i have been to Los Angeles and indeed the traffic there is almost as bad as in NYC.
most of the traffic is carried by highways … i just looked at Los Angeles on Google Maps and my estimate is that less than 5% of LA surface is occupied by highways …
and of course as i said only 1% of land overall is occupied by cities …
so the traffic is concentrated in 5% of 1% of land or 0.05% land overall …
no “one more lane” won’t fix traffic …
but TEN TIMES MORE LANES will
if we increase the number of lanes TEN TIMES the total area of all urban highways will still only be 0.5% of overall land area …
and that’s if we build in one level … whereas we can easily build highways in multiple levels same as buildings can have multiple stories …
isn’t it funny how city planners insist that single family homes must be replaced by high rises … but claim that we can’t use multi-level parking let alone multi-level highways
why do you think that is ?
it’s because that would actually solve the traffic problem. and if traffic problem is solved city planners will never get people to give up cars. thus we can’t have multi-level highways even though for example when i drive from NJ to Brooklyn i cross Verrazano bridge which was built half a century ago and has upper and lower decks … and those are suspended on a mile long span … somehow we could build it half a century ago but today we can’t. LOL
it is not “utopian” to see obvious and simple solutions to artificially created problems.
our car centric cities were built more than half a century ago. since then the number of cars increased, but we aren’t building new roads because they are racist.
i don’t necessarily believe that cars are the only possible solution - you have seen that i have thought of alternatives:
but reality is that traffic is artificially engineered same as parking shortages same as all the other shortages. these problems are so easy to solve it wouldn’t require even 10% of my intelligence to solve ALL OF THEM.
but none of them will ever be solved because they are CREATED DELIBERATELY.
it is not “utopian” to understand how problems are engineered. and i am not proposing any single solution as the only right solution. i gave you already multiple solutions as just options - i am not insisting on any of them.
but i am not here to offer solutions because nobody is asking for solutions. i am here to teach you how problems are engineered. solving problems is altogether trivial - the hard part is overcoming the mental block which tells you that they can’t be solved.