I've noticed recently that whenever major road construction projects are completed in my area the traffic is made far worse and slower. Part of me thinks it's just general stupidity, but I also wonder if this is intentional, get more people to break traffic laws, make people waste more gas for more tax revenue. Am I just being conspiratorial? Have others noticed similar projects that are seemingly just to screw up traffic where it was previously fine? Maybe it's just makework, and they'll tear it all out to fix it again in a year or so to create more jobs.
the city records will have the papers on why the project was approved so asking the city can get some answers.
i don't think a road project can "get more people to break trafic laws". only drivers can break trafic laws and only drivers are reasponsible for the trafic laws drivers break.
In some European countries the situation you described is deliberate: slowing traffic down has become something of a pet peeve of traffic planners. If I remember correctly it all started in Denmark, probably the most anti-car country in the world. The rationale is, of course, safety: if people drive slower, less accidents will happen.
Lowering speed limits is another "trick" on their book, though the rationale is different: a road with a lower speed limit requires less maintenance by law. This means more money can be diverted from road maintenance into such useful and wonderful projects as the Museum of Fisheries nobody but dragooned public school prisoners will visit and printing a million copies of a book nobody in his/her right mind is interested in reading.
But at least in a couple occasions I have noticed speed limits have been deliberately lowered to increase revenues: the typical trick is dropping the speed limit by 30-40 km/h on a straight road in the middle of nowhere. You can rest assured there's either a fixed radar or a very high probability of a armed public servant nearby. A blogger put a video on Youtube, a video I cannot find anymore: he basically visited a village in the middle of nowhere which depended upon traffic violations for around 40% of its budget. It was like watching a horror movie: people weren't very talkative and when he stepped into the Council House, a much run down building, he literally found nobody to talk to and plenty of locked doors despite being an "open to the public" day. I half expected the hillbillies from Deliverance to make a cameo...
The road right out front of my house had a stop sign put at one if its intersections in the past year. Until that stop sign was in place, people were able to go up and down the road freely, while those coming to the road at one of the intersecting roads would have to stop and make sure both directions were clear before passing across the road or turning onto the road. Now, with the stop sign in place, traffic has naturally been created. In addition to this, it creates a lot more noise (since there are now more cars in one congested spot as compared to before) and confusion (because the stop sign is in an awkward part of the road which feels unnatural for it to be there; unless you simply know it is there from going down the road before or living in the area.
I brought all of this up to someone who "works" for the borough and his response was, "That's the point. We wanted to create traffic to slow cars down from allowing them to just speed up and down the street."
So to answer your question; yes, it is intentional. At least, in my neck of the woods it is.
Kakugo, you might like this one:
In my town, there was an intersection that was just a huge open area. There were no accidents. Not one. The town then built a roundabout for $1.2 million dollars. Yes, $1.2 million dollars. Anyway, it turned out that the roundabout was too big for the intersection, as firetrucks cannot fit on the road there. They have to drive over the damn thing in order to get by.
Ah, the wonders of central planning.