Los Angeles is (Cough, Cough) #1 in Congestion


Here's a list you don't want to be featured prominently on: America's 100 worst intersections, according to Forbes Magazine. Too bad for the LA metro area, which claims a third of them, including 11 on the Hollywood Freeway alone.

Admittedly, congestion also means popularity, and in fact the Big Three metro areas (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) accounted for 87 of the top 100; the San Francisco Bay Area had five, Austin four, New Haven two, and Dallas and Honolulu one each. And in some cases (the article specifically mentions 580/101 in Marin County), it's a matter of poor layout.

But congestion is also auto-centricity gone terribly wrong, with negative impacts from lost human productivity to lost fossil fuels. Here's hoping the result of a spotlight on these 100 intersections isn't to try to solve the problem by building even more road capacity, thus exacerbating the root problem.

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