Los Angeles Drivers on the 405 Ask: Was $1.6B Worth It?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The problem is that the demand is virtually indefinite for a nominally free supply.
The only cost involved is time―time that is wasted in congestion―which limits the amount of drivers willing to use the route during congested times.
Dynamic tolls would make the cost explicit.
If the cost of using the road at any given time would be high enough that there's barely no congestion on the road, i.e. practically everyone can cruise at the limit, then people could choose to pay for the privilege, postpone their trip to a later/earlier time slot when there's less congestion and the toll would be lower or zero, or omit the trip all together. Obviously, people wouldn't like this because they've used to getting free access, or "free" if you don't count the billions of tax dollars that go into widening and extending this utopia of endless freeway capacity.
There's another "or" .. or take the regular streets instead and cause even more local congestion. That's a real issue in LA where on some routes freeways can be only marginally faster than taking cut-throughs during rush hour.
This is of course a perfectly well understood phenomenon. They went ahead anyway.
Vehicle capacity on the northbound 405 has increased from 10,000
vehicles per hour to 11,700 vehicles per hour at peak times.
So capacity increased maybe 10k a day, or 750M over a 20 year period. Makes the $1B investment seem reasonable.
A $1B investment in public transport can buy you a whole lot more than 1.7k vph. Hell, you could reserve that new lane for buses and transport a magnitude more people than those vehicles carry starting tomorrow.
Cities are growing, suburbs are dying, you can spend the money now or face the meltdown later.
There's the meltdown on the horizon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepulveda_Pass_Transit_Corrido...
Buses can already use the HOV lanes. One of the expansion lanes (the northbound one) was an HOV lane, so now there are HOV lanes in both directions. Who cares, given how few riders buses attract.
That is the very nature of Induced Demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand).
So he went from going an average of 10 miles/hr to 12.5 miles/hr. Never mind the ever-increasing population of the area and this little boost in commute time is just going to evaporate as more people congest the highway. Ideally they'd take away a lane on each side and build a new Metro rail line. It might not alleviate traffic much, but it would give people an alternative to driving.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it: I argue that the increased traffic throughput allows for economic growth in the region:
Individuals are of course likely to only think about latency/transit time (which hasn't improved, because of the increased traffic.). The society and the local economy cares about the throughput though.
That's true of everything though. All infrastructure doesn't scale. The water pipes / fiber lines / housing stock / schools / etc in the city today likely won't handle the needs of 50+ years either.
It's ok to build infrastructure to meet today's needs, even if it won't work 50+ years from now. "Perfect is the enemy of good."
Cars physically take up a very large amount of space compared to a pedestrian or person on a bike. This is why car oriented transportation scales so badly.
With highway expansion we're trying to scale up the transportation solution that is that requires the most area. This is dumb and expensive.
Better for who? Most of the people using this freeway likely don't live within decent public transit access, and the money spent here is so low, that fact wouldn't have changed for most of them.
> With highway expansion we're trying to scale up the transportation solution that is that requires the most area. This is dumb
Yes it takes up the most space. But it's also the most compatible with existing housing + job transportation, and is the most flexible in terms of arrival and departure time, and is the least likely to hurt the housing market (increase costs, gentrify area).
Trains and buses are great too, but they have their own negatives as well. This "all freeways are bad" attitude simply isn't true.
> and expensive.
This freeway project costs $22 million per mile. Yes, light rail has a higher carrying capacity for pedestrians, but it usually costs between $50 million and $100 million per mile. A lot of your "take up less space" requests explode the costs. LA's Crenshaw Line, for instance, is $165 million per mile, in part because some of it is underground.
Light rail is a great option that all cities should be investing in. But there's no need to race-to-the-bottom on transportation. LA is growing fast enough to need a freeway and more light rail. It's OK that money gets spent on some of both.
It's not like LA is ignoring public transit. There's already 11 active bus/rail projects in some state of construction right now, and many more on the way - https://www.metro.net/interactives/datatables/project/
And look how much was achieved for that money. Apparently not much. Whatever capacity gains appeared were immediately gobbled up. And what next? Scaling further will be harder and more expensive.
It's not enough to compare highway costs and transit costs independent of everything. We need to consider the long term implications of the design choices that are being made.
This point additionally references your comments about how transportation works with the existing infrastructure. We can keep doubling down on the way things have been done for the last 50 years, but I think cities need to take a step back, be more reflective about what they're doing, and work toward undoing some of the effects of bad decisions made decades earlier.
If you don't have proper urban planning a lot of things, like mass transit, will be much more expensive in the future. You need right of ways, for example.
One of the reasons that the "bullet train" between LA to SF is so ridiculously expensive is because getting the land is a lot harder than it would have been 50 years ago. In fact, they changed the route so it would be cheaper. $100 billion dollars...
What I am saying is that from an regional economic point of view, throughput is more important that individual latency. In the context of widening highways. That is it. I did not say anything about other competing transportation methods.
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_T...
I'm also hoping self driving cars will let people choose more appropriately sized vehicles and perhaps untether luggage from human transport (reducing the vehicle size even more).
You're not going to get around congestion, but I think we can break the norms of 9-5 sitting at your desk office hours. White collar jobs have changed dramatically in the past 40 years due to other forces; offices to cubicles to "open floor plans." But we've stuck to 9-5 and people expect me at my desk.
If broadband internet, or high speed data for train commuters, hasn't made working remotely a thing yet, then I don't see how self-driving cars are going to do it. Seems more likely to be the opposite, like the Googlebus: look how much easier it just got for you to work even more hours!
I'm not sure what the saturation for people taking commuter trains is, but if autonomous cars get adopted en masse, that might be the difference? One thing I didn't consider before talking to people in London, when the subway is full there is no relaxing and reading a book. You're elbow to elbow and likely standing the whole time. I know commuter trains aren't like that, though.
Like you're saying, googlebus makes it easier to work longer hours. Conversely, carpooling (or missing the train) keeps people to sane working hours. Taking a bike pushes people to leave before it gets dark outside. I'll be interesting to see how it changes our behaviors.
Still, millions of people manage to make it work somehow, so I guess you eventually get used to it and plan accordingly.
Holidays are usually the worst of the worst. For a few years I drove from the east part of LA to Vegas for Thanksgiving (not having to drive through LA). That 4 hour drive (admittedly a bit longer on a Friday) took 13 hours; 1pm - 2am.
What's unfortunate is in LA it is not just that there's rush hour on the weekends, it's all over and at odd times. 9-5 workers have accommodated the situation so long that leisure time is regularly constrained.
Yeah...people here in the Bay Area say traffic is bad, but it's mostly concentrated at rush hour. In LA, I recall traffic jams at 11:00 PM. You don't see that much in other places.
Frustratingly the California DOT has studied this and has acknowledged this fact, so I suppose spending 1.6 billion on road improvements was a political decision and the experts were ignored? http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...
If you want to reduce traffic and get people to their destination faster you need to halt and/or reverse road network expansion and put all your money toward alternatives such as transit and cycling.
Importantly every person that uses a car alternative for travel is one less car on the road. This frees up space on the existing road network for people who, for whatever reason, must use a car for their trip. With less traffic, their trip may now be faster, and no road expansion was necessary to accomplish this.
Personally there is no real difference in my 20 minute commuting time whether I choose rapid transit, cycling or car. Cycling speed is the slowest, but when one factors in the congestion on the road and walking and transfer times of transit, my cycling commute is competitive.
BTW asking other commenters for 'data' (especially to support claims they did not make) is not great commenting etiquette.
It seems the root cause of traffic is a mismatch between jobs and housing, leading to sprawl and traffic.
Which I suspect is quite natural, because it is driven by a mismatch between where people want to be when they are working (commercial districts) and where people want to be when they aren't (anything except commercial districts).
When you have errands to run, or want a day out exploring, you want all of that in the same place.
When you get home at night, you don't want to be next to the noise, parking lots, crowds of people, airports, ...
This is what Vancouver did. The amount of cars entering and exiting the downtown core is the same since the 1960s, but the amount of downtown jobs is dramatically higher. This is possible because they substantially added residential housing into the downtown core so that many could walk and bike to work, and by adding rapid transit. Expansion of road capacity wasn't needed.
Additionally instead of a hub and spokes model where everyone would live elsewhere and commute into downtown, Vancouver is organized like a loose federation of towns, each with residential and employment options. In suburbs of Vancouver such as Langley, more people work there or in adjacent suburbs than commute into City of Vancouver proper.
Sure. Freeways aren't art installations -- the freeway is built to service drivers. A newly expanded freeway can now service even more drivers before getting congested.
It would be pretty pointless to build a freeway, just for no one to use it.
> If you want to reduce traffic and get people to their destination faster you need to halt and/or reverse road network expansion
Those are two different things, one of which is inherently untrue by definition, for the same reason that "If you want faster internet, you need to halt or reverse fiber deployment" is untrue.
Traffic is transportation. If your goal is to reduce transportation, then sure, tear down roads and it will be much harder for people to move around. But that's going to suck for most of the people living there.
If your goal is to improve transportation, a freeway is one method of doing that. Improvements to public transit and/or bicycling infrastructure is another method of accomplishing that (obviously one you would prefer), but that doesn't make investments in freeways bad too.
It's possible to be pro-public-transit without being anti-personal-transit. LA can need a new freeway and more light rail, those two things are not actually in any conflict.
If it takes you 75 minutes to go 15 miles you already have plenty of incentive not to drive.
People keep moving to Southern California whether the traffic network can handle them or not. "Let's stop building roads so our home is a famously crappy place to live and people stop coming" isn't really a sound coping strategy.