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California's DOT Admits That More Roads Mean More Traffic

66 points by sampo 11y ago

klagermkii 11y ago
I really dislike "induced demand" as a reason to maintain a terrible experience of a desired product or service. Increase fuel taxes or even do demand charging, but don't have this thing where you make a car trip take three times longer because it discourages people from using their cars.
- randallsquared 11y ago
  I think the argument isn't "let's not improve things because people will use things more" but "let's not spend resources for little improvement". The induced demand argument suggests that the pain and utility of traffic are in equilibrium, and that there's so much latent demand that no feasible amount of pavement will reduce the pain appreciably. It seems to me of a similar genre to studies showing that safety equipment increases risky behavior.
- awjr 11y ago
  That's the point, "induced demand" is simply the fact of making it easier to travel by car, encourages more people to choose to travel by car. It is not that the trip takes three times as long, it's the fact, they built a wider road and the journey took half as long, prior to the road being widened. You cannot solve this by building more roads. You solve it by putting roads on a "road diet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet enabling modal share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share . You create segregated space for walking, for cycling. You prioritise public transport. You want more people to choose any other option, other than the car. This, however, is hard when traffic modelling still focuses on traffic flow (maximising car throughput) over modal share. In the UK, it estimated that the school run is 20%-25% of rush hour. Our road design precludes kids cycling to school.
  - timthorn 11y ago
    > Our road design precludes kids cycling to school No, there are plenty of children who cycle to school and in safety in the UK. The bigger issue is parents' fears of abduction and/or traffic.
    - awjr 11y ago
      I have to disagree here. Various Council Highways departments are absolutely focused on traffic flow. I would go as far as to say that the two top priorities are traffic flow and not affecting on-street parking. It's changing. This table comes from the Welsh Active Travel Act Design Guidance https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-2014-12-15-at-09-50-56.png https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-20... If you have a 30mph road, it needs a protected cycle track. We need space where an 8 year old cycling to school does not have to share road space with HGVs. Where one mistake does not get punished by death.
    - lhopki01 11y ago
      I cycle all over London and I don't feel safe a lot of the time. Big roads have inconsistent cycle lanes that start and stop at random or are ignored by drivers. Side roads have people who think 35mph is a reasonable speed to go on a road that doesn't even have space for two cars to pass side by side. The UK needs a lot more investment in cycle infrastructure before it could be considered safe.
      - awjr 11y ago
        This is the streetview of London Road, Bath. https://goo.gl/maps/BF8dHyqetow https://goo.gl/maps/BF8dHyqetow Local cycling groups campaigned for a 2 way protected track along here, but were over-ruled by a council officer who chose a design, where you can be cycling along with your child on a bike, be overtaken by a bus, that then pulls in forcing you to pull out into 30mph traffic. They chose a design where dead space in the middle of the road was more important than providing a design that encouraged modal shift. This road also breaks the EU legal limits on pollution. They knew this when they put in this design. I wrote about it here http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of-bad-banes-management/ http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of... however the real issue is that a lot of Highways officers still consider cycling a joke. "Why should we cater for the 2%" is a line I hear a lot. However, you do not build a bridge because of the number of people swimming the river.
crystaln 11y ago
The idea that induced demand entirely compensates for new road capacity is ridiculous on its face. This would only be nearly the case if the road infrastructure is vastly behind what's needed. Even then, much of the newly accommodated traffic will be of economic benefit. Consider that the theory states that traffic is unchanged because people will be incentivized to drive more because of less traffic. This is self contradictory - there can't be both less traffic and the same traffic.
- pfortuny 11y ago
  Inertia makes things react late to forces. Same here. The article clearly states that the new capacity is essentially filled in the long (10 year range) term, not the short one.
  - skellington 11y ago
    Wow, what an illuminating study. If you build roads and the population continues to grow and/or pent up demand is release, those roads will eventually/immediately clog up. Obviously people use roads until the equilibrium of pain is met (like any economic decision). But, there is a point where you can supply so much capacity that there won't be traffic. It's a lie to say that no amount of capacity can overwhelm all forms of demand. The only real question is how much road would it take to fully satisfy demand and what would that cost vs the alternatives. (Ignoring pollution issues)
    - Majestic121 11y ago
      I don't see any good reason to ignore pollution when looking for the best solution.
    - lhopki01 11y ago
      And what is that point? More roads mean less living area which means more roads to get out to where there is living area. A poorly designed response to a problem makes the problem even worse. There are better ways of dealing with pent up demand for movement than to build more roads. Ones that are more efficient of resources, that are better for the environment and that provide a better quality of life for everyone.
andys627 11y ago
Federal, state, and local governments have ignored "induced demand" for 50 years and the result has been endless highway building. This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does. Most of the US is "car dependent" - ie you must have a car to reasonably participate in the city - yes there are buses but they are not as convenient as having a car, yes there are bike lanes but they are dangerous and sparse. I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain. Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it. We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.
- hammock 11y ago
  Just to be clear for all the readers, the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic. The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road. With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that. I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
  - jerf 11y ago
    Suppose you want to build a railway from TownA to TownB. It's ten miles and you can prove in every conceivable way that it will be profitable for both you and the two towns. You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical. Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact. All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
mattheusser 11y ago
Jevon's Law. Google it.
nashashmi 11y ago
I have started taking every article of complaint from citylab with a grain of salt. It always seems like there is an agenda with these articles. In this case, they are trying to curb the building of roads. I do not know how that helps. Alleviating traffic and bringing increased capacity to roads helps spur economic activity. The Big Dig Project on the Central Artery in Boston helped alleviate traffic and resume economic growth in an area where it had stalled. The capacity of the artery is expected to be fully realized by 2050. In NJ, we are always stuck in traffic. And that is the main reason why NJ's economy has stalled. No more room for growth. The point of the article and citylab's purpose is probably to direct more use of public transportation. But likewise, the more public transportation you have, the more use you will have there too. I really don't see the point of this article.
- trgn 11y ago
  The point is that building more roads doesn't reduce congestion. This is because the number of car trips increases as well. As the supply of roads grow, the demand for car trips goes up as well, to the benefit of no one. It is definitely an editorial decision of Citylab to evangelize this finding. But in this case, not in a mendacious way, more in an exasperating i told you once i told you a million times kind of way. That NJs economy stalled due to not having enough roads is a conjecture. You don't need physical room for economic growth (well, I'd say in the US you don't). The US is incredibly wasteful, to the point of it being obscene, with its physical space. The upside is dubious. But the negative results of car slavery are clear: it excludes children and seniors of being independently mobile, it creates a terribly unattractive environment, high speed roads - aka car sewers - are a killer on property values since nobody wants to live next to on, driving claims more than 30000 lives per year in this country alone. Cars have benefits though!!! I have three, should that factoid help convince you. But they work best in a handful of use cases: longer trips, hauling stuff, recreational driving in the country, ... Basically, what the commercials show you. But when you're shackled to them to do daily errands that you could just as well do on your own two feet if only the built environment wasn't so hostile to humans, they are terrible.
- woah 11y ago
  Why should I pay for you to drive?
dumbmatter 11y ago
Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years. So... sounds like less traffic. Wonder why the title says "more traffic". Some of the cars on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled, or shifting development patterns, and so on. Those all sound like good things. The point of roads is to use them. So people use them to have a shorter commute, or live a bit further away from work to lower rent, etc etc etc. What is the actual problem? Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?
- codeulike 11y ago
  Because there are alternatives that also increase people's mobility, as 'hammock' wrote below: "the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic."
- thehenster 11y ago
  "Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?" I think that's exactly it. Perhaps all road building initiatives should be publicised as short term congestion relief and long term preference of cars over other forms of transport.
- lhopki01 11y ago
  The problem is you get into an endless cycle of adding more and more road capacity and still ending up with the same amount of congestion. If you invest that money in public transport or cycle infrastructure you end up lowering congestion and speeding up everyone's movement including those that still want to drive.
  - dumbmatter 11y ago
    I still don't see why "Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years" is being interpreted as "ending up with the same amount of congestion". If public transit or bike lanes would provide a better benefit for the same cost, then I would support them. But that's a separate and complicated discussion. Instead, this article seems designed to mislead people into thinking that expanding roads has literally no benefit, when obviously it does even if congestion remained the same (which it doesn't). Maybe I'm too cynical...
moron4hire 11y ago
Should we be focused on traffic--i.e. the density of vehicles on the road--or throughput of travelers? Because if you don't build roads, and let traffic build too high, there is a point where congestion becomes a major impediment and throughput plummets.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
xemdetia 11y ago
Being someone who is familiar the Connecticut segments of the highways mentioned it seems much like a false comparision. I-95 in that segment is the major artery from the US west of New Jersey and New York to Boston and most of the northeast, and I-84 is much the same (except it goes through Hartford and is consistently a disaster). Most of the segments of I-95 and I-84 they will want to improve already are 2-lanes and are frequently stopped due to accidents. While I agree with the article's claim that the increase in economic activity in those areas is dubious it's something that is needed. If anything it's going to increase tourism traffic to points north as well as Connecticut as there is already plenty of traffic from NYC/NJ through to other coastal areas (RI, Cape Cod). Also this includes traffic from points north to the Connecticut casinos that are in the heart of the state which is another major inflow. I just don't understand if the roads CalTrans are describing and the author is trying to demonstrate are really equivalent, where 'thru' traffic is just as vital as in-state to in-state traffic.
roflchoppa 11y ago
Yeah not sure if I'm down for larger highway 84, where are they going to push out into? Ardenwood Farms? The Fremont city board already has told residents that it does not plan to slow down the building of new homes in the area. Which is a big issue because current public schools cannot fit all these students here... 1LTC says that y'all are being paid for by the same development companies from SF to build housing here.
vdnkh 11y ago
I live in NJ, in the shadow of NYC, and commute to work every day on some of the busiest roads in the state. The real problem I see are trucks. Big stupid semi-trailers and dumptrucks, queued up by the dozens with shipments fresh from the nearby *ports. Trucks, which exceed the lane space of a bus yet carry a single person. Sitting comfy in the left lane doing 15 under while traffic piles up behind them, another semi alongside blocking any traffic.

66 points by sampo 11y ago

I really dislike "induced demand" as a reason to maintain a terrible experience of a desired product or service. Increase fuel taxes or even do demand charging, but don't have this thing where you make a car trip take three times longer because it discourages people from using their cars.

randallsquared 11y ago
I think the argument isn't "let's not improve things because people will use things more" but "let's not spend resources for little improvement". The induced demand argument suggests that the pain and utility of traffic are in equilibrium, and that there's so much latent demand that no feasible amount of pavement will reduce the pain appreciably. It seems to me of a similar genre to studies showing that safety equipment increases risky behavior.
awjr 11y ago
That's the point, "induced demand" is simply the fact of making it easier to travel by car, encourages more people to choose to travel by car. It is not that the trip takes three times as long, it's the fact, they built a wider road and the journey took half as long, prior to the road being widened. You cannot solve this by building more roads. You solve it by putting roads on a "road diet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet enabling modal share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share . You create segregated space for walking, for cycling. You prioritise public transport. You want more people to choose any other option, other than the car. This, however, is hard when traffic modelling still focuses on traffic flow (maximising car throughput) over modal share. In the UK, it estimated that the school run is 20%-25% of rush hour. Our road design precludes kids cycling to school.
- timthorn 11y ago
  > Our road design precludes kids cycling to school No, there are plenty of children who cycle to school and in safety in the UK. The bigger issue is parents' fears of abduction and/or traffic.
  - awjr 11y ago
    I have to disagree here. Various Council Highways departments are absolutely focused on traffic flow. I would go as far as to say that the two top priorities are traffic flow and not affecting on-street parking. It's changing. This table comes from the Welsh Active Travel Act Design Guidance https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-2014-12-15-at-09-50-56.png https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-20... If you have a 30mph road, it needs a protected cycle track. We need space where an 8 year old cycling to school does not have to share road space with HGVs. Where one mistake does not get punished by death.
  - lhopki01 11y ago
    I cycle all over London and I don't feel safe a lot of the time. Big roads have inconsistent cycle lanes that start and stop at random or are ignored by drivers. Side roads have people who think 35mph is a reasonable speed to go on a road that doesn't even have space for two cars to pass side by side. The UK needs a lot more investment in cycle infrastructure before it could be considered safe.
    - awjr 11y ago
      This is the streetview of London Road, Bath. https://goo.gl/maps/BF8dHyqetow https://goo.gl/maps/BF8dHyqetow Local cycling groups campaigned for a 2 way protected track along here, but were over-ruled by a council officer who chose a design, where you can be cycling along with your child on a bike, be overtaken by a bus, that then pulls in forcing you to pull out into 30mph traffic. They chose a design where dead space in the middle of the road was more important than providing a design that encouraged modal shift. This road also breaks the EU legal limits on pollution. They knew this when they put in this design. I wrote about it here http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of-bad-banes-management/ http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of... however the real issue is that a lot of Highways officers still consider cycling a joke. "Why should we cater for the 2%" is a line I hear a lot. However, you do not build a bridge because of the number of people swimming the river.

crystaln 11y ago

The idea that induced demand entirely compensates for new road capacity is ridiculous on its face. This would only be nearly the case if the road infrastructure is vastly behind what's needed. Even then, much of the newly accommodated traffic will be of economic benefit. Consider that the theory states that traffic is unchanged because people will be incentivized to drive more because of less traffic. This is self contradictory - there can't be both less traffic and the same traffic.

pfortuny 11y ago
Inertia makes things react late to forces. Same here. The article clearly states that the new capacity is essentially filled in the long (10 year range) term, not the short one.
- skellington 11y ago
  Wow, what an illuminating study. If you build roads and the population continues to grow and/or pent up demand is release, those roads will eventually/immediately clog up. Obviously people use roads until the equilibrium of pain is met (like any economic decision). But, there is a point where you can supply so much capacity that there won't be traffic. It's a lie to say that no amount of capacity can overwhelm all forms of demand. The only real question is how much road would it take to fully satisfy demand and what would that cost vs the alternatives. (Ignoring pollution issues)
  - Majestic121 11y ago
    I don't see any good reason to ignore pollution when looking for the best solution.
  - lhopki01 11y ago
    And what is that point? More roads mean less living area which means more roads to get out to where there is living area. A poorly designed response to a problem makes the problem even worse. There are better ways of dealing with pent up demand for movement than to build more roads. Ones that are more efficient of resources, that are better for the environment and that provide a better quality of life for everyone.

andys627 11y ago

Federal, state, and local governments have ignored "induced demand" for 50 years and the result has been endless highway building. This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does. Most of the US is "car dependent" - ie you must have a car to reasonably participate in the city - yes there are buses but they are not as convenient as having a car, yes there are bike lanes but they are dangerous and sparse. I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain. Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it. We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.

hammock 11y ago
Just to be clear for all the readers, the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic. The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road. With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that. I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
- jerf 11y ago
  Suppose you want to build a railway from TownA to TownB. It's ten miles and you can prove in every conceivable way that it will be profitable for both you and the two towns. You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical. Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact. All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.

mattheusser 11y ago

Jevon's Law. Google it.

nashashmi 11y ago

I have started taking every article of complaint from citylab with a grain of salt. It always seems like there is an agenda with these articles. In this case, they are trying to curb the building of roads. I do not know how that helps. Alleviating traffic and bringing increased capacity to roads helps spur economic activity. The Big Dig Project on the Central Artery in Boston helped alleviate traffic and resume economic growth in an area where it had stalled. The capacity of the artery is expected to be fully realized by 2050. In NJ, we are always stuck in traffic. And that is the main reason why NJ's economy has stalled. No more room for growth. The point of the article and citylab's purpose is probably to direct more use of public transportation. But likewise, the more public transportation you have, the more use you will have there too. I really don't see the point of this article.

trgn 11y ago
The point is that building more roads doesn't reduce congestion. This is because the number of car trips increases as well. As the supply of roads grow, the demand for car trips goes up as well, to the benefit of no one. It is definitely an editorial decision of Citylab to evangelize this finding. But in this case, not in a mendacious way, more in an exasperating i told you once i told you a million times kind of way. That NJs economy stalled due to not having enough roads is a conjecture. You don't need physical room for economic growth (well, I'd say in the US you don't). The US is incredibly wasteful, to the point of it being obscene, with its physical space. The upside is dubious. But the negative results of car slavery are clear: it excludes children and seniors of being independently mobile, it creates a terribly unattractive environment, high speed roads - aka car sewers - are a killer on property values since nobody wants to live next to on, driving claims more than 30000 lives per year in this country alone. Cars have benefits though!!! I have three, should that factoid help convince you. But they work best in a handful of use cases: longer trips, hauling stuff, recreational driving in the country, ... Basically, what the commercials show you. But when you're shackled to them to do daily errands that you could just as well do on your own two feet if only the built environment wasn't so hostile to humans, they are terrible.
woah 11y ago
Why should I pay for you to drive?

dumbmatter 11y ago

Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years. So... sounds like less traffic. Wonder why the title says "more traffic". Some of the cars on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled, or shifting development patterns, and so on. Those all sound like good things. The point of roads is to use them. So people use them to have a shorter commute, or live a bit further away from work to lower rent, etc etc etc. What is the actual problem? Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?

codeulike 11y ago
Because there are alternatives that also increase people's mobility, as 'hammock' wrote below: "the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic."
thehenster 11y ago
"Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?" I think that's exactly it. Perhaps all road building initiatives should be publicised as short term congestion relief and long term preference of cars over other forms of transport.
lhopki01 11y ago
The problem is you get into an endless cycle of adding more and more road capacity and still ending up with the same amount of congestion. If you invest that money in public transport or cycle infrastructure you end up lowering congestion and speeding up everyone's movement including those that still want to drive.
- dumbmatter 11y ago
  I still don't see why "Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years" is being interpreted as "ending up with the same amount of congestion". If public transit or bike lanes would provide a better benefit for the same cost, then I would support them. But that's a separate and complicated discussion. Instead, this article seems designed to mislead people into thinking that expanding roads has literally no benefit, when obviously it does even if congestion remained the same (which it doesn't). Maybe I'm too cynical...

moron4hire 11y ago

Should we be focused on traffic--i.e. the density of vehicles on the road--or throughput of travelers? Because if you don't build roads, and let traffic build too high, there is a point where congestion becomes a major impediment and throughput plummets.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

xemdetia 11y ago

Being someone who is familiar the Connecticut segments of the highways mentioned it seems much like a false comparision. I-95 in that segment is the major artery from the US west of New Jersey and New York to Boston and most of the northeast, and I-84 is much the same (except it goes through Hartford and is consistently a disaster). Most of the segments of I-95 and I-84 they will want to improve already are 2-lanes and are frequently stopped due to accidents. While I agree with the article's claim that the increase in economic activity in those areas is dubious it's something that is needed. If anything it's going to increase tourism traffic to points north as well as Connecticut as there is already plenty of traffic from NYC/NJ through to other coastal areas (RI, Cape Cod). Also this includes traffic from points north to the Connecticut casinos that are in the heart of the state which is another major inflow. I just don't understand if the roads CalTrans are describing and the author is trying to demonstrate are really equivalent, where 'thru' traffic is just as vital as in-state to in-state traffic.

roflchoppa 11y ago

Yeah not sure if I'm down for larger highway 84, where are they going to push out into? Ardenwood Farms? The Fremont city board already has told residents that it does not plan to slow down the building of new homes in the area. Which is a big issue because current public schools cannot fit all these students here... 1LTC says that y'all are being paid for by the same development companies from SF to build housing here.

vdnkh 11y ago

I live in NJ, in the shadow of NYC, and commute to work every day on some of the busiest roads in the state. The real problem I see are trucks. Big stupid semi-trailers and dumptrucks, queued up by the dozens with shipments fresh from the nearby *ports. Trucks, which exceed the lane space of a bus yet carry a single person. Sitting comfy in the left lane doing 15 under while traffic piles up behind them, another semi alongside blocking any traffic.