So, I was taking my sweet time going home to Sacramento this weekend, having just lost track of the number of times I was stuck in traffic slowdown trying to get out of the Bay. It’s perhaps sometime in the mindless inching march of the metallic mobile orchestra that I pieced together a mundane realization – transportation in California sucks.
It’s a given that public transportation in California is pretty bare, especially when compared to the developed and mature infrastructure on the American east coast and elsewhere in the world. That’s not supposed to be a problem, though, since California is big and vast, and people here would rather drive instead; so why are our roads so poorly designed?
Ok, so that was probably a bit unfair – there are roads which are well designed, cities that are laid out pretty well and in a straight-forward manner, and I’m sure there are all sorts of challenges to be had with building public roads on the hill that is under San Francisco. Most of our roads and major highways/bridges are also over 30 years old, so chances are Caltrans didn’t think about scaling its road system to accomodate quite this many cars.
But of course that’s no excuse for the poor design exhibited on some roads. I go to work everyday by merging onto the highway through a 4-way intersection: 3 STOP signs for the local streets and highway on/off ramps that feature a 100 ft. piece of road for motorists to go from 20 mph to 70 mph or vice versa; it’s essentially an accident waiting to happen. We also feature a highway on-ramp from a southbound street to a southbound highway, only one exit down, which requires a confused motorist to have to turn left 720(!) degrees to get onto the highway after following 5-6 road signs leading him there; maybe they were striving for creativity there.
Nonetheless, this weekend was especially stupid. Caltrans decided to shut down half the Bay Bridge over a period of three days, over a long weekend made possible by a holiday designed to provide a long weekend for families to travel and leave town. With one side of the traffic completely shut down, people were encouraged to travel via our inadequate BART rail system with trains leaving every 20+ minutes (they didn’t even increase train density throughout the day and only added a select few trains overnight) or to take an alternate route, via another bridge 17 miles south.
And I’m guessing most people chose to take the other route, which would explain the jam I was stuck in for most of the hour trying to cross the San Mateo bridge. The bridge itself has design issues – despite expanding in 2004, Caltrans didn’t see fit to add any sort of turning point in the middle of the 7-mile bridge, so a tiny sign on the west bank warns travellers of the point of no return, where if they do not turn out via an unimpressive exit just before the bridge they’ll be forced to spend $3 and 14 miles worth of gas cursing their mistake.
The east bank is worse, with what’s essentially a cloverleaf intersection between two major roads of travel. As a veteran of Simcity and Transport Tycoon, even I know that cloverleafs are only good for sparse highway systems that have equal merging from all directions; in this case, the vast majority of cars are simply going from north to west or from east to north, and for some unknown reason the ramps are single-laned despite the heavy 3 or 4-lane traffic flowing from the bridge, so things are almost always backed up there – not out of necessity, but simply from poor design.
And this is ultimately why I sat there, with the radio and A/C up, patiently waiting for Labor Day to end.