Last year, I wrote a blog post about how Los Angeles could fix its traffic problems. Today, the San Diego Union Tribune reported that traffic has decreased between 3.3% and 9.1% during the week and between 5.2% and 11.9% on the weekends. How has San Diego accomplished this?
Higher gas prices are the reason. A pleasant byproduct of higher gas prices are that less people will drive. Of course, when less people drive, traffic decreases.
As mentioned in the earlier post, instead of building more and more freeways, southern California should have implemented a gas tax or implement more toll on freeways. Higher gas prices are in essence doing the same thing that a gas tax would. Higher gas prices, however, end up in the pockets of oil companies whereas a gas tax could be used to create better public transportation infrastructure, thus making it easier not to use one’s car and thus further decreasing traffic.