Governor Jerry Brown (in his first incarnation as governor) abruptly halted all public works constructions in Californcation...including highways (and water resources)...in about 1974 or so........and there has hardly been any significant new freeways since...... even though the state’s population has more than doubled
the highways were (mostly) not clogged up when Jerry Brown shut them down....but after JerryB decided to shift the public works budget to, mostly, more welfare payments.......today’s horrid congestion and road rage attacks, violence.....ensued
Fascinating story.
However the envio-Agenda 21 propagandists misplace blaming Freeways or cars for horrendous traffic congestion.
1. The population of CA has doubled from 20 million in 1978, to 40 Million, so naturally highways that worked well 40 years ago are obsolete and impossible to double capacity.
2. California has three million illegal aliens that should not be there.
3. Real estate development has grown at an insane rate.
FCA
Wow, I got to CA in '73 and worked extensively in LA '73 to '76. I remember living in Westwood near Pasadena and taking a girl out in Laguna Beach, about 60 miles away. I was headed home one Saturday night and traffic was crawling about 15 mph at 2 AM!
I find it hard to believe that he could "ride the speed limit at any time of the day." LA freeways were always clogged from the 50s.
My wife and I went 90 miles from the San Fran Peninsula to near Modesto last Saturday. Horrible traffic everywhere!
I think illegal aliens had more to do with that. :)
People can always have a 20 min. commute (or less).... they just have to live very very close to their workplace.
It has more to do with things like HOV lanes, uneducated drivers from all over the world and electronic truck driver logging. HOV lanes cause people to cross three lanes of traffic to get in and out. So they cut in front of six other cars. Uneducated drivers get in the left lane and stay there. Truck driver logging makes truck drivers travel in rush hour instead of at night like they used to. And ethanol fuels make cars break down. And don’t forget about all the people commuting to mass transit.
She’s real fine, my 409.
Colony (TV show on USA Network) has the answers for too much congestion in L.A.:
-Alien invasion
-EMP
-Depopulation
-Fascism / police state
-Only the elite get to drive around in cars. Everybody else has to walk, ride buses, or ride bicycles.
The Progs dream about this stuff - fewer people, fewer cars, Big Government in charge.
They are much more retarded than they appear from the outside...
Yeah but the snarky attitude toward free citizens being able to travel anywhere they want is obvious. Car culture? That’s part of being a free citizen Living in LA is a choice
The dream of getting around by a personal car was ruined because OTHER people also got to have their own cars?
Your masters WON’T be giving up their stretch SUVs, yachts, private planes, or 3 mansions.
Freeways - any major new transportation route - accommodate/create more than a transportation solution to any need. They become the means by which the same need they are supposedly eliminating gets worse. Why? Increased development is MORE about what follows them, than what precedes them.
Take just one area in California - the Inland Empire, and particularly the belt of cities from the edge of L.A. county all the way out to San Bernardino. Thirty years ago most development in the western San Bernardino county area was not pushing up against the foothills of the mountains. Then (ostensibly because of all the traffic on I-10) they built the I-210 freeway many miles north of I-10 and not far south of the foothills of the mountains. Ah, then driving longer distances directly from that area no longer required going down to I-10. Development then mushroomed along and north of the I-210 (pushing right into the foothills in many places), which as it continued made the I-210 (envisioned to be an escape from I-10), just as congested during rush hours as the I-10.
They say that freeways are built to ease congestion in urban and urban-to-suburban areas (southern California has no “center” and is more like mass, giant set of interconnected suburbs), but they ignore “if you build it, they will come”.
The problem can be attacked, but (a) it requires very strict near utopian development controls, to keep new development from defeating the congestion-relief ability of new roads, (b) it will manufacture housing price and property value increases where development is restricted, and (c) density will increase (more multi-family homes) along existing routes in order to accommodate population growth amidst restricted development.
I think less zoning might “help” alleviate some congestion. Zoning, by restricting where work can be located, more areas where work can take place become concentrated, forcing residences to be more distant from work for more folks than if development was less segregated and less restricted. Houston has no zoning and the fears people have about that are not realized in how development takes place there. It also ranks far below Los Angeles as far as congestion ranking. (Los Angeles is tops - in congestion - in the world).
The “car culture” is a result, not a cause.
Mass transit, to be financially viable requires population densities like found along the “northeast corridor” from Boston down to Washington D.C. (severed from Amtrak and on it’s own privately, the train system along that corridor would be profitable).
But California started with none of that density and an asset the northeast lacked anywhere near as much as California - lots of open undeveloped land. The “car” and “car culture” did not decide the course of what developed, it came from, came out of what developed. Could it have developed differently? Could mass transit, like the northeast, have developed along the train line that still runs from 70 miles east of L.A. all the way to downtown L.A.? Would it have been financially viable?
Historians will continue to argue which came first, the accommodation of the car because the car demanded it, or decisions to not do anything else, to not create any alternatives, and were alternatives financially viable not just in getting something built but operationally (keep in mind that buying rights of way, in terms of cost, is usually neutral as to whatever purpose it serves).