▲ 113 points
back
146 comments
Why is congestion pricing never brought up in any of these conversations about traffic?
Simply charge people 10 or 20 dollars to drive at heavily impacted times of the day. Take every last cent of that toll to subsidize buses and eventually mass transit on the same route.
People in a hurry win because their time is valuable and they get to buy it back relatively cheaply. People not in a hurry win because they get subsidized mass transit. Everyone wins because traffic and pollution go down.
In a country where we allow people to live in misery just to uphold the "Free Market", why do we allow our streets and freeways to become unusable twice a day just so freeways remain "free"?
Isn't this basically FasTrak?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTrak
It seems to represent everything else in the state of California: you get what you pay for. It creates a classist, elitist society.
The FastTrak toll system doesn't cover the LA Freeway or any other major thoroughfares in California. It does cover a handful of isolated toll roads and bridges, but mostly it just lets you drive in the carpool lane without having to actually carpool. This doesn't dissuade people from driving, it just lets people who can afford it get places slightly faster. A real congestion charge avoids creating this two-tiered system by leaving no reasonable alternative route. You either pay the toll, drive 30 minutes out of your way, or take mass transit. Hopefully the latter.
Who is made worse off by the FasTrak HOV lane arrangement? People who can't afford the HOV lanes will remain stuck in traffic like they always were, although there will be less traffic than there used to be, because the people who can afford to use the new HOV lanes are no longer in the normal lanes.
Some people are made better off, and nobody is made worse off.
Wow, are those transponders still that big or is that an older model? We have Good2Go here in the Seattle area, and the little RFID cards are about as big as a credit card (though a bit thinner I think).
Capitalism is entirely about you get what you can pay for. It seems entirely appropriate to the USA.
What happens if you are poor and in a hurry?
The same thing that happens now.
Time redistribution. People with more time will be required to pull over to the side of the road and wait for some time interval to redistribute their share of excess time to people in a hurry. It's part of the self driving car program and will be administered by the Federal Dept of Transportation. It's only fair.
..That would just route out of town traffic happening to pass through the freeway onto city streets which would be much worse for local residents.
Vancouver doesn't have a freeway so all traffic goes through regular city streets.
What actually happens is that the level of traffic basically stays static, and people travel using other means.
The level of automobile traffic moving through the downtown core is unchanged since the 1960s even though the population and amount of people working there has massively increased.
That's a very good point.
I personally believe that all traffic (including surface streets) should pay congestion tolls when there would otherwise be a traffic jam. Again, spend all that money to subsidize mass transit which would benefit local residents without raising local taxes.
Any ideas how to effectively police that type of permit? My gut says the infrastructure and manpower needed would be incredibly expensive. Possibly enough to negate a significant chunk of the revenue
Systems like this are already in place. Generally via RFID and license plate camera readers.
Index the charge to income.
what about poor people in a rush :(
(don't live in LA is probably the answer, ha!)
"Why is congestion pricing never brought up in any of these conversations about traffic?"
Because it would be incredibly regressive. The people who can least afford the fee are those that are not at all in the position to change their driving time habits.
> Three decades ago, according to Fortune, about 70% of American 17-year-olds had a driver’s license; the figure today is 46%. More U.S. teenagers now have a smartphone than a license.
I'd guess that the rise in cell phones, text messaging, and now smartphones was a big contributor to the decline in early licenses and also in the urgency of teens to get their own car.
Before such easy communications, you generally were not in contact with your friends except when you were actually physically with them at school or at pre-arranged times outside of school. You could call then on the phone, of course, but that only worked if they were home to take the call, and you had to compete with the rest of your family for the phone in your house.
This made spontaneous arranging of rides from friends a rather uncertain endeavor. Unless your parents were very generous in the policies for sharing the family car(s) with you, getting a car of your own meant a tremendous leap in your freedom.
Nowadays, a large fraction of teens have cell phones, largely smartphones. They make heavy use of them for messaging services and social networks (and, I've been told, they sometimes even actually use them to talk!). They update their statuses several times a day, and send on average something like 100 messages a day.
Because of this, today's teens (and younger) are much better informed as to where their friends are and what they are doing when those friends are not physically present. They know which of their friends with cars are not busy, and it is trivial to propose a joint trip to the place they wish to go.
Accordingly, having your own car is not as important as it once was. Your social group is now more efficient at sharing cars than social groups were back before widespread mobile communications.
The OP talks of fewer kids having licenses. That has little to do with smartphones and technology. Beyond the increased costs, operating a car today is more emotionally expensive than ever. Driving is now a rationally terrifying experience for kids.
1) Traffic fines are no longer trivial. Beyond the money, if a teen is part of any graduated licensing program ANY ticket may delay them getting their full license many months.
2) Parking is dangerous. Wrong place or wrong time doesn't mean a simple ticket. Your car may be disappeared to some distant impound lot. The ransom demanded will likely be more than the vehicle's worth (at least given the junkers I had as a teenager).
3) Police encounters. The most likely place for a teen to interact negatively with an officer is during a "routine" traffic stop. Turn on the news. A minor incident can quickly spiral into days or weeks in jail.
4) Teenagers now fear failure above all else. A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary. (See many threads here). So they avoid the DMV.
5) Cars increase mobility, but have you seen the streets in most cities? Gridlock makes people feel trapped. For a child in today's world of apparently constant violence, being stuck on a city street is scary. Whereas you or I might see a simple frustration, kids today see physical danger.
Teenagers have plenty of reasons to avoid driving. It isn't because they once needed to physically move in order to communicate. It's because they have good reason to fear the road.
>A test failed is far worse than a test not taken. Teenagers are adverse to any test that isn't absolutely necessary
The driving test is stupidly easy. Whereas very smart kids have well-founded anxiety about SAT and AP testing (genuinely difficult, can make or break your life ambitions), only the most incompetent of the fuckups ever came within a thousand miles of failing a driving test. These were the kind of poeple where everyone else wondered how they managed to stay alive, how they would ever be adults. For those above the 5th percentile of general ability level, passing the driving test on the first try was pretty much guaranteed.
I think this is wrong. I'd much prefer a world where some normal people can't get drivers licenses and moat people on the road are professionals or robots, but if the state says, "No, you're not a good enough driver" then you can't really carry on a suburban life. So it has to say yes to all but the most egregiously incompetent, or lose its tax base.
6) So many people are distracted by their phones - crossing the street or in their cars - that a meaningless text could ruin your life - or end it.
Many streets in LA are wider than even the widest highways in certain countries (UK comes to mind). You can't broaden the 405 much more, nor would such a scheme work for the 10.
The obvious answer is more mass transit and please, pretty please, protected bike lanes on major throughways.
If Amsterdam can squeeze a dedicated bike lane, cars and trams on roads that haven't changed in hundreds of years, surely LA can figure it out.
The fundamental problem is LA's culture of eschewing planning because it requires thinking and an opinionated design might cause someone to feel bad.
LA traffic rehabilation:
1. Eliminate left turns at lighted intersections and any other place a queue builds up. It's a grid - trip routing should use right turns. Lights should only ever have two phases.
2. Transition most through streets to one-way for cars, scavenging some of that width for generous bike paths protected by parked cars.
3. Eliminate lights at entrances to neighborhoods and shopping plazas.
4. Build more than one light rail line at a time. Keep them elevated rather than needlessly dipping into level crossings.
5. If neighborhood streets remain two-way, paint lines down the middle as people seem to have no clue where the edges of their cars are.
6. Stop putting Brawndo on the plants.
I don't know if you've been to Holland, but it's flat. It's flat everywhere. Their steepest hill is a joke, it was less steep than the hill I lived on as a kid in the UK, which in UK terms was a pretty standard hill.
That's why everyone cycles. And that's why Amsterdam squeezed it in because they knew they were going to be used.
I cannot stress how much of a difference it makes everywhere being flat.
LA could definitely do better, but Amsterdam and Los Angeles aren't comparable in any way.
I lived in LA for quite some time. The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art, unless in an ironic, soul-destroying sense of immense fuck-upery.
LA would have all the space it needs if freeways were one way. Yeah, I'm serious. Separate the two directions of traffic by a city block or two and suddenly four lanes will fit in more places, the interchanges become less complex, and there's no spillover delays from rubbernecking the other side of the freeway.
Also, they only recently realized that freeways need to obey the pressure principle: lots of exits, few entrances with meters and long acceleration lanes. That discourages short-distance trips and gives many outlets for relieving congestion in the case of accidents. Long acceleration lanes reduce merge pressure and help reduce the jamming caused by fast traffic hitting slower traffic.
>> The 10/405 interchange cannot under any normal circumstances be declared a work of art
While I agree with you now and have always done so, the point made in the article was that cultural norms have changed so greatly these decades. Our antagonistic view was once exceptional, but it has become mainstream.
As a parallel, I still see immense beauty in the internet's form and function, but many of those of a younger generation who grew up with it might already be seeing the internet as a ubiquitous, soul-destroying, immense fuck-up.
I think he was referring to the cloverleaf interchange being a work of art.
I went to go have lunch with a friend on a Westside, coming from Burbank (20 miles), and the roundtrip took me close to 3 hours. LA is a strange place in that way.
The other day, I overheard someone, who is 'non-minority', tell someone else that they took public transit (bus) to work. The other person was slightly dumbfounded, wondering why anyone would subject themselves to that.
I really do want to see a more bikeable Los Angeles (see link below), and I do want to see the freeways as not part of the problem in this city.
http://www.williamha.com/bike-commuting-to-work-in-los-angel...
The buses in LA are awful. They're subject to the same traffic commuters deal with AND also makes stops every couple blocks. The questionable cleanliness and sharing tight quarters with unsavory people is to be expected in a city that doesn't consider mass transit an viable option.
If you press people about why they don't like taking the bus, you get some interesting answers, usually containing some riff on the phrase "those people". It's pretty shitty.
I asked my teenaged nephew the other day, while he was playing a car racing game, what he thinks would be a reasonable good first car for him. He is two, maybe three years from driving age. He grew up in the suburbs and both his parents have cars. Dad has a classic car for weekend pleasure driving. You get the picture. My nephew hadn't really considered getting a car. I can see the first car thing being a whole lot less of a thing for his generation than it was for his parents'. He would rather spend time tinkering on his computer than under the hood or behind the wheel like his father did.
To be fair, many people worked on their car because it was both accessible and a cheap way to increase the value of and/or reduce the cost of a large purchase. Cars' mechanical components have become less accessible over time, and while you can still work on them yourself, it requires either more knowledge to do so or to use more modular components where there's less technical work besides plugging it in.
Computer hardware isn't much better.
Software though, that's where I'm convinced this spirit is more alive than ever. Instead of racing his car your nephew may play racing games, and instead of working on his car to make it faster/better/cooler, he might become interested in making a game, or other software, and the bars of entry for that are lower than they've ever been, and are just getting lower.
Give him 2-3 years and he'll tell you. Especially once his friends start driving and owning their own cars.
Not directly on topic here, but anyone else feel this was a monstrous jump to make?
>Younger drivers see cars less as tickets to freedom and connection and more as obstacles to those things, in part because the one time that they can’t tap out texts or post pictures to Instagram is while they’re behind the wheel.
Why I drive to work and don't take the bus:
* The bus still takes longer (2-3 times as long)
This might change, but only if normal traffic gets worse.
* Loss of freedom
I have the option of visiting friends/family in other locations if I drive.
Loss of freedom is also related to the very poor intra-networking; the entire transit system in the area is designed as a star pattern for getting workers to the city.
* Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a shift worker: your hours and those of other workers aren't the same, you might not even have multiple workers from the same area at a small company.
* Commuting in a carpool is hard when you aren't a full time worker: (I don't have this problem, but friends do) if your hours aren't consistent or you might be called in at a moment's notice.
I think the answer to all of this is flexible pooled transit. Probably an extension of what we know of today as taxi/ubur; but much more Johnny Cab (80's Total Recall).
I would love to see a future where on-demand car services and / or self-driving cars shrink the traffic volume of Los Angeles back down to the scale it was originally designed for.
As you could imagine, native Angelenos are culturally disposed towards car-as-identity thinking. But the value shift away from that is definitely visible amongst younger people, and trends and values in LA have a tendency to spread at an accelerated pace. So it's possible after a certain tipping point, this could become reality much sooner than we think.
But I'm doubtful we'll be turning the 10 into a park anytime soon. Much more likely that it will just shave off some of the stress of trying to get to a meeting in Santa Monica from Downtown on time
Jevons Paradox: if the convenience and cost of taking the automobile goes down, the usage will go up. It just might suck less because you can go anywhere, from anywhere, and drunk.
If only there was some way to move a large number of people a mile a minute...
Of course, it wouldn't be built in the US.
I think it's great that people are questioning car use in big cities like Los Angeles. I've visited a fair number of cities in my life, and those without many cars are much more pleasant to hang out in. Much healthier, too. Subways, bicycle paths and walking streets work very well in large cities.
However, I hope people won't make the mistake of trying to get rid of cars in rural areas and small towns. Public transportation does not work well here.
Many left-wing politicians don't want cars anywhere, whereas many right-wing politicians want cars everywhere. Some people seem to have difficulties seeing that different solutions work well in different situations.
I don't think any left wing politicians give a shit about public transit in rural areas. The battleground is the dense suburbs.
The L.A. freeway system is not about L.A. It's about Southern California. Comments that suggest public transportation don't take into account the unique layout of SoCal. Here are just a few of the things to take into account, coming from a guy that grew up in NYC and now lives in SoCal.
--SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks.
--SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.)
--There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on.
--The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way.
I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car.
It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed.
----------
Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away.
+higher quality of life
+less wear and tear on the cars
+less pollution
+less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch
+less maintenance on the roads
+less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them
+less congestion for those that need to be on the road
Mostly nonsense article with no answers.
Get rid of carpool lanes and add some dang lanes in the meantime.
The I-5 HOV lanes in Seattle carry almost as many people per unit of time as the rest of the highway combined. If you're feeling daring enough to argue, note very carefully that I said "people", not "vehicles".
It's pretty well known that adding lanes actually increases congestion. Here are two cited articles that came up in a quick search:
* http://transportationist.org/2015/03/02/elements-of-access-i...
* http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.ht...
Every study ever done has shown that getting rid of carpool lanes is just about the worst thing you could do. All those people that were in the carpool lane are now in with the general traffic, and they're not carpooling. So there are even more cars.