This same story keeps repeating itself, decade after decade.
The asses in the seats at all the Transportation Bureaucracies seem to be chosen based upon their inability to serve the public they are charged to support.
Instead they go out of their way to impose their small minded central planning ideas based on "they know better".
They don't!
Below is an old example from California in the 1970s, exposed by Joan Didion.
There are many other examples. One of the latest was the idiocy of Carpool Lanes on the Freeways in New Jersey that were already over stressed by poor planing and inadequate peak capacity.
Now the elite fools in NYC are continuing their idiotic tradition.
Could these asses, just for once, act to help the situation instead of making it worse, ON PURPOSE!
Why do these "we know best" idiots have to keep making government our enemy?
Please, Vote their bosses out of office so they may be replaced! m/r
Time for some traffic problems in Manhattan!
City officials have intentionally
ground Midtown to a halt
with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave
their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles, high-level
sources told The Post.
Today’s gridlock is the result of an effort by the Bloomberg and
de Blasio administrations over more than a decade of redesigning streets
and ramping up police efforts, the sources said.
“The traffic is being engineered,” a former top NYPD official told
The Post, explaining a long-term plan that began under Mayor Mike
Bloomberg and hasn’t slowed with Mayor de Blasio.
“The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion,
to slow traffic down, to favor bikers and pedestrians,” the former
official said.
“There’s a reduction in capacity through the introduction of bike lanes and streets and lanes being closed down.”
-go to links-
Now for a Familiar Story from forty years ago:
And the pathetic origin of the HOV lane.
Last week
Fred Barnes, Robert Poole, and I
all wrote about how highways work and how government planning types
often try to “improve” them. None of this, however, is new. A friend
sends along Joan Didion’s wonderful 1976 essay “Bureaucrats,” concerning
the imposition of car-pool (or High-Occupancy Vehicle, HOV) lanes on
the Los Angeles freeway system. (You can find the essay in the evil
Google Machine, but it’s
collected in her book The White Album,
which is full of fantastic stuff. If you don’t already have it, you’ll
thank me.) As Didion reports, here’s what happened in 1976:
The California Department of
Transportation—Caltrans—decided that it wanted to change the way people
drive, in the name of the environment. Or something. So it introduced a
pilot program on the Santa Monica Freeway: the “Diamond Lane.” The
Diamond Lane was an HOV prototype, reserved for buses and cars with more
than three riders. At the time of the Diamond Lane’s inception, the
Santa Monica Freeway carried 240,000 cars per day, conveying a total of
260,000 people.
Caltrans decided that it would prefer to
eliminate 7,800 of those vehicles—that was, literally, their
precisely-stated goal—by forcing people to carpool. Thus the Diamond
Lanes reserved 25 percent of the available highway space for 3 percent
of the vehicles. As you might imagine, pandemonium ensued.
Traffic on the Santa Monica ground to a halt.
The number of accidents increased by about 400 percent. The public
flipped out. Lawsuits were filed; people scattered nails in the Diamond
Lanes in protest. Apparently, people thought that Caltrans was trying to
surreptitiously make their lives harder to achieve some statist
social-engineering target. Why would they have ever gotten that idea?
-go to links-
