I know this is an old thread, but I found it interesting. The writer of the piece the OP linked to is an exponent of the "Induced demand! Sprawl! Roads don't work! Suppress cars!" craziness that seems to dominate urban planning today.
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Originally Posted by hensleya1
Hence my proposal of digging a trench and capping the whole thing. Allows thru traffic to get through with a minimum of problems, also reduces the noise problem - and gets rid of those unsightly concrete support beams.
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An underground highway is certainly an ideal solution, and it's not as if there's any shortage of right of way.
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I've had a big problem with people that say expanding highway capacity is a short-term solution to congestion. This primarily stems from the largely reactive nature of highway building nowadays. We wait until there's a big traffic problem to even get the ball rolling.
By the time you've done the planning, the environmental studies, the litigation, acquisition of right-of-way, and then the actual construction, adding another lane to the highway has taken a decade or more. By then, the booming area has seen another 15-20% growth. Of course adding one lane is insufficient by this point, so urban planners point to this as an exercise in futility, thinking that adding lanes makes more traffic.
Fact is, it takes so long to add lanes that they're obsolete before they're complete. The way to solve traffic woes is to look 30 years in the future and determine how much traffic will be on the roads then, and planning accordingly.
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Exactly
. The driver of increased congestion is population growth and to a lesser degree economic growth; the road capacity has to increase to meet that demand, and the effect of induced demand must also be accounted for when you expand the road. The reactionary nature of road planning is the bane of Americans' day-to-day life. I've seen this formula play out dozens of times:
1. A 2 lane road is located in a rapidly growing area.
2. A proposal is created to widen it to 4 lanes to get a jump on future traffic demand and to ensure that the road isn't congested.
3. No one is willing to make the investment to widen the road, and the area grows rapidly.
4. With more people comes more traffic, and since the road is still only 2 lanes congestion becomes a big problem.
5. 20 years after step 2, the road is finally widened to 4 lanes. However, by this point 6 lanes is needed for optimal traffic flow and to get a jump on future growth. The residents almost never get 6 lanes, and the road remains clogged, giving more ammunition to the anti-car crowd.
Far from expanding it to 4 or 6 lanes to reduce future congestion, the residents are lucky if they don't get stuck in step 4. As the example of Phoenix demonstrates, cities will sprawl with or without freeways, but at least with freeways and huge roads traffic will flow better. Los Angeles is often cited as an example of sprawl=big roads=congestion, but the real problem is that there are 17 million people moving around Greater Los Angeles, and that presents a monumental challenge to any kind of transportation system. NYC, which has a similar population, is as congested or even more congested than LA by some measures, and NYC has good public transit. Considering how congested NYC is even with public transit, I think it's miraculous that LA does about as well with very little public transit. It makes one wonder just how uncongested LA would be if it did have good public transit throughout the metro area.
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