“Road building a dead end for congestion” — that was the headline in the San Jose Mercury News on November 14. A report by the Texas Transportation Institute says that Silicon Valley would need to add 84 miles of freeways every year just to keep traffic jams from getting worse. The report concludes that adding more highways won’t ease gridlock and that a national approach is needed to ease the country’s worsening traffic.
In the study’s traffic analysis, “Los Angeles again took dubious honors for the 16th straight year as the region with the worst traffic…”
“If you want to add lanes and add lanes, that’s like loosening your belt to cure obesity,” said James Corless of the Surface Transportation Policy Project in San Francisco. “And if you really want to look at the end of that road, it’s called Los Angeles.” (Read the The Texas Transportation Institute report) In response, the Surface Transportation Policy Project issued an analysis of the TTI data that shows that roadbuilding is an ineffective congestion relief strategy. The STPP study compares metro areas that have added extensive new road capacity with those that have not, and finds no difference between the two groups in the rise in traffic congestion.
Describing STPP’s findings on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Roy Kienitz, Executive Director of STPP, said, “We looked at the cities that added a lot of highway capacity and those that did not, and the only difference between the two was that those in the first group spent a lot of money.”
