Another traffic post

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why is this political in nature?

Because the cause of the problem is a series of political choices that deliberately and knowingly increased congestion.

That being pro or anti-congestion is now a political issue is indeed stupid. But this is the world we now live in.

Yes! It is a terrible that we are forced to deal with this WFO political movement. It’s funny the biggest advocate for this are people who no longer work or are like Trump who never are in the office working. It is disgusting.

They are disgusting. But what's truly disgusting are those that pushed to change everything about our transportation network during the pandemic in a delusional effort to prevent a return to normalcy.

Agreed! WFH was working great. Huge productivity and profit gains. Now everyone is sitting in traffic because a few people delusional insistence on WFO. It is crazy to disrupt everything for a these crazies.

[Anonymous]

omg the word road diet is so dumb

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:omg the word road diet is so dumb

We need to elevate these concepts and how we talk about them and solve them and using silly terms like "road diet" does not advance the cause. It's like "ways of working" - it's juvenile and regressive.

[Anonymous]

I'd be all in favor of "road diets" or "traffic calming" or whatever makes it harder to drive... IF they had amped up our public transportation game. Instead they're decreasing bus frequency, removing stops, and cutting entire bus routes, and of course metro is a shitshow.

it takes me 10-12 minutes to drive to my office. 35-40 minutes to walk. 35-40 minutes to take public transportation. What reasonable person would choose the 3rd option that includes waiting and walking time?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'd be all in favor of "road diets" or "traffic calming" or whatever makes it harder to drive... IF they had amped up our public transportation game. Instead they're decreasing bus frequency, removing stops, and cutting entire bus routes, and of course metro is a shitshow.

it takes me 10-12 minutes to drive to my office. 35-40 minutes to walk. 35-40 minutes to take public transportation. What reasonable person would choose the 3rd option that includes waiting and walking time?

I agree with this. I live in DC, in a neighborhood that is used as a thoroughfare for commuters driving in from Maryland. I hate the traffic coming through my neighborhood every day and I especially hate all the horrific, unsafe driving I see as people do deranged things and speed to try and make that commute.

But I can also see that public transit is not meeting these drivers halfway. There is metro into the nearby suburbs (we are in NE, adjacent to PG county) but it doesn't serve many of the neighborhoods well at all -- you'd have to spend almost the same amount of time driving to a park and ride on the other side of the county in order to take metro in as they currently spend driving into DC. Metro prices keep going up (though I don't know how that compares to parking costs downtown -- I always wonder about that because when I have worked downtown parking was prohibitively expensive IMO). The buses are not frequent enough, often overcrowded, and sit in the same super slow traffic. For a city dweller, that bus might still be better because it could save you the cost of having a car. But for someone in the suburbs, they have to own a car no matter what, so leaving it at home to take a slow, crowded bus doesn't make a ton of sense. And you lose the efficiency of being able to drop off and pick up kids on the way, go to the grocery store, run other errands. So I get it.

I just do not see any of the PG commuters that currently stream into the city via NY, Florida, Maryland, and West Virginia Avenues, or Bladensburg Road and Benning/H Street, being able to switch to public transit unless there's a HUGE overhaul of what is offered. No one is going to ditch their albeit miserable car commute to pay $10 a day to ride crowded, hot metro or buses that don't even go where they need them to go. You not only need a massive investment in these transit methods but you also need specific kinds of development around the transit hubs so that people can easily pick up groceries or dry cleaning or pick kids up from daycare when they get of the train or bus. You need to make it worth their while. Right now it is not.

Trust me, I'd be thrilled to get all these cars out of my neighborhood in favor of mass transit. It is probably the thing that would have the single biggest impact on my quality of life and property values, even over and above addressing crime issues (yes, really). But these people need a way to get to work. Right now, it involves sitting in traffic outside my house for two hours a day. You need an alternative that beats that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't understand how road diets cause accidents. I can see how they would cause slow downs and make people late, but sitting in traffic doesn't cause accidents.

If the reason for the back up was accidents, that's the fault of unsafe driving, not road diets. The fact that there were multiple accidents yesterday afternoon actually cuts against the idea that road diets are to blame, and could be seen as evidence that *more* road diets are necessary, to dissuade the unsafe drivers who cause accidents via speeding and refusing to obey traffic laws from driving at all.

So which is it? Was the congestion caused by unsafe drivers getting into accidents, or was it the intention creation of road diets?

Let me guess, you are one of the BPAC crazies. Just like many things in life, what in theory should happen doesn’t become reality. In theory, if you make people so agitated with driving my purposefully causing gridlock, people will abandon their cars in the form of other kinds of transportation or other routes. BUT that hasn’t happened. People can be married to their cars. People blindly follow directional apps, always looking for that short cut to save maybe 10 seconds. In theory if one lane is removed and replaced with a bike lane it will cause drivers to slow down and when they slow down they drive more carefully.

I wish these things actually had happened. I don’t mind being proved wrong, esp about traffic. But just like upzoning didn’t solve the housing crisis, these traffic diets didn’t solve congestion. It is all political. And no one wants to pivot and problem solve. It’s not working.

[Anonymous]

You guys know the region keeps growing as do the cars themselves? Traffic is going to get worse and worse regardless. The only way things get better is if people get out of their cars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why is this political in nature?

Because the cause of the problem is a series of political choices that deliberately and knowingly increased congestion.

That being pro or anti-congestion is now a political issue is indeed stupid. But this is the world we now live in.

+1. The city of Alexandria is currently trying to REMOVE lanes on perpetually clogged Duke street because they think adding a bus lane and a bike lane will make the city a better place. It's absolutely asinine.

The city of alexandria removed a slip lane from King st to S. Walter Reed YEARS AGO FOR NO REASON and now the traffic backs up on king st for miles. Nothing is done about it lane is still closed for no reason. They simply do not care if your sitting in traffic for no reason or not. The traffic would 100000% not back up on King st every day many times a day if that right slip turn lane road was open.

Ha. I drive truck and hop over that curb anytime I'm there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't understand how road diets cause accidents. I can see how they would cause slow downs and make people late, but sitting in traffic doesn't cause accidents.

If the reason for the back up was accidents, that's the fault of unsafe driving, not road diets. The fact that there were multiple accidents yesterday afternoon actually cuts against the idea that road diets are to blame, and could be seen as evidence that *more* road diets are necessary, to dissuade the unsafe drivers who cause accidents via speeding and refusing to obey traffic laws from driving at all.

So which is it? Was the congestion caused by unsafe drivers getting into accidents, or was it the intention creation of road diets?

Let me guess, you are one of the BPAC crazies. Just like many things in life, what in theory should happen doesn’t become reality. In theory, if you make people so agitated with driving my purposefully causing gridlock, people will abandon their cars in the form of other kinds of transportation or other routes. BUT that hasn’t happened. People can be married to their cars. People blindly follow directional apps, always looking for that short cut to save maybe 10 seconds. In theory if one lane is removed and replaced with a bike lane it will cause drivers to slow down and when they slow down they drive more carefully.

I wish these things actually had happened. I don’t mind being proved wrong, esp about traffic. But just like upzoning didn’t solve the housing crisis, these traffic diets didn’t solve congestion. It is all political. And no one wants to pivot and problem solve. It’s not working.

+1.

If disincentives worked, jails wouldn't be full of blacks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You guys know the region keeps growing as do the cars themselves? Traffic is going to get worse and worse regardless. The only way things get better is if people get out of their cars.

That's not an excuse for intentionally making things far worse in the here and now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You guys know the region keeps growing as do the cars themselves? Traffic is going to get worse and worse regardless. The only way things get better is if people get out of their cars.

According to who, you? Has it worked? No. Single minded bike advocates are so privileged they are ridiculous.

[Anonymous]

Accelerationism, in all its forms, is a bad idea.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You guys know the region keeps growing as do the cars themselves? Traffic is going to get worse and worse regardless. The only way things get better is if people get out of their cars.

You have to give people a reason to get out of their cars. Right now, it's all stick, no carrot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Accidents on multiple North-South routes. This is happening because capacity has been reduced on all of those and DOT is intentionally increasing congestion throughout the city as a safety measures.

This is a factor. Also factors: Ramped-up return-to-office policies in the public and private sectors that have seen far more office worker types commuting downtown than they had been for the last five years; more aggressive driving since the pandemic (this is obviously anecdotal, but I've seen it everywhere, cities, suburbs, various states); bad luck.

A return to the office was inevitable and very predictable. Nothing that happened from 2020-2022 was normal. Using that as a baseline comparison is extremely disengenuous.

The simple truth is that, in 2022, DDOT started reducing capacity on all the major routes in and out of town and changed the timing on stop lights in order to increase congestion.

This created a scenario whereby there is no excess capacity on any of the major roads. Thus, there are no detours around a problem. If two of those routes get hit by an incident, such as an accident or temporary road closure, the entire network becomes gridlocked.

All of this was warned about repeatedly and ignored. The whole road diet/traffic calming project is reminiscent of what the George W. Bush administration did in Iraq.

But also, some RTO policies have ended remote work arrangements that long predated the pandemic, and on top of that, people have been driving rather than taking Metro. You really can’t put all the blame for traffic on any one cause. No matter how much you dislike the specific cause you’re going to pick.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You guys know the region keeps growing as do the cars themselves? Traffic is going to get worse and worse regardless. The only way things get better is if people get out of their cars.

According to who, you? Has it worked? No. Single minded bike advocates are so privileged they are ridiculous.

This poster didn’t even mention bikes! What makes you think they’re a single-minded bike advocate?