Car Culture

(Tanya Snyder takes a somewhat more serious tone at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.  Alao, the Times reports that G.M. is pulling the advertisement out of its rotation.- DN)

There are two theories to transportation engineering and traffic.  One theory is that traffic is like a raging river.  If you block it in one place, it will flow someplace else.  If you add more space for it to flow, it will flow more smoothly.  This theory has dominated traffic and transportation plans for years.

We got your predictions in the thread below, but as the weekend progresses feel free to let us know how/if Carmageddon is impacting your weekend. My first report is that we're relieved that the news is recharging at the moment so that we have a couple of hours without helicopters flying overhead.

Unless you've been living under a rock, a rock that doesn't have Internet service, radio, television, print publications, carrier pigeons, bike message service or regular mail, you've been bombarded with messages about how awful next weekend is going to be. You see, to expand the already gargantuan 405 Freeway another lane in each direction, Metro and Caltrans are going to have to close 10.5 miles of said freeway between the I-10 and I-110 from Friday night until Monday morning. The press has dubbed it "Carmageddon." I have dubbed it "this weekend."

Gerontologists in a laboratory at the University of Southern California exposed a group of mice to the same atmospheric conditions that humans encounter when driving along the freeway. Horrifyingly, they discovered that the mice’s brains showed the kind of swelling and inflammation associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The researchers didn’t super-dose to get these results: the mice were exposed to freeway air for the equivalent of 15 hours a week-- less than the 18.5 hour average Americans spend in their cars. Jokes aside about getting those darn mice off the road, the study suggests that driving less can reduce our risk of brain damage.

Our local paper recently ran the story of Edith Cameron, killed in a car crash on a road we sometimes use. We anxiously scanned the column looking for that something that one of the drivers involved must have done wrong—the thing that we surely would never do, like hit the road without a seatbelt or after downing a few beers.

For eight months now, the LADOT has been taking shots in the Valley over the a two mile road diet on Wilbur Avenue.  Between Nordhoff and Chatsworth, Wilbur went from two lanes in both directions to one lane in each direction, a left turn lane, and bike lanes on both sides.  Last night, representatives of the Northridge and Porter Ranch Neighborhood Councils, in an official and deciding vote, voted to leave the current road configuration as it was instead of repainting the road to a compromise plan created by the LADOT and a Wilbur Working Group.  There's a lot of potential headlines from this meeting, so I'll do my best to give each of them their due.