This is what our enlightened transportation "leaders" would like us to experience in a couple of decades, thanks to their never-ending widening projects, both here (Verona Autobahn project--oh wait, I forgot, that road expansion is to help truckers get from Dubuque to Green Bay--never mind!--and my bowling ball is square and made out of foam), in Milwaukee, and elsewhere.
Hello????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can't build your way out of congestion.
Growth report predicts state facing gridlock
Fri Oct 4, 8:26 PM ET
SACRAMENTO(AP) -- Double-deck the freeways. Widen the roads. Tunnel through mountains, run trains down the highway medians, pay workers to take the bus. Virtually every community in California is wrangling with solutions to its snarled streets.
It's not only sheer numbers driving California's worsening traffic, though those are bad enough: By 2020, forecasters say, Californians will drive 55 percent more miles per year and add 10 million more cars, trucks and SUVs to the 24 million already on the road.
To the driver, traffic most often hits home as a local problem, an equation of job location, home address and the route between.
But local conditions across the state are hit by three factors common to every region of California:
Growth is highest on the frontiers of suburbia, communities that lack the roads to handle more cars and the money to lay more pavement, and where public transit and other options are most expensive and least efficient.
The state faces new threats to highway funding.
Political control over transit has become so diffuse that the buck doesn't really stop anywhere when it comes to fixing statewide traffic woes.
Pile those trends on top of California's inexorable population growth and the experts unanimous: The roads that are already jammed will crawl closer to gridlock, and the roads that flow now are probably headed for trouble.
"Go look at L.A. 30 years ago and what you'll find is people said it was impossible then and it couldn't possibly get worse. It's grown and they're saying the same thing," said Martin Wachs, director of the University of California-Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies. "I don't expect it to be solved."
Already, the most unlikely places are growing real rush hours.
"In the last six years here I think traffic has probably doubled," said John Burdette, who commutes into Sacramento from suburban Rocklin.
Burdette tries to leave home by 6 a.m. for Interstate 80 and a job 25 miles away. An early departure means a 40-minute drive. Much later and it stretches to over an hour.
"On the way home it takes me an hour and fifteen minutes no matter what route I take after 3:30 p.m.," Burdette said.
Demoralizing traffic jams are spreading far outside the cities as Californians seek affordable homes and trail ever-longer commutes along with them.
California already has five of the nation's 20 most congested metro areas, and traffic jams statewide cost $21 billion a year in lost time and wasted fuel, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.
Angelenos already waste more time in traffic jams than anyone else in the country, according to the institute, and there's much more on the way: The state's official forecast says the number of miles driven on Los Angeles and Orange county roads will swell 40 percent by 2020.
San Francisco is right behind L.A. on the institute's list of congestion-plagued cities, and No. 2 in the nation. About the only good news is that the City by the Bay is so jam-packed already there's not much room for more cars. The number of miles driven there is forecast to grow a mere 11 percent in 20 years.
As bad as the big cities are, the most dramatic traffic increases will be on the outskirts, in places like Hemet and Temecula on L.A.'s suburban frontier; Fairfield and Hollister in San Francisco's outer orbit, even Manteca and Fresno in the Central Valley's farm belt.
Growth creates a snarl of suburb-to-suburb commuting patterns that's hard to untangle with traditional hub-and-spoke highway or rail routes.
In fast-growing Temecula, a former farm town between Riverside and San Diego, Judy Staats has seen an influx of cars stretch her 35-minute drive to work to an hour in just three years. Reaching Corona, another old Riverside County farm town turned nearly overnight into a car-packed suburb, Staats navigates congested city streets to avoid an even more crowded Riverside Freeway.
"It would add another 15 to 20 minutes to go one mile," she said.
The state is becoming a laboratory for high-tech solutions, like sensors in the pavement to monitor and direct the flow of traffic, and on-board sensors that will allow cars and trucks to travel in tightly packed platoons to make better use of existing lanes. But so far, the improvements are incremental.
Californians are parking their cars and climbing aboard commuter trains and buses in record numbers. Ridership on most of the state's 29 largest transit systems showed double-digit growth between 1995 and 2000.
While this trend takes some of the pain out of commuting in the biggest cities, the bottom line is that statewide, just 5.4 percent of the workforce takes public transit. Even fewer -- 3.7 percent -- telecommute, according to the Census.
Architects, environmentalists and urban planners see the solution in "smart growth" -- the notion that new communities should include commerce and industry from the start, that blighted big-city real estate should be improved with "infill" housing, that apartments built over storefronts are both practical and chic.
But the bulk of new homes go up in single-family sprawl, and the cars follow a migration trail of drivers seeking houses they can afford.
"It's at least 100 years of a particular development pattern that just keeps replaying over and over again, except that we keep moving farther and farther out," said Chris Carson, a political science professor who led a two-year study of Los Angeles County transportation problems for the League of Women Voters. "We don't know how you reverse that trend."
All these new regions face turning their two-lane rural roads into highways, their highways into freeways and their train tracks into light rail systems, without the massive state and federal funding that grew California's transportation backbone in the 1950s and 1960s.
And there are new threats to highway funding. Experts say the state gasoline tax of 18 cents per gallon -- source of nearly $5 billion a year -- is falling behind inflation in highway building costs.
Gone, too, is the once-awesome power of a centralized state transportation planning system. In the name of local control, California has diffused responsibility -- and accountability -- for most transportation planning to 46 largely faceless regional agencies.
Business advocates worry that traffic could someday damage the economy by hampering the flow of goods and driving away workers and employers, said William Hauck, director of the California Business Roundtable.
Why hasn't traffic chased Californians away? Berkeley's Wachs said it's because congestion is the most visible sign of prosperity, that the attractions of living in the Golden State outweigh the inconvenience.
"I know everyone complains about congestion," he said, "but obviously they must benefit from the social, educational and recreational opportunities."
