7 ms·

Los Angeles Drivers on the 405 Ask: Was $1.6B Worth It?

• AdamN 10y ago
  We'll never know the value of 3 overpasses being made more earthquake resistant or the other safety improvements (typical NYTimes that they don't even research the issue). I hate these articles because they're so weak in journalism. http://dot.ca.gov/dist12/DEA/405/index.php#Technical http://dot.ca.gov/dist12/DEA/405/index.php#Technical
  • revelation 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure the dubious value of these improvements is dwarfed by the rise in vehicular violence that comes automatically with the extra traffic and miles driven as demand inevitably grows to fill the extra capacity. This is of course a perfectly well understood phenomenon. They went ahead anyway.
• riffic 10y ago
  >“I haven’t noticed substantial cutbacks in traffic. As a matter of fact, I would say it was the opposite.” That is the very nature of Induced Demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand).
  • snrplfth 10y ago
    Well, when you increase the supply of a valuable good, and price it at $0, an increase in consumption is pretty much what you would expect.
    • strictnein 10y ago
      Gas, cars, car maintenance, etc are free?
      • snrplfth 10y ago
        The good I am referring to is the service provided by the extra freeway space. Imagine an auto-body shop decided it would give a free engine oil top-up to anyone who drove up. You'd still need a car to take advantage of the deal, but it does mean that consumption of that engine oil will probably rise.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
• rpedroso 10y ago
  One unfortunate side-effect of traffic capacity expansion is that usage increases to compensate: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_Turner/papers/published/Duranton_Turner_AER_2011.pdf http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_T...
  • masterleep 10y ago
    If you replaced "unfortunate" with "fortunate", then I would agree with your statement.
  • sp332 10y ago
    So, more people are using the system more often, but somehow that's a bad thing?
  • mysterydip 10y ago
    This is actually how the original simcity handled its traffic algorithms and why as a kid I always failed to fix the problem :) Read about it years later in the SimCity Planning Commission Handbook (which I first found from a discussion here, coincidentally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168016)
• jasonwilk 10y ago
  Traffic in Los Angeles is in a sad state. I have moved my house and office to within 2.5 miles of eachother so that I never need to see a freeway. I am fortunate to be able to do so. There is heavy traffic all the time, even when you least suspect it. It's no way to live.
  • duderific 10y ago
    For me it's a deal breaker -- I could never live in LA because of the traffic. I have relatives there, and I am reminded anew every time I visit how horrendous the traffic situation is. Still, millions of people manage to make it work somehow, so I guess you eventually get used to it and plan accordingly.
    • pfranz 10y ago
      I think visitors see the worst of it. LA is big, can you can set up your work/life to avoid the worst of it (like the parent poster did). Like you said, you plan accordingly (many jobs are flexible about scheduling, too). When visiting, usually you're on a constrained timetable and your only choice is to brute force your way through the worst traffic. 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.
      • duderific 10y ago
        > 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. 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.
  • blt 10y ago
    It's really sad. There are so many good places, food, events, activities in LA, but the sprawl and traffic ensure that meeting up with friends or exploring the city is a difficult headache. It feels like punishment from a fable or something.
• johansch 10y ago
  I often read that it's pointless to widen/improve the capacity of roads because increased traffic will swallow the wins (in individual transit times). 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.
  • melling 10y ago
    Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. There's a limit to widening the roads. What happens in 50 years when the population is a couple of million people larger? More cars, more space dedicated to parking, etc.
    • maxsilver 10y ago
      > Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. There's a limit to widening the roads. 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."
      • Tiktaalik 10y ago
        Yeah but some solutions scale dramatically better than other solutions, so let's switch to those. 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.
        • maxsilver 10y ago
          > Yeah but some solutions scale dramatically better than other solutions, 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/ https://www.metro.net/interactives/datatables/project/
• Tiktaalik 10y ago
  Of course it wasn't worth it. Road improvements for cars incentivize driving, and so the result is more traffic. 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-admits-that-more-roads-mean-more-traffic/415245/ 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.
  • JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
    Do you have any data showing cycling gets people to their destination faster and more efficiently? That sounds like a nightmare to me if implemented in large scale and will always be hampered by the low top speed of a bicycle.
    • Tiktaalik 10y ago
      Cycling is good for short commutes. In the context of a longer commute, consider it as a potential solution to the last mile problem (ie. transit for 30 minutes to move between towns, then take the bike share at the station for 5 minutes). 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.
    • chockablock 10y ago
      Parent suggested supporting 'transit and cycling'. Mixed-mode commutes can meet a lot of people's needs. BTW asking other commenters for 'data' (especially to support claims they did not make) is not great commenting etiquette.
• majormajor 10y ago
  Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'm not looking forward to the similar articles about self-driving cars: "traffic still basically the same, people now just live spread out even further since total vehicle throughput is higher due to more efficient autonomous driving."
  • adamjernst 10y ago
    Jevon's Paradox! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox
    • snrplfth 10y ago
      Poor William Jevons. "You guys! It's not a 'paradox', it's just mildly counter-intuitive causality! Come on!"
  • pfranz 10y ago
    Yeah, that's probably step one. But I think people will reclaim time commuting if they're not actively driving--likely by working remotely (or personal entertainment). I hope that'll lead to changes in work patterns like working remotely most days or allowing people to shift their schedules even more. 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.
    • majormajor 10y ago
      > But I think people will reclaim time commuting if they're not actively driving--likely by working remotely (or personal entertainment). I hope that'll lead to changes in work patterns like working remotely most days or allowing people to shift their schedules even more. 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!
• cgrubb 10y ago
  Vehicle capacity on the northbound 405 has increased from 10,000 vehicles per hour to 11,700 vehicles per hour at peak times. http://thesource.metro.net/2015/05/28/study-finds-traffic-on-405-flows-better-over-sepulveda-pass/ http://thesource.metro.net/2015/05/28/study-finds-traffic-on... So capacity increased maybe 10k a day, or 750M over a 20 year period. Makes the $1B investment seem reasonable.
  • revelation 10y ago
    A light rapid transit system has a capacity in excess of 20000 passengers per hour per direction. 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.
    • magila 10y ago
      It would take a lot more than $1B to make mass transit viable for a significant percentage of those who currently drive on the 405. Just putting in a light rail line here or there wouldn't do shit because few people's destinations would be within walking distance of the stations. You'd also need to massively increase bus service to even have a chance at making a significant dent in car traffic. For better or worse, LA's low density means vast swaths of the metro area would be cost prohibitive to connect with mass transit.
      • revelation 10y ago
        Well, yes, if you want to desperately make sure nothing ever changes on this front, $1B for road widening is a perfectly reasonable investment. Cities are growing, suburbs are dying, you can spend the money now or face the meltdown later.
        • Gargoyle 10y ago
          What happens to cities when the jobs have been automated out of them? There's the meltdown on the horizon.
• cezary 10y ago
  > "Richard Close, 73, who has lived in Sherman Oaks for 43 years, said his daily commute to Santa Monica has become easier, and with the construction crews gone, he has come to appreciate the new 405. He said he leaves his office after 7 at night, to miss the worst of rush hour, and it takes about 75 minutes to go 15 miles, which he said saved him 15 minutes a night on his old commute." 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.
  • ariwilson 10y ago
    You can also compute a 15 minute savings a day as 50 hours a year (commuting 200 days a year) which means you get over 2 whole days of your life back. I would appreciate 2 more days of life a year.
• yason 10y ago
  If you make more space for cars, and thus reduce congestion, the improved traffic conditions will attract more drivers until the congestion reaches some boundary threshold again where the majority of the remaining drivers are no longer willing to spend their time on the route. 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.
  • snrplfth 10y ago
    Yep. People frequently have a strong aversion to paying directly for things, unfortunately. It's the same way with parking - people feel like they're getting all these huge quantities of available parking for free, but they're still paying for it, just hidden in the prices of goods, the increased distances between places, higher rents, and so on. But it's just so easy to make laws saying "thou shalt provide enough parking for everybody", so that's what you get.
  • anatari 10y ago
    It's more than people being used to free access. Tolls on a major highway like the 405 would effectively be a regressive tax - people need to get to work and in L.A. there often is no alternative. And people seem to generally agree regressive taxation is not a good idea.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • petercooper 10y ago
• devy 10y ago
  It's interesting to see NY Times covering this story not LA Times covering it.
  • nickv 10y ago
    With their new focus on California (like their daily "California Today" section), the Times seems to be doing a better job covering California news than either the LATimes or the Chronicle.
• majormajor 10y ago
  An area I wish the NY Times had dug deeper on, as this article seems fairly light compared to the local coverage of "did traffic on the the 405 get better? nope not really," is did seeing how little impact this massive highway project had help convince 70% of LA county voters to pour massively more money into public transit then ever before?
• CodeWriter23 10y ago
  The addition of the HOV lane is worth it IMO. The single-rider commuters of course are still kvetching because they are receiving a nominal change in their commute times. Carpools however are benefitting and carpooling is the needed behavior modification.
• ariwilson 10y ago
  In related LA news, Metro is doing an amazing job massively expanding LA's transit footprint, in rail, bus, and local (e.g. bikes). LA voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M to further fund the plan: http://theplan.metro.net/ http://theplan.metro.net/