Widening Roads Doesn't Lessen
Traffic Congestion
by Dom Nozzi
Jade Albrecht, in a June 26 letter to The Sun, claims the
proposed widening of Northwest 34th Street is overwhelmingly more of a benefit
than a cost, due largely to a belief widening will reduce traffic congestion
and give us free-flowing traffic, which Albrecht then claims will reduce noise
pollution.
Albrecht needs to do some homework.
For example, it is now obvious, after numerous studies and
hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of road widening around the
country, that adding traffic lanes does not eliminate congestion. The classic
case occurred three years ago in the state of Washington, where traffic
engineers, who predicted a new $1.7 billion highway bridge would provide at
least 20 years of capacity were surprised to learn that capacity was instead
reached in less than a month. Right here in Gainesville we need only look at
Archer Road, where a six-lane monstrosity is the daily scene of angry motorists
stuck in traffic.
As for reduced noise pollution, the usual approach is to
strive for roads wide enough to allow for the motorist utopia known as
free-flowing traffic, which, in technical terms, is at least
"Level-of-Service 'C'". Guess which road conditions have been
determined to cause the highest levels of noise pollution? You got it. The
coveted, free-flowing Level-of-Service "C".
What about the benefits of reduced gas consumption and air
pollution as a result of widening roads? Sorry, but this myth was convincingly
exploded by Kenworthy and Newman, who, in a worldwide survey of cities,
discovered the more a city widened roads, the more people made a trip by car,
and the more mileage they drove. As a result, such cities experience higher
levels of gas consumption and higher levels of air pollution.
I recently returned from a two-week trip in California. Ten-
and twelve-lane roads, filled with hostile, stressed motorists, were
everywhere. We heard several people talk about the need to escape from the
drive-by shooting problems. (Indeed, large numbers of Californians are fleeing
the state due to the shootings and traffic.)
I could go on and on about how wider roads destroy our
neighborhoods and downtown, how they promote sprawl, how they bankrupt
governments and families and how they destroy our sense of community and turn
us into sworn enemies of anyone who takes too long to make a left turn at an
intersection, among other things.
A road widening should give us a clear message. Not that we
are being foresighted in accommodating increased future traffic, but that we
have failed to adequately control the sprawl of housing into far-flung
locations and have made life so miserable for pedestrians, transit users and
bicyclists (and, conversely, so enjoyable for motorists) that we are almost all
forced to get around by car. Free-flowing, high-speed traffic is fine for the
interstate highways. It is destructive within cities, where traffic must
instead be slowed down for safety and livability.
If Gainesville is to realize any degree of quality of life
in the future, and escape the fate of road-happy southern California, we must
commit ourselves to controlling sprawl and stop spending millions of dollars on
community-destroying road widenings.
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