Comment 78779

By Burlingtowne (anonymous) | Posted June 21, 2012 at 18:49:24 in reply to Comment 78778

That still isn't really all that appropriate for a couple reasons, including the fact that there's traffic lights, parking, uncontrolled access unlike on a highway, the fact that streets are for cars, bikes, and pedestrians, as well as the fact that Hamilton, like all levels of government, don't have the money to install methods to control cars through ACC (which no one has anyways).

Apply some economics to the problem - it's a classic case of a "tragedy of the commons". Since we can't practically toll the roads so that the users become ratepayers like transit riders (unless the government mandated GPS-based road tolls), the best method is to cut off the positive feedback that road expansion causes. Reduce the lanes, some traffic will reroute to another road and a bunch will literally disappear (there are academic papers on this).

Check out Atlantic Cities, as they've posted 2 articles (probably more) on road congestion, one correlating congestion with faster growing GDP and another with regards to the increase of traffic flows and decrease of travel times in Manhattan by (a) shutting down part of Broadway at Times Square (4 lanes) and (b)instituting bus-only lanes on the Avenues. Both reductions in lanes saw better travel times across a wide swath of the island's grid.

As a side note - traffic "engineers" are morons. If they could actually engineer traffic (they can't) we wouldn't have traffic jams and we wouldn't continue to destroy our cities with 6-lane roads that are still packed. I have zero respect for their views and their job.

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds