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"Slugging can only exist because urban transportation planning failed. There are quite some requirements for slugging to work. You need a corridor with a common end that has HOV restrictions due to heavy congestion. What's the normal solution for that? Rail!"

but we HAVE rail to that end point (which is normally the Pentagon) The yellow and blue lines. We do not have rail along the corridor to landmark/annandale/burke etc. Are you saying that we should have rail there, and NO highway inside the beltway? Or that we should have a highway inside the beltway, and also rail, and that with rail there would be no demand for slugging.

The former seems like, to be justified, you need to take some of the anti-highway positions to the extreme (all roads get 100% induced traffic, all induced traffic is zero net marginal utility trips, etc) The latter seems like a high investment in commuter transport overall.

You are correct that slugging is actually an intermediate step between carpooling and transit. It works particularly well where ONE end is concentrated, and the other is low density. The way to make rail work instead is either to A have the residential end also be high density or B. use large scale park and ride

A, I think, might not have been feasible at the time i395 was built, given both preferences and legacy development. I mean planning has to mean more than "if i were king". B, would have been much more feasible - but there are certainly advantages to a highway with HOV vs heavy rail with a mostly park and ride trip base (at least if there are also other corridors which ARE heavy rail instead, which is the case here)

by AWalkerInTheCity on Jun 13, 2012 2:01 pm • link • report