I watched a PBS show about America’s transportation infrastructure, and they mentioned how congested L.A. is, and it made me as a Bostonian wonder,“Would L.A. benfit from a Big Dig type project?”
Sure, but you underestimate how much people in L.A. love their cars. It might just be the most car-centric city in the entire world.
Hasn’t the Boston one been a major financial mess? Seems to me unless LA is sure they could “do it right” that the answer would be no because when you don’t have enough money to do what you need to you sure can’t risk a ton on what you’d like to do.
Oh, yeah major budget overuns.
But worth every lousy penny, if you ever drove in Boston before the big dig.
So, are they tolling the shit out of Boston drivers to get their money back because its worth it 
?
I say that half in snark but also half serious. I mean if they spent billions to make driving nicer but now because of budget problems the schools (or whatever) are underfunded thats not neccessarily a net positive.
Keep in mind that the Big Dig isn’t really that “big”, in terms of freeway distances – a mere three and a half miles of freeway were moved underground. Ignoring any practicalities, if you magically could remove all congestion from a similar stretch of LA freeway, would it make much of a difference? I have to admit I don’t know much of LA, but from pop culture I imagine ten-mile stretches of gridlock on every freeway in every direction.
That is my first thought as well and it has to be correct. Boston is very small geographically like San Francisco. LA is huge and the problems aren’t the same. Boston’s problem was that it grew from a colonial city to a 20th century city and the old street designs couldn’t handle it. LA is spread out and has lots of much newer large roads. It is a completely different problem.
Massachusetts is the #1 public school state so the Big Dig didn’t affect the schools negatively. It did cost a metric shit-ton of money ($18 billion or so) . I am not sure where all the money came from or went (I am not sure anyone really knows) but it still didn’t break Boston.
The Big Dig didn’t take away anyone’s cars. It just moved them underground.
Okay. But I guess my point is, can LA “afford” such a massive sorta project? Though as others have pointed out the LA problem is quite different from the Boston problem. Though, an LA fix for their problem would probably be even more massive than the Boston fix.
Wouldn’t work. LA is just too freaking BIG! Right Coasters just have no idea of the scale of things out here. 3.5 miles of freeway wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket unless it was part of the Harbor Freeway. That you can just nuke.
That’s why we have this smilie: :smack:
I was thinking subway/train, not underground freeway.
I will say that a “big dig” isn’t feasible for LA because the LA area is so large, you’d be talking about 30 to 40 miles of freeway if you wanted to resolve all the congestion. It wouldn’t help to move the cars underground in the vicinity of downtown LA when you’d still have bumper-to-bumper on the 405, 91, 60, etc.
I live in LA so maybe I can help with some perspective. 3.5 miles is nothing. That’s like the distance between 3 stops. Near my house, if I were coming in from the freeway, we have 3 stops between about 3 miles and there are more than a dozen stops from here to downtown.
When I used to go from Santa Monica to the suburbs out past LA and towards the east, it would be 30 miles and practically all of that was congested. Out of 30 miles of highway, I’d be driving freely in less than a third of them. Took me 2.5 hours to make the trip, morning and night.
What we need is more highways, and ones that are about 50 miles long. There’s a huge gap of no major East/West highways between the 60 and the 91. I shudder to think how our traffic will be in 10 years.
Yeah, having lived in Boston pre- and post-Big Dig, I don’t think it would work in LA. As others have said, the sheer scale. The Central Artery Project essentially put 3 miles of I-93 underground, built a couple of bad-ass tunnels and bridges, and that’s essentially it. It created traffic and construction issues for a decade, went wildly over-budget, and there is also the issue of safety (at least one person has died as a result of improperly secured ceiling panels in the tunnel). I don’t think any city wants to go through what Boston did, even though the results are pretty incredible. I remember sitting in traffic on the Fitzgerald Expressway at a complete standstill, with the roadway creaking and vibrating… compare that to the mild congestion one experiences on 93 nowadays. Also, driving I-90 to Logan Airport rules.
I also don’t know what manageable part of LA could be put underground. I think the best way to address SoCal traffic is toll roads, HOV lanes, and surface rail. But there’s a whole culture of car worship out there that probably isn’t going anywhere soon…
No problem. For what it’s worth, not a thing changed with the subway. Maybe there’s a new bus line or something.
LA also has seismic issues…
You know that they have already considered doing this, with State Route 2?:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
At one time, the department considered building a cut-and-cover tunnel under Beverly Hills, but even this proved a non-starter, and the freeway plan west of Route 101 was quietly cancelled in 1975.
[/quote]
The people of Beverly Hills rejected it.
That wouldn’t be a problem as long as the tunnel doesn’t traverse major fault lines without compensation. Remember what happened with Loma Prieta in the Bay Area? The freeway above ground was where everyone died. The BART subway, however, which goes mostly through tunnels in that area, was operating an hour after the earthquake.
Some parts of LA’s Metro Rail are underground. But not a whole lot. Most of the land in the area is so cheap compared to Boston that it’s just easier to run the lines at grade.
In LA, if you have space limitations, you don’t go down, you go up.
There is still a lot of debt from the Big Dig - part of it is currently crippling the MBTA because it was (grossly unfairly IMO) transferred to the MBTA. But a large portion of the money for the Big Dig was federal. Thank you Ted Kennedy for funneling every other state’s money here!!! 