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Yeah great plan, let's see how that's working in cities which have leaned that way like LA.... Oh wow no way, it's one of the most congested places on the continent? That's crazy! Who could ever have predicted that...
Maybe Dallas and Houston? They're doing better than LA, but no suprise their traffic congestion stats get worse every year. It's almost like this doesn't work at scale.
Putting aside the fact that cities that are 50% parking area absolutely suck.
Los Angeles has fewer miles of roadway per capita than any urbanized area in the US with 1,000,000 people or more.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/hm72.cfm
That's kind of my point though.
Even major cities which have tried to prioritize driving as the primary transport modality fail, because it doesn't scale.
I'm sure 50 years ago the LA road per capita stat was way better. And then LA's population continued to rise, and amount of roads stayed fixed.
The sunbelt cities are earlier in this life cycle. Their populations are lower and they're not so sprawled you can't drive across them. But they'll keep growing, eventually more up then out, and traffic will continue to get worse and worse, which we already see.
LA did not try to prioritize driving. It neglected it. This has been true for decades -- LA has long been held out as an example of a place which built out its road infrastructure and had terrible traffic, but that whole time it has in fact been near the bottom in terms of road infrastructure per capita.
I guess if none of my negative examples are good enough, do you have any positive ones? Because you're right, LA is an example of a car-centric city, which did it's best to orient cars and yet driving there sucks.
I guess you're saying they specifically did a bad job and that's why their traffic sucks. I'm saying at a certain population size (depending on geography, alternatives, etc) it's not possible to do it well period. Because at a certain point the people of the city/society stop letting you flatten neighborhoods for more highways, and then your road capacity gets fixed and fills up and bam here we are.
Are there any large cities that were able to scale car use into the mid-millions well?
Because like I said, even the sunbelt cities who are in their growth golden area are seeing 5-8% YoY growth in travel times/delays/etc. So they're well on their way to being just like LA!
Also thanks for the point about low road per capita in LA, I didn't know that and this is an interesting sub topic to research.
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