One hundred hours is a fairly long duration of time. Even looking at the fraction of a whole year that one hundred hours take up, it’s still more than four days of your life. So, what’s the significance of that quantity of time? The average driver in the city Los Angeles spends upward of one hundred hours stuck in traffic each year. You read that correctly. Traffic is something that all drivers experience from time to time, but can you fathom spending four days every year frustrated, sitting in the driver seat of your vehicle while it remains motionless? People have places to be!

Los Angeles is home to some of the most congested highways in the country, and its residents are subject to great inconvenience as a result. The crowding of these highways presents a safety hazard as well. Imagine a house on your street catches fire. You may be fortunate enough to live very near to a firehouse, but, unless that’s true, emergency services are likely taking an interstate to reach the scene. Los Angeles roads are most congested between 4:00 and 7:00 PM. If the fire were to occur during those hours, emergency services would struggle to arrive at the scene in a timely manner, which is worrisome. The congestion of Los Angeles freeways can be attributed largely to the car-centric design of the city. Before Los Angeles became the second most populous city in the United States, it being car-centric was not an issue. However, now that twelve and a half million people live in the Los Angeles metro area, accommodating each person’s transportation needs with roads alone is becoming infeasible. Los Angeles would not benefit from more highways; the city would benefit from more accessible public transportation and fewer cars on its highways.

A remedy to extreme urban traffic is currently being tested in the city of Las Vegas, which resides relatively near to Los Angeles in comparison with other major United States cities. Ultra-wealthy entrepreneur Elon Musk has constructed a tunnel under the city with the intent of reducing congestion on the main roads of Las Vegas. This doesn’t sound like a poor idea, initially. However, this approach addresses the symptoms of traffic rather than the root cause of it. The problem with simply building additional roads in intensely congested cities is that the new roads will inevitably become just as crowded as the existing ones. Urban populations across the United States are rising, which will lead to further congestion in car-centric cities, regardless of how many roads are available to drivers. After these underground tunnels become unreasonably busy, residents of car-centric cities are back to square one. Such tunnels would be largely ineffective as a long-term solution to traffic in Los Angeles.

The direction policymakers should move in is making the city of Los Angeles less car-centric. How can this be done? The city has been designed and constructed already, and its roads have existed for more than a century. Just because Los Angeles has been built and established for so long does not mean that measures can’t be taken to provide transportation options other than the roads. Los Angeles already has an underground subway system, but it doesn’t get used nearly as much as it should. To allocate funding towards making the subway system under Los Angeles more practical and comfortable for passengers to use would reduce traffic on freeways. This may mean adding additional stops, which could present great challenges but it’s necessary as a part of the long-term solution to unreasonable traffic. The other part of this policy is implementing carpooling incentives. This would reduce the number of cars on the road at one time without keeping people from getting to where they need to go. An incentive could be a designated carpooling lane on major highways or it could be a break on paying tolls.

This approach is extremely feasible and would be more effective than alternatives because it suggests that existing systems be upgraded to become more efficient and it addresses the root cause of extreme urban highway congestion rather than the problem’s symptoms. For the safety and convenience of residents of the area, it is very important that this policy is implemented in the city of Los Angeles.