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paulddraper

If it's faster to take a neighborhood street than the interstate, there's a problem.

It's not normal.

It sounds like residents are at war with transportation infrastructure instead.

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10mph is blazingly, exceptionally fast for an interstate in a major city during commute hours.

Building bigger highways sparks further-flung suburbs and the new traffic brings everyone else's commute times back to equilibrium.

Indeed, you can see this in the Dallas area. The major roads have run out of room to expand and according to the old timers traffic is no better than it was in 1990. All the road expansion did was let people move to ever more distant suburbs.

>All the road expansion did was let people move to ever more distant suburbs.

Yes, this is called 'induced demand.'[1] And I think that Waze may be planning its own obsolescense: once it has optimized all the streets and roads in a city, they will all be equally slow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Elasticity_of_t...

Yes, but eventually, if the roads are big enough, time itself is the deterrent to commuting a long distance. We've never gotten to that point since highway traffic never moves at speed during rush hour. The other driving factor would be wear and tear on the car - and the costs associated with maintaining a vehicle, but since Maryland doesn't have a yearly vehicle inspection, people are free to drive around on bald tires in a car with no brakes.

In the California Bay Area, this is not true. There is a non-trivial number of people who are willing to commute 2+ hours each way in order to live in bigger, cheaper houses in "safer" neighborhoods.

The same is true of the Washington DC metro area... However, in both cases, I would bet that the distance involved is about 50-60 miles. If that traffic were moving at speed, it would be an hour commute - and I would submit very few people would put more than that amount of mileage on their car everyday (>30,000 miles/year).

Studies have shown that for every mile of road built, is an additional mile driven, in average, by its populace.

Traffic will expand to meet its resources.

I wonder if that's a per capita statistic or population average.

None-the-less, there is an upper bound of how far one can drive in a day. Somewhere an equilibrium would be met.

Given how the average car made today can do 200,000+ miles with minimal problems (especially if they're mostly highway miles), I don't think "putting too many miles on the car" would be a limiting factor.

This has been the case in Los Angeles since the 1960s.

The first time I went to L.A. we got in around 5pm on a Friday and planned to drive North on the 405 and get up to Venura or Santa Barbara before finding a hotel, which looks possible on a map.

It is possible if you go at some other time, but definitely not possible on a typical Friday afternoon. We got caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic and pulled off at Santa Monica Boulevard and found a hotel which looked right out of Pulp Fiction.

If you are going to most points north of LAX (to Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Burbank, etc.) a cabbie or Angelino will take you on surface streets because you get there way faster.

For the record, see Braess' paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox

"Normal" and intuitive behavior is not what you can expect from a busy traffics system.

While this paradox might be a good theoretical tool for theory, I've disagreed that it is a good tool for modeling real situations since first hearing about it.

* It is unrealistic that the mid-route would ever be created as described.

* It is also unrealistic that the capacity of two parallel routes would also vary so much and have a mid-point where that reverses.

* It would be much more realistic to have two routes, one of higher natural capacity, which react differently to increased load (not a static, no matter what, over-simplification).

* Finally; it still does not address the issue of systems that are literally unable to cope with peek load; such as modern metro freeways in the US.

Welcome to rush hour in every major city.

...in America (where cities are actually built for cars and people are just annoying, barely tolerated parasites).

Or London, or Paris, or Rome, or Shanghai, or Mexico City, or.... I'm sure there are shining paragons of traffic efficiency and urban design somewhere in the world, but you're not exactly doing a good ob of pointing them out here.

London, Paris, Rome - all have a gasp workable public transport (can't speak for Shanghai or MC), dwarfing the vehicular traffic. Unless I had no option to choose at all, separated public transit beat the car traffic each and every time; even the delay of leaving the car at the outskirts and taking the train downtown is quicker than hopping along, a meter a minute (and then getting the privilege of hopping around blocks, trying to find a parking spot, with everyone else doing the same). Not the buses, of course; those get stuck in traffic like everyone else - but the trains get you wherever. Yes, I understand it's unfashionable, and you don't get a coffee cup holder or your own comfy chair for the whole trip ;) But it works. (Yes, there are other people on the metro. Well if you can't stand people, what are you doing in a city - which is a concentrated blob of people by definition?)

>London, Paris, Rome - all have a gasp workable public transport (can't speak for Shanghai or MC), dwarfing the vehicular traffic

Yet they still have crippling rush-hour gridlocks.

The approach in the UK is increasingly to regard the gridlock as an educational opportunity, whereby drivers learn to leave their cars at home and take public transport. combined with decent public transport investment, heavy road calming on non-main roads and progressive removal of parking spaces in town centres it's really having a very positive impact for everybody except the people who bizarrely still choose to sit in the gridlock.

Fair enough, but that tells you that the solution is not "just provide public transportation". That was my point and, I suspect, the original commenter's point as well.

This type of attitude is part of what drives people to take residential streets.

while this clearly does happen, urban residential streets in the UK are usually much narrower and invariably reduced to a single lane by parked cars. They are also less often in a grid pattern which supports rat-runs, and most problem rat-runs have been identified and either blocked or traffic-calmed to death 20 years ago.

London and Paris have great subway systems, and yet somehow the streets above the subways are always gridlocked just as much as any American city I've seen.

Indeed. But it's then up to you to choose which is more convenient to you: gridlock in your private bubble, or getting places with the rest of the public.

People are in those cars, just because you use a car doesn't mean you are not a person.

Of course not. The problem is opposite: anyone not in car becomes an unperson, as only people in cars are worth considering.

Well the story mentions roadwork starts, traffic increasing... roadwork ends, traffic stays increased as some drivers now use that route as matter of habit...

I know I use a more varied bunch of routes thanks to Google Maps and Waze, some of which become preferred back-roads.

In TFA, it was due to a construction project, and the problem largely abated once the construction cleared.

There seems to be a new reality, a new problem with population growth and GDP fetishism: GDP rises with the number of people participating in the economy, true. But GDP and accompanying tax revenues don't rise enough.

Infrastructure becomes overloaded and the government fails to expand capacity sufficiently. Tax revenues rise somewhat, but, again, not enough to pay for the necessary expansion. Traffic gets worse.

One solution would be to literally force everyone to take high efficiency, high density modes of transportation (trains, public buses, carpools, chartered buses, etc) but local and even state governments don't seem to have the legal power (or will?) to do so. The gridlock continues.

Even if they had the power, or will, governments in ostensibly free nations shouldn't be forcing their population into a form of transport, just as they shouldn't be forcing their population into specific jobs, specific homes, or specific religions.

Force? No. But planning, incentives, market-oriented policies like congestion charges? Sure.

The reason traffic gets so bad during rush hour is a simple case of supply and demand: limited supply road of space, lots of demand, and most importantly, the space is effectively free. If cities charged something approaching market rate for the space, traffic gridlock would disappear.

Of course, this is impractical to do in most US cities, because of a lack of alternative ways to get around. Thus, the first thing that needs to happen is to provide more options; once that's done, you can work on incentivizing people to take the methods that can support more people.

We have the congestion charge in London. Initially the traffic did drop, but now the traffic is just as busy, and the gridlock lasts all day. Cities like London, NYC and SF are expanding very quickly in terms of population size and density, so in transport terms, the solution will have to be something like automated self driving cars integrated into a conveyor belt like system, which incentivise ride-sharing.

> We have the congestion charge in London. Initially the traffic did drop, but now the traffic is just as busy, and the gridlock lasts all day.

My guess is that this is for the same reason as the fact that housing prices have gotten crazy high in London over the last decade: demand has continued to outpace supply (and in this case, the congestion charge). I mean, you can always suppress traffic if you're willing to raise the price high enough, right? It's just that politically, that can be a hard thing to do.

> the solution will have to be something like automated self driving cars integrated into a conveyor belt like system, which incentivise ride-sharing.

Sure, Minority Report-style traffic systems are probably a good idea in the long run (although that kind of thing is obviously a very long ways out). We'll still have to make investments in other, denser modes of transportation, though, as well as market-oriented policies like parking fees and congestion charges.

Minority Report style fancy transportation is totally unnecessary. All we need is an automatic congestion charge similar to Uber's surge pricing. Heck, such a system would work great for keeping traffic out of residential areas too.

I view it a bit differently. Trading freedom for efficiency sometimes makes sense.

I have to admit that governments force us to do all kinds of things, and I accept that, mostly. For me the debate is about which things the government can mandate.

If turning three out of four lanes on LA's stretch of the 405 freeway into HOV lanes meant that commute times from the Valley to Culver City became a reliable 20 minutes, I think I might be happier.

If wishes were horses, we'd all ride; in reality, such broad changes tend to have various side effects, which are often unpleasant enough to obliterate the intended positive effect.

Sure. But LA's increasingly frequent and widespread gridlock also has serious negative effects.

Having government impose some new orderly process on a chaotic and inefficient transportation market (i.e. freeways) is not necessarily worse than the status quo.

LA is grappling with a serious mess. It's affecting the business climate significantly. People can't reliably and predictably get to their place of work. The unpleasant side effects are already here.

> One solution would be to literally force everyone to take high efficiency, high density modes of transportation

One example of this put into practice is in Singapore, where you bid for one of a limited number of 10-year Certificate of Entitlements to own a car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Entitlement

In many cities in Japan, you have to show proof of access to a parking spot to register a car, which limits the amount of cars to the amount of residential parking lots.

GDP/capita is the important figure.

GDP/capita is an important figure. But it doesn't tell the whole story.

(e.g. I don't think GDP/capita takes into account crowded freeways overflowing onto residential streets.)

More generally GDP/capita does not take into account the unevenness of changes in quality of life which occurred on the way to a higher overall GDP/capita.

Can we really say that one statistic is "the important figure" ?

You are correct. But it is still more meaningful than GDP alone. For example here in the UK a plot of GDP says the country is getting richer, but a plot of GDP/capita says everyone in it, is getting poorer.

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