{"id":9908,"date":"2009-08-23T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-08-23T21:00:12","modified_gmt":"2009-08-23T21:00:12","slug":"no-freeways-are-good-freeways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/23\/no-freeways-are-good-freeways\/","title":{"rendered":"No Freeways are Good Freeways"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Walters has an interesting column today that seemingly comes out of nowhere – a long complaint about California’s incomplete freeway plan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When Jerry Brown began his first stint as California’s governor in 1975 – he apparently yearns for a reprise next year – he more or less shut down the highway construction program that had transformed the state, for better or worse, in the three decades following World War II….<\/p>\n

A few new freeways were built, such as the Century Freeway in Los Angeles and Interstate 5 between Sacramento and Stockton. But dozens of projects, some of them in the works for decades, were erased, leaving Caltrans’ last official freeway map a quaint artifact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walters doesn’t mention that freeway construction has been quite a bit more widespread than that – Highway 85 in the San Jos\u00e9 area, the eastern half of Interstate 210, and numerous state-maintained toll roads in Southern California are just a few of the all-new freeways built since 1980. More significantly, thousands of miles of freeway lanes have been added to existing freeways over the last 30 years. The most prominent may have been the massive decade-long effort to double the size of Interstate 5 in Orange County, but across the state we can find freeways that are much larger in 2009 than they were in 1979.<\/p>\n

So when Walters complains about the unbuilt Sacramento-Bakersfield Highway 65 freeway, or the “missing link” along Interstate 710 through South Pasadena, it’s hard to see this as a particularly bad outcome.<\/p>\n

California’s zeal for building freeways will go down in history as a truly colossal waste of money, a stunning misallocation of resources, and a central cause of the economically and environmentally ruinous policies of sprawl. What’s done is done, and so we ought to be looking forward to smarter transportation policies that don’t double down on past mistakes, but that instead support the kind of economically sensible land use policies California needs to thrive in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

So when Dan Walters wonders whether LA County will find the $3 billion to finish the 710 extension, I wonder whether LA County will find the political will to abandon a project that hasn’t made sense for 30 or 40 years. Antonio Villaraigosa wants to accelerate the timeline<\/a> for building the Subway to the Sea – a task that will require several billion dollars more than LACMTA has on hand. Tunneling a subway under Wilshire Boulevard is far more vital to Southern California’s future than tunneling a freeway under South Pasadena.<\/p>\n

Walters understands the nature of the choice before us:<\/p>\n

One wonders which will come first – closing the I-710 gap, digging the peripheral canal or building a 500-mile-long bullet train. No one now breathing may be alive to learn the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let us hope and work to ensure the bullet train is that answer. Jerry Brown’s original goal in the 1970s was to rein in freeway construction and start building high speed rail. 30 years later we may finally have a chance to put that plan into action.<\/p>\n

Instead of building more freeway lanes, we need to put tolls on existing freeways (starting with Interstate 5 between Tracy and Santa Clarita) and use that money to fuel the growth and operating budget for mass transit. Ten years from now, when Californians travel around their state on bullet trains and wave at the slower, costlier, gas-guzzling vehicles stuck on the freeways, they will wonder what the hell took us so long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Walters has an interesting column today that seemingly comes out of nowhere – a long complaint about California’s incomplete freeway plan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When Jerry Brown began his first stint as California’s governor in 1975 – he apparently yearns for a reprise next year – he more or less shut down the highway construction program that had transformed the state, for better or worse, in the three decades following World War II….<\/p>\n

A few new freeways were built, such as the Century Freeway in Los Angeles and Interstate 5 between Sacramento and Stockton. But dozens of projects, some of them in the works for decades, were erased, leaving Caltrans’ last official freeway map a quaint artifact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walters doesn’t mention that freeway construction has been quite a bit more widespread than that – Highway 85 in the San Jos\u00e9 area, the eastern half of Interstate 210, and numerous state-maintained toll roads in Southern California are just a few of the all-new freeways built since 1980. More significantly, thousands of miles of freeway lanes have been added to existing freeways over the last 30 years. The most prominent may have been the massive decade-long effort to double the size of Interstate 5 in Orange County, but across the state we can find freeways that are much larger in 2009 than they were in 1979.<\/p>\n

So when Walters complains about the unbuilt Sacramento-Bakersfield Highway 65 freeway, or the “missing link” along Interstate 710 through South Pasadena, it’s hard to see this as a particularly bad outcome.<\/p>\n

California’s zeal for building freeways will go down in history as a truly colossal waste of money, a stunning misallocation of resources, and a central cause of the economically and environmentally ruinous policies of sprawl. What’s done is done, and so we ought to be looking forward to smarter transportation policies that don’t double down on past mistakes, but that instead support the kind of economically sensible land use policies California needs to thrive in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

So when Dan Walters wonders whether LA County will find the $3 billion to finish the 710 extension, I wonder whether LA County will find the political will to abandon a project that hasn’t made sense for 30 or 40 years. Antonio Villaraigosa wants to accelerate the timeline<\/a> for building the Subway to the Sea – a task that will require several billion dollars more than LACMTA has on hand. Tunneling a subway under Wilshire Boulevard is far more vital to Southern California’s future than tunneling a freeway under South Pasadena.<\/p>\n

Walters understands the nature of the choice before us:<\/p>\n

One wonders which will come first – closing the I-710 gap, digging the peripheral canal or building a 500-mile-long bullet train. No one now breathing may be alive to learn the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let us hope and work to ensure the bullet train is that answer. Jerry Brown’s original goal in the 1970s was to rein in freeway construction and start building high speed rail. 30 years later we may finally have a chance to put that plan into action.<\/p>\n

Instead of building more freeway lanes, we need to put tolls on existing freeways (starting with Interstate 5 between Tracy and Santa Clarita) and use that money to fuel the growth and operating budget for mass transit. Ten years from now, when Californians travel around their state on bullet trains and wave at the slower, costlier, gas-guzzling vehicles stuck on the freeways, they will wonder what the hell took us so long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-86"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2zO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}