Another issue that contributes to congestion in metropolitan areas is left-side entrance/exit ramps. This creates confusion, and forces traffic to slow in all lanes, especially when highways are set up so that drivers entering a highway have to quickly cross mulitple lanes of traffic to get to a left-side exit with a relatively short distance to travel.

In a few years, Russia not only fed the population, but it started to export a lot of grain (and does so till now). May be, author should have better mentioned soup kitchens from Great Depression time, shouldn’t he? May he would exercise more knowledge then, and wouldn’t looked like an ignoramus.

The Russians rationed the bread instead of making more bread. More bread would have fed more Russians.

The author’s thesis, as I understand it, is that rationing (variable time of day pricing) the road use would increase the resources available by making the road capacity more efficient.

Unfortunately, bread production does not have a similar latent capacity/efficiency which can spring back when it stops being overtaxed.

Yes, that’s true. We’re just going to roll with it, I think.

-Jebediah

Bandwidth is not limited in the same way that roadways are (space constraints, linear costs, etc.), and the scarcity we have in this country is artificial. I worked in the telecom industry when the government was giving companies huge subsidies to convert to fiber optic.

Incredible amounts of fiber were laid, and then, nothing. The telecom bust somehow allowed the companies to get off without providing the promised abundant broadband that fiber would have allowed.

The answer is not, though, as it is with highways, to ration the existing infrastructure with higher prices for peak services. The answer is to hold the telecoms accountable for the money that has already been invested in information infrastructure and bring it us like a river.

Then things will really take off.

http://www.transalt.org/newsroom/media/1072

Nearly half the traffic in Park Slope is created by drivers cruising around for parking spots due to jam-packed curbs, according to a new study unveiled yesterday.”What we have now is the equivalent of a Russian bread line,” said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, the advocacy group that conducted the study.”Except instead of bread, it’s parking, and instead of peasants standing in lines, we have cars circling the block,” White said.