'Carmageddon': Will Massive Project Fix LA's Traffic Nightmare?

traffic-jam-110715-02 — (Image credit: stockxpert)

This weekend, traffic in Los Angeles is predicted to come to an absolute standstill when the I-405 freeway is closed from this evening (July 15) until early Monday morning (July 18) while construction crews add lanes to the notoriously jammed-up road. That amounts to a 53-hour, $1 billion project that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has predicted to be a nightmare so hellish that it has earned its own nickname: "Carmageddon."

As an Angeleno, I have developed a few simple rules for driving on the west side: 1) Never get on the 405 after 3 p.m., in any direction. 2) Watch out for idiot drivers. It only takes a few idiot drivers to turn a smooth-moving stream of traffic into a parking lot. 3) Refer to Rule 1.

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Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington: The basic reason is simple. There are just too many cars and not enough lanes. And the reason Los Angeles got to be that way is because the greater metropolitan area was built to use cars. That works with low density, but it doesn't work as a city's density increases. LA has just run out of places to grow. It's actually the densest metro area in the United States. The basic problem is that as more people arrive, land becomes more valuable, so it's more difficult to widen roadways.

Hallenbeck: Well, there's a second thing. We've spent the last 80 years building roads. The older a road gets, the more you have to repair it, and repair is difficult because people are currently using them. You have to kick them off the roads in order to maintain them, and where do they go? It's one thing to build a road, because it doesn't exist before that. You can take your time and make sure it's perfect. But once you have to upgrade, it's either a matter of doing construction over two years between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., or it's a matter of ratcheting up the pain level for one weekend. The tradeoff is, it's over with quickly.

Phantom bottlenecks are a major contributor. As vehicles start following each other closely, the whole system becomes a slave to the worst drivers. It only takes one idiot to affect everybody in a chain reaction. Over the past decade, we researchers have come to understand these phenomena much better. Individual actions and the lag in reaction times lead to the provocation of these shock waves. The good news is, car technology is getting better to take matters out of our hands. There is also some good work in something called "speed harmonization" in Germany, which works to slow cars before a more congested area, so a bottleneck doesn't happen. [Read: The 10 Worst Traffic Bottlenecks in the United States ]

Matthew Turner, professor of economics at the University of Toronto: My group did a study where we measured the miles of interstate highway and major arterial roads in every U.S. metropolitan area, and the total amount of driving on those roads. We found that any increase in the amount of roads caused exactly proportional increases in driving. So 1 percent more roadway would lead to 1 percent more driving.

Some people say if we build roads, people will use them so we shouldn't build roads. But what if we substituted something else in place of roads, say, shoes? You wouldn't say that we shouldn't make shoes because people will wear them. It's a matter of balancing the value of shoes with the cost incurred to get them. To me, the interesting question isn't if this project will reduce congestion, but whether that $1 billion results in extra trips valuable enough to justify the cost.

But when it comes to our freeways, we build them and then charge nothing whenever you want to use it. Roads are the only infrastructure that collapses twice a day, and it's because we don't charge to use it. We continue to try to build our way out of it and it doesn't work. You'd think twice about running the air-conditioning all day or leaving your water running when you leave the house, because you start to use a resource more judiciously when it comes out of your wallet. That's what we need to do with roadways.