Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction

S810 writes "Elon Musk, one of the main people behind PayPal, Space Exploration Technologies and Tesla Motors, has paid $50,000 to help Los Angeles speed up construction of the 405 Freeway, making it better and says that he will pay more if needed. From the article: 'Musk said he is open to pay the cost of adding workers to the widening project "as a contribution to the city and my own happiness. If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I've super had it." — Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne.' For those who aren't familiar with this issue, the 405 Freeway runs from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley all the way down to El Toro and runs by LAX. Residents are getting frustrated that this widening project is over budget and well over the anticipated time frame that it was supposed to completed by."

Comments

If he has the money and is willing to spend it...

[Anonymous Coward]

If he has the money and is willing to spend it then why not move closer to his job site and entirely avoid the freeway?

$50k enough?

[jimmyhat3939]

Does $50k remotely make any dent there? Aren't these projects tens of millions of dollars?

Re:$50k enough?

[ackthpt]

Does $50k remotely make any dent there? Aren't these projects tens of millions of dollars?

Probably pays the salary of 1 worker, without benefits, no overtime. A junior one at that.

Re:$50k enough?

[Trepidity]

This project was budgeted at $1 billion dollars, and is currently projected to cost $1.1 billion. So no, $50k is not significant. Also, he didn't even spend the $50k on construction: he paid it to a lobbying group, Angelinos Against Gridlock, whose goal is to speed construction. The group actually looks like one worth supporting (they have a vision that includes both roads and rail improvements and it seems reasonably thought out), so that $50k might be well spent. But it's spent on an advocacy organization, not on construction.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the average cost per mile for a highway is anywhere between $2M - $6M.

So yeah, $50k is nothing.

Good for him however.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The sad part is that not enough people ever asks WHY they cost tens of millions of dollars. Even you, in your own way - seem to have been programmed to just 'accept' the fact that simple things cost millions of $'s, when it's public money being 'spent'.

Re:$50k enough?

[geekoid]

He sent it to have then find a faster way to do the expansion, and they could not. You know why? becasue the people who design this type of work, and mange it are really good.

Re:$50k enough?

[khallow]

becasue the people who design this type of work, and mange it are really good.

Really good at siphoning public funds, that is. Who knows? They might be good at building roads too. But we'll never know from the I-405 construction project.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if you live in the Valley or West Side, but I can assure you, the project has been a boondoggle. When you close lanes for months and months so you can (slowly) build an artificial rock-face facade on retaining walls, you can't call it well managed. When there's no work happening for weeks on end, you can't call it well managed. When they periodically shut down the freeway (better known as "carmageddon") to remove parts of the old bridge they failed to do some really really logical things like reassigning CALTRANS teams to fix pot holes and other issues.... well you get my point.

You get periodic news bits like this: http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/02/overbudget_405_widening_wont_finish_until_at_least_2014.php

If you scroll to the comments you'll notice the anger at the notion that some portions are "complete" when they are far from it. The only part of the project thats "complete" is the 10 interchange improvements, but even then they have had temporary concrete barriers in place of actual retaining walls for months. In one part of the 10E->405N interchange you can see the street below instead of where part of the lanes should flow together.

The worst part of this, when it's all said and done they will have spent a decade to add one lane, some new on/off ramps, and a facade on the pass' retaining walls.... and we'll already need to start a new project to widen it again

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

becasue the people who design this type of work, and mange it are really good.

My head just exploded.

Re:$50k enough?

[Pseudonym Authority]

You seem to have no idea the scale of work the goes into turning virgin terrain into a proper road. It involves hundreds of men working hard labor, dozens of machines that cost $10M each (or about $15K a month, if you want to rent) and are backordered for two years and burn 100 gallons of diesel a day, and hauling thousands of tons of rocks across large distances to poor on the ground. Then you take the amount of time to do all that and quadrupal it if you actually want to drive on it faster than 35MPH and not have your transmission fall out. None of that pays attention to the cost of surveying the land and planning out what angle is needed on the banks, determining just how much you can safely slope the road so both compact cars and big trucks can safely drive on it, to securing right-of-way from landowners,....

But yeah, it's public money, so we can ignore all that and complain that they should work for free so no tax dollars are wasted while we still get roads that you don't need a horse to traverse.

Re:$50k enough?

[Obfuscant]

Then you take the amount of time to do all that and quadrupal it

Run a web content package on a dual-core dual-threaded CPU?

Re:$50k enough?

[Electricity Likes Me]

Yes. The sad part is that not enough people ever asks WHY they cost tens of millions of dollars. Even you, in your own way - seem to have been programmed to just 'accept' the fact that simple things cost millions of $'s, when it's public money being 'spent'.

Do you know? Are you qualified to estimate the budget on such a project from your long history of public works and highway repair management experience? Have you bothered to Google search for some comparison information, taking into account size, scope, terrain and road state? Modern practice?

Or are you yet another person who'll bitch about waste without actually knowing what it is?

Re:$50k enough?

[Pseudonym Authority]

Something like that.

Re:$50k enough?

[Goody]

$50K will make the project be completed about four minutes earlier than projected.

Re:$50k enough?

[ChrisMaple]

It gets worse. Until the 405 gets into the mountains, it's solid city on each side. Widening means buying property, expensive property. It's an elevated freeway, so it's hideously more expensive to build than on the ground.

Sadly, it's not going to fix the problem. Twice as many lanes would still not be enough. There's a choke point where the 405 meets the 101 in the San Fernando Valley that backs at least 2 miles every workday, and has done so for at least 30 years.

It may get better, but it's not going to be fixed.

Re:$50k enough?

[s.petry]

Maybe they know something you do not? /shrug

mange

/mnj/

Noun

A skin disease of mammals caused by parasitic mites that causes severe itching, hair loss, and the formation of scabs and lesions.

Re:$50k enough?

[rahvin112]

Don't think he's an exception, half the country thinks their experts on road design/construction, even when confronted by indisputable facts that run contrary to their initial thesis they will simply reformat their premise to reach the same conclusion.

I always get a kick out of people that like the OP claim there is no basis for the cost but it's designed by registered professional engineers to standards dictated by the American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO is a committee of experts in the field from state and federal government and private business). Those plans are then built by low bid contractors (often with 3+ bidders and prices that are frequently with 1-2%) operating under strict quality control guidelines with engineers supervising the installation, inspection, testing and quality assurance. And in the end the entire project is audited by both State and Federal auditors to ensure that no tax payer money was diverted or used contrary to law.

Yet, according to the OP the whole thing is horseshit and you could build roads for half the cost. That is of course if you didn't care if they lasted more than a week, nor cared at all about safety such as whether the bridges will fall down in a strong wind. That's because the OP is an absolute expert in examining his rectum visually up close and personal.

Yes roads cost a lot, and it's because they are designed to last anywhere from 20-40 years depending on pavement type. Considering the interstates were originally built in the 60's they've more than proved that the standards are adequate. But with truck weights more than 10 times larger than when the interstates were originally built it means complete reconstruction with much thicker pavements than the interstates used in the 60's. A typical interstate pavement section is over 3' thick with a foot of granular borrow, a foot of road base and a foot of concrete you aren't going to get any of that cheap.

Re:$50k enough?

[davester666]

I doubt any construction company would bill only $50K/year for their most junior road-worker-bee [they would pay the worker-bee a lot less, but not bill that low].

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs nearly $10 million to build a measly parking garage (most of which I'd imagine are not publicly-funded), so it's not that surprising that building/upgrading dozens of miles of highway costs that much. Unfortunate, yes, surprising, no.

Re:$50k enough?

[maz2331]

Not at all... highways cost somewhere around $10 - 50 million a mile to build. He basically donated a few inches.

Re:$50k enough?

[fleebait]

I believe the average cost per mile for a highway is anywhere between $2M - $6M.

So yeah, $50k is nothing.

That quote would be good for a two lane in the early eighties, outside the city.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

That can't be true! The internet told me that lobbying is evil!

Re: $50k enough?

[murphtall]

And I have no mod points!! +1 insightful!! Mod up!!

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

It may get better

In English we have a wonderful verb, improve, that can substitute for such ugly constructions as 'get better'.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

half the country thinks their experts on road design/construction

Their experts on road construction... did what? Come on, don't leave us hanging.

Re:$50k enough?

[MachineShedFred]

In a study from the University of Southern California, they say that LA Freeway construction costs are roughly $20M per mile.

So his $50k buys him 13 feet of roadway.

Re:$50k enough?

[MachineShedFred]

Wait... did someone just say that CalTrans is... good?

Does. Not. Compute.

Re:$50k enough?

[MachineShedFred]

Hey, at $20m/freeway mile, he just bought 13 feet of roadway! He, and 11 other cars can sit on his car-length segment in traffic now!

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just reading about how the Fort McHenry tunnel (I-95 cross of the Baltimore harbor). Despite it being an insanely ambitious $825-million project, creating the world's longest underwater tunnel, it was completed on time and UNDER budget. They should hire those guys.

Re:$50k enough?

[captbob2002]

stop it with the facts! they mess up a good anti-gov't anti-union rant.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 miles only? We have had local traffic jams here which averaged 10 kilomters (6 miles). Disappeared entirely when the road was upgraded from 3 to 5 lanes each direction. It turns out that like matter, traffic goes through sudden phase changes. Traffic jams are very comparable to solids. Your ability to move is strongly limited by the cars around you. But with only a little more space, suddenly you move to the liquid phase. You still can't speed at will; other cars do influence you, but things flow.

Choke points are cheapest to fix of all. The engineering is much more complex, but engineers are cheap compared to all the other costs. To resolve a choke point, you typically don't to level need huge areas of land.

Re:$50k enough?

[Medievalist]

Road construction is not in any way like computer consulting.

Re:$50k enough?

[Archangel Michael]

My questions is, why not have a 10 mile length of a double deck freeway that has no exits. That way, you get into the express deck, and you don't have to worry about asshats who swoop across 4 lanes of traffic to catch their off ramp at the last second.

Re:$50k enough?

[tehcyder]

Isn't the fix to move businesses somewhere more sensible and so reduce the number of people commuting? What's so magic about California?

Re:$50k enough?

[tehcyder]

Yeah but if you'd let the free market build the roads they'd have lasted forever. Just look at the Yellow Brick Road., self evidently a symbol of colourful free enterprise as against the monochrome socialism of FDR's new deal.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly do not live in California and are not familiar with the absolute inefficiency, incapability, and over-inflated costs of CalTrans.

Re:$50k enough?

[steelfood]

That's the half of the population who grew up playing Sim City.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, the elected criminals GAVE private toll road operators veto power over highway upgrade plans.
SoCal will never flow any better than it does now, and it will undoubtedly get worse.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

50K and he gets articles written about him posted on sites like /.
I don't know how that compares to other forms of advertising but it seems effective.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a publicity stunt statement. $50k won't buy much if any usually incompetent government (especially in California) is in charge of spending it.

Re:$50k enough?

[bhiestand]

He sent it to have then find a faster way to do the expansion, and they could not. You know why? becasue the people who design this type of work, and mange it are really good.

That may be true elsewhere, but whoever designed this section of the 405 was not good.

Nearly every onramp or interchange has 1-2 "lane ends" mergers as it merges with the 405, and usually another within 500 feet. The result? 30+ minute waits at interchanges. Turns out Americans are even worse at lane merging after they've waited 30 minutes and just done two of them in the last 1/10th of a mile.

Re:$50k enough?

[skatefriday]

Because this is southern california and it's politically impossible to build a double decked freeway in an earthquake zone.

Re:$50k enough?

[skatefriday]

You have to convince the guy who decides where to place the business, the executive guy that can afford to live in Santa Monica, to move to Lancaster. Good luck with that.

Re:$50k enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish roads were designed in my country to last for 20-40 years. Here in 5 years they have decent holes and in 15 years you'll need a tractor to ride them.

Re:$50k enough?

[Archangel Michael]

But you can build 100 story high rise?

Re:$50k enough?

[skatefriday]

Indeed you can. The engineering is entirely different, and more importantly, the public has witnessed multiple freeway collapses in earthquakes in the last 30 years, but not one single 50+ story building has fallen over.

Idiot doesn't understand

[erroneus]

If you want to throw money at the problem of highway construction, you offer a large payout contingent on how quickly it gets done while still within project specifications.

The workers get paid by the hour and so do the contractor managers most of the time. So to give them money with the promise of "more if needed" will result in pleas of "hey! we need more!!!"

These people seriously don't understand how it works when highways are constructed with public money -- the recipients never want the money to run out.

Re:Idiot doesn't understand

[ackthpt]

If you want to throw money at the problem of highway construction, you offer a large payout contingent on how quickly it gets done while still within project specifications.

The workers get paid by the hour and so do the contractor managers most of the time. So to give them money with the promise of "more if needed" will result in pleas of "hey! we need more!!!"

These people seriously don't understand how it works when highways are constructed with public money -- the recipients never want the money to run out.

You know nothing about these construction contracts, which are handled by private firms. There are incentives to get the work done fast. But there are somethings you just can't rush, like having that sandy soil properly settled so new roadbed doesn't continue to settle and end up with cracks and holes. Then there's the matter of having the equipment necessary at various stages there on time, much of it coming from other worksites. There's hundreds of miles of freeways alone in the LA area. I see the same thing where I live. It looks simple enough, until you are in charge of the logistics and find how much more expensive it can be to try rushing things. Maybe if Musk threw several million dollars at the contractors, so they had more equipment they could get some things done faster. Sometimes private industry isn't faster than a good ol' bloated public department with lots of taxpayer dollar funded extra equipment available.

Re:Idiot doesn't understand

[Electricity Likes Me]

On the other hand, funding a lobby group (which seems to be what he did?) to get the project prioritized is probably one of the best uses of his funds, given how politics in the US currently works.

Re:Idiot doesn't understand

[rahvin112]

Settlement is easy to deal with (at a cost, there was a project with projected settlement times of around 5 years that was completed in 60 days through available mitigation measures), the project delays are often driven by the uncontrollable externals that sink every project, those being, required federal environmental documents, utility relocation and ROW acquisition. You simply can't force the electric company to relocate a power line that serves the entire LA valley in the middle of the summer. Nor can you speed up a condemnation process when there are specific time frames required by law to condemn the property of an unwilling seller. Though you hope for a smooth process, in the real world the process is often anything but smooth with no end to headaches. It also doesn't help that construction workers in California have been issued bulletproof vests in the past due to "road rage incidents".

Re:Idiot doesn't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

I will tell you a story: when I was in college in Arkansas, I drove with my friends to an R.E.M. concert in Memphis and there were loads of orange traffic cones on the Interstate in West Memphis; it slowed the traffic down a bit. They were doing major construction, I suppose.

Just this year I saw the last of the orange traffic cones removed. I am 44 years old. As near as I can tell, that renovation of a short part of the I-40 took about twenty-five years to complete. New workers who started working on that project when they graduated from high school had grand-children by the time they were finished. Don't make a mistake: these people see these jobs as lifetime appointments.

Re:Idiot doesn't understand

[flimflammer]

Dude. Don't laundry money; it will just ruin it.

Re:Idiot doesn't understand

[erroneus]

I am in total agreement. Coming from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I have seen a small highway project take decades until a new leader stepped in and said "okay. No more money. This is where it ends. If you can't do it for this amount of time and money, we are getting someone else." The project was completed in under a year. FACT.

SD Freeway isn't the problem

[ackthpt]

it's all the cars on it.

if they built the sort of light rail which the region desperately needs it could cut down on the traffic hugely.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MrEricSir]

Do you really think a guy who runs a car company would want to see public transit improved?

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

YES. Light rail, all over the place. You need to make taking public transit SUPERIOR to cars. This means bus lanes, light rail, subways, etc. But LA has ABSOLUTELY NO DESIRE to do this, because we're a bunch of rich slobs who'd rather have the homeless live, stranded, in Westwood than let them travel around the city.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MichaelSmith]

Its the only thing which will make life easier for drivers. Widening this road will just encourage more people to drive, increasing congestion everywhere.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[csumpi]

Right. Except that LA's broke. The bills are paid from giving out chicken shit parking and traffic tickets.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd like Masdar City.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[k6mfw]

Imagine a super highway, six lanes wide, will never again be a traffic jam, and it will be beautiful!

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The homeless can travel around the city on their two, no-one locks them in. If they want to go faster, well, it's not free.

Re: SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys just need to adopt a man. Your kids will love them. But I know that whole Jesus thing doesn't go over well with you guys.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[sconeu]

There's a reason nobody uses mass transit in LA. All mass transit in LA is based on a faulty assumption -- that everyone wants to go downtown.

There's no real north/south transit: To get from the Valley to the Westside, you have to go downtown and then back to the Westside.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla could become a bus company?

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MichaelSmith]

Not sure if serious or sarcastic.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

www.metro.net/riding_metro/bus_overview/images/761.pdf, http://www.ladottransit.com/comexp/routes/573/573.php

mass transit is very well used in LA, which doesn't contradict your other point, since not everyone needs to go from the valley to the westside. And any mass transit from the valley to the westside will be problematic, since there aren't enough park & ride lots in the valley to support even a small increase in commuters using them (check out a few park & ride lots around 9 am - no space in most of them), and not everyone is going to the same place in the westside, and changing a couple of busses to get to work isn't really an option for most commuters. In a few words: LA is a horrible city to have any sort of working commuter transit to anywhere except downtown.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sad so few seemed to get the reference.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[hairyfish]

Correct. Roads don't scale very well because the bigger you make them, the more people use them and so you end up where you started, except now your nice leafy suburbs are an angry sprawl of concrete, noise and pollution. For any city over a couple of million in population rail is the only solution that scales.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly right. I travel from Santa Clarita to the Westside everyday and my only mass transit option is limited bus service.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MichaelSmith]

The automated rail system in Kuala Lumpur is very impressive. It doesn't have drivers and ticketing is obviously automatic, so it scales very well. Services are very frequent and more faster in tight locations because of the automatic trains. The trains can be kept small, and frequent because you don't have to pay for a driver for each vehicle.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

And the rail should carry the cars too, not just the people.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[XcepticZP]

A six-lane highway has bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks are the on/off ramps. You could make the off-ramps bigger, but then the adjunct roads also need to be upgraded. In the end, most cities don't have the capacity to properly feed and siphon off traffic from anything remotely resembling a "super highway".

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[TheDarkMaster]

"Who framed Roger Rabbit?"

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[necro81]

More context: [link]

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[ristonj]

Perhaps I'm a candidate for a "woosh", but I-270 between Washington DC and Gaithersburg is 6 lanes, and it gets backed up every day during rush hour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_270_(Maryland)

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[CaptainLard]

I do if that guy is named Elon Musk. From what I know he is a bizarre type of billionaire. Rather than just increase Q3's profit forecast he actually seems to want to advance the human race through true technical progress. If there was some public transit project underway it wouldn't surprise me at all to see him throw a couple bucks at it. But there isn't. There is however, a project underway to improve the road he is driving on right now and hes one of the few people Ive ever heard of to voluntarily give money to potentially improve his life even so it might possibly improve all of his neighbors lives as well.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MachineShedFred]

You do realize that the "light" in light rail doesn't refer to vehicle weight, right?

It's short for "light capacity rail" - meaning that you have 2-3 cars per rail vehicle and 10+ minute headways per train.

To properly deal with congestion with a rail solution, you need heavy capacity rail, which has 4-minute headways and 8 cars per rail vehicle.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MachineShedFred]

I've never bought into the induced demand argument.

There is a finite amount of cars, and a finite amount of trips being made. Just because more freeway capacity opens up, it doesn't mean that people start randomly driving to places they don't need to go - they were still going to be going there regardless of if the freeway was built / expanded. They were just doing it on unmetered neighborhood streets before.

Wouldn't we rather have those cars on the freeway, rather than clogging up neighborhoods?

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Toronto's 401 is, at one point, over 20 lanes wide. From 7 AM to 11 AM, half of those lanes are moving 5 km/h and from 3 PM to 8 PM, the other half are moving 5 km/h.

You could make that stretch of highway 40 lanes wide and, within a decade, it would once again be a parking lot.

A single GO train (heavy commuter rail) takes 2,000 of those cars off the road. Ten such trains can replace every single car in a 10-lane, 20 km long traffic jam. They're clean, quiet, relatively stress-free, and you can read/sleep/chat/work on them.

Freeways are necessary for moving stuff (and people) who can't get where they're going on transit, but for the daily commute, no amount of highway work can hold a candle to well-designed trains.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[captbob2002]

Then don't build the on and off ramps. Problem solved. Road will last longer, too.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[dr2chase]

Never mind that some of us have seen it in our own lifetimes? When you add freeway capacity, you create the (temporary) ability to live a little further from where you work, either to find a better job without moving, or to live in a somewhat cheaper house. In the case of a place like NYC or Boston where many people already take mass transit, making the freeway more attractive will pull people off of mass transit and onto the roads.

Similarly, when the roads get screwed up you see a reduction in auto traffic and a surge in mass transit use (for example, by an earthquake, as happened in the SF area after the Loma Prieta quake -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake#Effects_on_transportation ) .

Perhaps "induced demand" would make a bit more sense if you looked that it the other way around. Do congestion and traffic jams make people more likely to drive, or less? I assume you would say "less" -- stuck in traffic sucks, and dinking around on surface streets (which jam up pretty quickly as soon as "everyone does it") is no fun, either. So why wouldn't adding capacity cause people to decide to drive more often?

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[dr2chase]

That's an insanely stupid and costly idea. Even adding a normal-sized bicycle reduces the capacity of a train car by 2-3x (source: Caltrain bike cars, 40 bikes take the same space as 40 up-to-2-person seats). The effect of adding that bicycle to a boarding is a concern for getting the trains in and out of stations quickly enough.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[SydShamino]

It's a quote from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[mikechant]

Light rail systems are not limited to 10+ minute headways. Modern UK tram (streetcar) systems have services at frequencies of up to 2 minutes on busy lines at peak times. (E.g. Manchester Victoria, where 6 routes each with a 12 minute frequency pass along a common section).

Also this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail#Capacity_compared_to_roads
Indicates headways of as little of 2 minutes, and vehicles can have up to 4 cars (which would match the capacity of your 4min/8car heavy rail example.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MachineShedFred]

No, they aren't limited to that. However, light rail installs usually don't have a separated right-of-way for 100% of their distance, so you have to increase headway due to traffic interaction.

Heavy rail usually has a completely separate right-of-way, which allows for faster headways.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[tehcyder]

Then don't build the on and off ramps. Problem solved. Road will last longer, too.

Like that Doctor Who episode with Father Dougal in a cat mask, spending the whole of your life in a traffic jam with no way out?

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

it's all the cars on it.

if they built the sort of light rail which the region desperately needs it could cut down on the traffic hugely.

LRT doesn't do anything to impact traffic. It mostly picks up existing bus passengers; the agency truncates existing lines to feed the LRT numbers.
LRT is not fast by any measure, typically doesn't connect useful endpoints, and in this town, invariably, gets built with at-grade segments, which means either congesting traffic or stopping at intersections, or both.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[tlhIngan]

I've never bought into the induced demand argument.

There is a finite amount of cars, and a finite amount of trips being made. Just because more freeway capacity opens up, it doesn't mean that people start randomly driving to places they don't need to go - they were still going to be going there regardless of if the freeway was built / expanded. They were just doing it on unmetered neighborhood streets before.

Wouldn't we rather have those cars on the freeway, rather than clogging up neighborhoods?

Problem is, every empirical study done has shown that widening roads does not work - traffic is alleviated for a short while then builds right back to where it was before.

There are essentially an infinite number of cars on the road - you'll find that a car is really only used 1% or so of the time - the other 99%, it's parked. And the big problem is rush hour - once a road backs up, it cascades and forms "brake waves" (it's actually counter-intuitive, but sometimes *adding* a traffic light can smooth traffic because it curtails the brake wave - the wave terminates before traffic catches up).

Improving a freeway also has the habit of getting people to move to the suburbs and further from work - whether it's the picket fence lifestyle, or cheaper costs, or whatever - if people were commuting 1 hour before, and now its reduced to 45 minutes, they'd go and find a house 15 minutes down the road (of course, in a couple of years that added distance and traffic jam means it becomes a 1h15 or 1h30 commute).

In fact, without public transit (light rail), the best alternative would be cars that are autonomous or semi autonomous with communications. This way when a traffic light turns green, all cars can begin moving simultaneously. And brake waves would be reduced because it likely won't cascade (if you're getting too close, you can always communicate that to other cars and have them reduce speed to the right amount rather than overshooting).

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[steelfood]

You can't rev your fancy new electric car to 120 MPH if every other person on the highway is only going 2.5.

And there is serious business incentive for him to cut the traffic down. The bad PR from electric cars dying in the middle of the road would be sufficient (in the same situation, the gas-powered cars probably would too, but that's wouldn't produce as sensationalist headlines as electric cars doing the same).

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Faulty assumptions lie in your nonsense. Metro records 1.6 million transit trips per weekday.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MichaelSmith]

Consider a typical urban area. Population density and land prices are highest in the central business district. Population density and land prices are low on the fringe, which is where you get the best quality of life. Commuters balance quality of life and cost of living against the cost and time taken to get to work. The more road space you provide for that, the further out they move. It can happen in a year. They see a new road and buy up in a new housing estate.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[MichaelSmith]

the best alternative would be cars that are autonomous or semi autonomous with communications

The rail system in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is very fast because the trains and automatic. The trains absolutely fly along and they stick to the schedule to within the second. No drivers to get tired or lazy. It uses small, frequent trains because of the low labour costs.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

How about just changing tax incentives to get some businesses to operate in off hours and at night when the freeway is less jammed and take those commuters off the road? A 10% tax decrease for businesses operating in off-hours might make deliveries easier and some employees might even like it better because they could spend some of their commute time at home with their kids after school.

Re:SD Freeway isn't the problem

[virtualXTC]

Do you really think a guy who runs a sports car company would want to see public transit improved?

There FTFY. ... and yes, of course.

pays money to "study" speeding construction

[Trepidity]

He didn't pay money to speed construction. He spent $50,000 on a consulting organization that would look into how to speed up construction. They did not find a way to do so. But hey, he's learning how these things work: spending $50k to "study" something with no results is exactly how many real projects happen too. ;-)

A better question might be why L.A. is spending $1.1 billion on widening a freeway, instead of improving its damn transit. Adding another lane is going to be a stop-gap solution at best, and it'll be congested to the hilt within another few years. Is the goal to have 30-lane freeways by 2030 or something?

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[Anonymous Coward]

Been in the roadway design business for over a decade, and in my experience, adding another lane, adds more than another "lane" worth of traffic. It is quite counter intuitive. For instance, say a 4 lane road had 16,000 cars a day (4,000 a lane for those keeping track). Widen that to 6 lanes and you'd expect an addition 8,000 cars, where, in fact, we tend to see 9-11,000 additional cars on that expanded road. Kinda wish we could test removing lanes and see if that fixes congestion via people seeking alternate routes/modes of transportation.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[ChrisMaple]

LA's red line from downtown to the San Fernando Valley (dead ending in North Hollywood, never to be built out completely due to taxpayer revolt) cost $4.5 billion to cover 17.4 miles. Ridership numbers aren't trivial, but they don't indicate real success, either. The highway is a bargain by comparison.

When I lived there, I thought that more north-south highways (one between the 405 and the 5, another along the coast) would help more than either widening the existing roads or mass transit. Presently, surface streets are also a problem, crowded leading up to the limited access highway. More highways means more access points and halving the average distance to a highway.

It's fun to imagine the political uproar a new superhighway through exclusive mountain estates would cause.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[ChrisMaple]

Sorry, a route N-S between the 5 and 405 is already there. But it's crowded, too. Add another one.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[Anonymous Coward]

There's quickly diminishing returns on public transit in LA. No matter how good it is, LA is large enough that people are not going to live or work next to a station. Without tearing LA down and rebuilding it from scratch, what are you going to do?

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[Trepidity]

The 405 expansion is only moderately cheaper than the Red Line, even if you measure purely in terms of construction cost per capacity. For $1.1b, it's estimated to add capacity for another 50k passengers/day or so, making it cost about $22k per new passenger. The Red Line, for $4.5b, carries about 150k passengers/day, so it cost about $30k per passenger.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[Trepidity]

I agree there are diminishing returns, but some heavily traveled routes could certainly be better. For example, the whole Westside is relatively compact but poorly served by transit, since the purple line stops after like 1 mile due to being axed after partial construction. It'd be sensible for it to continue west, which fortunately does seem like it may happen. Any kind of transit connection to LAX would also be useful.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[jabuzz]

It's been done. There was a study looking at traffic levels around some roadworks in London about a decade ago. What they found was that even six months after the road works had finished the traffic levels had not returned to there pre road work levels.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[dr2chase]

Bikes are an option. Either folding bikes that you take with you, or bikes at either end. Car-free friend of mine plays that game between Cambridge and Providence -- bike to Boston-Back-Bay on "good bike", take commuter rail to Providence, hop on "beater bike" at that end to get to work. "Beater bike" has survived over a year locked up in Providence. Full-sized bike on a train is more of a problem -- takes up space, and slows boarding.

But either way, use of a bike multiplies your tolerable-distance-from-station by a factor of 3 to 5.

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[bitingduck]

It works well in LA, too, where the weather is nearly always ideal. Better station planning and car design could speed the boarding times. Or having more secure bike parking at the ends (shared use lockers or valet services-- there are a few stations in LA that have bike valets).

Re:pays money to "study" speeding construction

[dr2chase]

Here near Boston at Alewife they have "Pedal-and-Park". It's a great big cage full of double-decker bike racks, with cameras on it, and a door that is locked and controlled by a (very easily obtained) access card. In the one instance of theft that I've heard of, they caught the thieves. See first and last photos: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/if-you-build-it-they-just-might-come/
And also, look at the induced demand -- for *bicycle parking* -- if you ever doubted that induced demand was possible.

technically

[geekoid]

405 means N/S off shoot to the 5 that reconnect.

That why there is more then one 405.

and this make it hard for me to feel sad:
"is commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne."
What a tragic life he has.
  20 miles through some of the densest population. You can blame the city planners who abandoned the much more logical freeway expansion in the 70's.

https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Hawthorne,+Los+Angeles,+California&daddr=Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA&hl=en&sll=34.009839,-118.406011&sspn=0.380785,0.437393&geocode=FfOFBQIdQRXy-CnxLsxaK7TCgDEBszjMHXHBYg%3BFe5YCAIdk3zw-Cn78k5sGb3CgDFY1NTXKyVR5A&t=h&mra=pd&z=11

Re:technically

[Anonymous Coward]

405 means N/S off shoot to the 5 that reconnect.

That [sic] why there is more then one 405.

There are three: the San Diego in Los Angeles, the I-405 or Stadium Freeway in Portland, and the I-405 in Seattle.

And I don't agree that 405 means any of North/South, offshoot of a I-5, or reconnects. It's merely a coincidence that all three I-405s happen to do that.

E.g. there are several I-495s. One is the semi beltway around Boston, another is the full beltway around D.C., the ones in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware run East/West, and the one in New York is not an offshoot of I-95 at all, never mind reconnecting.

Re:technically

[MachineShedFred]

The Interstate numbering standards are not random, nor are they some secret. Here's how they work:

1- or 2-digit freeway = primary route
even last digit = east / west route
odd last digit = north / south route
3-digit freeway = loop or spur route from 1- or 2-digit primary route
3-digit freeway, even first digit = loop route
3-digit freeway, odd first digit = spur route
1- or 2-digit freeway numbers are numbered ascending, starting west to east for odd numbered routes, and south to north for even numbered routes. Thus, I-5 on the west coast and I-95 on the east coast; and I-10 across the southern US and I-90 across the northern US.
3-digit freeway numbers are unique per state. Thus, California, Oregon, and Washington all having a 405 loop route that connects twice with I-5. Interstate 105 in Oregon is a spur route that goes from I-5 to a downtown terminus in Eugene.

There are a few oddities in the system due to an early convention that allowed a "directional prefix" in a name if a freeway split, this has been abandoned causing abnormalities in numbering. Example: I-84 used to be I-80N before being re-signed, and now I-84 is actually south of I-82 in Eastern Oregon / Washington. There are other oddities too, but they are few in comparison to the rest of the system.

Hope that clears it up.

Re:technically

[bhiestand]

Good points, even I didn't know a few of these. A few oddities worth mentioning (because they bother me so) are 1) re-signing like the 101 North/South to East/West in parts of LA and 2) Hawaii has interstates *facepalm*. Yes, I know why, it just drives me crazy when I am there.

Re:technically

[MachineShedFred]

Well, the 101 Freeway is a US Highway, and not part of the Interstate Highway System. the US Highway system (white shield, rather than red / blue shield) had a completely different numbering scheme which was convoluted as all hell, which is why they decided on a logical scheme in the 1950s for the Interstate system.

Re:technically

[david_thornley]

There still are directional suffixes. I-35 splits when going through the Twin Cities, with 35W going through Minneapolis and 35E going through St. Paul.

Dear Elon

[geekoid]

You aren't in traffic, you are traffic.

Re: Dear Elon

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha! Yes! Public funds that the workers will milk for years to come. Who blames them...the public cash cow. Keep the milk flowing!

I hope your commute doubles!

Re:Dear Elon

[Ichijo]

"Nobody drives on the 405 anymore. There's too much traffic." --Yogi Berra

Re: Dear Elon

[Pseudonym Authority]

God damn employed people! NEET4LyFE!

Re:Dear Elon

[s.petry]

^ That is what people don't quite get. If you don't like the commute, move closer to work. I live in the Bay area and daily people gripe about the 2 hour commute from the North Bay to South Bay, then the 2 hour commute home. I live 4 miles from work, and have no such issues. 20 minutes by bicycle on a bad day, on the same roads as cars drive. I pay 0 for gas as well as having remarkably good blood pressure and health for my age.

I get why people move out of cities, I really do. Pollution is higher, it's noisier than the suburbs, the yards are not as big, etc... But dang it, if you don't want to make the city a better place and you move out, shut the F&$* up about your commute!

Re:Dear Elon

[tehcyder]

I get why people move out of cities, I really do. Pollution is higher, it's noisier than the suburbs, the yards are not as big, etc.

And houses in a good area cost five times as much. The idea that people choose to live in suburbs is ridiculous. It's all they can afford. The suburbs of a city are just like living in the city, but further away and more inconenient.

Living in the actual countryside is a different matter, but in that case you have to expect to commute further.

Re:Dear Elon

[skatefriday]

^^ This. I live in LA. Traffic in and around West LA/Santa Monica is horrendous because the people who _own_ companies want to live in and work in Santa Monica. Everyone they employ, and Santa Monica is a huge net daily importer of jobs, must commute into the city because the vast majority can't afford to live there. If you want less traffic, you put people close to jobs. This means that Santa Monica builds far more high density housing, or the executives move their companies out to Santa Clarita. Neither of those things is going to happen, so we are stuck with precisely what Elon is complaining about.

Re:Dear Elon

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Surburbs are more expensive than living in a city. They're further from crime.*

* May not be true for all cities.

Weird choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't a helicopter be faster, AND cheaper? Unless this is mostly philanthropy, in which case, is making more roads REALLY the answer? Wouldn't a better idea be something to do with carpooling or new construction of commercial, residential and industrial properties to reduce population density in areas served by the 405, while NOT contributing to increased air-pollution and congestion? Even if you widen the freeway, there are still only a finite number of places for that traffic to go when it has to exit the freeway, so widening it will only do so much unless you are also prepared to widen the thoroughfares leading away from the exits all along the stretch.

If it helps great, but it just seems like a Band-Aid on a sucking chest-wound.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[SJHillman]

I like living in the country, I'm not going to move into the inner city where my job is just because the commute sucks. However, if I can contribute a fairly small portion of my money to make my commute a bit easier, I will. A good place for a job can be a really shitty place for a home.

private non union workers

[Anonymous Coward]

He should offer to get a private, non union team to finish a section of the highway. Let's see if the union or the non union team would win. At the very least, the union team would feel like they need the beat the non union team and get the job done faster than usual.

Commuting is the problem

[TubeReceiver]

He lives in BelAir and commutes to Hawthorne ?? Give me a break... that was ridiculous 30 years ago and still is. One word, listen closely... MOVE. Everyone seems to think it's normal to drive these ridiculous long commutes and it's actually a symptom of a screwed up society in love with their crappy cars. Try living closer to work and walk there, or ride your golf cart or something.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I drive 2 blocks to work every day. It is a condition of my employment that I maintain a working legally operatable vehicle. Sometimes I may need to drive 60 miles in a day. Most of the time my truck sits in the parking lot getting banged up by idiots with more money than sense. But I have to have it to have it there to keep my job.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the kind of guy who took Sam Kinison's Ethiopia rant as an actual practical approach to world hunger.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[csumpi]

+1. But then Bel Air to Hawthorne is not that bad. Shouldn't be more than 30 minutes. And there's not many nice places to live around Hawthorne.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Sam had a point. Sand sucks as farmland.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Move to Hawthorne? A rich white guy would stick out like a sore thumb. It's ghetto as hell around there where SpaceX is. But seriously, he should move to Palos Verdes or Manhattan Beach (like a normal rich guy) if he wants to commute to SpaceX and skip the 405 traffic.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Sam had a joke. And it was funny as hell, but it wasn't a solution. Neither is the OP's comment. Complex problems do not have simple solutions.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Onan]

Yes, clearly the only reasonable solution is for everyone to move (probably to a vastly different neighborhood with completely different safety and cost) every time they change jobs. Certainly there's nothing in the world wiser than applying for a new mortgage every time you have just started a new job.

Also, couples or people living together are only allowed to work within four blocks of one another.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

+1. And there's not many nice places to live around Hawthorne.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Manhattan Beach is directly to the west.

Perhaps Elon *likes* his Bel Air home. That's something else altogether. But Manhattan Beach is definitely a nice place to live, and literally 15 minutes on 4 lane roads to get to the Hawthorne plant site.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with everything you just said... except that I doubt Elon Musk (the Tesla Motors guy) is driving a "crappy car".

If EM wants to spend a bunch of money and make a difference to transport in his area, he should shell out a few billion and dig some big tunnels. Fill them with roads, trains and fibre-optics. Problem solved. Won't be cheap, but good solutions rarely are.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The commute is going to be awful mostly forever.
He can either ride a motorcycle, or build himself a nice hangar suite at the airfield.

Hawthorne/Inglewood isn't pretty, but money can cure a lot of it.

Re:Commuting is the problem

[tehcyder]

Yes, clearly the only reasonable solution is for everyone to move (probably to a vastly different neighborhood with completely different safety and cost) every time they change jobs. Certainly there's nothing in the world wiser than applying for a new mortgage every time you have just started a new job.

Also, couples or people living together are only allowed to work within four blocks of one another.

No, but in the case of someone like Musk, I doubt he's going to have to move at short notice to get another temp job at McDonalds on the other side of the State is he?

Re:Commuting is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The commute isn't bad, its horrible.

We have segments around here where speeds average 2-3 mph, for an hour at a time.
Our commute over the same route, just over 7 miles, runs 90 minutes, several days of the week.
And then remarkably, at other times, it takes 10-12 minutes.

The worst times are usually attributable to road closures somewhere off the freeway, complemented by some really ludicrous use of public roadspace.

Musk is trying to get the construction managed so the freeways flow as they were intended.
It really is possible, if we only had a road tzar, instead of the bureaucracy that entangles everything for the benefit of their patrons.

Yes, we would move, if it was possible. But Murphy lurks, and after paying out $50K in housing transaction overhead to relocate ... 5 miles ... no doubt, employment would move in a different direction, and the rental market isn't very fluid or competitive.

Los Angeles is worse - entire neighborhoods about employment centers are slums, and the city keeps them that way.

So we put up with the unpredictable commute, year after year.

I found a solution

[guantamanera]

Instead of taking the 405, he should continue south until he reaches Palisades park. And he should be pulling a Jetski or a motorized kayak. Jump into the ocean, and come out at Dockweiler beach state park. Have another car waiting for him there, and then take Imperial hwy which converts into 105.

Re:I found a solution

[MichaelSmith]

How about driving a hovercraft all the way?

Re: I found a solution

[DigiShaman]

Oh fuck that! He needs an Ironman suit. Would fit his bloated ego well.

Re:I found a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

How about driving a DC-10?

Re:I found a solution

[tehcyder]

Amphibious tank? James Bond style Lotus Esprit/submarine? Nuclear-powered jetpack?

Better still, why doesn't he use the infinite energy of his ego to power a Star Trek transporter system between his house and office?

Re:I found a solution

[MichaelSmith]

Lotus Esprit/submarine?

Hmmm the Tesla is electric...

May I contribute $5 ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Since Elon Musk is so wealthy and he's only paying $50,000, may I contribute my $5 ?

The $5 from me to me is worth much more (by ratio of my wealth) than the $50,000 to Mr. Musk, btw

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[edumacator]

This really isn't a bad idea. You could surely speed up construction on the most heavily trafficked roads.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[sanman2]

Immorally gotten wealth? You mean anyone who earns more money than you has automatically done it immorally?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[gewalker]

I don't know, he claimed to be cash broke during a divorce 3 years ago. Maybe coughing up $50K is harder than you would think.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't earn that kind of wealth by working hard. You earn it by withholding it from the people who do the work. In the past even the rich would have blushed at the idea of being paid that much more than the people doing the actual work.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This really isn't a bad idea. You could surely speed up construction on the most heavily trafficked roads.

If you think that construction companies, union workers and prevailing wage workers are not already soaking this government project, then you have no idea how government contracts work in California. if it a State, County or Federal project ultimately makes no difference. By offering more money from another source, it just cues those involved that they can charge extra to do what have been contracted to do already. Be it $5.00 per person or $50,000.00 per person adding the thought of having private money contributed to do a job that the government supposedly gave to the lowest bidder, which has already missed its time target and is overbudget is insane.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[dk20]

When faced with a divorce a lot of rich suddenly become poor. Besides living on INCOME means paying taxes but hording the wealth and using it to secure debt is more tax friendly.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past even the rich would have blushed at the idea of being paid that much more than the people doing the actual work.

Because I'm sure Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Schwab, Morgan, etc. were SO embarrassed by being multimillionaires in an era where an average employee in one of their companies made about $450 per YEAR...

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[ChrisMaple]

The dollar is worth 1.5 cents now compared to late 1800s. That $450 is equivalent to $31,000.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[ChrisMaple]

You earn that kind of money by providing value that allows you to hire people, people who make more working for you than they would otherwise. Why else would they work for you?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the poorest of the "multimillionaires" then had the equivalent of $133 million.

So how does that change the point in the slightest?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[asshole felcher]

That article was 8 days before the TSLA IPO.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pray tell, what's the maximum amount of money that you can earn "morally" before the next penny magically changes your alignment to Evil? And yes, that IS how you're saying it works. So tell us the exact number, or admit that you're full of shit. Those are your only possible choices.

Re: May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and therefore the billion dollars that Rockefeller had would be worth 70 billion today. A large gap then, a large gap now.

I believe Rockefeller topped out around 600 billion, inflation-adjusted for now.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[ShanghaiBill]

You earn it by withholding it from the people who do the work.

By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is a zero sum game, and therefore if someone gets rich, it must be because others are getting poorer. The real world doesn't work like that. Most people that get rich do so by creating opportunities that pull lots of other people up with them. Microsoft made Bill Gates a billionaire, but also created more than 2,000 millionaires and good salaries for tens of thousands more.

If your theory was right, third world countries, with very few billionaires keeping them down, would all be wealthy.

In the past even the rich would have blushed at the idea of being paid that much more than the people doing the actual work.

Are you serious? Have you ever heard of the Guilded Age. In the past, the rich had no inhibitions about flaunting their wealth. Of course, this was a period when the wages of the poor were rising rapidly as well.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[ShanghaiBill]

If you think that construction companies, union workers and prevailing wage workers are not already soaking this government project, then you have no idea how government contracts work in California.

This is an American problem. In other countries it doesn't work this way. I lived in Japan and China for several years, and public construction projects in both of them are done amazingly fast.

In the USA, the construction crew will show up, tear everything up, and put out lots of traffic cones, ... and then disappear. For months there is no activity. The machinery just sits there. Everyone now and then you see some guy in a hard-hat drinking some coffee, but nothing is getting done.

In Japan and China it is completely different. A construction site is a beehive of activity from start to finish. They set up giant lights so they can work through the night. When I lived in Shanghai, they build the middle ring freeway past my house, and it was annoying to hear the din of construction all day and night. But in three months it was over because they were done.

I really don't understand why America is so bad at managing these kinds of projects.

Re: May I contribute $5 ?

[murphtall]

It works like that in the Midwest. I live in WA state and construction is like you describe. Years ago driving multiple times to St. Louis and Dallas from Seattle you'd see projected going all night long even in the winter!!! I was constantly like WTF? Why can't they work like this in my state? Shit then i-5 may not suck so bad. Geez.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

With respect, I've seen this done on American sites as well. I'm guessing the Japanese don't go with the lowest bidder and/or they incentivize properly.

Road construction is something that is so frequently done, and roads are already publicly owned, I'm really surprised governments don't just have their own departments...

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Patch86]

If only we could establish some sort of formal, coordinated system for extracting money out of people, proportional to their earnings, to pay for local infrastructure projects. Think, boy, think!

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[icebraining]

What's the exact number of millimeters that makes a person tall? The fact that there isn't a specific number does not mean the concept doesn't exist. See "sorites".

(This doesn't mean I agree with GP, I'm just pointing out the fallacy)

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[captainpanic]

Faster construction means higher costs.
The simple reason is that you have to pay crews more if they work in the night. Also, the logistics of a project that runs 24/7 is more complicated than a project that runs only a few hours per week. The costs of a few diggers standing idle is small to the costs of the crews or the asphalt factory that may have to run over-hours. Asphalt is a major bottleneck: it cannot be stored after it has been made. It comes out of the factory, still hot, and must be transported to the site quickly.

I bet that in the US, as well as in Europe, they can actually pull off a trick like in China/Japan easily, but they often deliberately choose not to, to lower the costs. Only vital infrastructure is worked on overnight.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[dargaud]

In the USA, the construction crew will show up, tear everything up, and put out lots of traffic cones, ... and then disappear.

Yes, same technique in Italy. During a trip I counted something like 10 different areas with restricted lanes (or lane changing side) and traffic cones on the highway, some as long as 15km, and not a single worker to be seen. One such area has been like that for over 15 years.

In France it depends. I like the technique they use on the Paris beltway: they shut it down at 10pm, move all the equipment at once under floodlights, work on only 10 to 50 meters, clean up everything and reopen by 6am. Repeat the next night on the next 10 to 50 meters. But it's expensive and the planning must be held tight no matter what otherwise the city can shut down the next day!

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Capitalism: you take a risk with money you have or borrowed, and if it works out you make a profit. If it works out really well you make a big profit. If it doesn't work you make nothing and often end up deep in debt. At no point is wealth witheld from anyone, if employees want to take their own risks, or feel they are worth a partnership in the company to share in the profits and hazards let them have at it. The missing link in your monocles vs the people narrative is the risk factor.

Now obviously it's not as simple as that, but it more than rebuts this notion that you only gain wealth by keeping it from others.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[xelah]

I'd hazard a guess that more workers are injured or killed during nighttime construction, too, because of both lighting and effects on sleep.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[dbIII]

It's the wonders of private enterprise sticking it to the taxpayer. The funny thing is such idiocy is often presented as an example of why governments are useless, while in many other places where the government does most or all of the project shit gets done.
Then again it's California. Maybe somebody's been drip feeding LSD into the water since 1960 because no large project seems to have been done in a sane way since then (especially the electricity system - brownouts in a country developed enough that people can afford to eat - WTF?).

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[kwbauer]

Withholding from those who do the work?!?!? I guess he hired the dumbest people on earth if they don't realize he was supposed to be paying them. Maybe his slaves should realize that he owes them money, secure representation and sue him for back wages.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Foske]

Except that you forget the indirect costs of the traffic jams and accidents, which can be huge too. The problem is that the government is not accountable for these costs, so they don't care. If they would be accountable, I bet every project would be finished in no-time.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

Capitalism: you take a risk with money

And that's the problem with capitalism. Taking a risk with money is non-productive. Labor is productive.

At no point is wealth witheld from anyone

Executives and shareholders take a share of the profits earned off of the backs of labor.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

Anything you can earn through labor is moral. Anything you acquire through investment is immoral.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not entirely the fault of the government. People in the US don't want to pay 'for the government' (or maybe I should rephrase that to 'infrastructure'). Therefore it is expensive to get common used things done (or it is uncomfortable/problematic). Free market and stuff.

Power lines are above ground and grid is underdimensioned, fresh water is so-so, phone system is under par, road are eastern Europe quality and then some less, homes are built with wood instead of better insulating stuff, railroads/public transport are not so developed, water is not kept out (NY, Catrina), healthcare is expensive, can't safely ride a bike (therefore need a car), ...

I can only summarize it by: USians don't take for themselves and others at the same time. Guess why prisons are full.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[captbob2002]

... a job that the government supposedly gave to the lowest bidder, which has already missed its time target and is overbudget is insane.

Perhaps always awarding the contracts to the company which makes artificially low bids is the problem - they always figure they can make money back later on change orders and overruns. Ought to use slightly different criteria than just the lowest bid to pick the contractor. Also look at a contractor's history of past performance on projects...but then the whiners would say we are spending too much, why didn't you hire a cheaper construction company?,/p>

Glad you made sure to include a gratuitous union slam in you statement.. You have a problem with people earning a living? Perhaps the construction workers ought to be like Walmart workers and collecting aid from the government while they are working a job?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[captbob2002]

I really don't understand why America is so bad at managing these kinds of projects.

Because Americans want their infrastructure like everything else: cheap. Won't pay to do it right the first time, just pay for the same shoddy work over and over again. Something like this "thowing money at the problem" by hiring more people to work would actually help, but people do not want to pay for that. How much does their lost time and wasted fuel sitting in construction zone cost them?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[dr2chase]

Except that if we "accounted" honestly for congestion and accident costs, we would be far more willing to contemplate congestion charges. What if it turned out that the cheapest and most effective solution was simply to charge people to use the freeway, and use that money to subsidize bus transit to give people an alternative to the roads?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[captbob2002]

Except that you forget the indirect costs of the traffic jams and accidents, which can be huge too. The problem is that the construction companies are not accountable for these costs, so they don't care. If they would be accountable, I bet every project would be finished in no-time.

stop hiring the lowest bidder

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[captbob2002]

that won't work, people would howl and scream! Hey, what if there were a way to charge some kind of fee to the people that use the infrastructure? Naw, that'd never work either.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Kelbear]

You earn it by withholding it from the people who do the work.

By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is a zero sum game, and therefore if someone gets rich, it must be because others are getting poorer. The real world doesn't work like that. Most people that get rich do so by creating opportunities that pull lots of other people up with them. Microsoft made Bill Gates a billionaire, but also created more than 2,000 millionaires and good salaries for tens of thousands more.

If your theory was right, third world countries, with very few billionaires keeping them down, would all be wealthy.

The GP post indicts the rich by claiming their riches were acquired at the detriment of the wider public.

You replied to the GP by citing those who had been convicted of anti-competitive practices, i.e generating Deadweight Loss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

"Causes of deadweight loss can include monopoly pricing (in the case of artificial scarcity), externalities, taxes or subsidies, and binding price ceilings or floors (including minimum wages). The term deadweight loss may also be referred to as the "excess burden" of monopoly or taxation."

I don't dispute that the economy is not a zero sum game. I'm just saying that Microsoft is a poor way to exemplify this since this rise had been due to anticompetitive practices which effectively give to the rich, and take from the poor, showing qualities of a zero sum game. Particularly since prior to the rise of Microsoft, there had been a wealth of competition in these markets, and these anticompetitive practices may have significantly slowed technological progress on a global scale through the ill-gotten network effects accrued to their monopoly.

A simpler example would be a successful small business owner, who saw a gap to be filled in his local market, started a business, and grew both his own wealth and added job opportunities within his company and satellite franchises.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[NoImNotNineVolt]

By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is a zero sum game, and therefore if someone gets rich, it must be because others are getting poorer.

No, I'd disagree. That's the second biggest misconception. As we can see from your post, though, it's evident that there's a lot of people out there that realize it's not a zero sum game and won't hesitate to point that out. If you haven't heard someone cry out "but the economy is not a zero sum game!", then you've been living under a rock.

By far the biggest misconception about the economy is that it is infinite in size, and therefore if someone possesses wealth, it does not necessarily deprive someone else of wealth.

At any point in time, whether it's now, in the past, or in the future, there is a finite amount of wealth. If person X has all of the wealth, then it is necessarily true that no other person has any wealth. It doesn't matter if the economy is a zero sum game or not. The zero sum game argument is a red herring and has no bearing on the fact that wealth is finite, period.

And yes, the capitalist class earns their wealth by withholding it from the people who do the work, literally. That the people who do the work still benefit from this arrangement (because the economy is not a zero sum game) does nothing to refute this claim. The workers may not be getting poorer in absolute terms, but they clearly are in relative terms, because the real world does work like that. Most people don't get rich; those that do do so by creating opportunities that pull lots of other people up with them, and then exploiting the labor of those other people, literally. Sure, Microsoft made Bill Gates a billionaire but helped out all their other employees as well. However, Bill Gates' accumulation of a sizable personal fortune was not a requirement for this; I don't believe that it was the truckloads of cash that were pouring into Bill's personal bank account that made Microsoft a success. I'll even go so far as to say that if Bill had compensated himself as generously as he compensated his workforce, Microsoft's success would not have been jeopardized. And yes, every single dollar that he paid himself is one fewer dollar Microsoft had to pay other employees.

If you're uncomfortable with some negative connotation of "withholding it", "relatively poorer", or "exploiting", then stop being an apologist for the capitalist class.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

And that's the problem with capitalism. Taking a risk with money is non-productive. Labor is productive.

This is gibberish, it has no meaning. Money is a quantification of labour, that's why people get paid for working.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

People get paid more for owning than for working. Money is not simply a proxy for labor. Someone who lends a million dollars and gets $50,000 in interest has not worked as hard as someone who earned $50,000 by virtue of his labor.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

So who decides which work is harder, should coal miners get paid more than neurosurgeons because their work is more physically demanding? It's a meaningless metric. I've no intention of going into a whole capitalism versus whatever you're talking about thing here, of course casino/crony capitalism is wrong and regulations are needed etc etc.

The point is that a new business starter takes a big risk, and earns rewards occasionally. Much more often they end up bankrupt, and in almost every case they earn less than their employees for years until the business starts to take off. Then when it does take off and they earn more than their employees, along comes Johnny McManOfThePeople with his hand out saying "you earned it by withholding it from the people who do the work". Not so by any stretch of the imagination.

You want a share of the profits, take a share of the risks and pain.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Become a hitman and kill people for ten thousand dollars a head? You're A-OK.

Loan some of your money to a friend so he can start a business mass-producing and selling tbe cancer cure he invented, taking a small portion of tne profits in return? Now you're evil.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

Taking a risk isn't a productive act either, I don't see why it should be so highly valued. Perhaps we'd have more successful business if it weren't so risky to start a business. Deciding where to start businesses should be just another job where if you're good at it you get a raise, and if you're bad at it you lose your job.

As for your first question, I think the market is a pretty good mechanism for determining the value of jobs. I mean actual jobs, where you work for a wage or salary. Both coal mining and neurosurgeons are actual jobs and they should get paid whatever the market will bear. I'd just apply one hack to prevent the coercive potential of starvation from forcing people into exploitative positions when there are no alternatives. That hack would be a basic income guarantee.

The result of that would be that you'd have to pay coal miners enough to make them *want* to mine coal, instead of deciding that it's better than starvation. Would this increase the price of coal? Yes, to the point where it matches the actual costs of mining it. Whereas today we unjustly force miners to absorb most of the burden because they have no other choice.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

If someone with a plausible chance to cure cancer can't get public funding, there's something seriously wrong with society.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to change the subject rather than address the actual implications of your reasoning.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

What change of subject? I addressed the concern raised.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Taking a risk isn't a productive act either, I don't see why it should be so highly valued. Perhaps we'd have more successful business if it weren't so risky to start a business. Deciding where to start businesses should be just another job where if you're good at it you get a raise, and if you're bad at it you lose your job.

The act of taking a risk isn't what makes you a profit, that's a hazard resulting from trying to make a profit. Driving around drunk isn't likely to earn you anything except a DUI conviction for example, despite it being a risk taking activity. Starting a business isn't just another job, it's creating jobs, and most people who try it are suitable only for creating one kind of job, like a restaurant or an IT shop, because that's what they know best. The nearest thing to what you're talking about are venture capitalists, and I haven't much time for them, they're an example of capitalism gone wrong - build up a business then sell it, regardless of the consequences for anyone.

You're holding up 'labour' and 'ownership' like holy talismans but they're about as relevant as the old testament these days.

I'd just apply one hack to prevent the coercive potential of starvation from forcing people into exploitative positions when there are no alternatives. That hack would be a basic income guarantee.

I agree. Western societies are dancing around it with welfare and whatnot, but it's time to bite the bullet and just give everyone a basic wage, we have more than enough resources, and ever more as we approach a post scarcity society. Everyone should be able to live comfortably but be given every opportunity to improve themselves, a meritocracy.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you didn't. I pointed out that your line of reasoning holds that being an assassin is "moral" and funding the production of a cancer cure is "immoral". You intentionally avoided addressing this issue by changing the subject to public funding.

Either it's okay to kill people for money and evil to invest in curing cancer, or your premise is wrong. Which is it?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

The nearest thing to what you're talking about are venture capitalists

What I'm talking about is nationalizing venture capitalism.

You're holding up 'labour' and 'ownership' like holy talismans but they're about as relevant as the old testament these days.

You can call it irrelevant if you want, but every item of value exists only because someone worked to create it.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[djh2400]

They often get paid by "dollars per barrel per day". Thus, having lots of barrels set out for a long time increases their revenues.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Hatta]

Funding the production of a cancer cure is not immoral. Withholding resources from a researcher unless you get a cut is immoral.

As for your assassin comment, the morality of a job itself is unrelated to the morality of the economics behind the job. If you take my statement in context (iow, read the parent post), it's clear by "anything" I mean "any amount". If my comment was unclear, I apologize.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[lsatenstein]

This really isn't a bad idea. You could surely speed up construction on the most heavily trafficked roads.

If you think that construction companies, union workers and prevailing wage workers are not already soaking this government project, then you have no idea how government contracts work in California. if it a State, County or Federal project ultimately makes no difference. By offering more money from another source, it just cues those involved that they can charge extra to do what have been contracted to do already. Be it $5.00 per person or $50,000.00 per person adding the thought of having private money contributed to do a job that the government supposedly gave to the lowest bidder, which has already missed its time target and is overbudget is insane.

If you think that is bad, come to Montreal Quebec. We have a tribunal (commission) in place trying to resolve the municipal and provincial fraud that has been taking place. As much as 30% to 100% above quotes, for extras. A water meter project estimated at 1.2 million was called for tenders and the lowest was 3 million. It was discovered that the bidders had agreed on the sharing of the projects.
Then there was the 3% man. He took 3% cash from each contract winner towards the current political party. Illegal funding for sure. But this continued when the new broom came in. We thought the new broom would sweep clean.

So now with all those illegal payments, etc. The revenue department is after corps and personal for income tax evasion. Moreover, the rule is the provincial government had to hire the same gang, because they controlled asphalt and cement manufacturing.

Is it maffia or greed? What do you think (I think both). Love those pictures of the 50 foot yachts.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funding the production of a cancer cure is not immoral. Withholding resources from a researcher unless you get a cut is immoral.

Materials are a resource. Therefore, anyone who won't provide supplies to the lab free of charge is withholding resources from a researcher unless they get a cut.

Land and buildings are resources. Therefore, anyone who won't donate land and construct a building to house the lab free of charge is withholding resources from a researcher unless they get a cut.

Labor is a resource. Therefore, anyone who won't work in that lab without pay is withholding resources from a researcher unless they get a cut.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[rickb928]

Wow. Just wow. This is modded insightful because of the insight it offers into the mind of an AC, right?

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking a risk isn't a productive act either, I don't see why it should be so highly valued. Perhaps we'd have more successful business if it weren't so risky to start a business. Deciding where to start businesses should be just another job where if you're good at it you get a raise, and if you're bad at it you lose your job.

Except that you're still risking money this way. You're just risking someone else's money instead of your own. Since, according to you, the risk is the problematic part, why is it suddenly okay to risk money for a wage? You haven't changed the part that you say is the problem, you've only changed the compensation involved.

I mean actual jobs, where you work for a wage or salary.

I'll make sure to let the owner of the local cafe where I eat lunch know that he doesn't have an "actual job".

I'd just apply one hack to prevent the coercive potential of starvation from forcing people into exploitative positions when there are no alternatives. That hack would be a basic income guarantee.

That idea isn't without merit, but it's a separate matter, and not mutually exclusive with capitalism.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'm talking about is nationalizing venture capitalism.

Then you admit that it is in fact productive.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, as an anonymous CA resident, would overwhelmingly prefer to have that profiteer Elon Musk managing the road construction than basically anyone on the planet. He gets shit done. The government is the problem in California.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[credd144az]

You earn that kind of money by doing stuff people say is impossible. Stuff that wasn't imagined before you came along. These "people who do the work" as you say wouldn't be doing the work if not for Mr. Musk - the work wouldn't exist. These people would not have jobs.

The idea you present here is what is wrong with America. I only hope that this comment is somehow sarcastic.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[dbIII]

The government is the problem in California.

At a wild guess, I'd say part of the problem in California and a few other bits of the USA is they don't really get the "we the people" thing and don't see that they should be involved with the government. That would explain why they keep voting to starve their state government of revenue without understanding that they are shooting themselves in the feet.. Then again some of the stuff I've heard (from 20 years ago, maybe it's changed) about stupidity with elections in California, with propositions that take minutes to read and a long voting process, it seems designed to discourage anyone other than the political players to have anything to do with running the state.
Where I am the government plans and builds most of the roads and subcontracts out the bridges and other difficult bits to companies that are good at it. Shit gets done, a lot of it at night or weekends. Wages costs are relatively huge due to that but there's no comparison with the massive capital costs so it's not worth fucking about doing it in bits and pieces in daylight just to save a bit on wages.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[longbot]

Depends on the state. NY is abysmal at construction... they took 11 years to replace a ratty-ass bridge near where I used to live. Florida on the other hand kicks ass at it. I-275's been completely rebuilt in a matter of months.

I think it really is as simply as paying the contrator by the job, and not by the hour.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Rakarra]

This is an American problem. In other countries it doesn't work this way. I lived in Japan and China for several years, and public construction projects in both of them are done amazingly fast.

It depends on the urgency and who happens to be looking over your shoulder. In California as well, after the 580 freeway overpass collapse due to a tanker explosion

, it was estimated to take a month just to clear debris from the site. Then-Governor Schwarzenegger promised that the process would be expedited (the interchange services much of the traffic for the San Francisco East Bay area), incentives were offered to contractors who finished early. From the Wikipedia article:

"A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.
On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident."

Now that's how to do it!
Government officials need to know how to evaluate contractors and provide incentives like this. Surprise surprise, when rewards are offered to people who work better.. you get better work.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Rakarra]

I used to like the Green Party loooong ago, just because it seemed like they were the ones pushing for accountability -- corporate accountability at least. Then I decided to read the party platform and the statements by their candidates in the early 2000s, and yes, this was a running theme: that if you earned more than $80k/year (at the time) you must have been earning it dishonestly (like being an executive at a company), so you had no moral claim to the money that you'd earned.

Re:May I contribute $5 ?

[Rakarra]

that won't work, people would howl and scream! Hey, what if there were a way to charge some kind of fee to the people that use the infrastructure? Naw, that'd never work either.

I'd much rather be taxed and use basic infrastructure for free, as it should be. Having driven all over the country, I can easily say that toll roads are an abomination, and fewer things are more tourist-hostile.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[geekoid]

How about you actually making a point without logical fallacy and using specific examples?

405

[ShakaUVM]

"The 405 Freeway runs from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley all the way down to El Torro and runs by LAX."

And is a complete and total piece of shit. Unlike Orange County, which has been upgrading its road network for the last 40 years, LA in the 1970s diverted money away from roads and into mass transit systems (subway, light rail, bus). The net result is the completely clogged arteries of the city, which its vaunted bus network needs dedicated lanes to even barely function in.

Everyone knows when they reach the boundary between OC and LA. Going one way, it opens up from 25MPH to 85MPH. Coming the other way, it slams down from 85MPH to 25MPH.

Also, it's spelled El Toro.

Re:405

[Cali Thalen]

Actually I think it's spelled Lake Forest. But my memory may be a little off, I mostly lived North OC / South LA.

Re:405

[Cyberax]

Actually, LA benefits a LOT even from its current #*$&^#$ mass transit. You see, people who are contributing most to congestion are also most likely to use the mass transit. That was empirically checked during the LA strikes of subway drivers - the congestion skyrocketed even though the increase in number of cars was not that big.

Re:405

[tipo159]

Actually I think it's spelled Lake Forest.

The intersection where the southern end of the 405 split off from the 5 is called the El Toro Y. The area was called 'El Toro' until 1991 when Lake Forest incorporated as a city.

Re:405

[tipo159]

I used to commute from Orange Co. (South Coast Plaza area) to around LAX. Going to work, traffic would stop at the LA County border. The start and end of my work day was completely flexible, so I would shift my day in crazy ways (like go in at 4am and leave at 2pm or show work programmer hours).

Re:405

[bogjobber]

Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?

You can't move a population of 10+ million people around every day by automobile without traffic jams. It's an impossible task. You can eke out tiny improvements, but just as quickly they are overtaken by increased usage and then you're looking at an even larger, more expensive and time-consuming upgrade to keep traffic moving . The 405 is a perfect example of this.

Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion. Thankfully the government understands this and is moving beyond 1950s urban planning policies.

But it's LA, and no place on earth is more beholden to the notion that a car is freedom and taking public transit is for the unwashed masses. Even when it's obvious to everyone involved that upgrading the freeway system is a huge, inefficient pain in the ass and a waste of public money you still get people like yourself clamoring that they should do *more* of it. It's absurd.

Re:405

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you build better mass transit? It's cheaper than road upkeep.

Re:405

[Anonymous Coward]

The south end of the 405 is in the city of Irvine, the space between it and the 5 that it intersects with is occupied by the Irvine Spectrum Center.

El Toro is a road running through Irvine near where the 405 ends. I live just off it a few KM west of the highways.

Re:405

[ShakaUVM]

>Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?

Yes, because there is such a massive leap in population density when you hit the LA County border. That must explain it!

Orange County is part of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, so it serves as a good natural experiment demonstrating the effects the different policies have had since the 1970s.

Orange County has bad traffic. Los Angeles has indescribably shitty traffic.

>Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion.

Yeah, see that's the nice thing about empirical evidence. It shows you're completely full of it. Orange County was able to scale its freeways and has maintained a consistently busy but usable road network. LA is still using the same roads from 40 years ago, a fact that is lost on idiots like you that think it is "proof" that roads do not scale.

Of course, you might be right insofar as they've gone so far down the rabbit hole, they have no chance to dig themselves out now. It'd probably be a billion dollars (that they don't have) just to fix the I-5/I-10 interchange.

Re:405

[ShakaUVM]

Of course it has an effect.

But shutting down a lane of the I-5 or the I-405 is much worse.

Re:405

[bogjobber]

Actually, LA does have a much more dense population than Orange County, particularly around downtown. Orange County is similar in population density to The Valley or the western parts of IE. And if you drive into downtown from other parts of LA County on the 10, 5, or 405, you'll notice the same phenomenon you described coming up from Orange County.

And I don't have any data to back it up, but I guarantee that the number of cars going into LA proper is a lot smaller than the number leaving during the morning commute. Traffic is always always easier to manage the further you get from a major city center. If you look at other cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, DC you see exactly the same problems.

Re:405

[captbob2002]

... LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses.

Thank you. Some places buses can help, but ultimately they sit in the same traffic as the cars and many riders think that they'd rather be in their car listening ti their music rather than sitting on a bus in traffic. While much more expensive than buses, transit that has its own uncongested right-of-way make much more sense.

wish I could take a train to work, but I'd still rather ride my bus than drive myself...and I am one of the car-loving nut-cases.

Re:405

[bitingduck]

I temporarily commute from the SGV to the south bay (I'd move if it was permanent), and my experience is consistent with your claim. Getting into DTLA is a mess-- I have a bunch of bailout points that I use (and know in part from biking around the same areas) to at least keep rolling. I basically get off the freeway and take surface streets through DTLA then get back on the 110 outbound, both north and south, and in the morning there's generally less traffic outbound than inbound. I also get to cheat a little because I have a transponder and get reimbursed for tolls-- it saves a lot of time and drive stress, and I'd probably stay overnight a couple nights a week rather than do the round trip every day without it.

Re:405

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the 405 ends short of El Toro, in Lake Forest. I lived off of Lake Forest Drive.

Re:405

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?

You can't move a population of 10+ million people around every day by automobile without traffic jams. It's an impossible task. You can eke out tiny improvements, but just as quickly they are overtaken by increased usage and then you're looking at an even larger, more expensive and time-consuming upgrade to keep traffic moving . The 405 is a perfect example of this.

Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion. Thankfully the government understands this and is moving beyond 1950s urban planning policies.

But it's LA, and no place on earth is more beholden to the notion that a car is freedom and taking public transit is for the unwashed masses. Even when it's obvious to everyone involved that upgrading the freeway system is a huge, inefficient pain in the ass and a waste of public money you still get people like yourself clamoring that they should do *more* of it. It's absurd.

Public transit doesn't compete with the automobile, not even with the congestion we have today.
Rail is way too slow, doesn't go where people live and work, requires too many transfers.

People like yourself typically don't have a wife and kids and employers to contend with, and yet, you want to tell the rest of us to change how we are to live.

We would gladly live and work in the same city, where we could walk/bike to work, and get rid of our cars. But it is the housing element, not public transit, that needs to be addressed. Without decent schools and neighborhoods and a competitive rental market, there is no way we'll be living in the city where we work.

Re:405

[Anonymous Coward]

Lousy argument.
"Congestion" is not a linear function. It rapidly gets much worse once you reach a tipping point. A very small number of additional cars has huge impact at this point.

Mass transit in SoCal is nowhere close to providing what any reasonable person would call a sane commute.
~30 minutes should be the upper limit, not "not that bad" as one other poster commented. Every 12 minutes added to your commute distance (one way) is equivalent to a 5% pay cut. I'll be happy to take that money if you don't want it.

Does he car pool?

[Anonymous Coward]

Admittedly, I didn't read the article.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[lloydchristmas759]

Kind of true.The section of the 405 Elon Musk drives every day is the most congested of all, though. Have a look at traffic information on Google Maps. Right now (5:05pm local time), more than half of the distance between Hawthorne and Bel Air is red or black. The estimated time for that drive is 27 min, but 55 in the current traffic. And it is the same every day of the week.

I still find the money would be better invested in expanding the rail/subway network. How many lanes can you add to a freeway before it becomes ridiculously dangerous? There are already 17 lanes on some sections of the I-5 over here...

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I still find the money would be better invested in expanding the rail/subway network. How many lanes can you add to a freeway before it becomes ridiculously dangerous? There are already 17 lanes on some sections of the I-5 over here..."

But...but...but...SOCIALISM!!!!!!

Move

[hondo77]

If he doesn't like his commute so much, maybe he should move closer to "work"? Oh, he wants to live in a densely populated, highly desirable area which means that he knew the commute to Hawthorne was going to suck? Sounds like someone who moves near an airport and complains about the noise.

Re:Move

[Dieppe]

Speaking as someone living in Hawthorne, it's really not so bad here in some neighborhoods. He could live in Playa del Rey and have a view of the ocean, or in a condo in Marina del Rey, and have an uninterrupted view of everything, including ocean. Honestly though, he should just learn how to fly a helicopter. SpaceX is located at an airport afterall. D

Re:Move

[Anonymous Coward]

But he doesn't own a company that makes helicopters. Perhaps when SpaceX gets their Grasshopper VTVL rocket fully working he can take that.

Get some balls.

[csumpi]

And ride a bike. In LA you can split lanes, so you can get anywhere pretty fast while looking cool. It (almost) never rains and a nice crotch rocket is probably even more environmentally friendly than his current ride.

Re:Get some balls.

[treeves]

Someone should verify : gas motorcycle vs electric car. I wouldn't be surprised if the gas bike does better than the electric car, but it bears checking. And an electric motorcycle...not enough space for batteries?

Re:Get some balls.

[bitingduck]

I've seen an electric crotch rockets that will do at least 55 mph. They're not allowed to go faster than that on the indoor velodrome where we motorpace behind it (generally not nearly that fast). It uses some huge AGM batteries.

Re:Get some balls.

[dunkelfalke]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8147104.stm

Re:Get some balls.

[MachineShedFred]

My "sport touring" motorcycle's 60MPG shits all over the pretentious "hyper miler" Prius owners here in Ohio. And I have way more fun while commuting.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[csumpi]

But those are the very lanes Elon uses.

Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

Widening the 405 is an expensive and only temporary band-aid to the problem of traffic congestion. The hamburger analogy explains why:

Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).

What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.

A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution--because burgers are a highly-valued public good--is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.

You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers--eventually millions a day--to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers.

Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes. Eventually they will all get taken up. Any city planner (and Elon Musk) should know that a shortage happens when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand. It's much, much easier and cheaper to fix the problem of traffic congestion once and for all with a variable price set at the market equilibrium rate than by trying to build your way out of traffic congestion. Even Randal O'Toole agrees.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[ebno-10db]

Next those idiots that don't understand economics are going to give people free air to breathe. Obviously with a "free" resource like that everyone is just going to keep on breathing and breathing until there's no more air left.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[OhANameWhatName]

There's one problem with your analogy, people want to eat hamburgers. People don't want to drive to work.

Privatising the roads with costs being handed on to drivers isn't a solution. Inner city housing is more expensive than housing out of the city, so the people who can't afford to pay for the use of the roads are the ones who get forced to pay for the use of the roads. The real problem is that people like Elon Musk stupidly put their offices in locations which require staff to live in the inner city or travel to the inner city. He sticks his office in a location then complains that he has to commute to it?? Most of us don't have the luxury of deciding where our office will be but this guy actually decided that he wanted to commute on this route to his office and is now complaining to the government about his decision.

It's true that a public roads contractor will swallow whatever money you give them. The solution is public private tendering. The government tenders a job at a fixed price for a set outcome, then contracts the job out to the winner. If they don't come up with results, they're in breach of contract. Putting a price on the cost of travelling on a road simply disguises the problem of congestion.

The long term solution is to have more tele-commuters and greater spatial distribution of workplaces. Increases in tele-commuting are going to happen naturally over time as businesses clue into the cost savings of reduced office space, electricity, air conditioning and other infrastructure. Improvements in communications infrastructure will also allow for a more seamless home-work environment experience. Along with that, you can pay tele-commuters less to work because the vast majority of people would prefer to work from home rather than travel to an office. Combining this with adequate public transport is more than enough to not require anywhere near the breadth of roads that are currently required. "People should pay to use roads!" doesn't solve a damned thing. It's a right wing call for more extreme private control.

Try creating a private road system, and wait to see what happens. Companies will only upgrade the roads when people stop using them, because this is the only motivation a corporation has, to keep making money. Roads absolutely must remain a public trust. Anything else is sticking your head in a bucket of sand.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

Air is a public good because it is "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others." Freeways are not public goods because a vehicle taking up space on the road reduces availability of the road to others.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Electricity Likes Me]

Widening the 405 is an expensive and only temporary band-aid to the problem of traffic congestion. The hamburger analogy explains why:

Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).

What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.

A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution--because burgers are a highly-valued public good--is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.

You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers--eventually millions a day--to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers.

Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes. Eventually they will all get taken up. Any city planner (and Elon Musk) should know that a shortage happens when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand. It's much, much easier and cheaper to fix the problem of traffic congestion once and for all with a variable price set at the market equilibrium rate than by trying to build your way out of traffic congestion. Even Randal O'Toole agrees.

Road planning history is full of people who were just convinced that it was all about tolls, and tend to assume that tolls have no overhead in implementation or collection - both in monetary and congestion terms. They also don't have a stunning track record of being implemented alongside the actual substitutes needed to have them reduce congestion - because if you need to go somewhere up that road, then either you can get there, or you can't.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

He did. Read the last sentence.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[ColdWetDog]

You're describing Jevon's Paradox.

And you should be downmodded for using a hamburger analogy in a car thread. That's just not right.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[mjwx]

Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes.

Not really, a free hamburger is a good, a free highway is a service. That is a critical difference.

The goal of a highway isn't to accommodate cars, it's to accommodate car movement. This means you dont worry about how many cars you can put on there at any one time rather you are concerned with how quickly you can get a car from point A to point B. Adding tolls to roads does not fix congestion, it just makes it more expensive to sit in congestion. It will also force more traffic onto secondary routes, increasing commute times because it takes longer just to get to an expressway. This has been well proven everywhere from Sydney to Bangkok. You cant treat a road like a hamburger, if you constrict supply of a road, demand does not decrease.

To fix congestion, you need to offer alternatives like decent public transport or by better traffic management. I.E. Prohibiting trucks (any vehicle with a GVM >4.5t using the Australian definition) from using expressways in peak hours (7-9 AM and 4-6 PM for arguments sake) will do as much as adding another lane.

Toll roads are not a solution to congestion. They are at best a means to offset the cost of road maintenance or at worse a blatant money grab.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[wisnoskij]

That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
First off the road is not free. It already costs loads of money to maintain cars, insurance, and gas, and you pay for the road in your taxes. That is like saying the solution to house hold fires is to make people pay x thousand dollars before the firemen turn on the hoses. People do not want to commute in the first place, and they already shelled out the cash to buy those roads/firetrucks.

Preventing people from travelling/taxing it beyond reason is only something you would want to do if you wanted to stifle the economy.

There is not a infinite demand for roads. There are a finite number of people trying to go to a finite number of places. And all of them are either going somewhere to make money or to spend it. The only correct way to plan a cities transit system is to provide enough transit to accommodate all of these trips.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

Adding tolls to roads does not fix congestion, it just makes it more expensive to sit in congestion.

False. Perfect price inelasticity of demand only exists in theory. If people are still sitting in congestion, then the toll is still too low for that particular time of day and day of the week. The solution is to remove the price ceiling.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

Preventing people from travelling/taxing it beyond reason is only something you would want to do if you wanted to stifle the economy.

If setting the price of something at market equilibrium is "taxing it beyond reason," then you must think eBay's prices are unreasonably high.

Increasing traffic throughput improves the economy, but diminishing returns says that at some point, it's no longer worth the cost. Before you choose to widen a road, you should determine whether the benefits are actually worth the cost.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bad analogy, and here's why: each hamburger costs a fixed amount to produce and can be used once, whereas a freeway costs a fixed amount to produce and can be used many times thereafter, with a very low marginal cost. A better analogy would be if the council were to purchase magical hamburger-making machines, which each spit out one hamburger per minute, and put them on a table in front of the Capitol. In that case, you'd get congestion as everybody tried to get a free hamburger for lunch and for dinner, but the machines would go idle for the rest of the day.

The efficient solution, in either case, is a bit more subtle than simply putting a price on hamburger-machines (or freeway lanes): you put a price on them during peak hours, when they're congested, and leave them free the rest of the time. People respond to this by adjusting their usage patterns (by having lunch early, or making use of flexitime at work) to save money, which ends up making more efficient use of the available resource.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[wisnoskij]

But like I explained, we are already paying market price. Widening the 405 in this market costs 1.1 billion dollars, and we paid it. Why would you want to tax beyond what the market asks for?

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a reductio ad absurdum, but it's actually a pretty good representation of what happens in unregulated industrial societies (pre-environmental USA and modern China). Air is rivalrous (there's just a LOT of O_2, and plants are pretty good and making more) and it is excludeable (seriously: anybody with a gun can stop you from breathing). So... what is your point?

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[PhamNguyen]

That video is very interesting. However, according to the video, more is going on the a simple tragedy of the commons. Congestion actually decreases the capacity of the road (in vehicles per lane per hour). The case he makes for congestion pricing is very strong, even stronger than the argument you made in your post.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[diamondmagic]

Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage. You started this by arguing that air somehow was a non-scarce good (i.e. can potentially be used up until there is "no more air left"). In doing so you provided an example of a free public good, which is neither scarce, nor rivalrous, nor excludable, as the passage requires. Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[diamondmagic]

People do want to drive to work, otherwise they wouldn't do it. The fact that they spend time driving to work, and even plan ahead to be able to do so, necessarily implies that they want to. This is the economist's definition of "want", and the fact it is something they spend time planning to do means it is a need (need = highest ranked want at any given point in time).

Therefore the rest of your argument cannot follow. Nor is there any real basis for your arguments that follow, there's a long precedence for privately owned and maintained roads, even today in the US. It was among the first forms of commercial transportation, even (it was things like canals that have historically been government-funded, not roads!).

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

But like I explained, we are already paying market price.

Obviously not, or there wouldn't be a shortage of road space for the people who want to use it. Remember, when demand exceeds supply, it's because the price is below what people are willing to pay--the "market price."

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[ChrisMaple]

Time-sensitive pricing on the 405 probably wouldn't work. It's jammed from 6AM to 10AM and 3PM to 7PM or worse. How are you going to shift around those intervals?

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[JakartaDean]

That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. First off the road is not free. It already costs loads of money to maintain cars, insurance, and gas, and you pay for the road in your taxes. That is like saying the solution to house hold fires is to make people pay x thousand dollars before the firemen turn on the hoses.

You're very vehement for someone so incorrect. Use of a road is so different from asking for help from the fire department that I don't see what could possibly make you think they're similar. Okay, they're both public services, I get that. After that, nada.

The way to get the most efficient system is to have supply meet demand, and that cannot be at a price point of zero forever. Having to pay some amount for a service encourages or forces people to make choices, including whether they should work from home that day in the short term. Longer term it might influence their choices in place of employment or residence. That allows the taxpayer you seem so concerned about to maximize the public benefit of the whole system. Mass rapid transit is paid for by the taxpayer, so presumably that should be free also? Let me guess, you only drive so that's not relevant.

Preventing people from travelling/taxing it beyond reason is only something you would want to do if you wanted to stifle the economy.

There is not a infinite demand for roads. There are a finite number of people trying to go to a finite number of places. And all of them are either going somewhere to make money or to spend it. The only correct way to plan a cities transit system is to provide enough transit to accommodate all of these trips.

There is also a finite amount of land to be built upon, a finite amount of public money to use to build roads and so on. In general the people who plan urban transportation are not idiots. They know the costs to the economy, and their political bosses hear the complaints of the public and businesses. They don't set out to underbuild a road system just to piss you off. They try to maximize the effectiveness of the whole system given their constraints due to availability of money, land issues, political realities and so on. It seems that you understand that the number of drivers is not infinite, but you think that everything else is, or should be. That is irrational.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[tlhIngan]

Next those idiots that don't understand economics are going to give people free air to breathe. Obviously with a "free" resource like that everyone is just going to keep on breathing and breathing until there's no more air left.

Well, if you ask someone living in Beijing, they might disagree. Given that it's not people "consuming" the air that's the problem, it's the people polluting it so people can't breathe it anymore.

And in fact, we do charge for it through pollution taxes, carbon taxes, air quality standards, etc. Because if given a chance, people DO spoil it. Hell, LA used to have a huge smog problem until California introduced some of the most stringent air quality standards around.

And that was people consuming air for "free". Now China's actually had to admit the air in Beijing is actually polluted.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[dunkelfalke]

And the answer will be a riot. You can only fuck with people for so long. That is what the theoreticians like you do not understand.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[thegarbz]

Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes. Eventually they will all get taken up. Any city planner (and Elon Musk) should know that a shortage happens when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand. It's much, much easier and cheaper to fix the problem of traffic congestion once and for all with a variable price set at the market equilibrium rate than by trying to build your way out of traffic congestion.

You're analogy fails in one critical aspect. You assume 20000 people going to one place to eat a hamburger is a bad thing. If people flock to the freeway then that means people are out of the side roads which free up to handle more traffic. There aren't magically any more people in the world, the traffic just redistributes to find a new equilibrium. The end result is the free way is still congested, but not as much, and neither are the other mainroads which people used to take instead.

You can see this in action in Australia where several governments have set up stupid private public partnerships for cross city tunnels, naturally the private part means they are tolled. The tunnels are deserted as people prefer to sit in traffic then spend a few dollars on a commute. In Brisbane when the Clem 7 opened and has a toll free period it was great. Some 60000 cars were siphoned off the arterials that join the main roads going north to the highways going west and south. Traffic was much better ABOVE the tunnel. Then the tolls came in and the tunnel is now largely unused with less than 1/6th of the forecast traffic and the roads above are gridlock yet again.

User pays is not a good system for infrastructure. Beneficiary pays is, and everyone is a beneficiary when there's less cars on other roads.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[dkf]

You're analogy fails in one critical aspect. You assume 20000 people going to one place to eat a hamburger is a bad thing. If people flock to the freeway then that means people are out of the side roads which free up to handle more traffic. There aren't magically any more people in the world, the traffic just redistributes to find a new equilibrium. The end result is the free way is still congested, but not as much, and neither are the other mainroads which people used to take instead.

Even that is over-simplistic. Having the additional road capacity there encourages people to make journeys they would otherwise not do, or to travel using very different routes than they otherwise would; in a sense, roads generate traffic.

Infrastructure planning is tricky. Its impact (both good and bad) can be felt very widely.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[vux984]

Air is a public good because it is "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."

I take it you haven't been to a Chinese industrial area.

Actually... even the smog in LA gets pretty bad.

Maybe an individual can't reduce availability much all by himself, but if enough of them build factories without pollution controls you'll be carrying your air around in a bottle soon enough.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[vux984]

Yes and no. Yes there would absolutely be rioting, but it -would- also solve the problem.

People would literally not be able to afford to get to work. So they would quit and find a closer job, or move closer to work. Or both.

Simultaneously employers would find their employees completely unwilling to show up for work unless they got substantial raises to cover the cost of showing up. Employers would embrace telecommuting, move their offices to locales more accessible to employees, etc.

Public transit would take off as a vastly less expensive alternative to commuting.

And people would flee the city en masse to work elsewhere. Abandoning suburban homes devalued by the fact that they are no longer inhabitable by people who plan to work in the city.

The market would sort it out.

Or the city is burnt to the ground in the riots, torn apart by crime due to the massive unemployment and severe turmoil that would ensue.

Either way, if you take a long enough view the problem is solved. I'd hate to live through the transition though, and would lynch anyone that suggested it.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[dunkelfalke]

Well, or maybe a meteorite strike will destroy the city and solve the problem just as well. Everything will pass, if you take a long enough view.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[wisnoskij]

Or there is a necessary resource that is not abundant enough...

If you have a city and only enough food to feed everyone on starvation rations for the next 4 months. A incorrect solution would be taxing this food beyond reason (and we have many laws that prevent this), the top 1% would buy all the food, but you did solve the "too much demand" problem.

Sure in any situation preventing anyone for using the roads unless they shell out $1000 would fix the problem. As 99% of people would simply be unable to afford even occasional trips. They would also be excluded from the economy. We would not have solved any problems, just came up with a way to shift it around and hide it.

If travel demand was a liquid as you thought that congestion would be a self fixing problem. You would pay this extra tax in time and frustration and before long demand for the road would go down to reasonable limits.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[NoImNotNineVolt]

The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers--eventually millions a day--to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers.

That's it? That's your point? I guess I'm supposed to say "ah, we can't have millions of hamburgers a day being provided!"

Why not? Free burgers for all. That would be awesome. As awesome as highways with sufficient capacity.

P.S. Freeway lanes aren't unpriced. Fuel taxes, which are more or less paid on a per-mile-traveled basis, are a real cost that motorists pay. Do you think eliminating the fuel tax and replacing it with toll booths on the 405 would alleviate congestion?

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[dr2chase]

There's not a direct connection between the price of the upgrade and the cost to use the road -- instead of funding through congestion charges on that particular road at rush hour, it's funded from taxpayer dollars. We do that because it's approximately a public good, but the accounting is really crappy (does it includes the external costs, from noise, crashes, pollution, oil spills, as well as impediment to travel perpendicular to the freeway?). If the goal is to reduce congestion, you can do that in a number of ways, and simply building more road is not necessarily the cheapest or most effective use of dollars. Standard microeconomic theory says, with much handwaving, that if you can tie the charge directly to the costs (i.e., to pay a fee to drive when demand is high and congestion is likely to result) then you will get the most efficient solution, as long as the transactions charges are not too high. Toll booths have transaction costs that are too high so we have traditionally not used congestion charging that much, but nowadays we can read license plates on the fly for cheap.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[dr2chase]

Shift to another method of transportation. Motorcycle, carpool, bike, e-bike, transit, transit+folding bike, move, change jobs. The whole point is to attach the price to the thing that "costs" and let the market work it out.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[MachineShedFred]

The premise of your argument is incorrect.

People will get a hamburger if they want a hamburger. People don't drive on a road simply because it's there - they drive on a road because they need to get somewhere it goes. In your comparison, you assume that 100% of the population need to use a road, just like 100% of the population need to eat. That is incorrect.

If you don't build a freeway and people still need to get to that place, they will do it via surface arterials or neighborhood streets causing the neighborhoods to become much less safe due to through traffic that should be on a freeway. The "induced demand" argument is centered around this unmetered traffic that is already happening being put into the proper place, once that place has sufficient carrying capacity.

If you expand a rural section of I-71 between Columbus, OH and Cincinnati, OH, cars don't magically appear to fill the expanded capacity; nor does Washington Courthouse, OH start becoming a suburb of Columbus with people driving 50 miles each way to commute.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

Then the tolls came in and the tunnel is now largely unused with less than 1/6th of the forecast traffic...

Then the tolls are too high--above market equilibrium. Remember, I said the tolls should be "a variable price set at the market equilibrium rate".

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[squiggleslash]

Quite, he's on Slashdot, he should have used a car analogy. Oh, wait...

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

A incorrect solution would be taxing this food beyond reason...

Instead of taxing food, allowing the market to determine the price would make bringing in food from outside more profitable, encouraging suppliers to do so, provided there isn't a monopoly/oligopoly on food.

If travel demand was a liquid as you thought that congestion would be a self fixing problem. You would pay this extra tax in time and frustration and before long demand for the road would go down to reasonable limits.

And that's exactly what's happening. The amount of traffic congestion may be more than what you consider to be reasonable, but obviously not more than what others tolerate or they wouldn't be sitting in traffic and contributing to it. For them, sitting in traffic is better than their feasible alternatives.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[squiggleslash]

People will get a hamburger if they want a hamburger. People don't drive on a road simply because it's there - they drive on a road because they need to get somewhere it goes

...and it's the only option available. Yes, this part is important, let me explain why.

Note that, for example, one reason the US doesn't have many functional bus services is that most parts of the US have planning systems that force everyone to pay for car usage regardless of whether they want to use a car or not. The result is that it's uneconomic to run bus services.

Now imagine that congestion charging is introduced. Suddenly a large chunk of the costs of car usage are moved from "everyone" to "those people who are causing the problem." Those people who are causing the problem will start to look for alternatives. Eventually a balance will arise where enough people find it more economic and desirable to use a bus run by a profit-seeking company, taking 20 cars off the road per bus.

The number will still be lower than a system whereby car owners genuinely pay for direct usage, including payments to businesses for use of their parking spaces etc, but it would at least make some alternatives to car transportation profitable.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

If you don't build a freeway and people still need to get to that place, they will do it via surface arterials or neighborhood streets causing the neighborhoods to become much less safe due to through traffic that should be on a freeway.

Or they'll carpool or take mass transit and let someone else drive. Or they'll ride a bike and pass all that traffic. Or they'll move closer to where they need to be. Or they'll work a different shift when traffic is lower.

You bring up a good argument for eliminating minimum parking requirements that cities force upon developers and business owners. If there were less parking available at your destination, you might try to avoid the busier periods so you can find a parking space (if parking is unpriced) or cheaper parking, or you would find a different way to get there.

I don't know of any case where variable tolls set at market equilibrium have increased traffic congestion on surface streets.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[ebno-10db]

Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage.

No, it isn't. The OP never said that roads were, or even should be, a private good. "Public good" and "private good" have precise definitions according to economists, and they are not the only two categories. Which is why I said that merely citing the definition of "public good" is not an argument.

Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?

No, it never crossed my mind. And apparently the whole idea of "sarcasm" is unfamiliar to your mind. Next time I'll spell things out literally for the sake of those who have no understanding of non-literal statements.

And a comment that includes ad hominems like "do you have half a brain" gets modded to +4 insightful while mere sarcasm gets modded down to 0? Some of the moderators are incredibly biased and/or just as incapable of grapsing non-literal expression.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[tehcyder]

People do want to drive to work, otherwise they wouldn't do it.

Nonsense. I don't want to go to work particularly in the first place, but I have to. I'd much rather be able to walk to work, or get a nice handy bus/train. But I have to go where the work is, and it's not feasible to move every time you change job. Plus a lot of places simply aren't accessible without a car/motorbike.

It is simply untrue that normal people have a free choice about where they work and live.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[MachineShedFred]

The issue with all of that, is that people are stubborn.

Portland, Ore. has been adopting all kinds of policies that people refer to as "car-hating" policy. They've spent billions on mass transit, they've spend tens of millions on bike paths, they've been densifying neighborhoods so people can live closer, etc.

The net result has been the same amount of traffic, a light rail system that stops every 4 blocks downtown so that it takes you 40% longer to get where you're going in comparison to if you drove and dealt with the traffic, streetcars that you can literally walk faster than along the same route because they don't have traffic signal pre-emption, and towers full of empty condos that are too expensive, and nobody wants.

All of that planning, and they still need to build a $3B bridge to deal with the 5+ hours of traffic jam going over the Columbia River to Vancouver, WA. Of course, it would be far less expensive if Portland wasn't demanding that Vancouver take an extra $1.5B of light rail that Clark County voted down twice. Portland also wants to put congestion tolling on the new bridge, which will result in people commuting from Clark County going east to I-205 to cross the river instead to dodge the toll if it's too expensive.

Same amount of cars will still be driving the roads, but moving congestion from one route to another longer one, and using more fuel to do it. That's the Urban Planner way lately.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[steelfood]

The price of driving is supposed to come out of the taxes placed on gasoline. One solution is to tax gasoline so high that most people cannot afford to drive, or at least, are forced to carpool.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[Ichijo]

They've spent billions on mass transit, they've spend tens of millions on bike paths... The net result has been the same amount of traffic...

That's not surprising. Increasing transportation capacity does not reduce traffic congestion in the long term.

All of that planning, and they still need to build a $3B bridge to deal with the 5+ hours of traffic jam going over the Columbia River to Vancouver, WA.

If they think the only way to eliminate the shortage of road space for all the motorists who want to use it is to add capacity by building a new bridge, they don't understand the Hamburger Analogy.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[diamondmagic]

Read the rest of my comment. You're confusing wanting to drive to work with enjoying driving to work. Are you seriously trying to tell me you want to walk or even bike several hours all the way to work, and several hours back, and all the consequences that implies (e.g. possibly arriving late, having far less free time)? No, you don't, you drive to work instead because you want that more than walking, all other things being equal.

It is necessarily true that if you do something, you want to do it (more than any other alternative). This is what economists care about. This is by definition. You are losing a by definition argument.

Re:Hamburger Analogy

[thegarbz]

Actually the tolls didn't cover the cost of running the tolling equipment as it was and the company went bankrupt. Market equilibrium rate was lower than the running cost. It's a lose-lose situation.

Fun fact, my city has the worlds most expensive toll bridge per meter of bridge span. This toll bridge is located less than 100m from another bridge which has no tolls on it. Yes the idiots who bought into that public-private partnership went bankrupt too. Naturally one bridge is empty and the other is a carpark. They even tried some fancy lane markings and limited only one lane to travel to the other bridge. End result is the carpark now extends onto the inner city bypass during peak hour.

Now if the bridge were free to use everyone who travels around the city would benefit from reduced congestion. So why shouldn't everyone pay their share of the bridge through standard taxes rather than attempt to make money by tolling the occasional lost car while the city rots in its own congestion induced smog?

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't he afford a helicopter? And the cost of getting permission to fly it from his Bel Air property. He is a zililonaire isn't he?

mass transit?

[Anonymous Coward]

i was going to suggest building a subway system, but a subway system might cause billions of US dollars. maybe LA can build a tram that runs parallel to interstate 405. just a thought.

people could take I-5 or I-210.. oh wait, they are probably already clogged during rush hour. tough situation for LA.

Building roads won't help

[svirre]

"He who sows roads, will harvest traffic" - H.J. Vogel

Building more highways only encourages more driving, it is the congestion that will be invariant, not the traffic. It may take a a couple of years, and the congestion may move a bit, but the congestion will remain. Fundamentally building more roads is a lousy solution to the transport problem. See also "The fundamental law of road congestion: Evidence from US cities" By Duranton & Turner

Re:Building roads won't help

[wisnoskij]

Which implies that all roads would constantly be congested the exact same amount, relative to their size???

Because, you know, I have been to the real world. And there is this funny thing there where road congestion actually appears to have something to do with demand for travel between two points. And there are roads both huge and small that have no congestions problems at all. And single lane roads where traffic if backed up straight through two intersections.

Yo Elon, two words...

[FatLittleMonkey]

Flying car.

Re:Yo Elon, two words...

[ruir]

Personal helicopter. Many rich people in Brazil own one. Hey, rent-a-helicopter, aka taxis on the air. You heard it here first.

Re:Yo Elon, two words...

[bitingduck]

His neighbors in Bel Air will complain about the noise.

Build us a god damned flying car!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then traffic will be for losers.

YES! a smaller gov should be

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past, every road build in the world raise fun like this!

Widening the 405 to eliminate gridlock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha, tell me another one.
I lived in L.A. from 1966 until 1993. I've seen the 405 widened many times.
The day they open the new lanes they'll be at capacity and gridlocked – again.
More commuter rail? Sure. I don't know why they don't run a subway under or a monorail over the 405 while they're at it. They should have done that 30 years go. But you don't seriously think Elon is going to ride public transit to work do you?

Re:Widening the 405 to eliminate gridlock?

[squiggleslash]

Elon doesn't have to in order to benefit from public transit. This is what the people who write letters to the editor demanding the shutting down of all subsidized transit systems forget: they benefit as much as the riders do. Each transit rider is one less car in front of them.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If I were Musk, I'd just ride in a limo and treat the backseat as my mobile office for the variable amount of time spent in traffic. I'm sure the guy spends most of his time in email or on the phone anyway. He's got the money to do all that and full high-def video-conferencing from his car if he wanted to.

Sure, that doesn't help anyone else. But this article is about his personal frustration and what he's done in response.

Move your company

[asm2750]

Sure, LA has a great talent pool of engineers, but I am sure it would have been cheaper to just have SpaceX in a region with better managed freeways, and less density. I'm sure the engineers wouldn't mind moving since LA is a hell hole these days when it comes to commuting.

Re:Move your company

[ruir]

Move your company to the opposite building of your houseyou are the owner, after all.

Re:Move your company

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be a SpaceX employee, and left precisely because LA is an awful hell-hole. Quite an exciting and interesting job, but the city was abysmal. Now my commute is 5 minutes on my cyclocross bike.

Re:Move your company

[bitingduck]

SpaceX is located smack in the center of the LA aerospace industry- there's a huge pool of experienced engineers to draw from who have been working around that area for ages.

Re:Move your company

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to work there, and a guy I interned with at NASA actually does ('sup Mike!), but Hawthorne is pretty much right between Inglewood and Compton.
I've listened to enough west coast rap to think twice before raising kids in that neighborhood.

Hawthorne

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a family in Hawthorne that might be willing to swap!

seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

rich guy, doesn't like his commute in his fancy car from his mansion in an exclusive area to his office....

get a limo or mini van with driver and appropriate tech and turn the commute in to productive time...
-or-
do what many of us do - move closer and get a bicycle

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[Pseudonym Authority]

How about replying instead of trying to knock off my karma?

You're an idiot. Happy?

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, if he likes driving his Model S, he could hire a limo driver and have him seat in the passenger seat, so that he can use the HOV lane ! :-)

Wow, 50000$ has an effect?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Here in Montreal that barely pays for one corrupt city official to answer the phone.

Re:Wow, 50000$ has an effect?

[CodeBuster]

Here in Montreal that barely pays for one corrupt city official to answer the phone.

With or without the bad attitude and the French accent?

Re:Wow, 50000$ has an effect?

[captbob2002]

Here in Montreal that barely pays for one corrupt city official to answer the phone.

With or without the bad attitude and the French accent?

It is Montreal, no french accent - they will only speak to you in French.

Re:Wow, 50000$ has an effect?

[bitingduck]

but with a funny accent, nonetheless

Meanwhile...

[Charliemopps]

Meanwhile, the owner of the construction firm in charge of the project, who's been bleeding the state for every last dime it could just shit himself as he looked up Elon Musks net worth and realized just how much more money he could make if he made the delays even more intolerable.

Japan Hamburger fail

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't an infinite demand for roads, there's a finite number of people trying to get to a finite number of places and if the roads are sufficient then you don't have congestion. Driving is not a free activity, it costs money even if the road doesn't.

Japan is an example of that, they've gone road building crazy trying to make growth and where they've done that, the roads are empty. Just not enough traffic.

Variable pricing does not fix capacity, it rewards incompetence. If the authority is too incompetent to deliver the road service, it earns the most money from congestion charges. Thus the incentive is to be incompetent and fail to deliver proper road infrastructure.

Re:Japan Hamburger fail

[ebno-10db]

There isn't an infinite demand for roads, there's a finite number of people trying to get to a finite number of places and if the roads are sufficient then you don't have congestion. Driving is not a free activity, it costs money even if the road doesn't.

Japan is an example of that, they've gone road building crazy trying to make growth and where they've done that, the roads are empty. Just not enough traffic.

Variable pricing does not fix capacity, it rewards incompetence. If the authority is too incompetent to deliver the road service, it earns the most money from congestion charges. Thus the incentive is to be incompetent and fail to deliver proper road infrastructure.

Quoting the whole post because it's too good to languish at score 0.

Re:Japan Hamburger fail

[Ichijo]

if the roads are sufficient then you don't have congestion.

That's correct, and when the price of using them is set at the market equilibrium price, the roads will be sufficient in that supply and demand will be in equilibrium. Setting the price below the market equilibrium rate is never a good long-term strategy.

The optimal amount of road lane-miles is not the amount where there's never any congestion when the price is zero, but the amount where the cost of traffic congestion equals the price of the tolls or the cost of adding more road.

Variable pricing does not fix capacity, it rewards incompetence.

And that's why restaurant managers who set different lunch and dinner prices do so because they are incompetent.

No, incompetence is setting the price below the market equilibrium rate as a long-term strategy.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I prefer the country myself (and just recently took a job in the country to get out of the city), working in the city and living in the country is irrational by almost any objective criteria. Here are some examples (all times are for the round trip):

• A 45 minute commute makes you 40% more likely to get a divorce.
• A 90 minute commute kills your Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, even when you eventually do get home.
• Every 10 minutes commuting decreases your number of social connections by 10%
• Commuters have more neck & back problems (plus obesity), and for every minute they spend commuting there's "a 0.0257 minute exercise time reduction, a 0.0387 minute food preparation time reduction, and a 0.2205 minute sleep time reduction". BTW, that study controlled for time spent outside of the home by comparing people who worked 10 hours and commuted 2 hours with those who just worked 12 hours.
• It takes a 40% higher salary to justify an extra hour of commuting. (Measured by some economists based on well-being.)

Here is the article I pulled those stats from, it links to more definitive sources. Basically, it's absolutely not worth it to live further away from your job to have a bigger house. That said, raising a family might be better in the country, unless you're subjecting your kids to a long commute as well.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[ruir]

If I were musk, I would have my personal helicopter.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe shifting your job hours to 7 to 3 might make that less of an issue to you.

And yes, I am familiar with the area - I used to to have to go to work back and forth from Westlake Village to El Segundo and back.

With more capacity, more people will move here

[BlueCoder]

The widening project was a travesty of wasted money. It's was more about employing people than it was increasing capacity which they didn't want to do since if you did that the rest of the LA area would suffer more crowning and traffic.

With the money they had they had available they could have built a layer on top of the existing freeway that could have withstood a 10.0 earthquake. It's really not that long a stretch they are working on. They could possibly have tunneled through the mountains in two or three places with the same amount of money which wouldn't have bothered existing traffic.

Back in the 50's oil companies bought off LA area city planning. They designed the city for traffic. They decided where the more expensive and less expensive areas would be. Then they put the areas of industry and shopping far away from the cheaper housing which is where more people travel from.

Re:With more capacity, more people will move here

[rahvin112]

You have NO idea how much freeways cost to build. If you think they could build a double decker freeway for that distance for a billion dollars you've been smoking way to much crack.

Oh and BTW, when using the "Richter" scale earthquake measurement the highest value earthquake is 9.5, to exceed 9.5 the amount of energy released would turn the rocks molten. Not that I expect you to understand that given you just claimed you could build a bridge the entire distance or tunnel the 405 through the mountain for the same money.

Re:With more capacity, more people will move here

[ChrisMaple]

Tunneling through the mountain was a large part of the expense for the Red Line. Poor choice for the subway, worse for automobile road. The mountain pass is the one area where property prices aren't so high as exclude unlimited widening. (By the way, the access road through the pass is often faster than the 405). The congestion through the pass on the 405 is caused by the 101 intersection choke point on the north and more traffic entering the 405 going south near West L.A.

Re:With more capacity, more people will move here

[sternci]

Back in the 50's oil companies bought off LA area city planning. They designed the city for traffic. They decided where the more expensive and less expensive areas would be. Then they put the areas of industry and shopping far away from the cheaper housing which is where more people travel from.

This is the entire problem in a nutshell. Although I hate the concept of central planning, we've learned many lessons from the nightmares that are Houston and Los Angeles and the DC Metro area. The growth hasn't been organic, per se, but driven by planning boards and elected officials who seem to be looking for the quick buck, re-election, and the ad-valorem from single-family homes.

Logistics are not the publics problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You suggest that logistics are complicated and causing delays. As a public, that's not our problem, that's the contractors. If the contractor is delayed because they are using a loader or paver across town for a 2 month project, that's not the public's problem. We are paying for THIS stretch of the freeway. You bid and you agreed to do it within the same time window. The contractor is on hook to have a paver on the site as needed, and not delay it because it's not convenient.

Large construction companies that bid on these types of projects need to be held to the dates even more. "Logistics" excuses like yours are just not acceptable. Buy the equipment if you need it, deliver on time. Or for every day you pay a huge fine. Make sure the fines are more than the cost of the actual work and firms will start to deliver on time, and most likely, ahead of time.

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[ackthpt]

You suggest that logistics are complicated and causing delays. As a public, that's not our problem, that's the contractors. If the contractor is delayed because they are using a loader or paver across town for a 2 month project, that's not the public's problem. We are paying for THIS stretch of the freeway. You bid and you agreed to do it within the same time window. The contractor is on hook to have a paver on the site as needed, and not delay it because it's not convenient.

Large construction companies that bid on these types of projects need to be held to the dates even more. "Logistics" excuses like yours are just not acceptable. Buy the equipment if you need it, deliver on time. Or for every day you pay a huge fine. Make sure the fines are more than the cost of the actual work and firms will start to deliver on time, and most likely, ahead of time.

You're funny.

Next time you try building a house, see how successful you are at getting all the contractors to arrive and get their work done according to your schedule.

It's no different with a private firm, like Granite Construction, which may have a few pavers or shovels, but they queue the jobs up so they can get things done in an order, but breakdowns happen, unforeseen things interfere, weather can delay things, then all the planning is replaced by a scramble, maybe subcontract or lease from another contractor.

Seemingly simple projects often run over in time and can't be helped.

Aside that, one thing I've noticed which makes traffic move smoother is a few police cars in the traffic. Bust the chops of a few of these jerks who keep changing lanes to save a second or two. That's what gets the whole mass of traffic crawling. Amazing how well it all works when everyone sits in their lane and goes a reasonable speed.

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[rahvin112]

So you hold the contractor to a schedule that says a utility line will be moved by a certain date, but the utility company doesn't get it done? If you expect that you better be prepared to pay about 100x more for road construction.

Most states have strict liquidated damages for exceeding schedule. But there are often factors beyond the control of the contractor and beyond the control of the government. When the power company fails to move the power pole that prevents the traffic shift that allows the construction to move forward you do what you have to do and stretch the schedule because you can't do jack shit to the utility company and they know it.

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[jabuzz]

You fine the utility company the cost of the increase in the schedule of widening the road. You will soon find that the utility company makes sure that stuff is moved out the way according to schedule.

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the utility company files for bankruptcy.

You end up with a few more unemployed people, and a far greater schedule delay.

Oh, and the next road construction project? No one will bid for it, because if something happens they cannot control, they know you will bankrupt them anyway...

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[rahvin112]

Fine the utility company? Lol, under what authority?
Do you actually think the government can run around fining companies for made up things? Do you think a Judge wouldn't throw out any attempt or even retaliate against the government by fining the government for exceeding authority?

You are very naive.

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[jabuzz]

Well obviously you pass legislation first that gives the government the right to fine companies that don't move stuff out the way on time when formally requested to do so, problem fixed. I am not in the slightest naÃve.

Re:Logistics are not the publics problem

[rahvin112]

If you could even get the law passed assume they did, there is a major project a fine issued, the utility company raises rates, when people complain they blame the law that allows them to be fined, a week later the law is revoked. In actuality any attempt to pass such a law would result in one of the largest publicity blitzes by Utility companies you'd ever have seen.

In reality any attempt to issue a fine would be litigated, the costs of the litigation would far exceed any additional costs or schedule slips. The courts are NOT friendly to perceived government bullying. Even cases where you have zero controversy such as ROW acquisition are frequently litigated. This doesn't even include things like lawsuits filed by groups like the Sierra club that lengthen schedules.

And you most certainly are Naive to think there is a solution that hasn't already been tried. The fact is you just don't understand the business or it's constraints but you feel you are qualified to make judgements about what is or isn't appropriate schedule delays. Do you often feel you are an expert in fields you have no experience in?

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[lloydchristmas759]

I live and work in south Orange County, so I don't take the 405 every day, thanks God.

Shifting job hours can indeed be beneficial, but most employers won't allow it (this does not apply to Elon, though).

BTW, Westlake Village to El Segundo must have been a horrible drive to do every day. Happy for you that you don't do it anymore, really.

Bay area

[Anonymous Coward]

If only someone would get the idea to do the same thing for the Highway 101 project in the San Fran bay area.
Also whoever designed the Highway 85-101 junction deserves to be flogged!

Elon must have gained $10M on $50K investment

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon claimed NY Times cost Tesla $100M for the review, so this much of publicity should have provided $10M gains for Elon. What a genius! If I were Elon, my next move will be investing $50M to transform I-405 HOV to ExpressLane & demand Tesla cars to be allowed to use it for free.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Bel-Air is physically 10-15miles from SpaceX. He spends more time navigating the winding roads of the hills than on the highway too (unless he lives at the base of the hills, aka near Beverly Hills at the bottom). It's actually not far commute compared to folks coming from the SFV. On a weekend, it's a 25min drive on the side streets (maybe 15min on a Sunday morning on the 405). And compared to other cities is average if not less, unless you're in Manhattan... The kicker is that 15mile commute usually takes about 45min and over 70 w/an accident on the 405- now that sucks.

But the project is already 1/2bil over budget, 50K is a publicity stunt, he could do something better: money is the not problem, it's the underestimated resources. And we know those construction companies are "hurting from the sequester" w/their big CEO bonuses and taking advantage of it.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop. You're giving us old guys a -worse- reputation.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii246/sorinb_photo/montreal/Highway_401_18_lanes.jpg

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work with someone who had to do that commute (maybe it's you!) and I don't know why he did it vs. moving or getting a job closer (he was valuable to the team, so we wouldn't have liked that though). That commute would have driven me bonkers.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do, it's called taxes. If the taxes aren't doing enough, fire the government.

False

[Anonymous Coward]

"price of using them is set at the market equilibrium price, the roads will be sufficient in that supply and demand will be in equilibrium"

People still need to get to work, any traffic you drive off a road goes elsewhere. You've just moved your congestion. There is already a market price there, its the cost of the fuel and the cost of the lost time.

"The optimal amount of road lane-miles is not the amount where there's never any congestion when the price is zero, but the amount where the cost of traffic congestion equals the price of the tolls or the cost of adding more road."

Again false, the cost of the congestion is paid for by the driver in fuel and time. While the cost of the toll is also paid for by the driver. Both are costs on the driver, not in balance. Increasing the toll, does not reduce the cost on the driver by removing the congestion. He still has to drive to work.

That logic is based on the 'unnecessary journey' thinking. The idea that most people causing the congestion are on that road unnecessarily and can be induced to not take the journey if you charge them enough. However congestion is at peak hours and is thus work related. It's tard thinking to believe people drive in congestion voluntarily.

Re:False

[Ichijo]

The idea that most people causing the congestion are on that road unnecessarily and can be induced to not take the journey if you charge them enough.

Of course they can. Perfect price inelasticity of demand only exists in theory.

More Immigrants to Southern California!

[Baldrson]

Since Musk has joined forces with Zuckerberg to promote open borders, its obvious that he also sees the solution to Southern California's I405 traffic problem as more immigrant road workers!

Anyone who lived in Southern California for the 2 decades following the Reagan Amnesty can attest to the fact that more immigration is good for the environment generally. That's why the Sierra Club banned all debate about immigration after receiving hundred million dollars or so from a donor who told them to STFU about immigration and the environment.

Re:More Immigrants to Southern California!

[ChrisMaple]

And the immigrants drive so well, and are licensed and insured, and drive high quality vehicles.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

A business expense for his aerospace company. An area company; Robinson Helicopter would love to sell them one. He could use that $50k to get a helipad and parking facilities at the Bel Air Country Club; other members should love it.

Money Bucket To Crime

[Anonymous Coward]

Any money, cash, sent to CalTrans is money funneled for crime.

That 'hefty $50K' [laugh] will not be used for road construction, but be funneled to the CalTrans cocaine/heroine fund for the managers and Governor.

Building more freeways is not the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

If you live in LA you are part of the best worked proof that building more roads does not in the long term reduce traffic delays. The better the roads the more people will use them, so the busier they become. Actually this breaks down in extremis: where currently around 40% of the surface area of LA is dedicated to motor vehicles, once you get up to around 80% there won't be much room left for people and it probably stabilises. I see no indication that LA can be forward thinking enough to produce any other outcome.

Squeezing productivity to fit the road

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course they can. Perfect price inelasticity of demand only exists in theory."

1. You haven't disputed that people are making those unpleasant expensive (fuel+time) journeys out of necessity, not pleasure.
2. So you price the roads till you remove congestion, and you've eliminated *necessary* journeys.
3. So all you've done it squeeze productivity, till it's small enough to fit your road capacity.

Perhaps you force companies to move elsewhere, perhaps closed a few smaller ones, perhaps shrunk others. Ultimately you're just squeezing demand to fit a supply you've artificially limited. In the process reduced productivity, a cost you as road maker don't bear.

Re:Squeezing productivity to fit the road

[Ichijo]

So you price the roads till you remove congestion, and you've eliminated *necessary* journeys.

No, because journeys were already eliminated due to congestion.

Re:Squeezing productivity to fit the road

[squiggleslash]

FWIW, not all journeys at rush hour are "necessary" - that is, commuters trying to get to work. This is particularly evident here in Florida where large numbers of retirees take to the roads at the same time as most commuters, largely to take advantage of breakfast specials at local restaurants. These people would be forced off the road if there was congestion charging.

And, of course, that congestion charging can be used to pay for improvements that also reduce the congestion. So it should be win-win.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

In America, suburban schools are usually better than inner city schools. Being that said, I am willing to take a slight pay cut for telecommunting privlege and indefinite tenure. Some dumb blonde CEO may disagree with your finding however.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar commute: Redondo Beach to Westlake Village. I ended up shifting my hours. That made the morning commute about an hour to go 50 miles, which is great, but the return at around 3 was still quite congested. For those of you out there who don't know, L.A. has only one rush hour: 7am to midnight. It doesn't ease up after the "morning rush." My record for that 50 miles was just under 4 hours (one way).

The problem, besides the time (especially if you have a family), is that it's just nerve wracking. You've got to be really hyper vigilant and have quick reflexes. So however many hours you're stuck in the traffic for, you're probably getting more worked up than you do at your job.

On the bright side, I made it through a TON of audiobooks, had a lot of great morning radio (which is all gone now), and got to listen to a bunch of albums I hadn't had time to listen to in years.

rolling stones gather no moss

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

And the color of moss is green btw.

A plant often removed never grow.

That's why you don't change jobs often, over a few % point raise. It is not worth it. Switching jobs like a grass hopper hippie does not show the trait of a stable, strong man.

You want a raise? Grow some back, do your compatriots some good, and help start a national I.T. / SysAdmin / DBA labor union to protect quality American workers and repel lazy indian H1Bs.

Re:rolling stones gather no moss

[Onan]

The hell? People change jobs for a million reasons, few of which have anything to do with "back" and whatever macho/nationalistic fantasy you've got going on there.

- People at the beginning of their careers sometimes improve their skills more rapidly than their employers can accommodate. eg, the guy who starts out doing desktop support and grows into a sysadminning role, at a company that's already overstaffed on sysadmins.

- Companies downsize or go out of business. Any time you join a startup it is a crapshoot (mostly based upon factors outside your control) whether it will still be around next year. Does that mean that no one should ever join new companies?

- Many, many people simply cannot afford to live anywhere near their offices.

- Changes in medical conditions may alter the type and amount of work that you're capable of.

- Changes in your or your family's medical or educational situation may alter the amount or reliability of money necessary. eg, moving to a less fulfilling job at a big corporation with solid medical benefits.

And, frankly, change and drive and curiosity are good things. I would much rather hire someone who has displayed the ability to excel in ten different environments than someone who has sat still at one company for a decade.

Re:rolling stones gather no moss

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because the one thing IT people love is not being able to fire idiots.

Re:rolling stones gather no moss

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you hiring idiots in the first place?

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Miamicanes]

The problem isn't that LA needs wider freeways OR an expanded rail/subway network... LA needs wider freeways *AND* an expanded rail/subway network. People who argue for one to the exclusion of the other are missing the point.

A new rail line won't do a damn thing for gridlock *today* -- it takes a minimum of 25-40 years before a new rail line really starts to pull its own weight (40 when it's the first segment in a city, 25 when you're extending one that's already established). That doesn't mean the rail line shouldn't get built... it means the rail line should get built today, along with the freeway's reconstruction, so that 25-40 years from now, the rail line will have matured enough to start absorbing travel loads from the freeway, and it won't be necessary to demolish and rebuild the whole freeway yet again.

I wish I was...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I was rich so I could fix the DC beltway

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or consider buying a motorcycle in the only state in the US where lane splitting is legal. Not only does that reduce congestion for everyone else on the road, it also improves your mental health.

( http://www.gixxer.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-288070.html )

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[UnknownSoldier]

He's got a 6-digit id. He's still relatively young.

The kids these days always rant and rave without any substance. Notice how he didn't provide _any_ stats on HOV lanes. He hasn't pointed out any factual benefits or disadvantages to them.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[PrimaryConsult]

In America, suburban schools are usually better than inner city schools. Being that said, I am willing to take a slight pay cut for telecommunting privlege and indefinite tenure.

While true, inner cities also have private schools which are better than suburban public schools (particularly since problem students can easily be expelled, thanks to the safety net of public schools). Take ~$6,000/yr for high school for example - if schools are the main reason for moving to the suburbs, determine if you are losing more than $6,000/yr in money or time by commuting - it may end up actually being cheaper.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[s.petry]

I don't think anyone is bothered by that attitude at all. It's when people whine and complain about the commute that they "choose" to have that people pull out the pitchforks.

First world problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad so sad Elon... meanwhile they're digging bodies out of a[nother] collapsed sweat shop in Bangladesh.

I'm soooo sorry it takes a little longer than usual for you to get home.

710 Freeway

[dave562]

This seems as good a place as any to reach a wide audience of people who commute on southern California freeways.

Did anyone notice how many times they rebuild the center divider on the 710 in between the 405 and the 5? (Compton, Lynwood, Bell, South Gate, etc)

I am referring to the 2005-2009ish time frame. I swear that they literally built the entire length of it, tore it down and rebuilt it at least three times.

So, TeleCommute already, before you're obsolete...

[ivi]

Get huge See-Me-in-Life-Size screens
at the office you'd otherwise need to suffer
freeway delays driving to... connect them
to your home[-office]... & never suffer again.

Hold BBQ's at your home for any contract-
signings that may require more than a digital
signature.

I'm surprised that you're not already doing this
now.

I begin to think that the "Past-is-Future" thought-
lessness that -surrounds- you there has seeped
into your psyche, making it hard to see obvious
technical solutions.. that others take for granted
(except, perhaps Yahoo's CEO.. who's recently
-forbade- her staff from enjoying the -privilege-
of telecommuting some days each week).

By all means enjoy the extra time you'll save, ie,
by telecommuting whenever you can.

Maybe even set some "new" examples:

1. telecommuting (for those who can)
2. staggered start-times (for the rest)
3. Thorium powered plant (a big job)
4. flat organisational chart
5. zero-emission company
etc.

What can you gain by -using- & -supporting-
ancient, mostly fossil-fueled, mostly self-drive
personal-transport via -clogged- freeways?!?

Swedes enjoyed train-commutes (through
forested areas) from Stockholm to ASEA,
sitting at desks, each with a phone, FAX &
laptop... as early as the mid-1980's.

To get-a-Life, you may need to re-think your
present designs... & add some telecommuting,
etc. to the mix.

Start Today! :-)

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[bitingduck]

I just mapped it, and it comes up about 17-18, but you're still in the right ballpark.

His best bet is to move- as soon as the 405 is built out, it will return to the same congestion as before (that happens to freeways everywhere). The next best thing (and better for LA) would be to fund a rail line that essentially parallels the 405. And maybe throw in a bikeway-- LA has 330 days/year that are good biking weather, but having to do a long commute on city streets can be a pain. There are a few bikeways along the various rivers and/or freeways (SGRT, LARIO) that can make a bike commute competitive with driving, even for very long distances. Shorter than about 10 miles it's faster to bike, and even at 15-20 miles, the combination of bike and train is faster than driving at rush hour.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I don't get either. The people that can easily afford a professional driver would rather drive distracted (or even under the influence) while putting everyone else at risk rather than chip in for a salary which is a pittance when compared to their own income. Seriously though, even though you can afford a six figure priced performance car, it doesn't matter when stuck in traffic and by being distracted your driving is often among the worst (seriously you suck at it) and most accident prone. If you're making over $400,000 a year - it's more productive of your time and better for everyone that you hire and have a pro do the driving. Ride in something big and chillax during the trip and let somebody else stress over traffic.

Also even better than a limo is a conversion bus, that way you get to roll with a clean working toilet and a nice kitchenette while you have more headroom for a bigger videoscreen or to do teleconferencing on the move.

Auditors, investigators, and payo ... uh donations

[John Jorsett]

He'd probably do more good by funding a troop of auditors to go over the books of the project and investigators to turn over every rock regarding who's getting paid off and by whom. Just knowing that somebody's scrutinizing every invoice, payment, contract, and load of asphalt delivered would probably build a fire. Then there's the tried-and-true method of making a raft of campaign donations to the politicians involved.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[gronofer]

I'd just live closer to the business. If there aren't any houses there to buy, I'd build one.

But will it be wide enough?

[Sun]

Will it be wide enough to land a plane on it?

Shachar

Why doesn't he take a helicopter?

[TheSync]

LA has got to have one of the most helicopter-friendly weather conditions of any US city outside of perhaps Las Vegas.

Why doesn't he just take a helicopter to work most days?

It's called road tax

[dutchwhizzman]

It's called road tax. Many countries around the world have it, and use the money car owners have to pay to be allowed on the public road to actually keep that road maintained. Civilized countries usually have such a system and have well maintained roads.

Re:It's called road tax

[TheoMurpse]

We do that in the US, too. It's a tax levied on gasoline/petrol.

Re:It's called road tax

[Iniamyen]

Apparently here in Seattle we're not part of any "civilized country," since the majority of our public roads are not safely traversable by vehicle...

Elon Musk buys coverage on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

And the LA Times. Fortunately he has a lot of dollars to match his outrage.

Throwing Money at the Problem

[edelbrp]

An odd thing for a CEO of all people to do unless he's lost the relative sense of what the value of money is. Does Musk think throwing money at the problem will solve it? Reminds me of 'trickle down' economics. You know what happens when you go to buy something and are willing to give more cash for it than the asking price? The seller takes the extra cash and sticks it in their pocket, plain and simple.

Re:Auditors, investigators, and payo ... uh donati

[bussdriver]

This donations need to go to key politicians, that is just a drop in the bucket. The cost for highways is way out of his league. Upkeep is high as well. Auditing would only go so far, the big issue is that roads are expensive.... you could lower the cost considerably if you prohibited heavy trucks and limited the speed! (F=ma dominates the cost.) I've seen the cost for roads and the load + speed makes it rise so fast, people have no clue how much all these roads legitimately cost. You could double the size of city blocks and remove a lot of waste... however, those roads are cheap and it doesn't end up making a big difference in the long run (it does however SAVE a lot of money...)

All that being said, once you look into the real world numbers you realize that adding 1 lane for billions of dollars only improves traffic by about 10% if I remember correctly. If you take too long to build it, then you gain nothing! Unless you cut down on the INCREASE in cars you can't build it fast enough; as is already the case in just about every major city in the USA. Mass transit is required and far cheaper - like everything there is some function for both and likely an intersection point where cars will always lose.

You could cut down on the number of people... contribute to education - its the most effective politically correct way to control population growth.

The solutions are not something people are going to like. Can't have your cake and eat it too. Musk could work on building a huge rail line... and a car rental service for either end of it.... I'd like to see a train station that moves with the train so you don't have to wait while people get on and off. Even that is cheap compared to highway construction and buying land.

Make drivers drive smarter, not on more lanes

[jdbuz]

I drive this stretch of road. And I've driven in Germany. We should take a page from Germany's playbook and "drive right" (rechts fahren) and pass on the left. The Autobahn is mostly only 2 lanes after all. Take you're 50K and get the state of California to stop calling the far left (non HOV/carpool) lane the subjective "fast" lane, as they do in the driver hand books, and teach people to call it the "passing" lane.

Re:Make drivers drive smarter, not on more lanes

[dargaud]

There's no such thing as 'passing' when everybody is going 55 and going 56 will net you an automated fine.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[techno-vampire]

Another nice thing about motorcycles is that they're allowed to use the carpool lane.

Re: If he has the money and is willing to spend it

[murphtall]

*sources needed* 25 years ? 40 years?

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of it's obvious. There aren't really any traffic-related benefits to opening up HOV lanes to a specific class of vehicle differentiated only by engine type, except possibly the very minor easing of congestion by getting more cars into the HOV lane, making space for cars elsewhere. Whether that is offset by the number of people who would otherwise carpool to use the lane, I don't know.

I don't really care, either. It's absurd to think that traffic will change much with the addition of less than 1 lane of traffic. I think you'd get better results by mandating that vehicles in the HOV lane have to travel within 5 mph of the limit, so that one clown doing 40 mph doesn't screw up the entire benefit (to drivers) of the HOV lane.

Ten to one it is a rounding error on his tax dodge

[SmallFurryCreature]

Ten to one it is a rounding error on his tax dodges oops sorry, tax evasions.

Anyway, sooner or later, the people always get the government and infrastructure they deserve... the US government and infrastructure rotten to the core? How... unexpected, giving the nature of your average American who rather deny himself a thousand dollars for the fear someone else might get a penny of him.

Get a motorcycle

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved to Los Angeles from NJ back in 1999. I rode cross country on my motorcycle to get here. What I discovered was motorcycle nirvana. Sunny almost all the time. No snow, what little rain there is amounts to drizzle back in NJ. And the topper, motorcycles get their own dedicated lanes. It's called lane splitting and here in California it is not only legal, but encouraged. Riding a motorcycle from Bel Air to Hawthorne on the 405 during rush hour(s) will cut that 2.5+ hour one way commute down to 45 minutes. Plus riding a motorcycle is a good stress reliever. And if you have to have electric, check out Zero Motors, they have some really good electric bikes, they probably have enough range to make a round trip without charging.

I love it when some nitwit who owns a prius asks me about my fuel mileage. I tell them low to mid 40s for mpg. They go well I get 48+, so your bike sucks. My reply is, yeah, you get 48 mpg sitting in traffic for 2.5+ hours. While I get to be sitting at home relaxing for 1.75+ hours before you get home. Even better, they are on the road for an hour before I even wake up in the morning to go to work.

That will go a long way

[Chrisq]

Since this article says

"The cost to construct one lane-mile of a typical 4-lane divided highway can range from $3.1 million to $9.1 million per lane-mile in rural areas depending on terrain type and $4.9 million to $19.5 million in urban areas depending on population size."

I would see $50,000 as a drop in the ocean. Of course if it is a bribe to get that particular road prioritized then it could be a very effective drop...

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[serviscope_minor]

Some dumb blonde CEO may disagree with your finding however.

What's hair colour got to do with it? I assume plenty of bald CEOs don't allow telecommuting.

If you actually read about yahoo, and triad to reason without using your personal biases you might have actually come to the opposite conclusion. The place was a mess, and it seemed that no one had any idea on what half of the telecommuters were working.

Telecommuting works if (a) limited inter person communication is needed and (b) people know exactly what they're working on. Clearly neither of those was the case any longer at Yahoo and so telecommuting for not became untenable.

Her ability to see that is why she's the CEO earning $bigbucks and you're not.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[serviscope_minor]

He's got a 6-digit id. He's still relatively young.

And you've got a 5 digit ID. You're still a plonker.

Seriously.

I have a 6 digit ID in the 600k range (not the 500k range) and I've been reading slashdot for about 10 years. Maybe a bit longer. The poster you're complaining about has been here longer than me.

If you're claiming that 10 years is "new around here" then you're doing a fantastic job of demonstrating why waving teeny IDs is nothing more than e-peen waving and contributes nothing of value.

AFT

[johnwerneken]

Since we can not trust voters (after all, with a dozen measures, a person could vote yes on them all, making no choice at all where priority matters (as it does everywhere but ego boo) lets let all "public" action be driven either by cash, or people SIGNING UP for the ONE THING they want

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[icebraining]

Zoning laws don't always allow that.

Reverse commute is the answer

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Musk needs to get on the reverse commute side of things. Works great for me in Silicon Valley. Everyone is stuck in traffic *going the other way* on my way to work. Ditto in the evening.

Re:Reverse commute is the answer

[squiggleslash]

Not everyone wants to work from four in the afternoon until seven the following morning... I prefer an eight hour day myself...

Hah! I know why!

[Anonymous Coward]

The 405 is the nearest freeway terminus near Hawthorne airport, aka, spaceX airport. My buddy has a plane stored there and lives like 2 minutes away. I go by there all the time. Yeah the 405 is satan's asshole. it should be an 8-lane freeway to be honest.

Why doesn't he just use his Jetpack?

[sproketboy]

ntr

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[kwbauer]

Come now. Don't let facts get in the way of a good rant.Uber whatever is obviously way smarter than Marrissa Mayer and Uber whatever could obviously run Yahoo much better but he just isn't feeling it right now. Maybe in a few more years he'll be feeling it and then he'll move out of mommies basement and change the world.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[xelah]

I think some variation between people has to be allowed for (not to mention locating households with several occupants who travel to different places). There are lot of differences between large cities and small towns/villages other than house size - air quality, noise levels, environment, leisure activities, crime levels and so on. Some people love the busy-ness, noise, access to shops, vibrancy and general shittiness of cities, whereas others hate those things. Those numbers aren't going to be the same for everybody - and some commuters will spend some chunk of their commuting time on foot, which makes a difference.

It's a lot better with adequate transport and well chosen locations. My first commute from a village involved a five minute walk, 26 minutes on a train to travel 30 miles (to London), then another five minute walk. Many people travel for much longer than that just inside the city. London is a bit different to most US cities, though.....most journeys to central London are by public transport, and it's almost totally inaccessible by car for most commuters (outer parts are different, though). (There also aren't actually enough homes in London for everyone who works there to live there). And central London salaries can be 40% greater (and a lot more for some people).

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[sensei moreh]

I don't know about you, but I'd much, much rather live in Bel Air (if I could afford it) than in Hawthorne.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Building a train parallel to the freeway, especially in Los Angeles, doesn't do anything to relieve congestion. They've already tried that with MetroLink, as well as the Bus Rapid Transit along the 10 freeway, and they are just as clogged as they were before. Oh, and on national average of all US cities with population of 500k or more, a transit commute takes more time than a car commute by a significant amount. Source

That doesn't even get into the financial aspect, where cost per passenger-mile traveled on rail projects is 4x what a car costs when you factor in construction costs for both rail and road, as well as maintenance costs for both rolling stock and car, and personal ownership costs of the car (insurance, title fees, etc.) and fuel.

Outside of incredibly dense population centers, rail just doesn't make sense.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[necro81]

Or, like the owner of my company, occasionally fly his helicopter from home to office.

Good Guy Elon!

[slacka]

My company's president complains about the commute and company pays for Limo and chauffeur, so he can be more productive. Elon pays to get the highway fixed up with his own money. I need to get my resume polished up, so I can find a position at SpaceX or Tesla.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, one thing I notice in the DC area - the HOV lanes are fairly empty, while the other lanes are at a standstill. Strictly speaking it would probably (but I don't know) be better to open up the lanes to all... or make every lane HOV.

The real issue

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

He just hates his car dying halfway to work.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[gatkinso]

Melissa Mayer's ability "summarized" in one word: Summly.

Why is SpaceX in LA at all?

[gatkinso]

Seems like Palmdale would be a far better location.

Re:Why is SpaceX in LA at all?

[Areyoukiddingme]

He got a huge old unused Boeing plant for cheap, and it's right on the airport and right near the ocean, so if he builds something too big for roads, he can drag it to a ship fairly easily.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[captbob2002]

...The next best thing (and better for LA) would be to fund a rail line that essentially parallels the 405. ..., the combination of bike and train is faster than driving at rush hour.

What are you? Some kind of green pinko commie socialist? What is more socialist that public transportation? That is not what this country needs! Clearly if the road is getting congested again by private cars, then we need to spend more...uh...public money on more...uh, public roads! Why would I want to pay for something that I have to share with others like mass transit? I might have to sit next to someone that doesn't think or look like me!

Can't solve 2D promblem with 1D solution

[laughingskeptic]

Arterial roads are an attempt to solve a 2 dimensional problem (sprawl) with a 1 dimensional solution (linear roads). You can't add width to your line fast enough to make up for area growth at the end points. Elon Musk of all people should understand this. Is his little public donation a step toward a political life?

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[UnknownSoldier]

*sigh* Another high ID that can't seem to focus on the _original_ discussion. Way to stay focused on the negative instead of adding something constructive to the dicussion! Thanks for proving my point that 6+ digit ids rarely add any useful signal; mostly useless noise.

Now, to bring this back on-topic:

Where are the studies that show benefits and negatives to HOV lanes?

I'm not interested in anecdotal evidence, hyperbole, nor conjecture; I'm interested in facts about HOV.

Guess people would rather bitch about off-topic non-issues then raise questions in order to get answers and have a healthy, constructive, informative discussion.

--
Unless you grok BOTH the postive AND negative about any system, you do NOT understand it (fully.)

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

$6,000 gets you a pretty crappy private school, think more like $20,000.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[serviscope_minor]

*sigh* Another high ID that can't seem to focus on the _original_ discussion.

Sorry, I must have mis read the bit where you said:

He's got a 6-digit id. He's still relatively young.

Oh no wait, I didn't. You said exactly that.

Way to stay focused on the negative instead of adding something constructive to the dicussion!

Part of a discussion is calling out people when they talk crap. You were talking crap and I called you out. Now you're complaining that I'm the one topic drifting, when you're also the one who took the random segue into ranting about UID numbers.

Or do you believe that the priviledge to change topic is reserved for the 5 digiters and below?

By the way: you may have noticed a rather unusual feature that slashdot has which I like to call "threading". It's rather clever and represents posts and replies as a "tree" so that sub conversations like this one stay in a sub-"tree" and do not disturb peopl on other sub conversations. Amazing.

Guess people would rather bitch about off-topic non-issues

You mean like you were bitching about how people with 6 digit UIDs are new here since 10 years is just too soon?

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[UnknownSoldier]

Finally, some interesting commentary.

It is hard to determine the optimal efficiency of traffic flow without numbers, but let's try anyways ...

a) If an HOV is _added_ to an _existing_ infrastructure, then having it is not taking anything away, but I agree with the assertion that it may not be the most optimal.

The problem we are trying to optimize is: How can we move the most cars (maximize distance) in the least amount of time. i.e. dX/dT. Which looks like a differential equation.

Would it be better instead of having the extra lane be HOV or be a Open lane? I don't know. I would like to see some studies in various high population areas first. Otherwise I think we are all pulling numbers out of our an ass. The technical term is "SWAG": scientific wild assed guess.

b) Likewise I would also like to see the converse data. If an _existing_ lane is _converted_ over then what happens to the traffic efficiency?

> that one clown doing 40 mph doesn't screw up the entire benefit (to drivers) of the HOV lane.

I partially agree with you. The 2+ clowns doing 60 mph instead of the legal 65 mph (or the more realistic 75 mph) in the far left-most two lanes are a MUCH bigger problem then maximizing the HOV lane usage. Those retards introduce standing waves in traffic which are far most destructive to dX/dT.

It is a shame that the Dept. of Motor Vehicles doesn't know shit about standing waves nor teaches people how to help optimize keeping vehicles moving in the traffic flow. One of these days every car will be able to pass it's current speed both forward and backwards to its neighbor's car so that people 5, 10, 20 mins down the road can know about future traffic conditions. i.e. Peer-to-Peer Car Knowledge.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

A new rail line won't do a damn thing for gridlock *today* -- it takes a minimum of 25-40 years before a new rail line really starts to pull its own weight

We've had some new** rail lines open in the UK (mostly Scotland) and they've been massively successful in passenger numbers within a year or two of opening.

**Technically not new but as they were previously closed about 50 years ago, effectively new.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Medievalist]

Take ~$6,000/yr for high school for example

Not in any American city I know of. You might get preschool for that price, or unlicensed day care. According to the Internets the average cost of non-religious private high schools in the USA was $27,302 in 2007. But dropping enrollment due to the post-Clinton economic situation has driven individual costs up even more since then.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Jedi Alec]

I might have to sit next to someone that doesn't think or look like me!

Looking or thinking is fine, it's not smelling and acting like me that is bothersome ;-)

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[tehcyder]

Or, like the owner of my company, occasionally fly his helicopter from home to office.

Yes, sometimes there really is no other way of saying "I'm a highly paid douchebag with a vastly inflated sense of my own importance".

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[tehcyder]

Or consider buying a motorcycle in the only state in the US where lane splitting is legal. Not only does that reduce congestion for everyone else on the road, it also improves your mental health.

( http://www.gixxer.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-288070.html )

Lane splitting (which I assume means filtering between two lanes on a motorcycle) is not at all good for your mental health.

In the UK, it's OK to filter through slow moving traffic, but I wouldn't want to do so at motorway speeds even if it was legal. When I see fellow bikers weaving in and out of traffic and undertaking (illegally) I feel absolutely no desire to copy them.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[bitingduck]

Building a train parallel to the freeway, especially in Los Angeles, doesn't do anything to relieve congestion. They've already tried that with MetroLink, as well as the Bus Rapid Transit along the 10 freeway, and they are just as clogged as they were before. Oh, and on national average of all US cities with population of 500k or more, a transit commute takes more time than a car commute by a significant amount. Source

That doesn't even get into the financial aspect, where cost per passenger-mile traveled on rail projects is 4x what a car costs when you factor in construction costs for both rail and road, as well as maintenance costs for both rolling stock and car, and personal ownership costs of the car (insurance, title fees, etc.) and fuel.

Outside of incredibly dense population centers, rail just doesn't make sense.

Nothing actually relieves congestion-- you just move more people using less space or resources per person but the same congestion. There's a certain amount of congestion/delay/commute time that people are willing to tolerate, and people will keep saturating transportation modes back to that level no matter what you do to relieve it. New freeways or lanes rapidly return to the previous levels of congestion-- you can't pave your way out of it, but you can provide modes that are more pleasant or more efficient.

Transit being slower than driving in US cities is because most transit is buses that travel in the same lanes as auto traffic, but make more stops. Of course it's slower. Light rail can be quite fast, and in LA light rail plus bicycle can be much faster than driving at peak times. You also can do something like read while you're on the train, which you can't in the car. I live in the Pasadena area, and it's much faster to take the train to DTLA at peak hours than to drive. I temporarily have a commute several times a week to the south bay-- that's faster by car because I'd have to take 4 different trains or bus lines to do it. But traffic is so bad that I can get to Sunnyvale in about the same time it takes me to get to the south bay. Leaving early and coming home after peak make it tolerable for a little while (and it's usually only 3 days/week). I'd move if it was permanent.

My partner commutes (bike+train) sometimes to DTLA, and when she's late getting home it's because someone gave her a ride partway-- it's consistently slower than bike+train. Now that Metro lets you take a bike any time, there are a lot of people who do bike+train commutes. They should really consider a different style car, with bike hooks and flip up seats along one side, and regular seats along the other. It would make it easier to pack more people+bikes in. Shared use bike lockers (which are now available in the bay area) instead of long term rental lockers would also make bike commuting/shopping easier-- they work like parking meters, but keep people from stealing parts off your bike.

Who remembers this?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpx6o4gvmXE

but if everyone...

[schlachter]

with too much money in the area would give $50K you would probably very quickly hit tens of millions of $$

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[bitingduck]

And treat the wide line between the carpool lane and the number 1 lane as their own lane when both of those are stopped.

nobody uses the 405 anymore...

[schlachter]

nobody uses the 405 anymore...it's just too crowded. ;P

Try living in Northern Illinois for a year

[Anonymous Coward]

When they say this area has 2 season (Winter & Road Construction), they MEAN it! The week after I moved here at least 1 intersection of every possible route I could take to get to work was ripped out and a "widening" project started. This was begun 3 months before Winter began. In additon, the Tollway was reduced to 2 lanes in each direction. It tooks 2 years for all of those projects to finish. Once those were finished they ripped out another set of intersections and another section of Tollway. 5 years now, nothing but reduced lanes for every possible route I can take to work. This doesn't even include the CN trains that are over a mile long and take 15 minutes to pass through. Even though the get fined for rolling through during rush hour they continue to do so. All the rail crossing are at surface level too and none of the villages want to build freeways to the Tollway as they fear losing their precious tax revenue from people stopping at their gas stations and McDonalds. With no traffic and no construction my commute is 30 minutes, with traffic it goes up to 45 minutes, with construction an hour, those combined with Winter and it can take 2 hours. You know that episode of Married With Children wear Al is in his car on the highway and he looks over and sees people walking passed him because traffic is so backed up, it's like that.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

A 10 second search on that link reveals that it is backed by cato institute, and also based on old data, and also has very little to do with Portland, it is a national average. No time to dig into their data, but 73% of statistics are made up and all of that. Sorry, try again.

Re:Kill the Hippy Operated Vehicle lanes

[bitingduck]

The problem we are trying to optimize is: How can we move the most cars (maximize distance) in the least amount of time. i.e. dX/dT. Which looks like a differential equation.

One small but important nit-- you're not trying to move the most cars, but the most people.

It is a shame that the Dept. of Motor Vehicles doesn't know shit about standing waves nor teaches people how to help optimize keeping vehicles moving in the traffic flow. One of these days every car will be able to pass it's current speed both forward and backwards to its neighbor's car so that people 5, 10, 20 mins down the road can know about future traffic conditions. i.e. Peer-to-Peer Car Knowledge.

In LA they most certainly do. They can't make drivers drive better, but they instrument the hell out of the roads and there are a number of ways for drivers to get detailed real time information. The whole region's freeway system is instrumented and you can get near real time updates of freeway speeds at sigalert.com as well as most of the popular mapping apps. It even gives the dispatch reports from incidents so you know which lanes are blocked. I glance at sigalert and replan my route in an instant due to a collision 15 miles away. The city of LA also just completed integration of city street sensors and lights system wide, and it does work. You can get street speed data on google maps, and there are also crowdsourced apps like waze (which I don't use since it put me on a dead stopped 405) or trapster, that integrate realtime data from drivers on the road.

Stuck Tesla on the 405

[Anonymous Coward]

He cant afford to have a battery drained Tesla on the 405 can he ? Ouch, that'd hurt !

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Anonymous Coward]

dumb blonde CEO

Marissa Mayer isn't stupid, she's merely opportunistic and selfish.

Re: If he has the money and is willing to spend it

[Miamicanes]

Washington. Atlanta. Miami. San Francisco.

All were mostly useless the day they opened, and were seriously limited in their usefulness for at least a decade... but now, roughly 30-40 years after the first segment opened, all four cities have at least gotten to the point where somebody who lives within walking distance of a station can find just about everything he or she needs within walking distance of another station, and depending upon the local job market and one's career field, has roughly 50-50 odds of being able to work within "viable" distance of a station.

More importantly, all four rail lines now have at least a few segments that are of sufficient importance that none of the cities would *dare* to take up an evil genie on his offer to refund the lines' original construction cost (not adjusted for inflation) in return for making them disappear forever. That's not to say that all four don't have examples of glaring mistakes that are painfully obvious today... but they each offer examples of the circumstances under which they can prosper and flourish in their respective markets (most of which can be summed up as, "embrace sprawl, proudly take ownership of it, and direct it into new suburban skyscraper clusters around outlying stations").

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Iniamyen]

You also can do something like read while you're on the train, which you can't in the car.

Some of my fellow drivers would beg to differ...

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[cthulhu11]

I would think that his best solutions would be to a) Use a chopper, surely he can afford one or b) Move back to Salt Lake City

You user ID suggest that

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a jeu pig.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[Miamicanes]

Were they literally brand new isolated segments, or were they new lines that extended (or at least directly shared a station with) existing lines? I'm talking about the American situation where a city with no meaningful transit to begin with builds its first rail line, at least half of which passes through areas that are industrial wastelands, dangerous slums, and/or just plain stupid places to build it (generally, surrounded by an ocean of single-family homes whose owners will fight any attempts at skyscraper-density redevelopment next door).

In America, skyscrapers next to the station are almost mandatory for viability, because Americans have very little tolerance for extended outdoor walks. If their destination isn't next door or across the street from the station, Americans generally won't take the train (however, transit systems can cheat a bit, and build underground air-conditioned corridors that psychologically extend the station's useful footprint, because "next door" is measured from the point where the rider has to actually go outside. The underground corridors at Crystal City (Arlington, VA) can get kind of creepy (it almost feels like you stumbled onto a movie set or into some area where you aren't really allowed, and you're going to get run down by security guards at any moment), but they DO serve the useful purpose of making a fairly large area feel like it's all adjacent to the station.

Re:If he has the money and is willing to spend it.

[sternci]

I wish that there were quality private high schools for $6K that operated outside of the Catholic Church. From what I know, LA Unified is a nightmare of a school district, and many of the suburban districts aren't much better.

Re:Auditors, investigators, and payo ... uh donati

[volmtech]

I guess Florida traffic is different. Going from two lanes to four quadruples carrying capacity. A slow driver or someone trying to turn left can shut down a two lane. Adding a third lane to each side doubles capacity again. Slow downs for merging traffic from on ramps is reduced by through traffic keeping in the left two lanes at near full speed. I have been driving in the Orlando and Jacksonville area for 45 years. The population has increased dramatically in those years and even with lower speed limits travel times are much quicker. The only problem with Orlando is once you are on the surface streets traffic signal cycles are twice as long as needed and you wait a full minute after cross traffic has cleared before you get a green light.

Re:Auditors, investigators, and payo ... uh donati

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been to Orlando. Try living in a big city for a few decades

Hyperloop.

[DuhSn]

Elon is simply making friends for his next pet project.

You're right given the modbombing

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like all the modbombing proves that you're right.

Knocking off your karma is all they can do?

The Madness Never Stops

[Anonymous Coward]

When will it come to an end? I live in an affected neighborhood which has suffered the repeated folly of Kewit and Caltrans. The evidence that this project is improperly managed is overwhelmingly obvious.

Let us start with the original design. Weeks of surveying and digging, which eventually lead to the construction of a sound barrier near a 405 entrance ramp. But it was all for naught, the wall had to be demolished. Evidentially someone had executed such a colossal fuck-up, that the whole process had to start over.

Enter the late night cycle of incessant jack-hammering. Your personal living space invaded by intense vibrations and permeating noise that persists well into the twilight hour. One night I can recall, the industrial sized, tractor-mounted jackhammer did not stop shaking the ground near my home until about 3:30 in the morning. This was on a weekday. A large percentage of hard-working Angelenos have 9-5 jobs, and need their rest.

Write your congressman/woman. Go to a city hall meeting, make your voice heard. This shit HAS. TO. STOP. I won't lose anymore sleep because a construction company, it's management, and the state-run organization responsible for our transportation, are all inept. This shit sucks. It's laughable.

An emergency construction project that requires intense labor should be done on a weekend. Close the fucking ramp and get the job done in 72 hours. Hire 100 guys. Don't drag this shit out over 100days with a skeleton crew. You... are... killing... us...

Sincerely - residents of Westwood/West LA. Go fuck yourself.