This is one thing that makes me grateful that I live in Maine. “Traffic” is having five or six cars in front of you at the red light, and it’s pretty uncommon to have to wait at the same light for more than one cycle.
In my suburb of Kansas city the city planners have it in there heads we need Chicago style traffic congestion and are constantly allowing more apartments and condos to be built in an area that was at once single family homes.
What I find odd is how the traffic always seems worse on mondays?
Is the alternative sky-high housing prices because of demand out-stripping supply or is there something else going on?
A few years a go, my job transferred me to Valparaiso, IN. A town of about 25k. I immediately appreciated the lack of traffic. There were just NO analogues for the heavily travelled 4-lane suburban streets. And “rush-hour” lasted a predictable 20 minutes of so in the morning and evening, and basically meant brief delays at 5 or so intersections.
City folk can easily not appreciate that aspect of more rural life. Of course, I WAS living in Valparaiso… :rolleyes:
The hellish sprawling VA suburbs in the DC area have maybe one hour a year (pre-dawn on Thanksgiving) when the traffic is not bumper to bumper. It gets worse every year as people and businesses continue to flock here, while the drooling chimps of VDOT continue to fling their poop band-aids at the infrastructure problems.
My one concern with I70 getting dropped into a tunnel under Denver is they are going to build it for the traffic today not in 10 years when the project is supposed to be done and then they are going to have to figure out how to widen the tunnel.
Denver has been growing 10% per year for the last 6-7 years and will come close to doubling in a decade. The current plan is to force people on to public transportation by eliminating parking spaces downtown and not widening the roads. It has done the job of making the trip downtown unbearable where it used to be simply bad. My old commute was 40 minutes when i worked downtown and I would take surface streets rather than the highway because on average they were 5 minutes slower but way lower stress. Now that drive on the highway is close to an hour at normal commute times.
It may be because of Federal laws. I wanted to synchronize our (State) signals with a town’s signals to get traffic platooning better through a series of signals. I was informed by our Electrical folks that due to Homeland Security (? - can’t recall for certain if it was them) laws, we couldn’t let an outside agency connect to our network. We can view our signal operation from anywhere in the state, and so it’s considered a hackable access point. We were trying to negotiate us taking over control of their nearby signals to get around this when I left that job.
It may also be no one ever asked if they could.
In Maine and New Hampshire, travel on limited-access highways is mostly better and faster than it was ten years ago. They’ve added extra travel lanes to some highways, and increased the speed limit on some. Surface streets here are mostly a little slower and more congested than they used to be, but still not bad most of the time. The net effect is that for most trips around northern New England, I usually get where I’m going a little quicker than I used to.
Elsewhere in the Northeast, I’ve noticed fewer road improvements and speed-limit boosts on limited-access highways. And there’s more traffic and congestion. The net effect is that I get where I’m going slower than I did ten years ago on trips to places like western New York and Maryland, usually about 10% slower, I’d estimate.
One thing I’ve noticed both near home and on road trips is that the rise of toll transponders like EZ-Pass has virtually eliminated backups at toll booths in most areas. That effect tends to be at least partly offset by higher traffic volume and more congestion in other areas.
Yeah, Denver and I70 really anger me because I70 is the major highway for east-west traffic thru central Colorado and you pretty much have to take it.
That’s definitely become the case here in the Chicago area, as well.
For the first decade or so that I lived here, the toll plazas were all cash-only, and they would generate huge back-ups during rush hours, as well as on the weekends (Friday evenings for those leaving Chicago for Wisconsin to the north, or Indiana and Michigan to the east, and Sunday evenings for those coming back). In the '90s, my wife and I spent our summer weekends working at a Renaissance Faire just over the border in Wisconsin, and we spent a whole lot of time on Sunday evenings in traffic jams leading into the toll plazas as we were heading home.
For the past 15 years or more, if you have an IPass transponder, the toll plazas are a non-issue, traffic-wise.
I’ve lived in Chicago most of my life. Have a kid in Denver. I70 impresses me as worse than anything we’ve got in Chicago. :eek:
Was recently in Austin TX. Can’t imagine how those roads are going to handle to recent and anticipated growth!
There are some good tricks like roundabouts and through-lanes, but overall getting worse due to sheer volume.