Annals of Motordom – 2

An occasional update on items from ‘Motordom‘ – the world of auto dominance.

UPDATE ON THE CLEM7

For the backstory on this tolled tunnel under Brisbane, go here. For an update, here’s an item from the Brisbane Times:

Shunning the Clem7

Brisbane motorists have continued to avoid the Clem7 tunnel, prompting its operators to extend a toll discount period to the end of the financial year. In figures released to the Australian Stock Exchange this afternoon, the tunnel’s operator RiverCity Motorway revealed an average of just 21,178 vehicles used the toll road daily.

The highest number of trips on a single workday during the month was 25,688. By the company’s own admission, that was ‘well below the start-up forecast of approximately 60,000 trips per day’.

Ref: Cameron Atfield, Brisbane Times, 4/5/10

Will you use the tunnel now that the discounted toll period has been extended to the end of the financial year?

Yes: 19%; No: 81%, Votes: 1,263”

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MOTORDOM IN KENTUCKY

One would have thought the days of spending billions to build massive overhead freeway infrastructure along a city’s waterfront was well and truly over.  Indeed, many cities like Seattle aspire to tearing such structures down.

Not in Louisville, Kentucky.

Already I-64 and a floodwall cut off the city from its waterfront.   But that’s not sufficient.  So now there’s a proposal to spend over $4 billion to build a redundant bridge and a whole lot of spaghetti to create this:

Which would look like this:

I’m sure there all kinds of justifications for this proposal, which you can find out more about here. 

What astonishes me is that there’s a $1 billion shortfall in the highway program alone, not to mention huge budget problems in the state.   And this proposal is only one part of a larger bridge-and-road project. 

Motordom has been so used to unlimited resources for most of the last century that, in America, it considers itself in the same category as the armed forces.  Whenever an advocate for small government in the States calls for drastic cuts in budgets and taxes, they don’t mean the military and they don’t mean the roads.

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“RUNNING ON EMPTY”

What if tomorrow everyone’s car disappeared?

It would look like this – at least in LA:

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Do We Tolerate Too Many Traffic Deaths?

The New York Times asks:  What’s the one thing that could be done to reduce highway deaths?

And some selected bloggers, including recent SFU City Program speaker Dan Burden, respond.  

Click here for the bloggers.