Yeah OK, does anyone have the angle on that? Is there a new technology aspect here?
And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems
And rail has otherwise struggled in the US.
The amtrak story is not great. I've tried to use them repeatedly, and outside of northeast corridor it is cheaper to fly then to take them anywhere. Let that sink in, the cost to get you up in air, and FLY is cheaper than rolling along on low friction rails. When you say why is it hard to understand that rail is cheapest it's because folks KNOW that things like buses are MUCH MUCH cheaper.
This is ignoring the absolutely stupid cost to build one mile of rail tunnel.
Mass transit rail has hardly "struggled" in the US - it has high usage and conflating the distinction between mass transit rail and long distance rail is disingenuous when considering the usecases of Musks tunnels.
The boring company is more of a personal effort by Elon due to his hatred of LA traffic.
Elon has a lot to learn about induced demand.
>If the transport system exceeds public travel needs, there will be very little traffic.
Sure. But... it would take an enormous amount of development to make this happen, because so many people are going to want more space if they can have it with still a <1hr commute. So more sprawl, leading to more pressure on the new network, lather, rinse, repeat...
For all the talk of walkable neighborhoods, if you gave people the choice of a 30min walk-and-subway commute in a 5-story condo building vs a 30min new-car-tunnel point to point commute with a 2000sqft house on a private parcel of land, you're going to have a lot (not everyone, but a lot) of people picking the latter.
Best case it's going to, for a long time, until we reach steady state, still just be a repeat of the "build roads, watch sprawl" cycle of the last century, just with potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?).
Isn't it easier to persuade local residents to support a tunnel under their area than an above-ground structure in their area?
Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.
There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get.
Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people.
What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?
I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision.
My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options.
For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic.
If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.
people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells us we're woefully under-providing that demand. we're very far from the desired equilibrium point in nearly every metro area. elon seems to understand that better than a pithy quip might indicate.
along with mixed-use-as-default along transportation corridors, i would prefer more underground trains, dedicated busways, and small personal transport infrastructure (for electric bikes, scooters, etc.) in our cities (particularly in LA), but every effort, including the boring company's, that addresses that overwhelming demand helps.
If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7.
But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.
To make up for that, we can charge people at the entrance point. But charging people time is basically impossible, so money is used instead.
The fact of the matter is that it's absurd to transport people in a dense environment 25'x10' apart, one at a time, all going back and forth to the same exact two places five days a week for 40+ years. Trains let you fit way more people in a given area, people who are already heading the same direction, and therefor offer more space for a city to be a city rather than a place for infrastructure.
Until we get to a point where people are able to move easily with high capacity transit, it's irresponsible to waste precious political will to build with the intention of providing low capacity transport for those who can afford a $30k+ car.
that's accounted for in the foot-second metric. by a (very) rough calculation, we'd only need to double road foot-seconds to alleviate most congestion. that's very expensive, since most of these roads would have to go underground or be elevated, but not impossible (elon is trying to do just that for teslas).
i'm not advocating we double our roads, however. i'm just refuting the pithy notion that it's impossible to meet the supposedly insatiable demand implied by "induced demand" arguments.
but yes, let's build way more public transit and smaller personal transport networks (along with taller, mixed-use buildings)! it's definitely more efficient and can be less expensive and stressful.
How capacity is provisioned from A to B influences how people choose to move and, over the long term, build homes/workplaces.
Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions. There is overwhelming evidence of this at work over 50 years and across continents.
As a consequence, the argument is not "why bother?" but rather - "build it in a way that scales". For urban areas, private transport doesn't scale well.
that's the exact interpretation i'm refuting.
of course supply is less than demand. that's because the price of using roads is (perceived to be) zero, but the cost of construction on the supply side is high (and increasing, relative to inflation). it's impossible to meet the demand for free when costs are high.
my point is that this mispricing is a political and cultural choice, not an economic one explained by "induced demand". by using an economic concept for a non-economic market, we fall prey to misinterpreting and misadvocating.
we need to make the price of private transport much more transparent (e.g., real-time pricing) and rein in costs (land prices, legal/regulatory costs) so that we can make better choices in allocating our precious and limited resources (toward more mass transit for example).
(real-time pricing should also be progressive so that roads aren't just for rich people.)
Market demand, induced and otherwise, is a good thing, if the externalities are also addressed. That's basically Musk's whole business model.
The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable.
Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffic doom have failed to manifest when roads are removed. The traffic just goes away largely because the traffic was an artifact of the roads being there in the first place.
People are highly adaptable. They take the path of least resistance. If that path is a road, they take it. If you make the road bigger, it reduces resistance and becomes busier.
Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all?
Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight?
It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.
I'd say that it's more like taking models to extremes is useless.
If your doctor says that you're consuming too much salt it is increasing your risk of a range of diseases, you don't turn around and say "But salt is necessary for the function of life, I can't just cut it out entirely!". The answer, as with most things - is somewhere in between.
With our current set of transport options - a mix of transport options are going to be optimal. The specific mix is going to depend entirely on the area and traffic patterns.
The only problem is cost. For a city to out build unmet demand they would need to get to add several dozen layers of road, one on top of another (that is bridges over bridges for 12 layers). Nobody would seriously propose building such a thing. If we had it the mobility of the city would allow people to accomplish more things in the city than they can today.