Sunday, June 16, 2019

The LB Traffic Time-BOMB

Laguna's parking demand and traffic congestion grows exponentially, so what does exponential growth of congestion look like?  Let's use rice on a chessboard with 8x8=64 squares to demonstrate exponential growth.

The time elapsed for Laguna's car population to double is called the doubling period. Imagine each grain of rice on the chessboard is a car and each square represents the doubling period in years. The sequence goes 1,2,4,8,16,32 years and so on. For a growth rate at 6-percent the doubling period is 12 years. If the first horse and buggy arrived in 1900 and cars followed, the car population doubled in 1912, 1924, 1936 and so on.  Watch what happens to the population of cars.



Exponential growth means the number of cars using our streets will double and so must the spaces needed to park them, the condition when all the public space for cars is occupied is called saturation.  Urban consultants (RBF, MIG) have told us the demand for parking grows at 4.5-percent per year while Caltrans tells us in 2015 peak traffic volume growth was 13.5%.*

It should be clear Laguna Beach cannot build enough roads or parking to accommodate the exponential growth of cars nor faster than Japan/Germany/Detroit can build them. Lagunatics need to use alternatives to the car and both the city of Laguna Beach and Caltrans should provide the infrastructure.

*Caltrans SR-133 Peak traffic growth factors from base year 2015 are 2023: 13.5% and 2043: 6.25%  

-LS 

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