For many years I just lived one exit from work. So, never really had the experience of a long commute. I still live at the same place, but my work place changed for over 6 months now. Commute on 101 has not been very pleasant. I understand that economy is doing very well, at least in the bay area where people can sell their companies for Billions even when there is no profit. But I think the problem is partly an engineering problem. I feel that some of the systems we have in place are not correct. I will list down a few of my observations.
1) “Metering on”: I think this is a useless technique. I have actually seen the traffic to be much smoother when these things were not on at all than when they are on. But what’s more frustrating is that the car pool lane timing stops at 9am but the metering continues till 10am.
2) “Car Pool Lane”: I understand this encourages people to share the ride and reduce the carbon footprint. But I hope that’s not the main intent of this program and the main intent is to reduce traffic congestion. On the contrary, I see people who have the privilege of getting on to the car pool lane doing it in such a rush as if that’s their highest priory of the day that they cause sudden stops for people in other lanes. This is actually adding to the congestion rather than reducing. On top, think of all the wasted gas to accelerate back on a stop-and-go traffic. Is the net result more greener? Not sure.
3) “Car Pool Lane”: Yes, once more. Do we need Car Pool lane on a Friday evening? There are stretches on 101 where there is not so much congestion. Imagine a world where the traffic boards are digital and whether to enable car pool lane privilege is dynamic and based on the current traffic conditions. For example, there is an accident? Disable car-pool lane for the greater good.
4) Over/Under bridge: I see road expansions happening all the time. But I realized that when there is a perpendicular road, whether the bridge is under/over bridge can make a big difference with these expansion efforts.
When I was doing my Bachelors, I did this course called “Computer Simulation” which I thoroughly enjoyed. We used to have access to a software package that allows modeling complex real-life problems. Writing code felt like writing assembly language. However, the constructs were very rich and even the most complex problems could be modeled with just a few lines. Interpreting and understanding the results of the simulation is a different problem altogether. I wish I have access to a similar software for me to test out some of my hypothesis on traffic specifically for 101.