My former Senator, Barbara Boxer, sent me an email yesterday about reducing Los Angeles' traffic problems. One possible solution is conspicuously absent from her suggestions.
This study of urban mobility also concludes that there is no one magic solution to America’s congestion problems. However, as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, I am working every day to find solutions to our nation’s transportation woes.One of the ways to help ease Los Angeles’ traffic congestion is to make alternatives to single car travel more feasible. To do so, people need to be able to get to work, school, and home easily and quickly, without ever starting their cars. And progress is being made in Los Angeles.
Every year, more public transit lines are either operating or under construction in Los Angeles, which means that more residents of Los Angeles will have the option of using public transit. The Gold Line East Side Extension will bring service to East Los Angeles. I secured a federal appropriation of $70 million in the Senate funding bill to help this construction effort. The Expo Line construction that is now underway will extend service from USC and the Crenshaw area to Culver City. And in the long term, I am very excited that it may be possible to extend the Red Line from Union Station, along Wilshire Boulevard, all the way to the ocean. Think of the cars that will be taken off the freeways when all of these projects are complete.
Alternatively, think of how many more cars our cities could support if we built more freeways!
Adding more freeways is all well and good until it becomes costlier (politically and/or economically) to do so than to approach the problem with better management of existing infrastructure and alternative transportation methods.
Every attempt to address traffic congestion is, at best, a band-aid. None of them are silver bullets because none of them can be used indefinitely to the exclusion of all others.. and none of them are absent any indirect costs.
Sometimes the simplest solutions elude our leaders. For example, the best and easiest solution: wreck the economy. No employment, no disposable income, and traffic ends.
Sustenance farming requires no travel at all!
Mark: I don't like it when the government tries to "manage" me. I'd prefer if they focus on enabling me to exercise my rights and freedoms.
Also, building more freeways would work indefinitely. To build more freeways you have to tear down buildings, which are the destinations for the freeways. Fewer buildings leads to lower population density (living or working or shopping). So, eventually if enough freeways are built and enough buildings are torn down, and equilibrium will be reached.
But that's not practical, of course, which is part of why I don't live in Los Angeles anymore :)
The impracticality of tearing down buildings (and the political impossibility of removing too many.. or certain ones in particular) is precisely why building more freeways *won't* work indefinitely.
As for the "management of existing infrastructure", it's not really a management of *you*.. it's a management of *infrastructure* and how it's used by *everyone*, because everyone pays for it.. not just you.