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Why Building More Highways Is Making the Problem Worse

You are on your way to that all important call back, that corporate meeting with MTV, that early morning call time at Waner Brothers, when it happens

Gridlock.

You are caught in the jaws of the 405, the 101, the 10, or any number of freeways in Los Angeles that are now more akin to parking lots than highways.

It used to be that freeways saved you time, by cutting across the landscape like a serrated sushi knife, eliminating the hassle of navigating through Los Angele's un-grid like layout of streetlights, mini-malls, and

mini-communities.

But now, except for three hours in the middle of night, it is faster to take a relaxed jog to your audition.

And a whole lot cheaper. The drastic increase in the price of petroleum has not deterred drivers from their daily commute, but has only drained their bank accounts.

So local politicians have begun to act. After all, they have to endure the same torture. They have convened and arrived at whey think is a workable solution. Lets build more roads and widen the highways, they said. And

that is what they did.

Only the problem got worse. Why?

The dark secret that no urban planner wants to tell you is this: capacity equals more driving.

That's right. The more the city widens the roads and builds new highways, the more drivers actually appear on those roads. And construction aggravates the problem.

The arithmetic is simple. The city's lethargic process of expanding the transportation infrastructure is not fast enough to keep up with population growth, particularly in places like Los Angeles.

The simple truth is that building more highways and widening existing roads, almost always motivated by concern over traffic, not only does nothing to reduce traffic, but in the long run, in fact, it actually increases traffic. This revelation is so counterintuitive that it bears repeating: building highways and adding lanes makes traffic worse.

This paradox was suspected as early as 1942 by Robert Moses, who noticed that the highways he had built around New York City in 1939 were somehow generating greater traffic problems than had existed previously. Since then, the phenomenon has been well documented, most notably in 1989, when the Southern California Association of Governments concluded that traffic-assistance measures, be they adding lanes, or even double-decking the roadways, would have no more than a cosmetic effect on Los Angeles' traffic problems. The best it could offer was to tell people to work closer to home, which is precisely what highway building is supposed to mitigate against.

Across the Atlantic, the British government reached a similar conclusion. Its studies showed that increased traffic capacity causes people to drive more.

A lot more, such that half of any driving-time savings generated by new roadways are lost in the short run. In the words of the Transport Minister, The fact of the matter is that we cannot tackle our traffic problems by building more roads. While the British have responded to this discovery by drastically cutting their road-building budgets, no such thing can be said about Americans.

A recent University of California at Berkeley study covering thirty California counties between 1973 and 1990 found that, for every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, traffic increased 9 percent within four years' time.

USA Today published the following report on Atlanta: For years, Atlanta tried to ward off traffic problems by building more miles of highways per capita than any other urban area except Kansas City As a result of the area's sprawl, Atlantans now drive an average of 35 miles a day, more than residents of any other city.