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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

> the entire point of this article is that doing something to solve the traffic wave problem still won't fix congestion

The problem here is that the article (and StrongTowns, and most urbanists) are simply wrong. Demand simply does not work that way. They have a fundamentally flawed understanding of Induced Demand, and are incorrectly applying it to gain incorrect results.

By StrongTowns logic, we should never build more hospitals (it would just induce demand for more sickness), and we should never run new sewer lines (it would just encourage people to poop more often), and we should never run fiber lines (because it would just encourage people to "waste" internet bandwidth), and so on

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It is fairly well documented that demand for road travel DOES work this way though and is different than demand for health care, waste disposal, and the internet. [0] There is strong evidence that building additional roadway capacity does not decrease travel time in the long run. Whether or not increasing the throughput of the roads is the best way of enabling mobility or the best way to design a city is a judgment call, but it is fairly clear that simply adding roadway capacity does not solve congestion.

Would be interested in seeing any evidence to the contrary if it exists.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315534829_Closing_t...

Doesn't this end up implying that a city that was made entirely of dead-end roads would in some sense be very 'good' as it would lack all congestion? Portland seems intent on trying to prove that argument, but just because there would be no congestion in such a city does not mean that there is no value in making the roads efficient even if congestion remains the same. Sure, congestion doesn't decrease with more efficient roads, but efficient roads can clearly have a higher bandwidth.

A saturated dial-up line is not of the same quality as a saturated fiber line, even if packets are being dropped because the line is saturated, unless your protocol (roads) are of a deeply inefficient design to begin with.

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