Sadly, waterfall.
April 2, 2012 8 Comments
The California Department of Transportation is investing over $102 million on the Carpinteria to Ventura section of the 101 road construction for the next 4 years. Being a commuter of this stretch of 101 among many co-workers, I rarely experienced traffic in this route, unless there was a road construction; neither do my colleagues.
So I emailed them, out of curiosity, why. Curiosity kills the cat, I know, I know.
I did get a prompt reply, stating:
“Our studies of traffic volumes and patterns conducted in 2005 and 2008 indicated that this stretch of Route 101 is congested for several hours in each directions – predominantly northbound during morning peak hours and southbound during evening peak hours.”
Even back in the academia world, we didn’t cite literature that’s around 8 years old, unless, it’s very very compelling.
I pulled the Google traffic on Mondays, 8am, 9am, 5pm, 6pm – both directions are green at those rush hours.
What can I say? It was a 8-year waterfall process: before you ship it, customers no longer need it! And what’s worse, it’s making the customers life harder – the commute is going to be miserable.
More sadly, it’s a $102 M undertaking – the tax payers’ money could have been spent at somewhere else that’s more meaningful.
Google Traffic at 8am on Mondays, and stays the same:
About Kejun Xu
Kejun, this was an awful stretch of highway a few years ago. Are you saying that the road construction that has already been done is working? I didn’t realize it had cleared up. I wonder if the job market has something to do with that, or the economy in general.
Bo, it’s the Ventura to Carp stretch that they are going to constuct, after they are done with the Santa Barbara section. They haven’t done the Ventura yet, it’s going to be 4 years, 102 million dollars, and the outdated research data…
Oh, that’s a bummer. And the more they open the highway, the more people come. Hey, at least we get to pay for it!
you are funny:)
however in the next 4 years where the road construction takes place, it’ll cause hiring challenges to recruit talents from LA. we already had a candidate concerning about the commute from Ventura to Carp.
I’m okay keeping more people in LA
I don’t understand why you’re blaming the methodology (in fact, I have no idea how the waterfall methodology has anything to do with this).
This is clearly a pet project (or a political project, depending on how you like to name things) – methodology has nothing to do with it.
Interesting! I like your terminology “political project” or “dead project”, but sadly, it is a waterfall decision making and execution as years passed.
It is likely that the blame for such a misalignment of solution-vs-needs is a combination of the long-term waterfall government project process, the glacial slowness with which many costly government projects come into being, and the highly porky politics of government funding and project allocations.
In total, it’s pretty representative of what we often get when we depend on modern-day government expertise, processes, and funding to get anything done.