On a road to nowhere
Officials, public need to change direction
07/26/2007
Is it just us, or has nobody else caught on that adding more and more lanes to local freeways won’t solve our traffic problems?
In early July, Ventura County officials celebrated the long-delayed reopening of the Santa Clara River Bridge on Highway 101 between Oxnard and Ventura.
The spiffy new roadway now offers six lanes in either direction betweenVentura’s Johnson Drive and Oxnard’s Vineyard Avenue, and freeway access to Oxnard Blvd.
Anyone who has driven the freeway or visited the Esplanade shopping center during the past five years can probably notice a difference. With construction continuing at the massive RiverPark development in Oxnard, and new housing and commercial developments in store for surrounding areas, the new roadway will accommodate a large chunk of expected traffic growth.
Yet reports are already coming in that the construction has simply squeezed the 101 bottleneck west into the city of Ventura, where the freeway quickly narrows to three lanes in either direction. Will Ventura residents and officials begin clamoring for the Ventura County Transportation Commission and the California Department of Transportation to widen the freeway there?
Perhaps, but those institutions instead say that after freeways are widened in the East County on highways 101 and 23 they will turn their sights to spending $116 million to widen the 101 between Seacliff and Carpinteria, beginning in 2011.
Yes, nearly 17,000 people travel that stretch every day as they commute to and from Santa Barbara from Ventura. Yes it’s a pain. Yes new carpool lanes may help.
Will it solve the problem? No.
Simply put, too many people want to go too many places. Too many people want to live in Ventura County and work elsewhere. Until such a time that transportation and urban planners focus on getting commuters to either stay home or get out of their cars we will continue to have a broken transportation system.
We need real, working mass transit. We need reliable rail travel between Santa Barbara and Ventura and an expansion of the Metrolink system serving L.A. from Ventura. We need further implementation of the splendid Ventura Intercity Service Transit Authority, or VISTA, bus system and better integration of local bus systems.
It may not be where the money or the inclination lies, but the whack-a-mole system of freeway widen only proves the necessity of mass transit.
Transportation officials aren’t the only ones to blame. To all the NIMBY’s railing against trains, to all of the folks in Santa Barbara County plastering Fix101now.org bumperstickers on their cars, we have one simple thing to say: Wake up.
It has been said before. The more lanes you add, the more traffic you entice.
A complete shift in our thinking about mass transit is long overdue.
The public is in dire, dire need of kicking its addiction to automobiles. This isn’t some polemic about oil wars or the onset of global warming, although it probably doesn’t need to be said that both crises might lessen if we, as a society, actually took some responsibility for our driving habits.
Yes, road trips are pleasant and automobiles are fascinating machines. We all have different needs that make driving a car a convenient, enticing mode of transportation. But we need to give up our self-oriented, me-first attitudes and learn to make some sacrifices.
Just over half a century ago our nation learned how to make sacrifices to combat the Great Depression and then went on to defeat fascism thanks, in part, to the support our troops received from the home front. How depressing would it be if the children and grandchildren of the people who made those sacrifices refused to park their cars in the garage a few days a week because they didn’t want to sit next to strangers on a bus or railcar?
Besides, riding the train is fun, and who wants to slog through traffic when you can drift off to sleep on a bus as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean?
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