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It is so sad to see otherwise smart people be so dumb about planning and transportation.
I remember when 270 was 2 lanes in each direction. For 45 years, the county has expanded the number of lanes, the local lanes, the X crossover exchanges, and yet, we still have a lot of bumper to bumper car traffic with corresponding dirty air and health impacts. Time to do something else, what has been happening since the 1970's clearly isn't working. |
Whatever the question, the answer is always: more roads. Traffic congested? Widen the highway! Traffic not congested? Widen the highway! It's amazing, in a really depressing way. |
Should the answer be less roads? Is zero roads the ideal number? Do you believe that Star Trek style teleportation is real? |
What was the population of the county 50 years ago? What was the size of the county’s economy 50 years ago? |
Don't hurt yourself sliding down that slippery slope. |
The answer is, building and widening roads doesn't lead to better traffic flow. If the goal is moving people efficiently, then single occupancy cars is the least efficient manner possible. Just about anything - mass transit, bikes, whatever, is a better use of time, space and money. |
Do you have an example of a suburban county in the US realizing your goal absent the economic growth facilitated by cars on roads? |
DP. Since basically every suburban county has gone all-in on the build-roads-for-cars strategy, there are no examples of counties that haven't done that. |
So the answer is no? Got it. Thanks. |
Correct. There are no examples demonstrating the success or failure of an approach that none of the counties have tried. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples demonstrating the failure of the roads-for-cars approach that all of the counties have tried. |
Let’s take a step back here and recognize that you are advocating something that you admit that “no one else has tried” and yet you expect that countries and governments will follow your advice because….? Not too dissimilar from the communists in college who swore up and down that communism works, except that it has never been tried before. Okay, sure. |
None of the counties in the US have tried it. That only leaves the whole rest of the world. |
Ah, but part of that is due to the bottleneck when the lanes go back down to 2 past Germantown. What "something else" do you propose? Just let it keep getting worse until the highways around here are as bad as I-95 in CT? |
This is where we say: transit and other ways to get around without a car, plus land use to enable it. And then you say: no, roads for cars. |
Name a place in the “rest of the world” that developed cities and economically grew in the 20th century that followed a different model. Just one country. I’ll wait. In the meantime, the fastest growing cities and counties in our region and America writ large are engaging doing the exact opposite of what you propose while the ones that have started down that path are now economically struggling. Really speaks for itself. The experience of places in the US that are current and prior successful growth in this country is that roads are important for economic growth and transit can easily be added later, where it is needed. No one has successfully grown without roads, which just makes basic friggin’ economic sense predating the automobile all the way back to Rome. Imagine the Romans following your advice and saying sorry, since your cart filled with agricultural products going to the market only has one passenger you cannot use the road. When you reduce it to the basics, you philosophy is economically illiterate and just silly. |