Centerfield

Does your area have speed bumps on public roads? Here in MA, we only have them in private parking lots, condo/apartment developments, etc. There may be a law or a conventional wisdom about liability that is stopping these from going in on public roads.

People who live in modern cities and towns with E/W-N/S grids don't know what real traffic is...IMO :-). But the real problem with traffic is more simply that no one has come up with a good way to put 10 lbs of $h!+ into a 5 lb. bag.

It does seem regrettable that overpopulated urban areas are moving towards restricting traffic and accessibility. I've read stories where some European cities are practically charging admission if you want to drive in. But really, what else are you going to do? Full is full. What we really need to do is de-centralize. Maybe this will be a problem we solve using technology, for things like telcommuting, teleconferencing, online shopping.

I wonder how many of you from outside the northeast appreciate how idiosyncratic and outdated the traffic systems here are. Boston is a legendary nightmare not just for gridlock, but for how easy it is to get lost. I wish I had a buck for every out-of-towner traffic nightmare story I'd heard. They all end the same way: "never again!"

Virtually every suburban downtown here is an adventure during rushhour crosstown traffic. And where I live, the downtown has largely collapsed, to be replaced by a 5 mile stretch of big box retailers and a super-regional mall. The only sane way to deal with this latter region is to plan your forays in advance to go during off-peak hours, a luxury many families can't manage. If I need to do shopping or get things for any project related to the weekend, that shopping happens on a weeknight. Go to Walmart or Home Depot on a saturday? Only at gunpoint!

I've spent a fair amount of time in Boston, and remember the roads vividly. They were roughly reason #2 why I didn't end up living there (#1 was that the job offer was in way out in Malboro, and I'm a city boy).

"Here in MA, we only have them in private parking lots, condo/apartment developments, etc. There may be a law..."

Surprisingly that is not true. At least Concord, Lincoln, and Weston (MA) all have speed bumps on public roads. Lincoln & Weston on twisty back roads that have become heavily traveled. Concord has two on a bridge on a busy road that was damaged by large trucks driving too fast. Even if there is a law, there are apparently exceptions allowed.

As for the general subject, decentralization (sprawl) is a prime cause of traffic gridlock, not a solution. Promoting very dense development at mass transit hubs (such as commuter train stations and freeway interchanges), better mass transit, and discouraging paving over small towns that have poor freeway access with houses are the sort of thing that can reduce traffic gridlock (that is, mostly the opposite of what happens in MA).

The European changes (like Athens) are to make mass transit easier (encourage) on the one hand, while making driving into city centers more expensive (discourage). Boston, on orders from EPA, if I remember correctly, has done something similar by artificially limiting the construction of new parking garages downtown for many years.

A problem for suburban Boston mass transit is that many suburban commuter and subway parking lots/garages are filled with cars by 7:30AM. There is an unrelated problem in the other direction; commuter train schedules make it very difficult to commute from Boston out from the city.

Well, dew, thanks for the bad news: speed bumps, coming to a town near me.,

I'm not at all convinced convinced that decentralization itself causes gridlock. I think more people causes gridlock. When the population reaches a point where even thinning out stops working, there's your basic problem.

This problem (around here at least) is then compounded by the inadequacy of road patterns left over from previous decades or centuries, especially town centers that may have made sense in 1950, 1930 or 1897, but are ludicrous now. Demolition is obviously not an option, and in many or even most instances, substantial revision is unlikely to help. (Which, BTW, never stops the local government working in the deteriorated downtown from shopping urban renewal.) These problems stem from a lack of foresight, and a lack of working cooperatively. And on that latter, I'm unconvinced there's a true will to do it (work cooperatively). Almost every new development that goes in around here is a cul-de-sac, which guarantees an increase in capacity upon existing roads, and no increase in ways to get around.

But honestly, I'm skeptical of the notion that sprawl is necessarily much worse than planned clustering. At least where I live, the commercial sprawl is zoned off onto a lengthy crowded section of rte 1. So if I don't need to shop, I can often drive around parts of my town without running into a gazillion traffic lights and a bunch of small shops. Cluster zoning often feels to me like the result of people from liberal enclaves close to Boston (like Newton, Cambridge, etc) moving further away (because they can't afford those places) and then trying to make the far suburbs more like the place they grew up in and liked. Guess what? Not everyone likes neighborhoods composed of a bunch of

Brain--When half of California got tired of the traffic jams and high taxes, they moved to Colorado. And immediately created more traffic jams and started demanding more services requiring higher taxes. Coloradans call this process "Californication."

Mass transit only works well if you have a critical population density. Sprawl fights against that. "Cluster and hub" planning brings it a bit back the other way, but it's still only economical during peak hours.

My city has a bit over 300K population, with about 600K in the "Metropolitan Statistical Area." We have no mass transit worth speaking of. I can get almost anywhere in the MSA (four counties, and not small ones) in 40 minutes, anywhere in town in under 30 minutes on a bad day during rush hour, 20 minutes or less off-peak. Good planning.

Of course, we have no major league sports teams. Can't win 'em all.

Side note: We do not put up speed bumps any more because of liability issues. Too many busted-shock nuisance suits. We keep winning 'em but the cost of going to court is annoying. I know they still put 'em up in San Antonio. Here we target speed limit enforcement through community policing in residential areas in response to officer observations and citizen complaints. Translation: We whine when it gets bad, they come and ticket violators. Repeat periodically. The city makes money instead of spending it in court, habitual violators get slapped down, and everyone else is happy.