🚀 go-pugleaf

John Higdon  <no-spam@RadioMonopoly.com> wrote:

> spp@cs.berkeley.edu  wrote:

>> 85 Doesn't go through San Jose.

> Oh, it doesn't? It certainly cuts through a major portion of
> south San Jose, from its southern terminus along many miles to
> where it enters Los Gatos. It then cuts through another portion
> of west San Jose. Check your map.

Okay, I stand corrected on that point.  I've never been on
that southern stretch of 85, only the part from 280 to 17.
In any case, 85 doesn't go through the city center.

>> On those ocassions when I have to travel by car from Berkeley
>> to Santa Cruz, in order to get to an evening event, I find it
>> incredibly inconvenient that there is no freeway
>> that totally bypasses San Jose.  880 to 17 is the most direct
>> route but it is the worst in terms of traffic.  And obviously,
>> San Jose people commuting locally are not benefitting from
>> people like me who are just passing through the middle of
>> downtown San Jose.

> You have cited the worst bottleneck in the Bay Area: the
> passage of 880 from Milpitas to the 101 interchange. The fact
> that it goes through San Jose has much less to do with the
> congestion than the fact that it has the same number of lanes as
> it did when it opened in the fifties (two in each direction).

Exactly my point.  You build a freeway cutting through a
city center; usage patterns and demographics follow which
make it a necessary artery; then a few decades later, it's
a major regional clog.

>> The best route is in fact the one that most resembles
>> a bypass: 280 to 85 to 17.  Unfortunately, 280 is most
>> easily reached by going through San Francisco...

> I agree. Tell them to widen 880 north of the 101 interchange.
> "Bypass" is not a factor. The route you described just has wider
> roads. Oh, I forgot:  "making freeways wider does not reduce
> congestion".

It's partly true that widening freeways doesn't help congestion,
but the main advantage of a bypass relative to a wider city
center freeway is that traffic on the bypass will not slow
down traffic more local to the city.  This is, like, obvious.

>> I consider San Jose an excellent example of why, in general,
>> you need bypasses, and how the city-center-oriented freeway
>> system makes traffice much worse.

> You are making a generalization from a notoriously bad isolated 
> problem.

It's not an isolated problem, it's a very typical problem that
results from typical poor planning.

Steve