Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
User Journal

Journal fiannaFailMan's Journal: Why widening roads is not the answer 17

Journal by fiannaFailMan

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.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Why widening roads is not the answer More

Why widening roads is not the answer

Comments Filter:
  • Score:5 Insightful

    Totally agree. After living in suburbia my entire life, I can totally vouch for this. My community, Harrisburg PA, has is in one of the most heavily traveled corridors in the United States. Our roads are clogged, and seemingly under perpetual construction. And all the construction hasn't helped anything, except to cause more accidents.

    It seems counter-intuitive, but if local governments spent money on effective public transportation and similar things (like bike paths and sidewalks), peo
    • Yes, I wrote it. I've been reading a lot about this stuff. Currently I'm reading 'The death and Life of Great American Cities' by Jane Jacobs. It was written around 1958 but is still relevant today. I also recommend 'Suburban Nation - The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.'

      See also, Congress for the New Urbanism [cnu.org], a growing movement in North America which aims to promote sensible urban planning as a means of improving quality of life all round.

  • I agree in newer developments. More mass transit. Less focus on more lanes. As has been noted, the areas with increasingly higher and higher traffic problems are the younger and younger cities. here [usatoday.com] (Of course, you're finding old cities -- you know, the ones with 3 lanes of road since 1950 when it got built) with just as much traffic.

    Every now and then I like ranting about transit in Chicago, and there's big road construction projects in areas that I believe need it. It's more about safety and outdated de

  • You have an interesting theory, that more roads means even more traffic. In Boston, they are moving an interstate underground and adding lanes in both directions. (http://www.bigdig.com)

    It will be interesting to see, once the project is done, if the traffic jams get worse or better. Here's something to think about though. Due to the extreme disruptions that this project has caused in Boston, could that end up reducing overall traffic due to people getting used to alternatives while the construction is goin
    • Yeah, I've heard all about this 'Big Dig.' I hear that it has been going on for so long (ten years?) that it even has a dessert named after it. Personally, I'm all in favour of moving cars underground and out of sight be it for parking or driving purposes, it frees the surface of the city up for more important things, like people. As you say, time will tell if this has any adverse effect on traffic once it opens.
      • I know of a Big Dig ice cream flavor offered by the local ice cream chain Bringham's. Is this what you are talking about.

        Anyway, my prediction is that traffic will be just as bad as before, at least at peak times. (Perhaps it'll clear up on the weekends, though). There may be a few years where things are better, but it'll play out exactly as the original poster suggested. Once traffic improves, more people will move out into the suburbs, and you are right back were you started. It's particularly bad i
  • You wrote:

    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.

    The railways ARE privately owned; Am

    • Thanks for that info about funding.

      I agree that the US is too big to cross by rail in that aircraft have an advantage once the distance gets over, say, 400 miles. However, trains can be very competitive at shorter distances, especially if they are high-speed. And when I say high speed, I mean 110 mph+. Currently the infrastructure just cannot handle trains travelling at that sort of speed here in California, due in part to the fact that the tracks are owned by the freight train operators.

      A high-speed

      • Coast-to-coast, the US is too big for practical passenger trains. That still leaves a *lot* of traffic within the coasts. If we had two dedicated high-speed passenger lines, one from Boston to D.C. and one from San Francisco to San Diego, both connecting frequently to local mass-transit networks, that would be very useful.

        I live in New Britain, Connecticut and go to school in College Park, Maryland (near D.C.). When I go home for vacation, I fly Southwest from BWI to bradley. The whole trip is 1 hr gr

        • Amtrak has tried to create a high speed service through the Northeast corridor: their Accela service. Because of the quality of the tracks, sharing the tracks with other trains, and the neighborhoods the trains go through, the train reaches its max speed for all of about 10 miles between Boston and New York. The net savings is 20 minutes over the previous slower trains, and it costs twice as much. This is not the recipe for success.

          To do it right would require new tracks, and therefore major government
          • Indeed. Only the Japanese model (dedicated tracks for high-speed trains) can provide a truly reliable high-speed service. Having said that, high speed trains in England share their tracks with freight and local commuter traffic. Sophisticated tracks and signalling help to keep it all running, but it can be a bit unreliable at times.
  • The fundamental problem is that people to get stuff done (working, shopping, etc.) people need to be close together, but given a choice, people want to live far apart.

    While I agree that the suburban strategy of trying to keep everything separate creates a utopia for cars and not much else, I'm not sure relaxing the zoning rules will change much. People like to live in the suburbs because they want the space. I suspect most people's ideal home is a single family house on at least a 1/3 acre. This now det
    • I disagree with the idea that 'most' people want to live in suburbia. I know tonnes of people here in Silicon Valley (including myself) who only live in the suburbs because they have to live close to their work. If they had their own way, they'd live in urban San Francisco where property values are a lot higher than down here, such is the demand for high-density living.

      I'm not suggesting that everyone should be forced to live in a built-up area. But where demand exists for high-density housing, that

      • I disagree with the idea that 'most' people want to live in suburbia. I know tonnes of people here in Silicon Valley (including myself) who only live in the suburbs because they have to live close to their work.

        Living in the suburbs to be close to work? That exactly opposite most people I know, who need to live in or near a city to be close to work. I guess this just means that generallities aren't generally true. I'll admit I was being far too general. I think a lot of it has to do with age. A few ye
        • Your points are well made. However I probably didn't make myself very clear. I don't know if you're familiar with Silicon Valley or not but it is a huge suburban sprawl spanning many 'cities' (and 'cities' is a word I use loosely here) around the southern part of San Francisco Bay. People's places of work are scattered throughout office parks all over the place which are all but inaccessible to anyone without a car. The older downtown areas of each city have been reduced to a single street in some cases
          • I've been to the San Francisco Bay area a few times, so I am somewhat, but not well, familar with the area. Things are similar here, with the financial sorts of businesses congregating in the city and technology oriented businesses congregating in a ring along the major highway about 10 miles from downtown. If I remember though, the sprawl of office parks is worse in the Bay Area. I don't know how much the sprawl is due to zoning, or lack of planning. I can imagine that what happened during the birth of

  • Agreed - Answer To Terrorism (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AmericanInKiev ( 453362 ) on Friday April 30, 2004 @10:30PM (#9025214) Homepage
    We need to realize that Airplane are missiles.

    Trains on the other hand are limited in real damage - even the Spain bombing was an order of magnitude less devestating that the World Trade Center.

    High Speed Trains - small and often could go a long way towards reducing our exposure to terrorists and our reliance on foriegn oil.

    Airplane also do not penetrate the city center - whereas train will let you off at the doorstep of the action. You can WALK from there to anywhere important very often.

    In short - for several reasons in addition to the relentless congenstion issue - we should move from roads to trains.

    AIK

Slashdot Top Deals

One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.

Close