LA has a love-hate relationship with freeways. Everyone realizes that making more of them, and making them bigger and wider, is of limited help in clearing congestion for any length of time — but the nature of housing and job distribution in the Southland makes rapid transit of much narrower value to a smaller number of people than in many other urban areas. Everyone wants freeways that go where they want to go (surface street congestion being just as significant a problem, only not so dramatic) — but nobody wants to be the people (usually, but not always, poor) through whose neighborhoods freeways are built.
Efforts to restrict freeway expansion by the state have generally been short-lived and ultimately counter-productive. Jerry Brown, back in his first stint in the governor's office, killed a wide array of freeway projects — many of which got picked back up by later administrations, often at significantly higher cost.
It would seem that the only ways to reduce freeway traffic (or its growth) are indirect: promotion of timeshifting and telecommuting can have an impact (as previous special events have shown), but those in turn may be driven as much by rising gasoline and property prices that encourage employees to look for other alternative ways of getting to (or accessing) their work, and employers to look for ways to reduce their office space.
They Moved Mountains (And People) To Build L.A.’s Freeways
Carmageddon—it was the nightmare scenario L.A.’s transportation authorities warned of when a construction project shut down a critical stretch of freeway for an entire weekend in July 2011. Gridlock. The glow of brake lights. The overwhelming angst of a city denied its full and unimpeded access to its freeways. In the end, the public outreach built around that ominous term worked. Motorists stayed home, and life went on as normal. A few wags even…