Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
vox.com
vox.com
So, unless we get teleport watches... congestion is the "price," the thing that limits consumption. Economists would prefer the price to be price, being economists.
One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.
I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastructure. I live second year in Netherlands and I love it.
Fivethirtyeight did a study in Minneapolis on bike lanes constructed earlier this decade and showed that bike lanes did increase congestion for 10 roads they looked at.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...
Anecdotally, the mid sized city I lived in added a bike lane experimentally on my commute to work. The lanes going into the city decreased from 4 to 3 and immediately increased the amount of congestion. It also slowed my commute anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes based upon what time I left.
And the sad thing was, nobody used the new bike lane. I never saw a single rider use those lanes during my morning commute.
https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/groningen07...
I was studying in Groningen and I can tell you this is a daily occurrence there, sometimes it's even worse since the photo is from a rainy day in winter :P .
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
By 2012 cycling had grown tremendously in popularity. In Amsterdam alone, 490,000 cyclists took to the road to cycle 2 million kilometres every day, according to its city council statistics. This has caused some problems as, despite 35,000 kilometers of bicycle paths, the country's 18 million bicycles (1.3 per citizen old enough to ride) sometimes clog Dutch cities' busiest streets. This is being addressed by building even more bike lanes to tackle a problem many other cities in the world would envy — that of bicycle traffic congestion.
Also, it takes time to build biking culture. And as a side note, biking infrastructure in Groningen was build on anti-car sentiments. They wanted to get rid of cars from the city, not to relive car congestion. They did get rid of them especially from the center and the city is now lovely for pedestrians and cyclists. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...
Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.
http://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-1235-1718/20170317%20STB%20CSEW%20...
50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes.
> The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent.
False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traffic -- even if there's a bike lane. In this case, I was so pissed off at the increase of my commute I started to count bikes in the bike lane, and I saw exactly zero.
But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.
These days, I fly back and forth to work, so it makes little sense to use a bike.
> single bike sticks out like a sore thumb
Now it totally makes sense.
I’m all for bike lanes. And bicycle licenses. Can’t go up the 80 percentile hill in your town at 20 mph? You fail.
Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car.
Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating, so showers at offices would be helpful.
In places where bicycle infrastructure is provided, it is well used. The first Reston Metro stop (Weihle Station) has a large, locked bike room with nice racks and a small workbench area. The station is located right off one of the regions main multi-use paths. That bike room is heavily utilized.
Sadly, the second Reston Metro station, Reston Town Center, doesn't provide any infrastructure at all. No bike storage, no parking, nothing. Not sure what the heck the county was thinking when planning this station.
That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes.
The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular.
> Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating
Or there's snow on the ground 4 months out of the year, and makes it a real pain to commute on a bike. Or in several places, you have both. Chicago comes to mind.
Bike lanes are beneficial in urban areas, and that's pretty much it.
But when it comes to US, the bike lanes is the last thing when it comes to the kindergarten level of infrastructure planning. In my experience infrastructure in US was planned exclusively by NIMBYs...
And as others noted. A single bike line without connecting lanes will not change people's commute. Changing habit is also something that doesn't happen over a day or even a year. It might take 5 years for the effect to show.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ride-ha...
But then... I haven't been to a city with a good motor vehicle infrastructure in a long time. Certainly none of the major US cities are designed well to handle even remotely appropriate levels of private motor vehicle use.
PS: I have a car in NYC. Use it for some cases, but would never drive daily in NYC.
Because 1) You're not allowed to build mixed-use areas thanks to NIMBYs
2) You're not allowed to build high or mid-density areas thanks to NIMBYs
3) You're not allowed to build real bike routes (the kind you'd let your 8 year old cycle to school alone on) because of NIMBYs
4) You could cycle the long distances needed on the road, but the US has made it legal to kill people with your car so long as you're sober, so this is dangerous.
Nobody's driving from NYC to LA for their morning commute. The size of the country is not relevant.
The size of the country is relevant; not everything is as dense as LA, NYC, SFC. Chicago being the 3rd largest metro area is also probably one of the least dense. I cannot reasonnnably bike from my home into the Loop. Between shit roads, bad neighborhoods and generally not wanting to die. Not to mention, it is infeasible at least 3 months of the year.
Also, your argument 4 is just wrong and FUD. It is no where legal to just hit a cyclist and kill them. Probably the slightest you will get is negligent vehicular manslaughter, if you are found to be at fault with no other extenuating circumstances. If you are not at fault, you might likely not face charges.
Obviously not dead, but I was the victim where a car ran a stop sign and T-boned while I was on a bike. The driver, who did stop and offer assistance, was ticketed (I think failure to yield right of way, failure to yield to avoid an accident), faced court, around $500 in fines and had to pay my medical costs (about $20k) amd to replace my bike (about $3500). His insurance took most of the brunt, but I was fully compensated for my losses.
No, the US accepts that traffic accidents happen, and absent irresponsible behavior like drunk driving, drivers should not be held responsible for accidents. When these accidents involve collisions between cars, they're usually simple fender-benders. When similar collisions happen between cars and bicycles, they often lead to serious injury or even death.
It's an extremely dangerous idea to have bicycles and cars travelling side by side in such close proximity with such narrow bicycle lanes. What we need is proper bike lanes with lane separators protecting them from traffic.
I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine.
Generally people who kill others with their car get off fine, so long as they're sober. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
On the other hand if a gun range built a pathway for people downrange right by the targets, you wouldn't be the one responsible if you accidently shoot someone. It would be the gun range's fault for creating such a dangerous setup in the first place.
Dramatic upzoning is only brought to the table when the NIMBYs are seen as weak enough that it might stand a chance.
Property taxes can pay for these updates once the additional housing is built, it's self-financing. (Of course this won't work in CA, due to Prop 13. But then again, it was a ballot initiative, and those crazy folks in California voted for it. It's all self-inflicted pain on their part.)
2) Expecting your groundskeeper to drive a century on top of his (or her) actual job is pretty sick and cruel too
3) I'm pleased you mention Southern California as it's a useful case study of how to turn a pleasant area in to a dystopian hellscape. I've lived in Westwood (near UCLA), Santa Monica, and most recently San Diego (South Park - a fairly upscale neighborhood).
I routinely attended meetings of the planning group for South Park, where the attendees, all of whom were homeowners aside from me (and elderly), opposed ANY new housing of ANY sort ANYWHERE. They were blunt about their reasoning - it might hurt their home values. Of course, keeping homes expensive is a great way to ensure your groundskeeper can't live near work.
They also hated bike lanes, because they thought it would affect parking. It's rather sickening they cared more about places for cars to sleep than for people to sleep.
https://www.sandiego.gov/planning/community/profiles/greater... if you care to go yourself. The area's taxpayers will even give you free parking welfare.
Thankfully I escaped SoCal (and the US), but not everyone (including, perhaps, your gardener) is able to do that.
Is it really so shocking to live that close to a gardener? What is outlandish about that?
I think it's not that people refuse to live next to a gardener, it's that the job of gardener does not allow for an income that someone could afford to live close by given the housing market. It might not be 50 miles, but there are areas of affluence where it would take awhile for a low-income person to reach. There are also areas of affluence right next to considerably run-down (but famous) areas, such as Hollywood. Then again, I'm not sure how much housing there is in the run-down portions.
It may have started as NIMBY, but I think natural market forces eventually reinforce it to the degree that NIMBY isn't necessarily the largest factor at play at this point.
Manila by comparison is 71,263/km2 in it’s core. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila
It's not dense relative to other types of metro areas, but I think it's probably fairly dense for single level housing in an industrialized nation.
My point wasn't to imply that Southern California was very densely housed, but that there may not be a huge amount of unutilized land left to build high density housing one, at least not enough to really change the dynamics. And once the conversation shifts from just what to build and where to also who to displace to build it, it's an much harder conversation.
I could be entirely wrong, I don't live in LA, but my impression every time I visit is that there's not a lot of unused land, even if the land that is used isn't used efficiently (population density wise). If that's true, it's not just a NIMBY situation (even if it might have traditionally been one), as it's also a "don't displace historical group X that's been living in this area for decades" situation (whether entirely accurate or not).
PS: It’s a question of underutilization, where it would be economically profitable to take each of these buildings down and replace them with more useful structures.
Therefore the riverfront should be low density huts forever I guess.
Out of respect for property rights though, please don't make it illegal for your neighbour to do this to their home should they choose.
Public transit is a bad joke too, the light rail in LA waits for cars to pass at intersections! I've never seen that in other metros, as rail always gets signal priority, but it is a great way to drive away riders...
I’m fully guilty of this myself too. But like all things it cannot keep growing indefinitely.
http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...
Beyond that, the stats in that article are just plain bad because it ignores the fact that not everyone lives in a new house, but it still compares the average household size to ONLY new homes built in that year.
I would actually ignore the average household size. We already know that that that decreasing over time.
Note that I didn't intend my comment to be a personal attack on you. I'm merely trying to point out this trend. Apologies if I came off that way. But your case also highlights another fact that was rare back in the day -- using your house as an office is increasingly becoming viable or necessary for those doing remote work.
I didn't take it personally, but I also didn't quite know the best way to respond either. I probably didn't do the best job at it.
This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.
Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable).
However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.
It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.
I have more trouble seeing where the 500 seat office for a global enterprise should go on my city block. it seems like that sort of space would lead to a dead feeling at night when everyone goes home and the space sits empty.
Turns out when you don't need to allocate space for 500 cars around a building, you can build it in a single city block and coexist with other types of buildings. And you even get a rooftop with a view as a bonus.
More people will die horrible deaths in their cars, more people will die walking and cycling, more people will die because their understandable fear of walking and cycling gives them a sedentary lifestyle, more people will die from cancer, lung disease, etc, more wildlife habitat will be destroyed, more sound and light pollution will destroy mental health and disturb wildlife, and the planet will boil a little bit sooner. But those are externalities and not borne by the person choosing to drive more.
But all of this is apparently just fine. Adults matter too of course, but it's striking that cars (drivers, really) are the thing that kills more kids than anything else, and yet people do. not. care. I'm astonished how much outrage there is over kids being killed by bullets but not those killed by cars. People in the US accept it as normal, though. When I pointed out I cared more about automotive violence than gun violence people would look at me like I had 3 heads. And then joke about running over cyclists.
On the bright side, it might encourage those who are able to emigrate somewhere nicer (Netherlands and the Nordics, basically), so I guess it's a gain to those countries.
Is that because affordable houses are worthless?
So, instead of solving the housing crisis, city planners do nothing on the matter, but go and ration transportation too, so people... well, gain nothing because they will be the same time in traffic.
Other than that I do not really understand your "astonishment": you've artificially constructed a personal axiom that has never applied to human society - namely that people should care equally about every casualty, regardless of circumstances or causes, or the impact of those causes on society as a whole - and are then surprised that others don't follow this model.
Where did I do that?
A thought experiment - how does your reaction to "cyclist on sidewalk kills child on bike" compare to "driver in street kills child on bike" ? I suggest they should be the same.
I understand we may simply have utterly and drastically different worldviews and priorities. This sort of thing is part of why I moved away from a profoundly hostile city.
Driving is dangerous, as are its byproducts. More driving kills more people.
However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there.
The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them think nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic, each way, every workday, just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend.
>Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.
When people don't do anything with all those kms traveled than move farther out of the metro area and extend their commute, no, I don't really see the value to society there. Rather, I see that it has a real cost to society for people to waste their time and money on these things, rather than things that provide positive economic value to the society at large. Don't forget that more miles driven means more accidents, more traffic deaths and maimings, etc., all of which cost society. Plus all the pollution produced.
What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment?
I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality. Alternatives only exist because they were created in a different era, under different constraints. Their supply is fixed and dwindling. So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.
Also, by the way, the median driving commute is closer to 25 minutes. Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.
Try traveling to Europe or Japan sometime. They have dense cities with nice homes, great public schools, and a clean and safe environment. Japan in particular has basically zero crime. Cities in Europe are walkable and bikeable, and it's commonplace to have residential units on top of commercial space so that people can easily walk to a nearby cafe or restaurant or grocery store. You see this in NYC too to an extent.
>I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality.
Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Sprawl doesn't scale, that's the whole problem: you're just going to get worse commute times, more traffic congestion, etc. It isn't going to help, it's going to hurt.
>So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.
Then you need to change the laws.
>Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.
Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.
Most people shop for housing where there job and family are; international migration is a big deal. Japan is very hard to immigrate to if you lack Japanese ancestry.
>Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity
>Then you need to change the laws.
Land use policy is made by a small, elite, politically active subset of incumbents. People looking for a place to live, and choosing the best of the available options for their circumstances, are not to blame for the abysmal nature of the available options. This is the whole problem. Market demand has little to no influence on what can be built. It's inappropriate to look down on people for moving to suburbia. The scorn is rightly placed with activists and politicians for crippling our cities so badly that suburbia manages to be better.
>Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.
The data say 32 minutes [0]. This is high compared to the national 25, but no, 1-2 hours is not the norm even there.
[0] https://wtop.com/traffic/2017/04/dc-area-has-2nd-longest-ave...
Cities at one time were far superior to non-cities in precisely those ways. It is not an inherent flaw of cities, just a problem with how we manage American cities.
Some studies have basically found that people chronically overvalue how happy a nice house will make them, and undervalue how unhappy a long commute will make them. I don't know if Americans are uniquely guilty of this, but humans are prone to lots of little errors like this.
Neither the 4 mile walk through congested, diesel-fumed London or the small, expensive flat with single glazed windows did make me happier.
I now live 30 miles outside London and take a 30 minute train to work. It is much cheaper, much more pleasant (I stand on the train most of the time) and I get to hear the birds and smell the fresh air when I wake up or go outside.
You're assigning beliefs to Americans that, in my experience, they don't have in any significant numbers.
And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.
When I lived in Brussels, Belgium from 1999 to 2006 and worked for a Dutch consulting company, there was a period of time where my commute was 1.5-2.0 hours one-way to go up to the company offices in Veldhoven, or to a customer site at Eindhoven.
Living here in Austin since 2006, during rush hour, any commute involving any of the major infrastructure (360, MoPac, I-35, etc...) is likely to take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour or more. When there isn't any traffic, that same commute might take just fifteen minutes.
When my brother-in-law lived and worked in the LA area many years ago, until he made a point of moving to an apartment that was ridiculously close to the office, he was frequently spending two or more hours on the road, one-way. And that's when traffic was reasonably good and there weren't major jams that turned into eighteen-plus hours on the road, one-way.
Just because you don't have a given type or amount of experience, doesn't mean that your experience is universal in this regard.
I certainly realize that my experience is not universal, but I do have multiple instances in my life where I saw those kinds of numbers on a regular basis. And I knew plenty of people at the time who had similar experiences to mine.
It hasn't changed, and if anything it's worse. The traffic on I-66 into town every morning looks like a parking lot, all so a bunch of people can live in McMansions in Manassas and Haymarket and Gainesville.
>And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.
Yep, I've met people who live in DC and commute to Baltimore (because they don't want to live in Baltimore...), and people who live in NoVA and commute to Annapolis.
This stuff is common here. You can see it in the massive traffic jams on I-66 and on the beltway every workday: those people aren't getting to work in 15-30 minutes in that traffic.
That would be a poor decision indeed. But more likely, in my experience, is that they live far from their work because there is no affordable housing near their work.
Also, maintaining roads is expensive. Once you build a new road it is politically unpopular to get rid of it. Who really benefits from the new road being built? The businesses that can afford to build a long the new highway and have a massive amount of parking around it. IE: Taco Bell, WalMart, etc. The people road construction businesses the government shovels money to. [1]
We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have!
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
Might be hard to get an answer given that most places didn’t build highways to Walmarts.
Either way, consumers tend to shop at their local Walmart regardless of the road to it. Consumers seem to consistently pick Walmart over overpriced local businesses nearly everywhere except for wealthy, dense cities where people can afford to avoid the unpleasantness of shopping the giant things with lower class people.
Trips do have value. When you sell something on Craigslist, the economic activity you are generating depends on the road network, and that transport event can be said to have value.
The epiphany that hit me though is that all the most valuable transport is already happening. Less valuable transport that isn't worth sitting in traffic for, is passed over.
This is key- it means that having roads is good, as it provides transport for those most valuable trips. However expanding the road adds only the less valuable trips. It's wicked diminishing returns- the road is more and more expensive to expand, and the trips/economic activity it adds are less and less valuable. The first two lanes were the cheapest to build and the most valuable to society, and every pair after that is worth less & less.
I mean, of course. If you pay for something with money, then someone else gets the money. If you pay for something with time, then that time is just gone.
>One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.
A lot of the "value" winds up in making far-flung homes part of the housing market for people working at centers of employment. Suburbanization, basically.
It does, which is one reason why (in the United States, anyway), highways are paid for by the governments — to spur commerce.
In contrast, railroads (at least in the United States) still mostly have to pay for their infrastructure, which is one reason why passenger rail is in the shape it's in.
A lot of road capacity is needed, but a lot of it is also purely wasteful and entirely caused by social choice.
E.g., the parking lot for the store needs to hold the Black Friday parking demand ->
the store is now too far from the street to walk home with bags ->
everyone drives to the store and there is congestion ->
the street must be widened to accommodate the congestion -->
the street is now too wide to cross or walk along safely -->
everybody drives, etc.
The suburbs are now vastly overbuilt as a result. Nassau County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country yet has been fiscally monitored by New York State since 2000 because it cannot afford the lifecycle cost of infrastructure or services for such a low-density, sprawly environment. And this is despite very high property taxes, to the point where the population is starting to decline.
It reads like that county is a complete shit show and not necessarily indicative of the sustainability of low density.
This is actually part of the problem of the American model; larger entities are always willing to foot the bill, so why bother assessing the economic feasibility of a project?
I agree with your second point, especially as the feds only fund capital costs and state and local has to do maintenance, which they are awful at. The smart strategy is to fund minimum viable operations costs, let stuff crumble and get more capital $ to rebuild!
Of course we should carefully consider all the costs and externalities of road expansion before doing it. But it’s all too often presented as being completely pointless or having no redeeming features at all, so there’s no point in even considering it.
road users are insulated from actual costs, since road costs are both subsidized and pass through an intermediary (government, taxes).
since it's costly, inefficient, and politically unpalatable to directly create an efficient marketplace for roads themselves (by building a bunch of competing ones), economists urge regulators to create a market for road use and price in maintenance costs and externalities (pollution, things that Isinlor mentions): tolling, congestion pricing, gas taxes, etc.
if we correctly price road use and there is still great demand, it means we should build more roads. instead, the perverse logic currently employed is that insatiable demand should be a reason not to build roads because (it seems like) we'd never meet that demand.
Nitpicking this from a physical perspective, consuming this amount of travel fundamentally requires you to experience a certain amount of acceleration. I'm pretty sure that the itinerary you describe here would kill you, regardless of how cheap it was.
A six hour commute is unrealistic, but by my calculations a constant 1g of acceleration is enough to cover a round trip from Wellington, New Zealand to Tokyo and another from Wellington to Lisbon in under 90 minutes of daily commute.
I note that in reality, we don't ever travel with constant nonzero acceleration, but it's fair to ignore that under the explicit assumption that there are no costs involved.
Portugal isn't 'on the way' to New Zealand from Tokyo regardless of speed or timelines.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.576...
I like congestion charging alright, which the article advocates at the very end, but it has a habit of being regressive - it's easy for me, as a software engineer, to show up at work at 11AM, but that might not be the case for those who can less afford to pay those charges. I think it's a net positive, but it can have consequences - especially in places like the Bay Area where there is no vaguely affordable housing anywhere near where the jobs are.
Why not think about locating things people want to go to - especially their jobs - near where they live? Why do we need sprawling suburban "campuses" and a million tech busses to shuttle people from the cities to them? Throwing up huge office buildings and tech HQs in SF - but refusing to build housing the same way - is only a little tiny bit better.
Both just force people to the exurbs, creates more super commuters and more demand on the roads.
It spreads out businesses and makes our cities utilities spending less efficient. The roads need to be maintained, and it is very expensive to maintain them.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s...
It's a problem insofar as building more roads is often sold as a way to resolve traffic problems. When traffic expands to fill all available roads, this solution is an expensive way to not fix anything.
There are probably more useful options, and faster ways to waste money, available to polities.
Saying "traffic will be solved by this!" is clearly misleading. But those extra cars on the road must be benefitting, or else they wouldn't make the trip.
This may be slightly different from a political cycle that spends ever-increasing amounts of resources on roads without examining if the results obtained provide a reasonable level of value for money. Or indeed address the issues that drove the construction of additional roads in the first place.
Broadly, fully utilized resources are not always an ideal goal. For example, my experience is that meeting rooms in offices are almost always in constant use, no matter how many there are. This may not be the same as all uses of meeting rooms being desirable and efficient uses of the time and other resources used. I know I have been in meetings, enabled by a sizable of supply of meeting rooms, that could have been handled much faster with a handful of emails.
Have you ever worked on a shared compute cluster? In general, disks fill to capacity & machines run at capacity, no matter what those capacities are. It's bloat; files that don't get deleted until you run out of disk, because deleting files takes ten seconds. Massive processes that are left always-running to save ten seconds of launch time. So on and so forth. Basically, the user is getting some value. But it's very small, and thus makes a poor reason to make expensive upgrades to the cluster.
It always surprises me to see people actually believe this utter illogical nonsense. There's a finite amount of people and cars, so new roads satisfy existing demands but do not magically increase traffic until everybody drives 24/7 and beyond.
There are plenty of roads with very little traffic. Hasn't anyone of those anti-car-activists noticed?
It's a theoretical concept with no basis in reality as far as traffic is concerned. Every statistic I know of shows that more people move to cities, not farther away despite new roads. What drives people to longer commutes is not new roads, but high housing prices in cities.
Also, when you build useful roads, traffic there certainly increases, but somehow ideologists neglect to measure how traffic on other roads previously used for the same route decreases.
It’s a problem if your assumption was that demand was closer to fixed and building more roads would “spread drivers out”, reducing congestion.
This was for decades, and still to some extent is, a very wide-spread assumption in local politics, leading to incredibly questionable urban planning decisions.
It seems reasonable to assume that latent demand per capita is fixed, but at a level too high for a city to accommodate without destroying its density advantages.
The problem always seemed to me to be less about road capacity, and more about city density and poor planning. I think we need to rethink the central urban hub model for cities. I suspect small hubs throughout the city would dramatically reduce congestion. We face similar scalability problems in tech. Typically if you have too much traffic going to your server you won't upgrade the server, but spin up more nodes. We distribute the traffic instead of spending larges amounts of money on infrastructure to send it all to a single node.
And another problem of this is that it causes feedback loops. I'm now in a position where I either have to continue to find working outside my city or relocate closer to the city centre contributing more to the urbanisation and population density problem.
With the right government incentives I see no reason why we could reestablish the city centre as a consumer hub. A place for shopping and leisure, etc. Then outside the city centre we could have tech hubs, financial hubs, industrial hubs, etc, all with good (perhaps even free) transportation between them. The time and money this would save seems like a no brainer to me. But then again, I don't really know anything. Perhaps there is a good reason to continue densely packing people into small 2-3 mile radiuses, where space is so limited most people can't afford a car, a decent size home, or even a decent sized office to work out of.
I don't see city center commerce and leisure hubs as being particularly able to dominate neighborhood and suburban equivalents. I need a car to get out to work anyway (8 miles away from the city center), so once all the fixed costs of the car are covered, it's incredibly cheaper and more convenient for us to shop and eat in the suburbs.
I don't see government incentives changing that in a meaningful way.
What I'd advocate for is governments to tax the hell out of companies who want to buy offices in city cores without a good reason. All a lot of these companies do is contribute to congestion and unaffordable property prices through increased urbanisation which forces people into the city or to deal with the congestion. A few years ago my girlfriend use to have to travel an hour every day to get to the city centre to work in a call centre. What's the point in that?
If instead governments allocated certain areas of cities which have low congestion and offered companies tax breaks for opening offices there you probably would see many moving out of the cities to the suburbs, reducing congestion and making properties more affordable.
I honestly think one of the main factors contributing to depress and mental-illness today, and why people don't have kids like they used to is because of the way we're living. Who the hell is going to raise a kid on £35,000 in 10m x 10m one-bed "flat" in a city like London? However, if on that money living in the suburbs of a city like Birmingham you'd be able to afford a reasonable two-bed home with a driveway and garden. The problem is uncontrolled urbanisation is driving businesses to city centres, and often to the major cities, then forcing anyone who wants to decent job to follow along whether they can afford to or not.
I bet most well paid developers living in the UK here live in London. And that's by no accident. It's not that they all just love London so much that they're happy to live in tiny apartments with no hope of raising a family or affording a mortgage. They do it because that's where all the decent tech jobs are. And why? Who is benefiting from this? A few very rich people and large businesses who can afford offices in city centres?
Not sure whether you made a mistake in conversion, but 100 sqm is actually a fairly decent living space here in a city like London (Tokyo).
My 90-odd sqm house has been plenty large enough to raise a family. Small garden, no driveway. But who needs car ownersip when there's three well-connected rail lines within a 7-minute walk?
Density need not be the problem you imagine.
This is fantastic to hear, what forward thinking city do you live in?
If we didn't subsidise highways so much, demand for them would be reduced, and it would make more sense to build denser housing and provide public transportation.
I've never sat in stop-and-go traffic, looked around and thought "Gee, this is great utilization of this road!"
Oddly, I have looked around a crowded standing-room-only train and thought "Gee, these load factors must be good for farebox recovery"
My solution to noisy transit is to wear headphones.
I think the problem is more cultural conditioning, I've been riding transit for 25+ years, and I like taking transit to work. Others who haven't ridden transit don't understand why I'd ride a bus to work even though we get "free" parking.
On the way to work the bus is usually faster than driving (the bus takes the carpool lane), on the way home, traffic is bad enough that the bus is probably about the same speed as driving (maybe a bit longer since for one stop it needs to leave the freeway express lane so needs to cut through 4 lanes of traffic to get to the stop and then again to get back into the express lane), but I don't care since I'm usually reading.
The land use required to merely own cars is not great but it’s not the primary cause of sprawl in the US. There are plenty of examples that show car-oriented development with transit to a city center can work at up to 2000 people per km^2 and a typical American suburb has less than a fourth of that population density.
The traffic deaths can be reduced dramatically by reducing miles travelled and speed, but if we’re playing that game they also rank lower than infectious disease which spreads just fine on transit. Traffic deaths also are only a bit higher than suicide in America and lower than it in Europe; suicide is a crude example of the excess death burden of unhappiness, which ought to be considered.
And furthermore I’m not even convinced you’ve been on a crowded train. BART is almost never truly crowded. Trains in Wuhan are crowded. Crowded often means literally shoving your way in if you want to go anywhere. And the person I responded to claimed he thinks about the tollbox operator on a crowded train.
So yeah, dying in traffic on an ugly highway? Cool story bro.
Which Bay Area trains are you taking that are not crowded? Both BART and Caltrain are full during commute hours -- Caltrain express trains are usually standing room only (in rail cars that aren't well designed for standing passengers) and BART is running crush-loads out of Embarcadero in the evening.
The Caltrain local trains are usually less full but those all stop trains take forever to go any significant distance. (SF to RWC is about twice as long on a local as on a baby-bullet)
Indeed. And trains usually don't go from people's homes to their destination, so they typically cause traffic of some sort around train stations.
But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.
Commuters don't all drive to the city center, they drive to 1000s of working places and arguably that's easier to handle traffic-wise than the traffic around fewer train stations (in one city!).
If businesses were spread out near major transit lines, that'd be another matter, but as it is now, the density is too low to serve well, transfers are a hard sell to commuters, no one wants to commute 40 minutes by train only to have to wait 15 minutes to transfer to a bus that takes another 15 minutes to get them to work.
VTA transit tries to serve a huge area with light rail, but everything is so spread out and there are so many stops that it takes forever, you can take light rail the 12 miles from downtown San Jose to Mountain View, but it'll take over an hour with 28 (!) stops in between. You could bike faster.
If you don't put a price on it then people won't prioritise, and the demand becomes endless. And you can never have supply to meet an endless demand.
That's the point -- we should incentivize people who can time shift to do so thereby alleviating traffic for those who can't.
There are, however, a lot of people for whom that $50 more in weekly commute costs, would be financially deadly and almost unavoidable.
It's easy for me to advocate for congestion charges; they clearly benefit me. Those who make a lot less than I do might feel very differently.
If the McDonalds employee has to pay $50 in fees to get to their job, it changes their financial calculations around whether that is a viable job. If enough of them decide to quit because of this, the restaurant will need to pay its employees more, subsidize their commutes or shut down.
If the restaurant shuts down, then it didn't make sense for them to be in an expensive urban hub, and the negative externality of the traffic their employees generated is gone. I suspect a lot of only-barely-viable jobs would go this way, and that's where traffic reduction would come from.
If they pay more, or subsidize commutes, they are paying to paying for the negative externality of filling up the highways to bring their employees in. The people who want cheap cheeseburgers in an expensive urban hub will decide if they want to pay more for cheap cheeseburgers to cover the cost. If they don't, it doesn't make sense for it to be there and the traffic isn't worth it.
What’s the point in me commuting to work to write code on a couch in an office that feels like my living room anyway?
The alternative is not Walmart paying stickers $50K/yr. The alternative is no or fewer Walmart jobs in locales with these laws. IMO, that makes things worse, not better, for prospective Walmart employees.
I also feel like where I live is none of my employer’s business, provided I can do the job. Maybe I’d make an exception for fire or police, but even there I’d rather not make the employer totally paternalistic.
Poor people would likely benefit overall from more efficient use of roads.
Interstate roads allowed people to live far from things they need (e.g. jobs). Your suggestion is backwards, people should be located near things, not the other way around. Roads with no fees have distorted supply and demand. The market can't function.
We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have!
Recommended reading:
- https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s...
Meanwhile America's best, most expensive, most politically supported public transit systems barely work, and can be expected to fail you completely several times each month.
The lived experiences don't match the theory. Roads usually work fine, and degrade gracefully when they don't. Transit is obnoxious on a good day, and when it fails it cascades catastrophically.
I want to be a good urbanist, but the quality just isn't there, nor does it seem to be a budget priority (instead new money goes to fare subsidies, empty bus routes, etc).
Literally moved to this city due to the walkability and quality of public transit.
I. LOVE. IT. HERE.
When comparing the best roads in the world (Say the German Autobahn) to the best mass transportation in the world (Japan Railways Group) we see that when mass transportation is done correctly it can be timely and reliable. It is also cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient than roads.
We shouldn't limit our sources of inspiration to one continent when developing transportation solutions.
Inspiration is cheap. Disenfranchising the stakeholders who reliably mess things up is the real work.
This to me is something like the “I can’t live in a city because I can’t afford a 2000 square foot detached unit” issue.
You just need to modify your expectations. I’m far happier and less stressed not driving every day - but yes, it’s noisy and I have to stand and sometimes something smells bad.
There’s room for improvement, but that doesn’t mean public transit is unuseable.
Saying "We need roads because public transit does not work" is just false. There are MANY examples of cities where they all get around just fine without having to slather down some more pavement. I was very impressed by the Park and Ride system in Strasbourg, France and Amsterdam, Netherlands. Or hey, my current home Portland, Oregon! Or my previous home Chicago, Illinois also has excellent public transit! ( Though Chicago has been going through a rough patch lately due to bad zoning laws around the Blue Line EL stops )
When I lived in Chicago it took 60-70 minutes to get to the Loop by bus and Red Line, or 15-20 by car. I don't claim this is an inherent feature of transit. I claim that the way we do transit systematically underperforms the way we do roads, and so all else being equal, roads are going to deliver a better UX. We should be fixing that. Unfortunately, politicians who preside over transit meltdowns (i.e. Cuomo) keep getting reelected.
If you mean transit can’t deliver you to your destination, that certainly isn’t the case in the Bay, Chicago or NY for any of my friends who take public transit daily in those cities.
Source?
>but the quality just isn't there
Based on what metrics? Last time I checked, public transportation in any city doesn't routinely suffer breakdowns around the same time, every work day. It also doesn't suck money from productive city centers into outlying suburbs to pay for an absurd amount of infrastructure to support a particular, luxurious transportation lifestyle.
Good luck.
Introduce paid roads where applicable.
Oh my god do the voters scream about this. They are entitled to free roads.
We struggle to maintain roads because the voting public wants $1.00 worth of services for $0.90
They did this with the Orange Line westwards inbetween Route 66. They then did this with the Silver Line North-westwards in-between Route the Dulles tollway.
I imagine the increased traffic due to increased highway capacity is partly because exurbs dont have mass transit support back to the center city...yet people reach further outwards to exurbs seeking more affordable housing. The Washington DC approach solves parts of that problem quite well.
Freeway median transit is no panacea (though better than nothing).
With respect to getting to downtown Falls Church VA, that is more a last mile problem. One I dont want to dismiss, but not something a commuter rail can solve. The commuter rail does pretty well at getting people to several major job districts (DC, Tyson's Corner)
Building commuter rail along highway medians solves a different problem -- the NYC problem where a city fiddles around for 40yrs figuring out where to dig a tunnel and eminent domain problems.
People rarely want to go there. Some are built so traffic is moved from where people actually want to go into some place that is not too far (by car) but will not disturb the destination; others are built at the end of a set of smaller roads, linking to a different set at the other end.
When HOV lanes were first built in Houston, they were designed to eventually be converted to light rail. I bet it never happens.
Traffic is a sign of something. It’s a sign that the benefits of transportation outweighs the costs of transportation. Given this, high traffic often implies that there is pent up demand out there - more cars that would be on the road right now if only the roads could support it.
When more roads are built, this unlocks some of the pent up demand, as the cost of transportation has effectively declined due to more available roads.
However, this reduction in cost / hassle etc and the previously pent up demand may be so large that in encourages much more driving, such that in equilibrium the traffic could be nearly as bad as before.
Which, given the way roads are funded, is something of a broken equation. The costs of transportation are not fully borne by the user proportionally to consumption.
You pay fuel taxes & buy tires, yes, but they by no means cover the full per-mile cost of your trip.
On the other hand, if the on-ramp of a highway would only let cars through for one minute every 10 minutes (which would be considered a good service interval for any suburban public transit), the demand for roadspace would likely be a bit less elastic. Ditto, if the highway would only go to a set of destinations with no connections.
Motorists can embark on a trip any time, join the highway any time, and take any exit, and continue from there to local destinations. This free schedule suits way more people than fixed departures to fixed destinations using public transit.
Only in a densely built city you can achieve the same: people sharing segments of public transit before diverging to a number of different destinations.
In other words, with just a car you can get anywhere you want in the continental US in 2-3 days. With just passenger rail (or commercial air travel, etc.), you can get to passenger terminals in a lot of places, but that’s about it.
I have lived in Phoenix and Tucson, where the light rail is a joke: they are so short and there's only one line, so you probably don't live close enough for them to be useful and they probably don't take you where you want to go. If there was more light rail, more people would use it, but since so few people use it, there is little incentive to grow the light rail.
Contrast Hudson County, NJ, which has a light rail system that's used heavily, the trains are often full during rush hour. You can use it to get pretty much everywhere (except Union City and uptown Jersey City, which both require a long trudge up the Palisades).
For public transportation to work, we first need to make our cities denser. The best way of doing this is by outlawing use-based zoning and moving to form-based zoning. That means getting rid of the concept of a "single family zone" and a "commercial zone", etc. and just specifying stuff about the materials and shapes of buildings. It also means outlawing parking minimums. Many cities around the world (and even a few in the US, re: Philadelphia, NYC) have this kind of zoning which allows for much denser development.
Yup. I live in a metro with the longest light rail system in the US (almost 100 miles) and I don't go anywhere near one during my commute and many don't. It doesn't get half the riders that the second-longest gets. I would not vote for light rail funding...different strokes and all that.
Building wider roads is a success if they move more people compared to a more narrow road. It doesn't matter if they stay congested even as you widen them. The goal of a wider road isn't to reduce congestion the goal is to move more people.
This same type of reasoning is used against constructing more housing because building more housing doesn't have an impact on rent prices while ignoring that every new apartment provides housing for a new person. The goal of more housing isn't to reduce rent prices, it's housing more people!
A goal of house building is certainly to provide affordable housing. Unfortunately that goal isn't shared by the people with the money/land whose goal is usually just "make as much profit as possible". Those already profiting from rent are usually strictly opposed to the goal of affordable housing too.
But that doesn't mean that a substantial portion of society doesn't support it; the power to achieve it just doesn't lie with them.
Sometimes it looks like the Silicon Valley is trying to solve transit problems either against the laws of physics and economics or, alternatively, ignoring solutions that were there already in the 1800s.
The problem is that many American cities, including those in Silicon Valley, would need to be torn down and rebuilt for European- or Japanese-style transit to make sense. Everything is very spread out. Most people in London or Paris or Tokyo live within a short walking distance of a train station. In cities like LA, many people could walk over a mile from their house and only see other houses.
Because everything is so spread out, we would require many stations in suburban residential neighborhoods or nobody would have a station within walking distance of their home. However, those stations would only be useful to the small number of people who live in those neighborhoods because nobody else would have a reason to go there. It's hard to imagine those stations would get enough ridership to make economic sense.
So we are stuck with transit restricted to downtown areas, and if you want to go downtown or leave downtown you need a car. The Boring Company is attempting to recognize that reality and solve the "last mile problem" by turning cars themselves into public transit. It will be pretty cool if it works.
That, or the Old World is simply stuck with cities where no more roads can be built without tearing down many inhabited buildings, so people are forced to use smelly, uncomfortable public transport. I'd appreciate more honesty and less ideology in such debates.
and yet
> forced to use smelly, uncomfortable public transport
There is no need to public transport to be smelly and uncomfortable if enough money is spent on maintenance.
I live in Vienna, which has arguably some of the best maintained and expensive public transport. It's still smelly, because people. They forbid food (initially only smelly food, but signs - pictograms in the subway - show any/all types of food) recently because people complained and during last summer the administration handed out free deodorants to passengers.
Sorry, public transport IS uncomfortable and smelly, like most places with many people.
It's a mentality issue - Singapore and Japan are also famous for clean public transport, but in most countries it's simply not possible.
If you include London in "the Old World," it has the same horrible freeway congestion problems every other city does. Being European doesn't change the laws of physics.
A hundred years later, driving is a massive part of US culture, and we have trouble seeing the problem because that's "just how things are".
Honestly it's not hard to see why it succeeded. Back in the early postwar period, driving was cheap and easy, parking was plentiful, traffic was light, and the new interstate highway system made long-distance car travel practical.
Even if the motorist groups had not lobbied for it, cars would have taken over anyway because people liked them so much.
Progress!
Here's some questions we argue:
1. Where's the money coming from? We see massive Houston mega-projects, huge new freeways built on top of massive existent ones. Yet there's no gas tax, no state income tax, and I don't remember there even being a city income tax (that was several years ago that I worked here though). So who's paying for the new freeways?
2. Why do cars clump at exits? Why do Houstonians sometimes spend 15+minutes at a total standstill waiting to exit? Is it because of line cutters (culture of driving)? Is it because of people reacting violently to line cutters (culture of driving)? Is it because of poor design? Is it as the Houston Chronicle has argued and due to feeder roads, a feature that doesn't exist outside of Houston/Dallas (and thus is a strong contender)? Is it simply because the population is massive and driving is the only viable option to get around, and thus the roads are always clogged? Is it actually an issue in San Francisco, and we simply don't notice because we drive motorcycles (unlikely, but I will pay extra attention when we return)?
3. Why the fuck did i-45, in the middle of a 50 year construction project, suddenly swap out freeway-going-under-bridge design in the Clear Lake area for freeway-is-a-bridge design? Now it's terrifying to drive the speed limit over those bridges because you might smash at 65mph into a half-mile exit-clump line.
The federal highway program. Highways are heavily, heavily subsidized by state and federal dollars. That's why their true cost isn't born on drivers, and it's something that greatly exacerbates the problem of urban planning the U.S that leads to vast sprawl, urban decay, hell for walkers/bikers and environmental degredation. If all highways were toll roads, most would cease to exist and our cities would become denser, doubly so if all those highway dollars were diverted to public transit.
These aren't contradictory if you look where most of those state and federal dollars come from (i.e. fuel taxes, which is borne by the driver). Mass transit more fits the description of transportation subsidized by non-users.
Not sure they are uniquely Houston, and definitely not their explicit fault, but I'd say the issue is (obviously) large concentrations of people going to the same area. The DFW metroplex has some traffic issues like any metros, but not to the same extent as e.g. Houston despite being a larger metro (but smaller city). And that's the point. Were Houston's employers to fan out even more than they already do, you might see the suburb-to-suburb commutes that many other sprawls enjoy. Maybe there are plenty of people that live in Katy and work in the Woodlands or vice-versa. Not having to ever even enter the city on a regular basis is very welcoming to those who hate traffic.
This is not completely true. In some cases interstates are 80/20 federal/state funded, in others its 50/50. Not sure of any states where it is 100% federal funding of interstates.
They didn't change the two lane in each direction structure, they just added another lane on each side which can only be entered/exited around exits.
A couple things I've noticed, most mid-day traffic occurs in clumps. You can usually take one segment of toll road for $0.35 and exit back into a mostly empty highway. Also, the toll lane people usually move above the speed limit. This speeds up traffic in general because people seem to tend to move into the right lane when someone blasts past them. A few people do it and most slow drivers will get the idea. And it also discourages lane switching which is a significant contributor to traffic. Once you're in the toll lane, you're committed to it until the next exit.
The problem with just arbitrarily adding more lanes is than lane switching is a major cause of traffic. Every time someone switches a lane because their lane is too slow, they usually cause the car behind them to have to slow down which causes a ripple effect. Add this to complexity of an 8 lane freeway and you may have created a nightmare for travelers. Granted in over populated areas like much of CA, congestion is somewhat unavoidable. (I grew up in the LA area)
[1] https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=108...
I believe the article mentions this, but the paper only studies urban-area VKT, the paper mentions that the same effects do not apply to interstate highway system or a number of other categories.
We don't pay for road usage!!!
Anything useful that is handed out to consumers at the cost of $0.00 will be overused and develop a shortage.
This is so ingrained that it can be hard to think about.
Anyway, if we had to pay to access roads, depending on the traffic load, traffic could always flow at full speed, road investments could pay for themselves and a lot of things would be healthier in society.
I know this argument doesn't convince a lot of people... I think we just have to wait for some society to implement it first and the the rest of us can wonder at the miracle and slowly copy it. Perhaps the Chinese? The seem keen on innovating, for better and for worse :)
I didn't know about this.
I'm very impressed by Japanese infrastructure, and this is one more piece explaining how they do it.
Can you explain how I still seem to have enough oxygen to breathe?
I get the point, but I don't like the absolutism applied in these kind of arguments. Similarly, I can go to a small country town with a 2 lane highway through it and somehow building that road did not induce congestion despite the fact that the article asserts a 1:1 correlation between congestion and building roads.
Obviously these are silly arguments but it still all goes back to the point that we need to figure out how to model these things and each situation should be modeled and engineered on its own merits. Turning the argument into just an alternative form of dogma to what caused the problem originally is actually almost as bad as the original problem.
This is a fundamental question in economics, and the answer is that oxygen is (currently) not a scarce resource.
This is not an inherent property of oxygen. In a Mars settlement, oxygen would probably be a costly manufactured good.
Economics is sometimes called the "science of scarcity", and the basic economic problem as the gap between limited resources and theoretically limitless wants: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scarcity.asp
Resources that are in bigger supply that the demand have nothing for Economists to study.
As for roads, I'd note that they're only scarce some times. I wouldn't expect much or any road pricing to apply at nights or weekends even in heavily congested big city commute paths.
And as for my "absolutism" and "dogma", I don't know what that specifically refers to. I think I'm just calmly explaining the state of the science in this field. Let me know if I need to clarify anything!
I live in upper Manhattan and have an unlimited-ride metrocard. But I would much rather go shopping at the store that's a five minute walk away than one that requires 30 minutes on the subway, even though the latter offers many more options. I increasingly order products online instead of doing either.
To where are people driving that makes these longer trips worth their while?
Light and commuter rail ridership makes up only 300M/quarter riders out of a total ridership of 2.5B/quarter for all forms of mass transit, if I'm reading this right.[1]
[0]https://www.apta.com/mediacenter/ptbenefits/Pages/FactSheet....
[1]https://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Pages/ridershiprep...
Why are people driving such long distances—and putting up with traffic—in their expensive cars? Is a larger house really that valuable?
I suppose the answer is "yes, it is that valuable", since we are where we are. But, like, what's wrong with people?
For example, Bitcoin is a lot like the interstate highway system in that it's prone to traffic jams. The Great Bitcoin Scaling Debate of 2016 and 2017 attempted to address this problem
One camp argued strongly like the old-school urban planners in the linked article: more capacity = less congestion.
Another group argued that variable-rate fees (a feature built into Bitcoin from the beginning) would take care of the problem. When transaction volume spikes, so do fees. This discourages use during spikes and incentivizes off-peak use.
Bitcoin ended up adding a small increase to capacity in the form of segwit.
The result followed the prediction in the article. After a massive spike in usage during the later part of 2017, fees spiked to $50 or more per transaction. This was followed by a marked decrease in on-chain transaction volume to the point that blocks aren't full today. Fees have likewise decreased by more than two orders of magnitude.
Two other developments during 2018 may be relevant:
1. The BTC/USD exchange rate collapsed.
2. The Lightning Network (a way to route more transaction volume with fewer on-chain transactions) was deployed on mainnet.
This whole notion of "induced demand" seems like a suspicious artificial label used to position roads as a negative. The reality is that roads provide something people want - the ability to get around quickly, on one's own terms, without dealing with waiting times or trip planning, and without some of the unsavory experiences that can sour public transit (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...).
Building roads doesn't "induce" demand. Rather, it _fulfills_ it. There is a limit to that demand - it's not like supplying infinitely more of something would infinitely scale the associated behavior. There are only so many humans and only so many trips they are willing to make in a day. And an area that is 100% roads obviously would not have any destinations worth traveling to (leaving aside edge cases like race tracks).
So as far as I can tell, this is just regular supply-demand: people want something, and supplying it satisfies that need. Why is this noteworthy except that it lends dubious credence to a narrative Vox likes to push?
Sure, turning two-thirds of a city into roads will cut down on traffic - but within realistic restraints on road construction, induced demand is real.
(There are 140mi^2 of roads now[0], and 4,058mi^2 of land mass[1].)
[0]: https://la.curbed.com/2015/11/30/9895842/how-much-parking-lo... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California
Not only should we not make room for newcomers to the Bay Area (cause screw immigrants), but no need to make room for people who grew up here either; just have them live with their parents!
Given the options available, people will generally choose the most hassle-free route. If public transit improves, more people will take it, which will improve road traffic.
If bigger roads are built, less people will take public transit, because roads can handle more cars before the traffic factor forces people to use alternatives.
This breaks down a bit outside cities where the only option is to drive (no buses, too far to bike or walk), but remote areas don't usually have traffic problems even with low capacity roads.
Edit, more info for the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
And in other news, more food makes people eat more. And more money lets people spend more.
Conversely, when roads are put on a diet and lanes are removed it generally turns out that the traffic does not pack into queues twices as long, as is often expected or feared, but generally disappears.
To control congestion is to control the space available where congestion can happen. Build a two lane road and you will have two lanes of congestion. Build an eight lane road and you will have eight lanes of congestion.
The practical solution is to find a trade-off where we allow enough congestion to allow the necessary and important things to move but not too much that allows convenience traffic that makes the city unwalkable and car-dependent.
> [...]perhaps you could create a system that also takes a person's income into account, which would let you make a progressive form of congestion pricing.
It's oddly inconsistent to hold that opinion about road use and not say real estate use.
Very few people are of the opinion that someone making minimum wage needs to be living in downtown Manhattan. Why shouldn't use of the scarce road resources of Manhattan be treated similarly when it comes to pricing?
Since driving is the preferred mode of transport, the fact that a reduction in traffic encourages more driving (and congestion) should not surprise anyone.
The question we should be asking is whether people are being better served stuck at home afraid of traffic or would they be better off getting out and going places.
I tried to explain the concept to an acquaintance who claimed it wasn't true - bigger roads just ease congestion so all we need to do is keep expanding roads until congestion stops.
Then, after a freeway expansion was completed, he moved 10 miles to the far side of the expansion to buy a bigger house. And now he complains about the traffic since his dream commute for the first couple years is now worse than ever.
Seen this? Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century
Only if the trains carry people to a place they want to go.