Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick TYler
Cite? When CalTrans widened the Santa Freeway through Orange County from six lanes to twelve and improved several interchanges, there is no doubt that congestion and average trip times were both reduced. The problem with road and highway projects is that they are usually done too late, and upgrade an underbuilt road to another underbuilt road. Tacking rail transit onto an urban area that grew up around a road grid is a fool's task. Urban rail only works well where the urban area grew up around that rail system, not the other way around. How would you do urban rail in a place like King County, Washington, or Denver, Colorado? Unlike Chicago or New York (both of which grew up around rail) people do not live in one spot and work in another. Areas like LA/Orange County in California have residences and work locations spread around a vast area -- it's hard to link the residential areas with inner-city factories and offices when they are spread fairly evenly.
Anyway, there is no magic bullet. No one transportation scheme is going to fit every urban area.
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I'm sorry for the confusion, as I probably should have clarified that I wasn't proposing a "magic bullet" solution, but rather a set of goals which would be very beneficial for places east of the Mississippi.
All the cities out here grew up around railroads, and by the time the 1950s came around the highways were snaked through cities, often meaning the demolition of tons of neighborhoods. And the population of many major cities out here hasn't changed much since the 1950s.
Out West, where they had the abundance of land, they don't have the same problem with highways as the East does, as such highways are a smart decision and actually work out there.
But here on the East Coast, simply adding a single lane onto existing highways would be a multi-billion dollar eminent domain nightmare, as many highways out here only acquired just enough space for two or three lanes in each direction, sometimes with no median save Jersey barriers, and they've been way over capacity for the past two decades or so.
And yet, for the most part we still have lots of rail lines around here, most of which coincide with areas of very high population density. Most cities of at least 30k or 40k people still have some kind of railroad going through them. Most are used for industrial freight service only, but there is a big movement out here to bring passenger commuter service back onto these rail lines. For this, a sizable chunk of the infrastructure is already in place; with the only "new" infrastructure being rebuilding many of the passing sidings and stations that were abandoned 40 years ago.
As such, if land is cheap and plentiful, and highways are working out West, then that's fine, and proposing rail travel would just be a waste of money. But as I previously posted, it would only be through studies of potential routes between 50 and 500 miles that would be targets of upgrading, as these are the areas where efficient rail can compete with highways and air travel; based upon these goals rail travel would primarily be focused on East coast expansion to the levels it used to be at 40 or 50 years ago.