Post by nickv on Jul 23, 2007 17:49:45 GMT -8
LA Times - Southern California's newest freeway will open for business next Tuesday, the long-awaited extension of the 210 from Rialto to San Bernardino. Will it help Southern California's commute?
I was reading the LA Times Bottleneck Blog and found this interesting piece of information about traffic congestion and freeway building:
This might be something worth including when writing to the state and federal officials on transportation projects. Another mode of transportation to compare is heavy rail transit vs. a 4 seat car. The TTC site has these figures available.
www.thetransitcoalition.us/TTC_SpeedCapacityGraph.htm
The I-210 Expansion to San Bernardino:
I read the stories about this expansion project and the folks in LA County along this corridor can expect some increased congestion in the near future. I'm at least glad to find out that more and more people are agreeing that the better alternative to "help Southern California's commute" is to expand mass transit. Read the responses to this question:
Public responses to the above question:
www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-210fwy-gb,1,3922102.graffitiboard?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
What do you think will happen in the long term with this freeway project?
I was reading the LA Times Bottleneck Blog and found this interesting piece of information about traffic congestion and freeway building:
Posted by: Tim | July 11, 2007 at 08:26 PM
why does everyone in socal want to build more roads....as the highways get wider to "ease congestion" they will gobble up more land, creating less housing until all of LA is simply a 600 lane highway, or two. but on a more serious side, obviously there is going to be a problem with the amount of available land for use for transportation. because cars are incredibly inefficient at moving people (speaking in a manner of how many people can be moved by what dimension of vehicle) that at some point those of us in socal need to realize cars just cannot be used as a major source of transportation. here is a quick example stricly by numbers. assuming on the long side that buses are an average of 45 ft, and they can carry an average of 39 people sitting, that gives us a ratio of .866 feet per person. as a reference, you take a prius that has a lenght of 14.5 feet, and say an average load of 4 people. that give you a ratio of 3.625 feet per person. what does this mean? it means it would take 141 ft, or nearly 9 priuses to move the same amount of people as a 45ft long bus. add 5 ft to space in between the cars, and suddenly you look at almost 200 ft of vehicles. and you wonder why there is congestion.
why does everyone in socal want to build more roads....as the highways get wider to "ease congestion" they will gobble up more land, creating less housing until all of LA is simply a 600 lane highway, or two. but on a more serious side, obviously there is going to be a problem with the amount of available land for use for transportation. because cars are incredibly inefficient at moving people (speaking in a manner of how many people can be moved by what dimension of vehicle) that at some point those of us in socal need to realize cars just cannot be used as a major source of transportation. here is a quick example stricly by numbers. assuming on the long side that buses are an average of 45 ft, and they can carry an average of 39 people sitting, that gives us a ratio of .866 feet per person. as a reference, you take a prius that has a lenght of 14.5 feet, and say an average load of 4 people. that give you a ratio of 3.625 feet per person. what does this mean? it means it would take 141 ft, or nearly 9 priuses to move the same amount of people as a 45ft long bus. add 5 ft to space in between the cars, and suddenly you look at almost 200 ft of vehicles. and you wonder why there is congestion.
This might be something worth including when writing to the state and federal officials on transportation projects. Another mode of transportation to compare is heavy rail transit vs. a 4 seat car. The TTC site has these figures available.
www.thetransitcoalition.us/TTC_SpeedCapacityGraph.htm
The I-210 Expansion to San Bernardino:
I read the stories about this expansion project and the folks in LA County along this corridor can expect some increased congestion in the near future. I'm at least glad to find out that more and more people are agreeing that the better alternative to "help Southern California's commute" is to expand mass transit. Read the responses to this question:
Public responses to the above question:
www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-210fwy-gb,1,3922102.graffitiboard?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
What do you think will happen in the long term with this freeway project?
