Reply to Widening 355 in MoCo

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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?[/quote]

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. [/quote]

Most of us just want to get to where we need to go.  The problem is that suburbs were largely built around car transportation.  Expanding public transport to serve all neighborhoods in a way that is efficient enough to meaningfully reduce the number of cars on the road would be very expensive.  I metro to work, but I end up driving to the station because I need to drop one kid at daycare and the other at before care and its all too far apart to walk.  DH does not have a logical public transport option to work (would involve a long metro ride on two lines and an infrequent bus).  But his commute around the beltway takes longer and longer in the afternoon and there's no solution in sight.

The most "walkable" communities are often the most expensive, which is another reason why people end up living further and further out.[/quote]
Yes, one of the reasons why they say expanding highways doesn't work is because if they widen the roads , then more people will use it by moving further out. Well,yea, they move further out because they can't afford close in.  They say widening the roads just encourages people to move further out, but then the same people would complain that we don't have enough affordable housing, not enough room for green space, etc...

It's like you want your cake and eat it, too.

Public transit is super slow; you're in a tube with strangers (and their germs). I get motion sickness in buses and trains. Some people have daycare situations that doesn't work with public transport. There are many reasons why the kind of public transport we have doesn't work for people.[/quote]

You create the communities and resources you need based on conditions. If you could get what you needed without spending the additional money on a second or third car, by living in a walkable community that was tied to the rest of the region via a viable mass transit, then for many, that would be a preferred alternative. And in many countries, the day care centers are near the rail stations, so it is more convenient and viable for families to use them. We could do that here. We are simply choosing not to.[/quote]

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