this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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The problem isn't where the traffic is, it's where the traffic isn't.
Say you've got 3 lanes into a set of traffic lights and 90% of the traffic continues into 1 lane, then you can add however many lanes you want to the ingress road, but it's still going to fill up and have the same throughput as the bottleneck is the egress.
That said, it can be people doing bad merges, etc. but that's going to happen regardless of how many lanes you put in.
Direct feed highways to parking garages. But as my last paragraph says, LA (in the image) is already too late to fix the problem with roads.
Given hindsight, you'd install covered cycling infrastructure (to protect from sun) and air conditioned commuter rail, not design the roads to have higher capacity, but not only that but it's also less disruptive to retrofit those than higher capacity roads as you can dig underground without needing large junctions to get people to the surface and convert road lanes to cycle lanes with a roof and wall on one side protecting you from traffic, fumes and the sun... It's a political and cultural issue rather than a design issue.
I think you would still need some substantial space to move things underground. But maybe they have enough. I don't really know. That said, yeah politics. So it ain't going to happen.