In the coming years, look forward to metering lights being installed on the I-80 on-ramp in Hercules. This should reduce traffic congestion and travel times on the busiest stretch of highway in the Bay Area, the westbound I-80 commute to San Francisco.

I am a big fan of metering lights. Although they may cause a slight temporary back-up on city streets, new technology allows the system to adapt to these lengthened queues and should relieve the situation. Metering lights are a passive solution to an issue — traffic congestion — that should be addressed, in fact, passively.

Adding lanes and widening roads — an active response — do not remediate the problems by themselves. The active solution will only provide cosmetic temporary relief to a systematic problem, and is based on a fallacy. The reason being, highway traffic flow is governed by its terminals, e.g., bridges, tunnels, etc. It really doesn’t make a difference if you have ten lanes to travel if the bridge only carries four lanes of traffic. At one point, the lanes will need to be combined, and will cause a back-up. An appropriate analogy would be a line in a bank. If the customer lines are actually broken into three, but there is only one teller, the three lines are essentially meaningless. You may be second in line, but you’ll be the sixth person to reach the teller.

Adding additional lanes to highways do add short-term congestion relief especially within short distances of adjacent exits. Lengthened on-ramps and off-ramps (or acceleration and deceleration lanes) are integral in reducing congestion, but widening roads do not necessarily reduce traffic.

Applying passive solutions for traffic control is the best method in dealing with the growing traffic problem. The best example was highlighted to me in a college course (the class was contaminant transport, but the analogy could also be used for vehicle transport)… Imagine babysitting ten or so children in a large room with an open door. A child leaves the room, and you walk out and pick up the child, and bring the child back in the room. And then a second child leaves the room, and you bring the child back. And this continues. This is an active solution. The passive solution… shut the door. This is what metering lights do. They restrict vehicles from entering the highway, i.e., “close the door.”

Promoting alternative modes of transportation — carpools, train, ferry — is another passive response. The population of the Bay Area is growing, and there is limited space to construct new highways. One could envision a double-decker I-80 along the eastshore, but as long as the MacArthur Maze is as convoluted as it is, and the Bay Bridge only allows four or five lanes of traffic, that congestion will exist.

Widening roadways where appropriate, fully taking advantage of acceleration and deceleration lanes, and extending stretches of HOV lanes should all be considered in developing a regional traffic solution, but “closing the door” is sometimes the best option moving forward. Of course, this is my opinion.