California's DOT Admits That More Roads Mean More Traffic
citylab.com
citylab.com
I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain.
Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it.
We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.
The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road.
With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that.
I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical.
Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact.
All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
Please explain this further.
There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
The problem is generating that capital. Most Americans simply don't care enough about transit for a politician running on the "Moar railways" platform to get elected.
Most of our passenger rail mass transit systems got built before reliable auto transportation became cheap. Now that cars are ubiquitous, the political will isn't there anymore.
I'm sorry I didn't spell out what I thought was a common-knowledge topic.
None of this is criticism; for exactly the reasons I discussed I don't see any practical alternatives to collective action at the governmental level.
Not quite - I think that's why you've got so many replies. The comment you were replying to said "subsidised" not "private", which are different things, so it looked like you were answering a question nobody had asked.
You can have unsubsidised state mass transport and subsidised private mass transport. Although not having a subsidy is rare, there are a few state services which are required to run at operational breakeven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltim...
When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.
To substantially reduce road traffic, you need to offer people an alternative that is cheaper and/or faster and/or more convenient.
Since most of the cost of a car is sunk costs (you have to pay your insurance & depreciation on your car whether you use it to commute or not), if there's free parking at work the car is going to be the cheapest option for most people.
So either you have to substantially increase the cost of driving (aka tolls), or you have to give them an option that's faster and/or more convenient. A bus using the same roads as cars can never be faster or more convenient.
Bus rapid transit (buses on dedicated roadways) may be an option, but a good BRT (aka one without traffic lights) isn't substantially cheaper than LRT.
For many people, Light Rail (or trains / subways) are the only decent mass transit they have ever experienced in the US.
Every single major and minor city has a bus system. Most of them are nearly useless, often intentionally so by design. It's natural for people to demand something useful, and light rail is nearly universally more useful than busing (including BRT) in any given market.
> It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
Those are benefits of light rail, not drawbacks. The higher costs and inflexibility of light rail represents an authentic long-term commitment to good useful transit in that area.
To replicate that value with a Bus system requires you to build grade separated, dedicated right of way. Which is where 90% of Light Rail's cost comes from. So if your going to spend that money, you might as well put in real Light Rail and get all of the benefit.
The "X cost system" is worse than the "2X system". That's why it's cheaper.
The "X" system is slower or carries less passengers or runs less often or goes to less places, or gets stuck in traffic, or is less reliable, or changes it's routes.
--
It's like comparing a WalMart Netbook to a MacBook Pro and saying "they're both 'identical' computers, why are we spending 2X on the MacBook Pro?".
We spend the extra cash because they aren't identical, the 2X one is better.
With your notebook computer analogy, the extra cost of a MacBook Pro is not a benefit. The benefits are all the various things that are better about it, with the extra cost being worth it to have those benefits. The only way you'd say the extra cost of a MacBook Pro was itself a benefit would be if you wanted to show off how rich you are or something equally silly.
European here. Why would someone intentionally design a useless bus system?
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9118199/public-transportation-s...
This is compounded by the fact that in most of these types of cities, most of the jobs and/or the "best" jobs (highest paying, most stable, best health insurance benefits, etc) are located in the suburbs, where transit is least available. Often these places can "opt-out" of transit altogether.
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-hender... (subheading: "Designed for failure")
I'd love it if you could wave a magic wand and simply "make" bikeable-to-work housing in the Bay Area more affordable, but good luck with that.
BUT also decrease cost of density... pretty hard considering the momentum behind sprawl. Sprawl looks less attractive when it's more expensive. Density looks more attractive when it's cheaper.
I'd love it if I could wave a magic wand too. This is going to be a generation long effort. But it's taken a generation long effort to build car land.
That part may be a feature. A bus stop next to your apartment building might be gone next week, but a light rail station is staying put and developers can more confidently build "transit-oriented" neighborhoods (denser, less parking, etc.).
That cuts both ways. There are very few subway systems in the world that are self-sustaining. You can't just say to not subsidize one way of life while demanding people subsidize another.
Secondly, it depends a lot on accounting. Consider that in Europe, most infrastructure doesn't get built until it has a positive cost-benefit ratio. Since transit does get build, it's overall positive economic impact apparently outweighs the cost - so overall they do 'bring in' more money than they take.
Thirdly, if you require a strict sense of 'bringing in more money than they take' as a specific organization building the infrastructure then charging for the access, I have to tell you that there are relatively few roads that 'make money'. In fact it's basically only some highways, and bridges -- high capacity trunk lines, and lines across choke points. This ignores the cost of large feeder networks, which are generally paid for by taxes. In North America, municipal taxes. This gets interesting when people who don't have cars subsidize single occupancy drivers via municipal taxes.
If you ignore feeder networks for transit, for example ignoring the cost of bus feeders, and only considering the cost of major trunk lines relative to the income of the whole system, then I'd say many subway systems in the world 'bring in more money than they take'.
You absolutely can. And you absolutely should, if the one you say should not be subsidized has net social cost compared to the other.
To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor.
The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate.
Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking.
So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.
This is also observed in countries in Europe that don't have similar history in racism as the US. The perceived comfort is better in trams.
(Also me personally, I get motion sickness if I read in a bus, but in a tram I can read just fine.)
So... sounds like less traffic. Wonder why the title says "more traffic".
Some of the cars on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled, or shifting development patterns, and so on.
Those all sound like good things. The point of roads is to use them. So people use them to have a shorter commute, or live a bit further away from work to lower rent, etc etc etc.
What is the actual problem? Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?
I think that's exactly it.
Perhaps all road building initiatives should be publicised as short term congestion relief and long term preference of cars over other forms of transport.
If public transit or bike lanes would provide a better benefit for the same cost, then I would support them. But that's a separate and complicated discussion. Instead, this article seems designed to mislead people into thinking that expanding roads has literally no benefit, when obviously it does even if congestion remained the same (which it doesn't).
Maybe I'm too cynical...
Adding extra capacity can even make the problem worse because of what happens when increased capacity meets lower capacity. Human driver are terrible at going from two lanes down to two. You could say that this is bad design but in cities especially there are constraints that you can't really design around very easily without destroying massive parts of the city. This was done in the past to allow highways to penetrate right into cities but those highways just slowed to a crawl.
As for cost effectiveness bike lanes are a lot cheaper than extra road lanes and very much cheaper than elevated highways. Bus rapid transit is also extremely cheap. That's before you start looking at other cost benefits such as increased health for more exercise and less pollution.
That seems to argue in favor of the expansion. The 10% road increase may only lead to a 4% decrease in car density, but that could be enough to bring traffic out of standstill.
There's lots of constructive arguments to be had about the relative benefits of investment in roads vs. rail vs. whatever, and tons of good criticism to level against subsidies and un-taxed externalities (for all those options). But arguments complaining about the "endless cycle" of building useful things that subsequently get used are silly. This lowers the quality of the conversation about public transit, making it more difficult to convince others of the relative merits.
You cannot solve this by building more roads. You solve it by putting roads on a "road diet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet enabling modal share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share . You create segregated space for walking, for cycling. You prioritise public transport.
You want more people to choose any other option, other than the car. This, however, is hard when traffic modelling still focuses on traffic flow (maximising car throughput) over modal share.
In the UK, it estimated that the school run is 20%-25% of rush hour. Our road design precludes kids cycling to school.
No, there are plenty of children who cycle to school and in safety in the UK. The bigger issue is parents' fears of abduction and/or traffic.
It's changing. This table comes from the Welsh Active Travel Act Design Guidance https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-20...
If you have a 30mph road, it needs a protected cycle track. We need space where an 8 year old cycling to school does not have to share road space with HGVs. Where one mistake does not get punished by death.
This road also breaks the EU legal limits on pollution. They knew this when they put in this design.
I wrote about it here http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of... however the real issue is that a lot of Highways officers still consider cycling a joke.
"Why should we cater for the 2%" is a line I hear a lot. However, you do not build a bridge because of the number of people swimming the river.
I don't know what will make the difference. I think in London it's taken years of campaigning and highlighting to deaths to get a change. Having an elected mayor controlling transport also helps a bit to because it gives a focus for the campaigning. It'll remain to be seen if London continues it's improvements or gives up on them. I hope we have now reached the tipping point where cyclists start to outnumber other road users on so many roads that the 5% argument can't be used anymore.
A neighbouring country, the Netherlands, has 49%, the highest in Europe.
Given the lack of joined-up cycle lanes in most English settlements, a default speed limit of 30mph (50km/h), and a ban on cycling on the pavement, a fear of traffic seems very reasonable.
A road accident is the most common cause of accidental death for a child, and most of these are child pedestrians. (This is followed by asphyxiation and drowning.)
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/walking-and-cyclin...
More roads are a fantastic solution for encouraging mobility of individuals. Yes, it is difficult from a group planning point of view, but think about it from the users point of view. There is a single dad who is restricted by her availability of time to a thirty minute commute window. If he has no available car, he is forced to a bus route based job, or bicycle / walking distance job. Locations for bus routes are chosen by top-down planning based on productions and attractions, with a preference for utilization based on larger employers, think hospital and hospitality. The buses drive the single dad to a certain area and precludes him from looking for jobs in non-bus route areas. You are forcing an individual to choose a non-ideal job based on a push for modal share and the "Planners" basis of what is best, not the individual.
Road diets are dangerous for the populace. Look at Los Angeles current push for road diets that will decrease the levels of service across the city from 18% failure to 30% failure and the warnings that the emergency services say about the corresponding decrease in response times.
The school run in the mornings is a good thing to focus on, here in the United States, we force the kids onto a crazy schedule of arriving in class before 8:00am.
Oslo and Berlin are planning to ban the car from the city centre. It is about recognising that the car is a very bad form of transport for cities. It also has severe negative health effects on the population.
Your argument feels like a smoker trying to justify why they should be allowed to smoke wherever they like.
In this case, they are trying to curb the building of roads. I do not know how that helps. Alleviating traffic and bringing increased capacity to roads helps spur economic activity.
The Big Dig Project on the Central Artery in Boston helped alleviate traffic and resume economic growth in an area where it had stalled. The capacity of the artery is expected to be fully realized by 2050.
In NJ, we are always stuck in traffic. And that is the main reason why NJ's economy has stalled. No more room for growth.
The point of the article and citylab's purpose is probably to direct more use of public transportation. But likewise, the more public transportation you have, the more use you will have there too.
I really don't see the point of this article.
It is definitely an editorial decision of Citylab to evangelize this finding. But in this case, not in a mendacious way, more in an exasperating i told you once i told you a million times kind of way.
That NJs economy stalled due to not having enough roads is a conjecture.
You don't need physical room for economic growth (well, I'd say in the US you don't). The US is incredibly wasteful, to the point of it being obscene, with its physical space. The upside is dubious. But the negative results of car slavery are clear: it excludes children and seniors of being independently mobile, it creates a terribly unattractive environment, high speed roads - aka car sewers - are a killer on property values since nobody wants to live next to on, driving claims more than 30000 lives per year in this country alone.
Cars have benefits though!!! I have three, should that factoid help convince you. But they work best in a handful of use cases: longer trips, hauling stuff, recreational driving in the country, ... Basically, what the commercials show you. But when you're shackled to them to do daily errands that you could just as well do on your own two feet if only the built environment wasn't so hostile to humans, they are terrible.
Each person riding the bus, is one less car on the road.
Most of the segments of I-95 and I-84 they will want to improve already are 2-lanes and are frequently stopped due to accidents. While I agree with the article's claim that the increase in economic activity in those areas is dubious it's something that is needed. If anything it's going to increase tourism traffic to points north as well as Connecticut as there is already plenty of traffic from NYC/NJ through to other coastal areas (RI, Cape Cod). Also this includes traffic from points north to the Connecticut casinos that are in the heart of the state which is another major inflow.
I just don't understand if the roads CalTrans are describing and the author is trying to demonstrate are really equivalent, where 'thru' traffic is just as vital as in-state to in-state traffic.
Consider that the theory states that traffic is unchanged because people will be incentivized to drive more because of less traffic. This is self contradictory - there can't be both less traffic and the same traffic.
Obviously people use roads until the equilibrium of pain is met (like any economic decision). But, there is a point where you can supply so much capacity that there won't be traffic. It's a lie to say that no amount of capacity can overwhelm all forms of demand.
The only real question is how much road would it take to fully satisfy demand and what would that cost vs the alternatives. (Ignoring pollution issues)
Cite this, I dare you.
edit: the part I'm not buying is the combination of "terrible" and "personal"
It matters little whether you're sitting on your but for 45min in a car or on a bus, you're still not getting exercise. That's not really "terrible" as it's something that can easily be counteracted unlike (for example) working in a loud environment for 45min twice per day without hearing protection.
The "terrible" stuff (accidents) isn't really personal because it only comes into play on a statistical level (seeing as most people will never be seriously injured in a vehicle accident)
Sorry people, you're living in a bubble. The vast, vast, VAST majority of people don't hate cars like the HN collective does.
People generally don't hate their own culture. But it's obvious from a european perspective that the US has an unhealthy obsession about cars. Not that we hate cars, but we don't worship them either.
And I don't think HN hates cars. All I've seen is people pointing out real issues. Maybe some exaggeration here and there, but everyone is guilty of that.
From my own personal experience(real life, not on-line), techies are by FAR more pro-car, and dismissive off traditional urbanism. Real Engineers outside software even more so. I think it is because suburban homes have a lot of space for all the crap tinkerers collect. Hobbies in this crowd tend to skew to things with stuff; drones, cars, ... A more introverted disposition may drive engineers to the quiet and seclusion of the suburbs too. Plus, engineers like to optimize things. Keep the process intact, but strive for less travel time, less fuel consumption, less pollution, less casualties. Hence electrical cars. Hence self-driving cars. But always "cars".
Not necessarily related to what you were saying, but I'll sneak it in anyway:
Traffic is not a technological challenge, it is a human one, with all the messiness that entails. An anthropologist can just as well study traffic (and propose solutions) as a traffic engineer. The big mistake in the US was to hand over the governance and implementation of our urban environment to technocrats. The planning profession has long since come around, precisely because often they were educated in sociology departments (Oh, the affront an engineer must feel when he has to justify building codes to this numbnut planner who probably only passed intro to stats by schmoozing with the TA!). Anyway, eventually the bureaucrats, legislators, and building professionals will come around too. But it requires for a lot of people to reject what they have - literally - bought into. The suburbs are NOT doomed though, there's a lot of good about it. But they are expensive. So the suburbs at all cost are most definitely coming at an end. Municipalities are strained financially, precisely because the financial obligations of maintaining car sprawl are high. On an individual level, the suburbs just cost a lot too. Everybody needs a car, maintenance & utilities costs of the home are born by just a single household, etc... The suburbs are massive social engineering, a federal project to promote home ownership and promote financial independence. Plus, a sprawling city would be more resilient should a nuclear war breakout, that paranoia was also something in the 50s. The home ownership part has succeeded, but the financial independence part has been a total failure.
In the USA the car is the solution to every city building problem. This is the problem as I see it.
Background Public health must continually respond to new threats reflecting wider societal changes. Ecological public health recognizes the links between human health and global sustainability. We argue that these links are typified by the harms caused by dependence on private cars.
Right there off the bat tells us that they have a political ideology that they're trying to justify with their "study".
(a note: you'd have a point if you're pointing out that "terrible" is exaggerated, but that would silly since it's obvious, so I'm assuming you think that there's no health benefit)
Much of the point of public planning is that in practice that definition of need isn't one that really creates fantastic outcomes.
The only reason there is induced demand is that the infrastructure is too small to support the way our cities and metro areas have evolved. Maybe the way they have evolved is a product of the Eisenhower Interstate highway system, but we're already invested in that infrastructure. It would take an inordinate amount of money, resources, and effort to relocate and redesign our cities than to just build the correct size (and number) of highways to support the population.
In addition - one thing that it seems highway planners rarely plan correctly for is growth. The population of the Washington DC metro area has grown from about 3 million in 1980 to over 6 million currently. Many of the highways are nearly the same size over that span.
What they failed to account for, however, is the growth of exburbs like Ashburn VA and other places even further out like Frederick MD.
These remote places are built by developers who literally put ZERO thought into infrastructure and what will happen to traffic and many other things when thousands of well-paid people move into their McMansions in the middle of nowhere.
They just buy up farmland from farmers who want to retire, sell a fake dream of idyllic rural living, plop down a bunch of cookie-cutter houses, then take the money and do all over again somewhere else. People have been finally getting wise to this anti-pattern (it was known in Maryland since the 90's) and the citylab article is an example.
While I too find some scorn for the McMansion culture, it is not really a local developers job or role to plan for medium to long distance infrastructure. I don't think it would even be legally possible for a private entity to take on a highway project that crossed multiple counties and/or states without a massive amount of support from local and state governments.
Also, I wouldn't call suburban and rural development an anti-pattern. Unless you want the cities to be double the density they already are, some people are going to have to live in the suburbs and rural parts of the country.
As far as # of daily metro rides. My point is that if the metro were shutdown, the highways in and around DC would be a nightmare and people would not enjoy travelling in or through it. Getting around in DC, without the metro, would BE INTRACTABLE.
As for developers, while it is not "their job" to plan for infrastructure, it is very disturbing that they can simply buy land for cheap, put down and sell thousands of homes and walk away while forcing the nearby cities to deal with the mess they made. In response, many localities are now pushing "smart growth", we simply can't allow developers to make short-term selfish choices and pass the long-term costs onto everyone else.
The biggest problem with these fees is that they are "local". Bedroom communities use these fees for local infrastructure, whereas a portion should be paid towards metro infrastructure.
Daily... so one commuter to work and back home counts as two? So the road enables 100,000 commuters, or somewhat less than that, if we subtract people who drive through during other times than commute hours.