Well said, but it needs to be built.
Ironic that it's your 520th post.

If I ran the show:

All on and off ramps would be on the right hand side of the freeway.
There would be no four lanes, down to three lanes, down to two lanes.
The Seattle powers were plenty willing to use immenent domain for the monorail now we'd see it used where needed.
Highway 99 would become an actual highway again. No cities or districts would be allowed to add stop lights.
Ferries would pay for themselves which may slow down rampant development across the pond.
I'd wait for the viaduc to fall down then, using emminent domain again, tear down all of the condos and replace it with a much larger viaduc.
Bulldozers would be stationed along the freeways and highways. Blocking a lane you get bulldozed off to the side. Tow them away after rush hour.
I'd discourage and maybe even penalize cities like Seattle and Bellevue who try very hard to concentrate all big business in one area creating commuting nightmares.
Finally, I'd launder, I mean fund, billions of dollars to select friends in order to perform a "feesability study" for development of a Star Trek type of teleporter to, once and for all, resolve traffic headaches, climate change and pollution. Coincidentally the study will be completed about the time I retire.

How about this?......Didn't Alaska stop selling land ?.....I know that the Growth Management Act screwed a lot of landowners out the possibility to develop, but maybe we need to crank up that concept? If people didn't have a place to live, they would have to leave, right? hmmmmmm

In fact, if the State bought out all the sellers, and refused to allow further construction, wouldn't that send some of those out-of-state imports elsewhere? (I'm kinda liking this... )

Less folks = less traffic, less cops, less government.....more fish for me......is there a down side?

Yup, "The State" is made up of you and me and a pile of others that would have to fork out the money to buyout all the sellers!

I have a simpler solution: licenses to have kids and limits!

Once you learn we don't have and never will have the money to spend our way out of gridlock, and you learn that logistically due to the large and increasing human population and the finite land base we cannot build our way out of gridlock, then what cha' got for a solution?

Aunty's the only one who's got a finger on the pulse of this problem.

Free public transportation--- starting in the neighborhoods with small buses or vans to the main streets with bigger buses on 15 minute intervals.

By the time I drive to a park and ride I can be at work.

In California I can take a bus and I do once a week to the job I am currently on. Easy convenient and green. So that is equal to 20% of the time... the other days I am at other locations and cannot bus it. But always carpool home, I love carpool lanes..... zipping by all that traffic. Same applies to Washington zip up the 5 hop on the ferry and stay on the island. works seamlessly

Hankster,

The weather is nice enough that most of the year in the Bay area a person could ride a bike to a BART station. When auto traffic on arterials becomes stop-and-go, bikes are faster. My youngest daughter is in grad school in Berkeley and works a few days a week in the city. Assuming that a car is a good way to get around is the first flawed assumption.

Sg

Berkeley to the city is a mass transit breeze, in fact anywhere BART goes is convenient for travelers. It is fast and if it takes you to the far reaches of the bay area. The one of the few places it does not go is into the north bay where I live, they do have bus bridges that could make that work if you were so inclined. In the 60's Bart was proposed to go into Marin county which is in the northbay, it was voted down because it would attract the " wrong" type of resident. Guess what I ended up there anyway. If there was something Washington state could consider it is a system similar to BART it is astronomically expensive I cant remember the per-foot price but it is shocking

OW,

Right, it is a breeze for those who are willing to not rely on a car to get to and from the BART stations. Yeah, it's funny how the middle and upper classes don't want to resign themselves to public transit. An observer has to assume they prefer gridlock, cuz that's the obvious consequence.

Hankster,

If you're handicapped I apologize in advance. It ain't about what we desire for transit. I desire a chaffeur driven Bentley to take me to and from work, but that ain't a happenin' thing either. I know a guy who works as a logger, and instead of riding in the jitney with the other loggers to the work site from the road parking area (typically 4-6 miles of logging road) he rides his moutain bike and then operates machinery and loads trucks all day, rides back to his car, and then joins us for a 30 mile road bike training ride twice a week in spring and summer. I'm saying the bike commute would more likely extend your life. Fortunately you moved into the city. Otherwise you could do as most commuters do, just b!tch about it, cuz traffic will get worse and not better.

Sg

Yeah they'd come to oregon and F up are traffic worse than you washingtonians!


I did a very scientific study in my recent travels on I-5 around oregon.. Every time the left lane was tied up by some 58 mph driving Jack ass (pissing me off was the scientific trigger for this study) I read the liscense plate. 90% of them were from washington, the rest were born during the great depression!

I moved 5 minutes away from my office and as much I dislike city life, I really enjoy the commute with no gridlock.

Hankster,

I wasn't picking on you. Just sharing what I've learned over the years after talking with traffic and highway engineers. I used to b!tch like so many and complain that if "they'd" just fix things, all would be good. It was quite the revelation to learn that "fix" ain't on the menu and won't be. So I figure it's up to each of us to find our own solution or semi-solution that works best for us. I'm less than 7 miles from my office. I drive now, but can also ride my bike if the traffic should become onerous. I'm building a new home in a semi-rural location that will either be an OK drive or I can also ride my bike. Alternatives are the imperative in my opinion; otherwise a person is stuck, and stuck ain't pretty.

Sg

It's like alcoholism with a plague of locusts. It needs to hit rock bottom and have the locusts move on to plague some other area before it gets better.

As far as the courtesy side of traffic goes, I would think that a lot could be improved with just enforcement and awareness of the existing laws (impeding traffic, merging, etc). When you get into the issue of gridlock, that delivers an entirely different logistical challenge of improving commute time with little or no ability to expand our current infrastructure. As much as I hate to sound like the Socialist EU traffic Nazi, I have to say that they were much smarter in developing, and continuing to develop new railways that span the entire continent, actually more if you count the other side of the Urals. Over there, you have a traffic light for pedestrians, one for bicycles and finally one for traffic in the inner city, with mass transit generally occurring below ground. People follow the traffic laws at the intersections and on the roadways, and unless you're willing to pay about 10/gallon for petrol, you take the train everywhere, because it goes everywhere. We as a nation will never be able to afford the labor to put this together here without going trillions again into debt. The last time we sent railway expansion across the nation, or labor was much cheaper (see immigrant/slave labor). There's also that pesky eminent domain issue (jk, I wouldn't want them taking my house for a railway either, unless they paid what I was asking, not what they were willing to give). That's not to say that they don't have commuter problems as well, it's faster to walk from Waterloo to Heathrow than it is to get a cab from Parliment to Westminster Abbey. But if they didn't have that infrastructure, it would be much, much worse. At the end of the day, there's nothing we can do about overcrowded commutes until we send you to a road crew when you sign up for selective service. So, it's moot. Doesn't mean that you couldn't express a little courtesy to the other minions out there trying to make an honest living. I'm gonna buy a yurt and apply for a ski patrol position, that'll fix everything.