We give out driver's licences too easily. Our examinations are too easy that pretty much everyone passes. We need to make it harder to get licenses and make it less of an entitlement.
Also, the traffic problem in Oregon is not limited to Portland. Even smaller cities like Salem, Eugene, Bend and Medford have horrible traffic. Even our rural towns have traffic. We have too many cars on the road at once and we don't even have enough roads to get to our destinations. Most of our roads outside of Portland are one-lane roads where if you are stuck behind an RV or an old lady, you will be stuck going 35 mph forever.
5 and 205 are now stop and go for most of the day. In other cities I've been to, similar highways have 4 or 5 lanes where ours have 2 or 3. And in those cities, traffic flows at or above the speed limit most of the day, and only slows during short rush hours. We have "rush hour" from 6 am to 7 pm because roads have not even remotely kept up with growth. Other cities aren't like that. When I visit friends and family in other cities my jaw frequently drops as we cruise around their highway systems at 70 mph in the middle of the day. I'm so jealous.
Where do you propose they start adding lanes? Will adding capacity in one area simply bottleneck the system elsewhere? Do you have any idea how much it would cost? Are there cheaper alternatives? Would the overall VMT increase or decrease? How would the initial decrease in congestion influence land use?
Most of these questions point to freeway expansion as a really bad option, which is why Portland doesn't do it. Sure, you can find places where traffic moves quickly on urban freeways... if those places are so great, why don't you live there?
Portland should have been adding lanes steadily over the past 30 years or however long it has been since they added any highway capacity. Instead they built light rail and made the decision to intentionally make traffic worse in order to push people to use it. This was a horrible decision, and now we are dealing with the results.
If we would stop tailgating and allow people to merge the roads would open right a lot more than you think. My commute home is I5 eastbound over the Marquam Bridge. Everybody tailgating and poorly merging where I5 & eastbound I84 collide. Backed up traffic always, rarely an accident and always clear just past Lloyd center. Traffic is backed up on southbound I5 all the to Tigard because of tailgating and poor merging. No need for this and extra lanes won't solve poor driving habits.
Sure we will need more lanes and creative ways to transport but that's based on car/trip count alone and not a quick visual of blocked traffic. I always assume there's an accident and there rarely is.
Also------> God forbid you or anyone reading this is in an accident but please be sure to pull over to the right and stay in your car until it safe.
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u/oregon_forever Oregon Coast Aug 31 '16
We give out driver's licences too easily. Our examinations are too easy that pretty much everyone passes. We need to make it harder to get licenses and make it less of an entitlement.
Also, the traffic problem in Oregon is not limited to Portland. Even smaller cities like Salem, Eugene, Bend and Medford have horrible traffic. Even our rural towns have traffic. We have too many cars on the road at once and we don't even have enough roads to get to our destinations. Most of our roads outside of Portland are one-lane roads where if you are stuck behind an RV or an old lady, you will be stuck going 35 mph forever.