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Comment by klagermkii | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike "induced demand" as a reason to maintain a terrible experience of a desired product or service. Increase fuel taxes or even do demand charging, but don't have this thing where you make a car trip take three times longer because it discourages people from using their cars.

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That's the point, "induced demand" is simply the fact of making it easier to travel by car, encourages more people to choose to travel by car. It is not that the trip takes three times as long, it's the fact, they built a wider road and the journey took half as long, prior to the road being widened.

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.

> 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.

I have to disagree here. Various Council Highways departments are absolutely focused on traffic flow. I would go as far as to say that the two top priorities are traffic flow and not affecting on-street parking.

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.

I cycle all over London and I don't feel safe a lot of the time. Big roads have inconsistent cycle lanes that start and stop at random or are ignored by drivers. Side roads have people who think 35mph is a reasonable speed to go on a road that doesn't even have space for two cars to pass side by side. The UK needs a lot more investment in cycle infrastructure before it could be considered safe.

This is the streetview of London Road, Bath. https://goo.gl/maps/BF8dHyqetow Local cycling groups campaigned for a 2 way protected track along here, but were over-ruled by a council officer who chose a design, where you can be cycling along with your child on a bike, be overtaken by a bus, that then pulls in forcing you to pull out into 30mph traffic. They chose a design where dead space in the middle of the road was more important than providing a design that encouraged modal shift.

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.

Yeah I see this a lot. The first "cycle superhighways" in London were along these lines. Thankfully they've started building properly segregated cycle lanes and are rebuilding quite a few junctions. I think it helps that now cyclists are the majority of traffic over quite a few bridges in London. It'll continue to be a very long fight but I think there is hope. That being said it does seem like other UK cities are lagging behind London which in itself is nowhere near where it needs to be. I think the true sign that cycling has finally been acknowledged will be the implementation of green wave traffic signalling for commuter routes into the city.

Honestly, the only way I see this ever being taken seriously is when the DfT has to ringfence 10% of their budget to the development of high-quality cycle infrastructure. When a road can be identified as a major "arterial route" and councils have to prioritise cycling over the provision of on-street parking. That one is an absolute killer for many schemes. As a resident, you can object to the removal of an on-street parking space, creating a major weak link in a good cycle transport corridor.

Yeah on street parking is the bane of cycling. So many roads have on street parking on both sides and yet there's no space for two cars to pass each other.

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.

About 2% of English children cycle to school, which is very few — the lowest in Europe.

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...

No, travel demand modeling includes transit shares and modeling.

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.

This completely goes against the point the article is making. The premise that building more roads creates more congestion. Road diets enable modal shift.

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.

I think the argument isn't "let's not improve things because people will use things more" but "let's not spend resources for little improvement". The induced demand argument suggests that the pain and utility of traffic are in equilibrium, and that there's so much latent demand that no feasible amount of pavement will reduce the pain appreciably. It seems to me of a similar genre to studies showing that safety equipment increases risky behavior.

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