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It's well known that LA's freeway building was completely out of control. Thankfully, those days seem to be done and the city seems to have shifted to making most their capital investments into transit instead.
At some point, you start getting diminishing returns from building more and more highways and widening existing highways. They may help ease traffic at first, but only until the people that were avoiding taking the highways realize that the extra lanes have improved traffic. They start taking the highways, and in a couple of years you're back up to the same level of congestion- only this time its 12 congested lanes instead of 8. The phenomenon is well known to traffic engineers and is called Induced Demand. Unfortunately, many cities continue to hemorrhage money they don't have by overbuilding even more highways, even though they know better.
Don't even get me started on all the externalities of overbuilding highways. From the health problems in adjacent neighborhoods like increased rates of asthma, cancer, and possibly autism, to the driver-related health problems such as obesity and higher rates of heart disease, to the global environmental impacts of exacerbating sprawl, highways are incredibly destructive. Yet we're still investing 3 times as much in building them than we are in building transit. I hope to see that change in my lifetime.
And i say that as a bad thing, some of our most major interchanges are cloverleafs.
idk if its for safety in the winter or what but it sucks having to slow down to 30mph on one of the clover leafs and have to get all the way back to speed on the next freeway.
The freeways in the Twin Cities are just fine as they are (ignoring how they destroyed the urban fabric of Minneapolis and Saint Paul), but as soon as the snow melts, it's road repair season.
Basically, it's a never-ending despair of freeway upgrades and resurfacing from April-October. Every summer, at least three or four major freeways will be reduced to 1 lane or even closed, causing gridlock on the rest of the system. Traffic would generally be stress-free here if not for all the unceasing construction.
Work on State Highway 183, which hasn’t had a substantial revamp since 1973, is part of an $847.6 million contract the Texas Transportation Commission awarded Thursday. The project is scheduled for completion in 2018.
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Another huge project!!
