Thursday, February 12, 2009

Remove Infrastructure To Improve Traffic?

I blogged about this after the Obama inauguration last month, but now the journal 'Scientific American' is tackling it. An article in the January issue of the publication talks about how removing transportation infrastructure may actually improve traffic flow, instead of slowing it down.

On Inauguration Day in Washington, D.C. last month, all the bridges into the downtown area were closed. There were millions of people in town for the occasion, all trying to get to the same place. So was traffic horribly tied up for hours? No, everything actually seemed to flow better when people had to find an alternate to driving alone into the city core.

The Scientific American article talks about how engineers tore down a 6-mile stretch of highway in Seoul, South Korea and put a park in it's place. Was there mass hysteria, civil unrest, people driving through the park? Read the article to find out.

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About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.