This is a diary about the nation’s infrastructure and transportation network. I work in infrastructure (to the extent a consultant can work in any one field) and, in my opinion, the state of infrastructure in the US is one of the most daunting and complex challenges that must be addressed by government officials today. And it must be addressed, because how we use infrastructure, how we build it, and what we build are tied into many of the most pressing issues of our day: oil, climate change, poverty, and many others. Today, I’d like to focus on freeways and the mentality of freeways.
To begin, Costa Mesa has freeway trouble:
Despite $240 million in improvements to the Costa Mesa Freeway since 1998, traffic is as bad as ever on Orange County's central corridor, and a persistent bottleneck remains a vexing problem for drivers and transportation officials.
Congestion on the 55 Freeway between the San Diego and the Garden Grove freeways has steadily increased since the 1990s. Traffic has become especially clogged at the Edinger Avenue on- and offramps, where the number of vehicles has grown to 279,000 a day, an 11% increase in a decade. The volume rivals the notorious Riverside Freeway's.
Caltrans predicts that by 2030, that stretch of the 55 will handle 332,000 vehicles a day on average, because of population growth and high-rise development nearby.
But how to unclog the 55 -- and where to get the money to do it -- is a multilayered puzzle.
While you’re all probably shocked that there would be chronic traffic problems in the LA metropolitan area, this is true across our nation. Our roads are past capacity and it causes any number of problems, from harming the environment to draining the economy to causing accidents. I could go on and on about how much car culture sucks, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll tell you some more about what’s happening in Costa Mesa. The solution:
The state is planning to build three auxiliary lanes in the bottleneck area -- a project scheduled to run from 2010 to 2014 -- but state and county transportation officials said there were no plans for other major improvements.
The plan is to build more lanes. This is the American way, or at least it has been: add more lanes. While building more lanes does temporarily sooth traffic, it is hardly a long term solution but it is comparatively cheap and requires no change from those in cars. We just keep driving, deal with a couple months worth of construction and then there are suddenly more lanes available. In comparison to having to carpool, bike, or – heaven forbid – take the bus, this is the most widely acceptable answer to freeway congestion. Thankfully, people are realizing it doesn’t work:
Transportation officials say the corridor is emblematic of many urban freeways: As soon as they are fixed, the area's population grows and increased traffic develops, re-creating the congestion.
The 55's problems are exacerbated by developments and expansion of commercial facilities, especially near the interchange with the Santa Ana Freeway, said Kia Mortazavi, director of development for the Orange County Transportation Authority.
A coworker described this situation perfectly: we use freeways the same way we use credit cards. We max them out immediately. One of the main reasons people stop driving is because traffic is terrible and as soon as traffic is good people start to drive again. This is to say nothing of the sprawl that arises around big freeways, leading to more traffic and longer commutes, which leads to bigger freeways, which again leads to sprawl... you can guess where this goes.
The bottom line is this: freeway expansion is not sustainable. In places like Costa Mesa, in freeway friendly SoCal, they’re finding they don’t have the money to keep building freeways. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we don’t have the space to expand freeways any more. These are the same issues being encountered across the nation, and yet people still want more freeways.
The freeway mindset, as I alluded to earlier, is one of convenience. You get in your car and go to your destination. You don’t make stops, you just go. This convenience gives us a number of options that otherwise wouldn’t be available, particularly options associated with suburbs. We can live a hundred miles from where we work because of freeways. We can live in a neighborhood without a grocery store because of freeways. It is convenient to do those things and so we do them. This is not to demean the importance of convenience. I don’t like being inconvenienced, as I’m sure you don’t, so I’m a big proponent of convenience.
The public transportation mindset is very different. It is one of utility. You take the bus because it’s useful, it gets you where you want to go. It’s not the fastest thing there is, but it does what it’s supposed to. This is why public transportation is more popular in dense urban areas (aside from logistical considerations). When you live, work, shop, and eat in an area of a few miles, everything is already convenient and driving a car isn’t going to make the difference one way or another. Now, transportation is a tertiary issue.
Convenience and utility are not mutually exclusive, and neither are freeways and public transportation, but currently the decision making process in the governmental powers that be tilts heavily toward freeways. More importantly, we the people tilt heavily towards freeways.
The challenge of getting people to shift away from driving everywhere is currently being addressed by the invisible hand of the market, and that isn’t great. While high gas prices and stagnant wages are keeping people from driving as much as they otherwise would, that only helps keep people off the road. It doesn’t help people get around. When gas prices first started rising, I had (foolishly) thought that people would demand better public transportation to ease the burden. They didn’t, not to any meaningful extent. They cried out for lower gas prices.
The deeper challenge is yet to be addressed and I’ll gladly support the candidate, at any level, who tackles it head on. How do we get people out of the freeway mindset? How do we balance the need to get people off the road with the need for people to move around? How do we provide public transportation to those who live in the suburbs, where public transportation is not as feasible?
We need leaders who will speak out about the dire state of our infrastructure and how we can fix it.