But experience on this side of the pond shows that building more roads, does not solve congestion, it just increases demand for road use and increases congestion.
In Birmingham, England, it used to take 45 minutes to drive into the city from Junction 1 of the M5 motorway before they built the Midland Metro Light Rail line. Now you can park at the Hawthorns station (extra car parking spaces are available on days when West Bromwich Albion FC are not playing at home!) and you can be in Birmingham City centre in about 15 minutes. The Park and Ride is signposted on the motorway.
One perhaps comparable American analogy, Tulyar, is/was SF, where the famous/infamous 480 Fwy. pancaked and had to be completely torn down after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Many SFers were quite worried that the residual shift of cars from the elevated fwy into town would paralyze the surface streets, but the anticipated logjam never quite materialized. Of course, it could also be pointed out that SF (like England) is a bit landlocked, and there isn’t much choice in the matter. Most US cities have a little more land to sprawl over.
I highly doubt that’s the reason for not carrying Fox News. The fact is Fox News is a VERY expensive channel to carry and there are other options that are much cheaper like CNN & Pacific Northwest News.
It was the 880 that colapsed in Oakland. Although it didn’t paralize traffic it certainly did slow things down. As did the Northridge quake to the 5/405 interchange and the 10 colapse at Fairfax. That was the reason for the shotgun startup of Metrolink service to Lancaster with borrowed GO Transit and Caltrain equiptment. The 10 was diverted to surface streets modified for directional traffic. It was a mess.
Good morning, Chad. Yes, I had also heard about the 880, but wasn’t it also true that the 480 on the SF side collapsed, and the decision was made not to reopen it, b/c it was so severely damaged? I think they called it the Embarcadero Freeway, didn’t they?
KBC, when you say “Clackamas”, are you referring to the Clackamas Town Center, running down the I-205 median from the Gateway Transit Center? I thought they’d already done/planned that!
On Channel 4 in Britain last night there was an excellent documentary by Bob Kiley, the American (I believe he was in charge of running New York’s subway system) brought in by London Mayor Ken Livingstone to head up Transport for London (TfL). Mr. Kiley thinks the only way to combat congestion is to either price cars out of city centres, as the congestion charge in London seems to be doing, or to ban them altogether as York City Council has done. The park and ride car parks on the outskirts of York are linked to the city centre by a frequent service of high spec buses (York isnt big enough a city to justify investment in light rail).
Mr. Kiley was both critical of Maggie Thatcher who took away powers from city councils to co-ordinate public transport (thereby wrecking the excellent integrated transport they had in Newcastle when the Metro there opened in 1980) and Tony Blair for failing to sort out the mess the Conservatives left our transport in.
Compared with American cities, British cities have very few powers to co-ordinate transport, with the notable exception of London.
As far as I understamnd it …Portland has been highjacked by a bunch of Califinian Do Gooders who are redoing the city in there likeness. The Native Portlandites would like to send all them back down the coast were they belong.
No, I’m not saying they can’t afford it. I’m saying they probably did not want to pay so much for it. Why spend $1.50 for fox news when you could buy NWNC or CNN for $.20 ?
They have. In Tri-Met’s newsletter, they explained how it would run in the transit mall. They also said it would open to the public in 2009. I’ll probably ride it on opening day!