the privatised railway operators might actually be able to make a profit whilst improving services.
As well as roads, the airline industry is also unfairly subsidised. Time to tighten the purse-strings and let the market go to work for the benefit of the consumer. Time to provide a bit more choice as to how people want to live and get around.