Bay Area traffic gridlock is the third worst in the Nation, topped only by Los Angeles and Honolulu. Was this dismal situation inevitable?
No….it resulted from decades of bad local and regional transportation decisions. Can things improve? We think so, but it will take time and a whole new way of addressing regional transportation problems. Read BATWG’s 10 important steps that should be taken to clean up the mess.
To encourage more transit use the non-automotive alternative must be fast, comfortable and efficient. For this to happen the agencies listed below must coordinate their services for the benefit of Bay Area transit users. Sometimes one hears from local officials that getting the agencies to work together is impossible. BATWG rejects this defeatist idea. Regionally coordinated transit services have been achieved elsewhere and can be done here as well.
We are told that Express Lanes will let us neatly bypass congestion. It you think that sounds too good to be true, you’d be right. HOT lanes (now euphemistically called “Express Lanes”) sound good. But here’s the rest of the story: The Interstate Highway System was launched by President Eisenhower in 1956. For a while the emphasis on auto travel worked, but it wasn’t long before the freeway backups and the urban traffic impacts began to cause problems. By the early 1960’s some city dwellers, San Franciscans for instance, were strongly resisting attempts to jam brutal elevated freeways through their sensitive urban districts. By the early 1970’s it was widely recognized that expanded freeways always brought more traffic that eventually caused harried freeway users to end up with the same freeway backup misery as before and the traffic congestion in the cities at the ends of the freeways to be even worse than before. Continue reading
Once in a while a project comes along that warrants special attention, respect and support. The Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority and BART’s planned upgrading of the high quality Capitol Corridor passenger rail service that runs from Auburn via Sacramento and Oakland to San Jose is such a project. On April 26, 2018, the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA) received notification from the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) that it had received $80,340,000 in State grants from Senate Bill 1 and the Cap and Trade program to be used to execute the project.
In an economically dynamic region like the Bay Area the ability to get around is paramount. Yet in recent years the movement of people and goods in this region has been slowing down. The highway backups have been getting worse and the hours of delay longer. Urban traffic congestion has been getting ever more constrictive.
In the past 25 years there have been many opportunities to deal effectively with regional gridlock. These opportunities have been largely ignored. Instead, billions of dollars of scarce transportation resources have been lavished on backward-looking highway expansions and ill-conceived parochial and pet projects, mostly of small consequence.
Above is the video about congestion pricing in Stockholm, with Stockholm Director of Transport Jonas Eliasson moderating. STREETFILMS.
For more videos about congestion pricing and evolving cities, go to STREETFILMS.
For an accompanying STREETSBLOG NYC article on congestion pricing go to: Congestion Pricing Was Unpopular in Stockholm — Until People Saw It in Action
This article was featured in Newsletter Issue 4. Click here to go back to the newsletter.
Bay Area Transportation Working Group 