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Computerized Navigation Systems to the Rescue
Rhys_Lewis writes "There is an article in Newsweek discussing the advantages of traffic avoidance systems in big cities around the world. I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper to subsidise in-car satnav units with traffic avoidance than building new freeways. Surely it makes sense to interactively route traffic than to keep building passive roads?"
New Orleans and Baton Rouge are good examples of good and bad planning. New Orleans, despite being built on a river that flows both north and south, works. It has a grid that starts with the ancient French quarter. The grid was expanded reasonably when the Americans arived in 1812 or so and continued to expand. It's streets curve with the river and are crossed by streets that look like spokes on a wheel. The city has filled the space between the Lake Ponchitrain and the Mississippi River gracefully, so that there are any number of large streets to get from one end to the other. Baton Rouge is cursed by Bayous. The north end of the city follows a rectangular grid that matches one section of the Mississippi River. It is navicable itself but matches up poorly with the much larger and growing southern half. The sothern part of the city is composed of several large neighborhoods oriented around bayous and rural routes that meet at crazy angles. One two lane road follows the river and only the interstate traverses them all. To get from one side of town to another, a person has to drive a crazy zig zag of short rural routes and the interstate which are always choked.
It has an effect on people. New Orleans is known for it's couteous and polite drivers. Baton Rouge is full of hot heads. Insurance companies do take note of driver attitudes and told me what I knew from simply driving in one of their publications.
Just try getting the people of Baton Rouge to buy a gadget that's going to tell them the interstate is clogged and there's no way around it. Ha! My 1970 VW van farts in your general direction.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think you got it wrong. Americans, although over consumers, are certainly not lazy. We have just about the longest work weeks and shortest amounts of vacation for a first world country. This is exactly why people can't just go adjusting their schedule. When you are so strapped for time that you find it car to eat three squares in a day or have a life outside of work, losing another hour of it is the last thing you are going to sign up to do.
Your comments reak of someone who thinks everything in the US is handed to Americans on a silver platter. There is a reason the US has the largest economy in the world and it is certainly not due to laziness. Think about it next time you are on your 3 week holiday.
But it's not the politicians fault (totally, anyway). The voters of the nearby counties keep voting down extensions of MARTA that would make mass transit available to them (apparently to keep it difficult for a certain element to reach their nice suburban areas). Of course, the other problem is you need to run the rails through already heavy populated areas - and the stations would have to be ginormous.
Some counties have combatted the problem by starting bus service all the way into downtown Atlanta. That's nice, but I'd have to drive 15 minutes, wait for a bus, take the bus way past my destination (even though there's a station near where I work, the bus I'd have to take goes past it to another one), then take the train back to the station closest to where I work and walk about 1.5 miles (which is not a problem except for time).
When I just drive it takes 35 minutes. I'm willing to sacrifice some time to take mass transit, but it'd take me well over twice as long.
The problem, though, with a GPS system telling commuters how to avoid slow traffic is that we already have one. It's called 750WSB - news, traffic, and weather every six minutes! Unfortunately, the volume of traffic is so high in Atlanta, at peak times, that an accident can cause slow traffic on a different road 20 miles away because everyone already knows the alternates, but the volume is so high that by taking alternates your just making a bad situation worse and often taking even more time to finish your commute than if you'd have just waited through the original jam. One bad accident here can sometimes affect the whole city, and we're talking about a very LARGE city.
The drivers here are also horrible, but I know everybody says that about where they live. However, having lived in three major metropolitan areas (and experienced others), I can say these people are the worst I've seen. I'd like a nice job down in Florida, maybe, somewhere on the keys where I can work out of my house.
Stupid sexy Flanders.