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We're living in the 21st century. Aren't we supposed to have cities made of crystal spires, everyone wearing the same silver jumpsuit, and nuclear powered flying cars? You would think paving a road shouldn't be that damn hard, but it often is. There are stretches of highway & interstate in various parts of the country that have been under construction for decades. It sounds like a small issue, but if you think about it, whether a government can efficiently & quickly fix a road can be emblematic of how it might deal with "larger" issues.
And even if the roads were smooth, then throw into this discussion that you still have to deal with the nuts that have no business operating a mechanized conveyance.
So... what has been your worst experience with horrible traffic & shitty roads?
How much does your commute actually cost? The financial data websites Bundle & TheStreet ran the numbers based on cost of gas, time lost, upkeep of a car, etc., and then ranked it across 90 metropolitan areas.
Click on the images below to "emBIGgen" them:
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According to U.S. Census data, roughly 76% of U.S. workers drive to work alone. Twelve percent carpool, 4.7% use public transportation, 3.3% work from home, 2.9% walk to work and 1.2% used other means (including a motorcycle or bicycle)... According to Bundle's data, the average American worker spends more than $6,000 a year in transportation costs. Those over the age of 65 spent the least this year, averaging $3,820. Those ages 36-40 spent the most: $6,240 a year.
To rank cities, Bundle used spending and price data that looked at the average length of commute, miles traveled, annual hours delayed, auto expenses and gas... Bundle determined that the worst commute in the country, in terms of cost and wasted productivity, belongs to Dallas. Other cities that struggle the most with commuter aggravation and cost are San Jose, Calif.; Houston; Miami; Phoenix; Los Angeles; Bridgeport, Conn.; Riverside, Calif.; Austin, Texas; Orlando, Fla.; and Nashville, Tenn.
Dallas had the unfortunate distinction of having one of the nation's longest average commutes (with a combined 52,077,000 miles a day travelled by its rush hour commuters), as well as costly auto expenses ($400) and a high rate of hours delayed (53).
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In California, one of the most maddening things in the world is to be trapped in your car on the "405" for an hour & then pass the Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) construction crew, where one guy is working & five other guys are watching him work. But we are talking about a state that's home to the eighth circle of Hell (also known as the California DMV), so nothing surprises.
At last count, there are 3,967,159 miles of American highway. It is the legacy of President Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created the Interstate Highway System as well as other roads to support the expansion it caused.
However, every mile of road is open to the same political vices as other programs that suffer from waste, fraud, and abuse. Politicians vie for transportation funds so they can build "Bridges to Nowhere." The specific placement of a new road or upgrading an old one, and the traffic that will pass through certain points within an area because of it, can have positive or negative effects on businesses & communities. There's bid rigging & kickbacks, which may or may not help someone in a high place get his brother-in-law's construction company the contract. And then, let's hope the brother-in-law's construction company doesn't use substandard materials to build the overpass.
On the Federal level, in 2005 Congress passed & President Bush signed into law a $286 billion transportation bill, which governs federal surface transportation spending through 2010. Within the 2005 transportation bill, there was also 6,371 earmarks. The economic stimulus bill passed last year dedicated $48 billion to transportation infrastructure. Also, a new transportation bill has been one of the "hostages" held by the GOP since last year, with Congress passing continuing resolutions in the meantime. According to some reports, the Republicans in the House are targeting transportation spending for budget cuts.
However, the Department of Transportation was saying 5 years ago they needed $500 billion over 6 years to deal with congestion & fix everything that's weathered, broken, or in need of replacement. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2009 Report Card on America's infrastructure estimated a need for about another trillion in funding over 5 years to substantially improve bridge & road conditions.
The Federal Gas Tax is supposed to be what funds fixing all of this. Except the Gas Tax hasn't been raised since 1993, leading to an estimated unfunded six-year shortfall of $200 billion for the next proposed authorization (which still wouldn't have fixed everything, and is out the window with the Republican takeover of the House). Politicians of both parties view it as political suicide to support a gas tax increase, but it's "penny dumb, pound dumber," since whatever people might save in lower gas prices at the pump goes to fixing the damage caused by big-ass potholes. The alignment on automobiles doesn't react well to running over giant potholes.
The latest road report from TRIP (a national nonprofit transportation research group) found almost a quarter of the nation's roads are in poor condition.
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Twenty-four percent of the nation’s major metropolitan roads – interstates, freeways and other critical local routes – have pavements in poor condition, resulting in rough rides and costing the average urban motorist $402 annually in additional vehicle operating costs, according to a new report released today by TRIP, a national transportation research group.
"With state and local governments facing looming budget deficits and without a long-term federal surface transportation program in place, road conditions are projected to get even worse in the future," said Will Wilkins, TRIP’s executive director. "Repairing rough urban roads could ease the burden on drivers and provide a smoother ride while creating jobs and boosting the economy." The FHWA [Federal Highway Administration] found that every $1 billion invested in highway construction would support approximately 27,800 jobs, including approximately 9,500 in the construction sector, approximately 4,300 jobs in industries supporting the construction sector, and approximately 14,000 other jobs induced in non-construction related sectors of the economy.
According to the U.S. DOT, through 2025, the U.S. faces a $189 billion shortfall in the cost to maintain urban roadways in their current condition and a $375 billion shortfall in the cost to make significant improvements to urban roadways. State transportation funding is threatened by the continuing fiscal crisis in state budgets, which in fiscal year 2010 prompted a $74.4 billion reduction in overall state spending. States’ financial needs continue to far surpass expenditures, with the National Governors Association projecting total state shortfalls for 2010 – 2011 of more than $127 billion.
So what about specific roads, interstates, bridges, and intersections? When judging this, it can be more than just the physical condition of the road, but also traffic, scenery, and other intangibles.
Earlier this year, Popular Mechanics had an article on "5 Terrible U.S. Road and Highway Designs: Lessons Learned."
In the immediate post-war years, massive highway projects reshaped vast sections of the urban landscape. In New York, whole neighborhoods disappeared, and more than 5000 families were forced to move when master builder Robert Moses ran the 8.3-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway, a vital link in his vision for a massive network of urban expressways, through a densely populated segment of the Bronx. In the years after 95 divided the Bronx, the neighborhoods to the south, cut off from normal street traffic flow and related commerce, quickly faded into the blighted, burned-out south Bronx of the 1960s.
Across America, similar projects floundered in the face of community protest. The so-called "highway revolts" of the 1960s and 1970s brought central urban expressway expansion to a halt. According to Steve Alpert, a highway engineer trainee with HNTB, who studied the lessons of the Cross-Bronx Expressway at MIT, "You still never see inner-city freeways being built anymore." What you do see, though, is cities grappling with the legacy of old urban expressways. Seattle, for example, is currently considering a proposal to replace its Alaskan Way Viaduct. Built in the 1950s, the elevated, double-decked highway runs 2.2 miles along central Seattle's waterfront. "This has been the center of a great debate; why put a viaduct on the waterfront?" says Ron Paananen, who is the project administrator for the proposed replacement of the Viaduct.
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Originally built between 1944 and 1948, the Valley Highway in Denver is one of the older segments of the Interstate Highway system. Freeways, though, tend not to age gracefully, and this particular stretch is no exception. When it was built Denver's population hovered around 600,000. Since then, it's quadrupled to 2.4 million. Now, 200,000 vehicles use the Valley Highway each day, and according to Steve Hersey, a traffic engineer with the Colorado Department of Transportation, certain sections of the road are "almost always backed up." One major contributor to the congestion is the spacing, or lack thereof, between I-25's interchanges.
"When you look at these older roads, typically what happens is you start out and you have decent spacing," Hersey says. "But as roadside areas develop, which they tend do when you build a freeway past them, and you start adding interchanges, that's when you get into trouble."
Every year, Overdrive magazine, a trade publication for long-haul truckers, polls its readers to determine the state with the worst roads in the country. For a number of reasons, Louisiana is a fixture at the top of the list. As one driver told the magazine in 2008, Interstate 10, which runs east-west across the entire state, is "rougher than a corncob." The truckers aren't the only ones who have noticed.
"You know you're here from the bumps," says Richard Levinson, a travelling jazz musician who works out of New Orleans in the winter. "As soon as you hit Louisiana, even if it's dark and you can't see the signs, you can tell." One explanation for the rough and rumbling roads of Louisiana is the soft turf on which they are built. Speaking to Overdrive in 2008, Mark Lambert, then communications director for the Louisiana DOT, said "Over time, you get waves in the concrete as the loose soil shifts or sinks, and if you're in a long wheelbase vehicle, that gets pretty bumpy. You'll get a bump about every 50 feet."
The New York Times' Freakonomics blog once had a "Worst Roads in America" competition, in which readers of the blog submitted their suggestions. Top transportation scholars at the University of Southern California whittled through the submissions and picked ten, of which New York's Cross Bronx Expressway was picked as the worst. The list leans East Coast, but from what I hear Massachusetts deserves it.
Here, in no particular order, are the top 10:
- The
Cross Bronx Expressway in New York City.
The Cross Bronx Expressway. An oxymoron if ever there was one. It is a symphony of delay, dereliction, and despair. You get your first introduction by sitting in a cacophony of traffic at the George Washington Bridge toll plaza. The number of roads that funnel their cars to "the Bridge" look like a half-eaten bowl of linguine. Then the true nightmare begins as you hit New York City and begin the slow, desperate crawl through the Bronx. You can only wonder what Robert Moses was thinking when, like a kid with a shovel at the beach, he just dug a 100+ foot trench through the borough, displacing thousands of families so that hundreds of thousands of cars can crab their way at speeds upwards of 4 m.p.h. while being whipsawed by 48-foot tractor trailers arriving from points south and east after many hours of caffeine/Red Bull/?-aided driving alertness. Oh, and that is on a good day!
- Route-18 through New Brunswick, New Jersey.
- Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, New York between 70th and 30th Streets.
- Trying to get on "The Capital Beltway" (aka I-495).
The on-ramp to the Beltway near the Woodrow Wilson bridge headed out of Alexandria, Va., into Maryland made me meditative. This scenic two-mile stretch of the on-ramp to I-495 has been a favorite place to while away an hour or two in my car pondering Buddhist philosophy as I watch a caterpillar crawling past me and 300 other cars stuck at the same intersection. Green light, red light. A fleeting chance to pass through three intersections. Another light change. Now the ethereal cacophony of honking drivers hoping to enter the on-ramp into I-495 rush-hour traffic at a rate of 5 miles per hour. Life is random and beautiful. Construction workers on this stretch of road also lean to zen Buddhism as they examine the weather, the car dealership across the street, and each other, slowing the rhythm of their months of work.
- The stretch of I-80 that runs through Nebraska. I thought this was an interesting selection for this list, because according to the person who submitted it, the road wasn't bad because of potholes or an overall shitty condition. It was selected for the list because they thought the road was boring. The submitter claimed it was like driving through "desolation" for six hours.
- The cluster "truck" that is the tangled morass of merges leading to the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City, New Jersey.
-
The "Big Dig" in Boston, Massachusetts.
The "Big Dig" — the megaproject to reroute Interstate 93, the chief highway through the city of Boston, into a 3.5-mile tunnel under the city — has amassed an infamous reputation. As the most expensive highway project in the U.S. — the total now stands at a staggering $22 billion — it gave cause for longtime Congressman Barney Frank to quip, "Rather than lower the expressway, wouldn’t it be cheaper to raise the city?"
What truly makes this among the worst stretches of highway in the U.S. is for all the project’s lofty aspirations of alleviating the chronic congestion on I-93 that was predicted to have 16-hour traffic jams by 2010, the project has incurred criminal arrests, escalating costs, death, leaks, poor execution, use of substandard materials, and has had negligible impact of traffic. As my mother would testify to, trips at rush hours are longer and more congested, rather than less.
- MA-2 in Massachusetts.
- Gano Street on-ramp for I-195 in Providence, Rhode Island.
-
The Tobin Bridge (aka The Mystic River Bridge) in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Tobin
I take the road most traveled,
With pot-holes galore and water dripping,
The pavement shattered,
The workers lost and mingling.
I take the road most traveled,
With the two levels crumbling,
A two-hour commute with drivers enraged,
And the fast-pass gate shuttering after every car.
I take the road most traveled,
The tourists lost and clueless,
Backing out of the fast-pass lane confused,
With the road trembling all the while.
MSN has created their own list of the "most treacherous, traffic-clogged roads in America." There's a bit more West Coast flavor with this one. So, in no particular order.....
- Los Angeles, U.S. Route 101 to I-405 Interchange.
Nowhere in the nation (except parking lots) do cars spend so much time bumper-to-bumper than at the juncture of the 101 and 405 freeways in Los Angeles, which link the east side of the city with the downtown area. The statistics alone are enough to provoke road rage: 318,000 drivers per day use this juncture, and they spend 72 hours of their lives stuck in traffic annually. The rush hour window here is a staggering five to eight hours per day, and during that time, you'll spend twice as long on the road as when it's traffic-free — which makes for the highest travel time index rating in the nation. If you must drive it, make sure your Bluetooth is fully charged and your iPod is locked and loaded. Speaking of which . . . you'd be wise to avoid eye contact with other drivers: Car-to-car shootings are not a relic of the past. There have been six so far this year, although most were the result of gang violence rather than road rage.
- Colorado, U.S. Route 550, aka Million Dollar Highway, from Ouray to Silverton.
- Atlanta's I-285 at I-85 Interchange, aka Spaghetti Junction.
The hip-hop duo Outkast, Atlanta natives, named a song after this gnarly web of highway. The lyrics are foreboding: "Be careful where you roam cause you might not make it home. Don't you dare ever get lost cause you get caught up in that sauce." The junction is a five-level interchange (think clover leaf above clover leaf above clover leaf) with multiple ramps and smaller roads feeding into it. The American Highway Users Alliance gave Spaghetti Junction a grade of F, indicating that stop-and-go traffic prevails here most of the time, causing 133,000 hours of traffic delays each year. The time to avoid Spaghetti Junction at all costs: in winter, when a combination of rain and freezing nighttime temps can turn the many ramps and overpasses into a labyrinthine ice skating rink, causing dozens of accidents and epic delays.
- Chicago, Circle Interchange.
- Maine, U.S. Route 1.
- New York, I-95, Cross-Bronx Expressway.
- San Diego, I-5.
All-you-can-drink specials at Tijuana bars attract hordes of SoCal residents each weekend — many of them San Diego college students and other minors who are lured the 15 miles across the border by Mexico's lower drinking age (18). Hence, the stretch of Interstate 5 leading north from Tijuana becomes a swerving, high-speed DUI minefield on weekend nights, and each year 10,000 to 15,000 people are arrested for driving while intoxicated in San Diego County. Occasionally, all-night binges combine tragically with one of the most traffic-clogged early morning commuting routes in the country — both in San Diego and leading north through Orange County.
- Nevada, I-15.
- Providence, Rhode Island, I-95 at the I-195 Interchange.
- Louisiana, I-10.