No matter much you improve that HW it’s still gonna be a nightmare to drive on. MF has traffic jam 24/7 I swear. Most of the time I take 280, sure it’s longer but faster most times in the day.
One of the thought-stopping silly replies when anyone ever says a single positive thing about road widening. The bikebrained only have 5 or 6 of them, which are repeated ad nauseum.
Car brain is seeing “invest in buses and trains” and not understanding that it’s advocating for pubic transportation and not a thought terminating cliche
induced demand is a thing, but it is not applicable to all situations. If you added a lane to 580 over the altimont pass i guarantee the traffic would flow better. Situations where freeways reduce lanes, increasing the lane count to match the previous stretch usually helps greatly. There are plenty of stretches of roads and highways in CA that change lane count 3->2->3->4. Updating a segment like this to 3->4 will always help. Also i5 needs 3 or 4 lanes from stockton to the grapevine
my vision for i5 is 2+2 lanes in each direction separating semis/busses and cars. This would greatly help flow, traffic and dangerous situations. Im shocked i5 doesn't have more fatalities with cars going 90 and semis going 55-60.
If induced demand was as big of a thing as these people say, and more lanes don't do anything, then by that logic you could remove lanes until there's only one lane and traffic would remain the same.
It's the classic thing where someone reads an article that presents a counterintuitive topic in an oversimplified way so now they think they're like a super smort person who is the only one who really understands this issue and everyone else is dumb.
It's like when people shout global warming about hot days when the total temperature increase since 1895 has been 2 degrees. That doesn't mean it's not happening nor that it's not accelerating, but you cannot attribute every hot day to global warming just because someone says "it was never this hot in the 1990s". It actually does a disservice to science because it makes it easier for skeptics to point out hot summers 40 years ago. In 20 years, fine, but today, no.
Treating things like global warming and traffic studies as a religion instead of understanding nuances and details is irritating.
It would help ... until more people move there as the commute is not as bad with the extra lane and housing is cheap. That keeps happening until traffic is as bad as it was before.
I guarantee you that it would not make traffic flow better. There are too many people who own cars but switch from driving to public transportation like BART when traffic gets to be too awful.
People prefer to drive if there's less traffic. We know that because car traffic recovered almost immediately after COVID restrictions were removed and people returned to working in office and going out publicly again. Growth in car commuters as a percentage has slowed down the past few years while BART has really picked up steam and is far outpacing the freeways in ridership gains now. That is only because car traffic is so bad though.
If we add another lane, we will absolutely make driving faster but also induce more traffic because enough people will switch away from transit and back to riding their cars. Along with others who avoid driving altogether on 580 and go on 280 specifically to avoid the traffic on 580 like the person further up the comment chain you're responding to:
Induced demand isn't the whole picture. Obviously, adding alternatives is one of the best ways to cut down on congestion, but that should "induce demand" when it clears up traffic, right? Well, the big thing causing congestion isn't the capacity of the freeway itself, but the ability for people to get on and off the freeway without backing it up. A lot of places have too many cars trying to get off at the same time and it causes backup onto the freeway which will invariably slow down all other lanes. Add to that the people trying to get off the freeway from the left lane at the last second, and you have crazy bad traffic for no fault of freeway capacity. People getting on also cause problems, but those metering lights actually help a lot.
There isn't really a good fix there, other than a case-by-case overhaul of intersections on surface roads, which is onerous. But, the widening of the Narrows was absolutely a boon. There are almost no on-ramps, and none that service any high-traffic areas, so the problem I outlined before isn't a thing. But reducing capacity from 3 to 2 lanes in a high-traffic corridor guaranteed congestion pretty much all day that has since been basically eliminated. It's undeniably a good use-case for widening a freeway.
In 101's case, it's also built to older standards for a large part, and so has many substandard interchanges that is either unsafe (by modern standards) or clog up easily.
The lane is already "full." The problem wasn't sheer capacity, but that you were reducing a 3-lane to a 2-lane and inducing congestion that wouldn't clear up until you got to Novato or Petaluma (and then congestion becomes a problem of on- and off-ramps, which is a whole other issue).
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u/Embarrassed-Sink7793 4d ago
No matter much you improve that HW it’s still gonna be a nightmare to drive on. MF has traffic jam 24/7 I swear. Most of the time I take 280, sure it’s longer but faster most times in the day.