LA TRAFFIC LOS ANGELES DRIVERS
Phone apps today provide easy and immediate access to traffic information, but in the 1950s there was the Sigalert, developed in Los Angeles, which allowed police to interrupt radio broadcasts to warn drivers of backups. Today's technology, while it has advanced leaps and bounds past what was available fifty years ago, echoes early tech. One of the most surprising - or maybe depressing - lessons to be gleaned is that the many of the proposed congestion solutions have not changed for a hundred years. Before it could get off the ground, Ronald Reagan, who was at the time a radio show host, got a lot of mileage out of making fun of what he called a "zany idea" proposed by "mass transit zealots."
Here's another: In 1976, the city of Berkeley volunteered to test out the concept of congestion pricing. He believed this would improve safety, because "slow drivers endangered others who got 'backed up behind the lane hog.' " Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan - proposed a state law that would have set minimum speed limits. Here's one example: In 1966, Caspar Wienberger - the same man who would go on to serve as U.S. In addition to a fascinating look at Los Angeles history, the paper offers some surprising little nuggets that could serve one well at, say, a cocktail party. All quotes below are taken directly from it. It's worth it - this is a well-written and enlightening dive into these topics. The paper can be read here in its entirety here. One post on Streetsblog, highlighting a few excerpts, cannot do justice to "A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles: 1920-2020." The paper gives an overview of everything from the city's complicated history with public transit to the development of technological fixes to proposals for congestion pricing, a strategy that until relatively recently would have been difficult to test.
The current debate imagines the city of today, with current congestion levels, as a starting point that is difficult to change, but it is better understood as the result of many historical events and policies and ultimately amenable to change." "This paper reflects the expectation that the debate will benefit from consideration of new strategies and will be more reasoned if informed by lessons learned from history. But they remain hopeful that there are solutions. The debates will continue, and they are likely to be acrimonious, say the authors. Today's proposals are not different from past solutions, and even though mistakes have been made, it's not clear that lessons have been learned. "Proposals to manage traffic in Los Angeles must respond to the land use and transportation landscape that resulted from past programs that we hardly remember," the authors remind readers. That makes right now a good time to take a moment to read up about the history of Los Angeles' long fight to create a transportation system that works, to look at solutions that have been tried, and to learn about what has not worked. The pandemic may have revealed one temporary, very unsustainable solution, but with recovery there is no reason to believe traffic congestion won't come roaring back.
And the many solutions proposed for solving traffic congestion - public transit, encouraging people to move out to suburbs, building ever wider freeways, inventing traffic management regulations and technological fixes - have never brought more than a temporary reprieve from the unrelenting growth in congestion. Today, the city is a sort of hybrid, with multiple city centers spread throughout the region. The paper describes century-long arguments over what form the city should take: one focused on downtown? or one distributed into suburban neighborhoods? Arguments for both were based, in part, on trying to solve the growing congestion that was choking downtown streets early last century.īut the arguments were never resolved, just as L.A.'s congestion has continued to grow even as the city expanded.
Policymakers are studying potential solutions such as pricing roads - both Metro and SCAG are looking into testing versions of it - but none of the current ideas are new, according to the authors of a new paper, "A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles: 1920-2020." "Century" was published the UCLA Luskin Center and authored by Martin Wachs, Peter Sebastian Chesney, and Yu Hong Hwang.
LA TRAFFIC LOS ANGELES HOW TO
Los Angeles, and California as a whole, has been fighting traffic congestion, and fighting over how to fight congestion, for its entire history.
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