Traffic on major Bay Area freeways has grown 80 percent since 2010

San Jose Mercury-News ^ | September 20, 2017 | by Erin Baldassari

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Drivers slogging through Bay Area freeways during the rush-hour commute are spending more time crawling along at speeds of less than 35 miles an hour, with traffic congestion up 80 percent since 2010, a new report released Monday by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) found.

Ask MTC spokesman John Goodwin, and it’s a good problem to have.

“As I look at the map and as I look at the data, so much of it is tied to the strength of the regional economy,” he said. “If you want meaningful congestion relief, a recession is a great way to do that.”

But the reality is a harsh one for those who suffer through it, and one that Netflix employee Andreas Schafhauser knows all too well. He makes the roughly three-hour roundtrip commute from Walnut Creek to Los Gatos and back each day.

[TalBlack]

It’s up noticibly on 495 LIE in ny the last 3 or 4 years.

[gaijin]

remember Obama’s Department of energy Guru yearning for $15 per gallon gas..?

[OttawaFreeper]

I can remember reading in one of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader books (on one of the bottom pages) a trivia note that stated that the average speed on freeways in Los Angeles around 60 or 65 mph in 1970 but by the late 1980s, it was 40 or 45. Wonder if the same sort of thing is happening in the Bay Area?

[DoughtyOne]

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Just $862.00 dollars and cents to 94.00%

[DoughtyOne]

Hmmm, I wonder if a sanctuary city classification might cause certain folks to swarm?

[luckystarmom]

It goes much longer now. I used to wait to go on 85 until 10 and I’ve be fine. Now, it’s crowded at 11 am.

It would take my daughter around 45 minutes to an hour to go from San Jose to Saratoga to go to community college. She started going the back roads and she cut it down to 30 minutes.

[SMARTY]

Well ... if people who consume community resources but don’t contribute to upgrades and development... how’s that gonna work?

[Signalman]

Same thing here in L.A. area. The influx of illegal aliens has to be a contributing factor in this sanctuary state.

[minnesota_bound]

The answer is to take away lanes for bikes as they are doing in Los Angeles. I kid you not, 4 lanes to 2 and the people behind do not care you are stuck in traffic for another 30 to 45 mins. They want to force people into buses and you to move into hobbit apartments near work. They want to control us peons.

[lewislynn]

Nearly a million undocumented drivers could be licensed in California by the end of the year (2017).

[Seruzawa]

I’d say the Bay area is worse than Los Angeles.

[NormsRevenge]

Sure, that’s easy for a guy pulling in a fat 6 figure income off of the backs and out of the pocketbooks of commuters.

The folks that milk the Golden Gate for all its worth,, now say, Hey, there too many people around here these days in cars and such.. Go figgure.

[NormsRevenge]

The Bay Area transportation system was likely designed by traffic engineers on LSD and mushrooms.. my best guess.

What has happened here is no one had a vision of how much this area might grow and how quickly.. The problem here is,, no more easily accomodated addition of lanes is possible.. which means lousy freeway layouts , designs, traffic flows that don’t, all the things a place like Toronto avoided a long time ago in the design of their road system in that area.

BART should have encircled the Bay when it was first built.. They are a few years away from finally getting it to the San Jose downtown.

You can only pack so many pounds of moose fertilizer in a 5 pound sack.

[roadcat]

The Bay Area transportation system was likely designed by traffic engineers on LSD and mushrooms.. my best guess.

Lol, funny guess! It wasn't always that way. My family lived in San Francisco, and my dad commuted daily across the SF/Oakland Bay Bridge to his job at Alameda Naval Air Station in the 1960s. Traffic flowed on the freeways all day long, even during commute hour it sailed along at 50mph. You could park almost anywhere in downtown at all hours. Parking spots were abundant.

Fast forward to today, and there are perhaps five times as many people converging on the cities. Suburbs were small, surrounded by open farmland and fruit orchards. Now they're as built up with building towers as the city. The transportation system could never keep up with that. The regional directors concentrated funding on pie-in-the-sky ideas like expensive ferries and bicycle lanes - which took away traffic lanes from autos.

As for BART, they couldn't get buy-in from Marin County, San Mateo County and Santa Clara County. Buy-in came later, and is super-expensive because land has been developed since the early days of BART when it was vacant. Someday it's encircle the Bay - perhaps in 100 years from now.