🚀 go-pugleaf

In dc.driving Josh Turner <shua@umich.edu> wrote:
: Yes, but this is rather like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
: Why should we, the people who live inside the Beltway, punish ourselves
: with awful traffic just to prevent those from outside the Beltway from
: coming in?

Ah, but we're punishing those evil far-out suburbanites more; they've
already travelled 20 or more miles before they hit our gridlock... makes
it easier, no?

Ahem.

: Personally, I think that there is no excuse for a freeway system that
: forces me to drive on the WW bridge if I want to get from Arlington to
: BWI.

I was looking over the 1971 DC highway plan again today. Something caught
my eye: The plan offers several alternatives (my favorite is 2A, btw) but
there is also a map of "existing" corridors. It includes anything already
built (in 1971) or already "committed." This, it turns out, included not
only I66 and the Dulles Toll road, but the Twin Sisters Bridge, The
Potomac River/Pallisades Parkway, the I695 South leg, and the 295 East leg
all the way up to Bladensburg rd. So all of the dire predictions about
traffic in 1990, which turned out to not be dire enough (it's worse than
the planners envisioned) was based on DOUBLE the DC freeway miles that we
actually got -- their worst-case scenario wasn't nearly as worst-case as
they thought...

: Yeah, what the hell is that all about? I'm assuming that it must be the
: work of the taxicab lobby, or something, because it sure seems asinine
: to shut down the mass transit system two hours *before* the bars close.
: What a good way to encourage people to drive drunk...

In all fairness to Metro, they're one of the few big transit systems that
cleans EVERY car EVERY night. Yeah, I know, they could clean them every
other night and run 7 x 24, but that's the only excuse I could think of...


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 > B E N T L E Y <     bentley AT digex DOT net
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