The gears of government grind slowly. The 101-405 logjam isn't anything new. The interchange was built in 1956 to accommodate 200,000 cars a day. It took a 1997 Daily News series identifying the 101-405 interchange as ground zero for gridlock in the Valley to attract any political attention to the bottleneck, and even then it took another three years for the work to get started. This is how business is done in California.
Politicians are more interested in politics than governance.
Only at the last minute do they start paying attention. They then scramble to clean up what had once been a wholly foreseeable and preventable problem. Sacramento could have dealt swiftly with the energy shortage last year, but it dawdled, and now we're faced with a full-blown crisis. Similar crises in water supply, transportation, housing and health care await, but don't expect the politicians to start addressing them until it's all but too late. The silver lining is that the public is slowly wising up to its elected officials' malfeasance.