I traded traffic on the 405 for traffic on the 22. I don’t know if that was such an upgrade because traffic on the 22 sucks worse, and there’s less of an excuse for it. Whereas the 405 gets backed up because of volume and bad driving (why can’t freeway drivers handle curves? It is a mystery!), the 22 gets backed up because somewhere during the Measure M funded constriction process, some asshole decided to add too many ramps, creating complete clusterfucks of merging vehicles.
Take the Bristol Eastbound on-ramp. That ramp feeds not into the main freeway, but the two lanes that feed onto the 5 south and 57 north. These are separated from the rest of the freeway by a wall, presumably to reduce “slamming,” but this creates its own problems. For example, people entering from Bristol that don’t want to get on the 5 south get less than 500 feet to merge.
To make things more fun, the 57 south and 22 east feed onto the 5 south at about the same place. And the 5 south carpool slash HOV is always backed up because the 57 south feeds into it, and then two lanes merge into one. The HOV lanes are also separated from the main freeway by a wall.
The 5 north to 22 west connector sucks too, again because someone wanted to put in an extra on-ramp. Instead of being 2 lanes that merge into one near the end, this connect has one lane that goes onto the 22 west and one that exits towards The Outlet Mall Formerly Known as the Block at Orange. This causes a crushing amount of slamming, of which I am admittedly guilty off because I’ll be damned if I lose another 10 minutes of my life because some politician really wanted an exit. I have no respect for this design. Sorry folks, blame the government and make them close that off-ramp.
Oh, then the 57 south feeds into it a couple hundred feet later, just as you think the interchange-caused jam is going to clear up. Instead, it goes on basically until harbor. Hell to the yeah. Screw you Orange Crush. Good thing you have the East LA Interchange to make you look good.
SoCal’s traffic is legendary. We waste a horrific amount of man-hours every year sitting in this nonsense because nobody can afford housing in the core and there aren’t any jobs in the Outer Rim, err, Inland Empire. Regional transit options are woefully inadequate, there’s no more room to build more freeways. All we can hope for is the self-driving cars. Maybe, just maybe, through the magic of computers, we’ll solve this problem. If not, we’re all going to REALLY lose our collective shit one day. But in the meantime, we could at least not stuff our overloaded interchanges with poor designs. The bad traffic they cause radiates for miles in all directions.
On a related note, I wonder how things will look at the 22/40 connection when they’re done with that construction. So far, I think it just might help.
The Rambling Russian 