Traffic much worse in Europe
posted by Rob Anderson @ 9:29 AM
11 comments
District 5 Diary
Rob Anderson's commentary on San Francisco politics from District 5
Monday, April 18, 2011
Previous Posts
- Megaprojects and Risk
- The US: a low-tax country
- California high-speed rail: Outlook is "bleak"
- San Francisco: A one-party town
- Another anti-car "activist" appointed to MTA board
- Waving the bloody shirt on Masonic
- Goodwill, Whole Foods, and Earth Day
- Streets of SF are not unsafe for pedestrians
- "Greenwashing" the Berkeley BRT
- David Chiu's fake vision
11 Comments:
That's a joke of a study.
Now there's a misleading headline.
Nobody in Wyoming gets stuck in traffic. There is no Wyoming in Europe.
Moron.
Among individual metropolitan areas. Los Angeles had the greatest peak hour delay, at 74.9 hours annually. This clearly because Los Angeles is a city very much like European cities.
I've lived here 33 years now in various neighborhoods, including Pac. Hts. The Castro, Hayes Valley and Noe V.
Traffic has never been problem driving around the city. It really has not changed that much in the 33 years I have lived here. Still pretty easy to get around by car.
Seems you are even further behind the times than first suspected. Even the CATO institute is praising better parking management and congestion pricing.
Parking and traffic issues don't break down along tidy political lines. O'Toole is a free market libertarian and a cyclists, but he also understands that motor vehicles are here to stay, that anti-car policies imposed by governments are unwise and counter-productive.
Who doesn't believe in rational parking management policies? What I object to is creating an artificial shortage of parking based on the assumption that people are going to stop driving. As it is, motorists are a major source of revenue for SF, which owns a lot of parking lots and makes a lot of money from parking meters and parking tickets.
Traffic in downtown SF is nowhere near bad enough to justify Congestion Pricing. And, as it happens, the last time people in SF were polled on the issue they rejected the idea of paying to drive downtown in their own city. It's not going to happen in SF.
As I've pointed out in earlier posts, a shortage of parking actually creates more congestion on city streets.
"Traffic has never been problem driving around the city. It really has not changed that much in the 33 years I have lived here. Still pretty easy to get around by car."
I agree. Back in 2005, Curt Sanburn wrote a piece in the SF Weekly saying the same thing, which annoyed the bike people. What I object to is deliberately making it harder to drive in the city based on a half-baked anti-car ideology. Doing that is not only a massive inconvenience to the thousands of people who really have to drive but it's getting to the point where it's going to damage the city's economy.
This comment has been removed by the author.
"Traffic in downtown SF is nowhere near bad enough to justify Congestion Pricing."
Please come tool around Soma at 5 PM on any weekday.
Rob would go to SoMa at 5 on a weekday and think the problem is a lack of parking or a bike lane. He'd nearly get hit by 10 cars but then bitch about the fixie he saw a block away slide through a stop sign.
The problems with these numbers is that they measure something very, very specific: hours of peak delay per driver. What they don't measure is "time behind the wheel", or "time spent commuting". Somehow I don't think the US would look quite so rosy in those comparisons.
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