@MotherJones tweets, “A billion for a road project that won’t make any difference,” with a link to this piece by Kevin Drum:
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.
Wow. Imagine if there were some mechanism that could have prevented California from wasting $1 billion dollars on this project? Wouldn’t that be great? Let’s put on our thinking caps and Google back in time to see how such a project could move forward:
Work began Friday on construction of a northbound carpool lane on the San Diego (405) Freeway which, when completed in Spring 2013, is expected to speed up the commute between the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa were on hand to break ground on the Sepulveda Pass Widening Project, a $1 billion effort that had been on hold until state officials received $190 million in federal stimulus funds.
And there you go. Another “stimulus” success story.