LA's Billion-Dollar Car-Pool Lane: It Cost a Fortune and Won't Even Fix the Problem

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:




Carmageddon: LA's Billion-Dollar Car-Pool Lane

— By Kevin Drum
| Fri Jul. 15, 2011 2:55 AM PDT





Midnight tonight marks the beginning of Carmageddon in Los Angeles: For two days and five hours, Interstate 405 between I-10 and US 101 will be completely shut down. Since the 405—and yes, we always use "the" in front of our freeway numbers in Southern California—is the main artery between Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, everyone expects total chaos as drivers jam up every available alternate route into the city (and into LAX, which is, inconveniently, located right on the 405). City and transit officials are treating this about the same way they'd treat a tsunami warning, telling residents in increasingly apocalyptic tones to either leave town or else just stay inside for the duration. Their message, broadcast across every medium known to science for the past two months, is pretty simple: Don't even think about taking your car anywhere if you live within a 30-mile radius of the construction.

So what's the reason for this mind-boggling closure? Answer: Caltrans is adding a 10-mile northbound car-pool lane to the freeway. The Los Angeles Times' architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, has some questions about this:

To begin with: Is widening the 405 (to add one solitary carpool lane on the freeway's northbound side) really something that we should be spending $1 billion on? Will it actually make traffic through the pass better? And if so, for how long?

After all, study after study has shown the ineffectiveness of this approach. As soon as you open up new lanes, drivers adjust: A few more decide to take the newly widened route each day, and before long the congestion is just as bad as before.

In this case, because an HOV lane is being added, some of the change in behavior will be virtuous, turning drivers into passengers. It's still tough to think of a less cost-efficient way to spend a billion dollars of public money.

Actually, it might be even worse than Hawthorne thinks. For the past two decades Los Angeles has gone on a binge of increasingly expensive car-pool construction, but the benefits of these new lanes are surprisingly equivocal. The lanes are always additions to freeways (no previously existing lane has been converted for car-pool use since the Santa Monica diamond lane debacle of 1976, which set back car-pool lanes by a decade), so they always ease traffic for a while. But as Hawthorne points out, the phenomenon of "traffic generation" has been known for decades. More lanes just attract more drivers and more congestion. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/07/billion-dollar-carpool-lane

[brendan120678]

1. I was supposed to be in CA for a business trip...

headed out yesterday, staying the weekend and back to the east coast on Tuesday.

Since I would have had to work over the weekend, and would have been right in the thick of that mess, I decided not to go.
Instead I invited my coworkers in CA to come to the CT office. They happily accepted.

[Marrah_G]

2. Is there much public transportation there?

It sounds like they need a good commuter rail system.

[kick-ass-bob]

3. But that would cost a billion dollars! That's too much!

Oh wait...

[NV Whino]

4. No.

LA's answer to the congestion problem is more freeways.

[Marrah_G]

7. ewwww

Just think of what could be done if DC cared enough to put as much effort into infrastructure as they put into blowing people up.

[Lebam in LA]

8. They are building railways now from Downtown

Currently ends in Culver City. Will end up in Santa Monica when done. Hopefully that will handle a lot of the traffic.

[Xolodno]

5. As somone who vanpool's....

...seems worth it to me. I get to work and home a lot sooner than if I drove in.

Now if the CHP would spend more time patrolling the HOV lanes for solo drivers taking advantage of an open lane...it would probably be even faster.

[NeedleCast]

6. What a waste

Carpool lanes in DC and the surrounding metro have done nothing to alliviate horrible traffic on the main line freeways. Mostly they just make things worse, as people have to merge into and out of those carpool lanes at some point. Money would probably be far better spent on improving mass transit in L.A.