Did creating the iPhone induce demand for iPhones that otherwise would not have been there? Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation?
Or did people like the utility of iPhones, and buy them in spades?
In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
You've got it in one. People think that the biggest highway with the most lanes will mean less sitting in traffic, so they plan their trips to include it.
People think that a satellite city connected to the big city with a big highway will have a short car commute, so they choose to live there.
This kind of thinking induces demand until the experience of sitting in traffic for an hour on one of the widest highways in the world—like Ontario's 401—discourages people from taking the highway.
So politicians spend billions widening the highway some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
What's worse, I hear this awful argument deployed under the flag of a cause I believe in: more public transport, less roads. Guess what? If we deploy more public transport, I bet people will use it more, too! Does that mean we shouldn't? Ugh. It's so dumb it almost feels like it has to be a false flag, but I've heard it from people who I know believe what they say, so I think it's just a meme at this point. A pejorative that people throw at cars without thinking about what they are saying.
"Cars are bad at scaling throughput" is the argument we need. Not this "induced demand" garbage.
You're arguing with someone who isn't present. If and when someone makes that argument here, you can refute the argument they actually make, rather than the one in your own head. Until then, you're actually arguing with your own personal straw-man.
Also, and this is an actual thing in the HN guidelines, when you do argue, calling ideas staggeringly stupid and so forth is strongly discouraged.
Fair enough.
When you decide for yourself what somebody else might say—but hasn't said, or decide for yourself why you think somebody didn't say something, you're arguing with yourself.
"Not even wrong" has a very specific meaning here, it means arguing from speculative premises that cannot be falsified. Like, "But other people will argue X," or, "You declined to engage because Y."
Both of these statement forms are not even wrong.
Well... I hope this explanation is soothing then.
It's about what the investment in more capacity is meant to accomplish.
Accommodating more cars? Sure, but why did you want to accommodate more cars?
To move more people from A to B, more comfortably.
Now, what happens when you create this capacity is that it gets used to the same point it did before you built it, until moving people in cars through roads becomes untenable due to congestion. By making it temporarily better, you put more vehicles on the road, made it more viable to move to the suburb, and allowed the problem to grow.
So, describing this phenomenon as an argument not to build more capacity for cars as it won't have the expected pay off in quality of life for people is important. It can and often is an either/or building more capacity for private cars or allocating that money to public transportation.
Scaling arguments do not have this problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity
> It's a social coordination pattern, not a car pattern.
So making it easier for automobile transportation is throwing money at the symptom. Money and policy decisions should be focused on moving people around generally and not on cars specifically.
The argument is "we should not add new road capacity to solve traffic problems because it will just create more traffic".
You're not solving anything by spending the money on road capacity. If you want to get rid of traffic you need to spend the money on alternatives that get people using roads less or more efficiently.
It's another question if it makes sense to add that amount of road. It probably depends on the particular case.
And how much money would it cost to build out enough road infrastructure to 'overwhelm all possible demand'? How much would it cost to move the same amount of people via some other form of transportation?
The province of Ontario finds it cheaper to run an entire railway (GO Transit) compared to being able to build out enough highway infrastructure (and it's not like they've stop building that):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA
And that's just the road infrastructure: what about things like parking space at the destination(s) of where all these folks are going? How much area would have to be bulldozed for all of this?
Let's say that 500K people can successfully make a mid-length car journey in London per day. Number pulled out of a hat.
You widen all of the roads where it's viable. Now 700K people can successfully make a mid-length car journey.
Sure, I'm still stuck in traffic, I can't go further, it's no more "convenient", but it literally improves the situation.
By the same token, it makes no difference to me whether 200K new homes are built in the capital - they'll probably all get filled up and I'll end up paying the same or close to. Hell I have a mortgage anyway.
But that's another 200K people that can live in the place they want to.
We use trains, there are lots of them, they solve different problems.
I live in a small village of 800 people and we have a rail connection. Remoteness is not an excuse.
Rail is great if you're going long distances, or if traffic is an absolute nightmare. Not so much for the much shorter distances inday to day travel. Worse, if you're walking out to the train station, that's even more time spent that would have been covered by a car.
The tube station is ten mins away and then on the other side it's ten mins from my friend. If it's close enough I just drive or cycle the whole thing in 15.
Roads and paths are everywhere by definition, they're like, what "outside" is.
I live in London, we have a billion trains and shit, my mate 4 miles away is still 45 mins by train/bus because public transport is worse by definition for rarely travelled routes.
I can cycle in half the time or drive in 1/4.
Both the "there shouldn't be places" and the "where the rail doesn't go"
Sprawl just doesn't pay for itself[1]. The more of it there is, more a government will bleed money building and maintaining infrastructure for few people per square kilometer. It doesn't make economic sense.
Now, of course "does it make money" is not a criterion to be applied to everything in life and society, but sprawl just makes it harder to fund everything, and you can end up subsidizing low-density well-to-do neighborhoods with the tax collected from lower-income people if they live in more densely zoned areas.
It's just a road to not having money to maintain the infrastructure, or improve education, or provide daycares, or anything else that would improve the life of the population.
1. Youtube "citations" are lame but this is a presentation of a consultancy ran for a few municipalities on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Yes, correct. That’s spot on. A lot of people were crying out for a powerful, capable, usable mobile computer to access email, the web and use applications on the go. The mobile networks had invested billions building network capacity to meet these needs. This is why there were huge queues for the very first iPhone before hardly anyone had even touched one.
The mobile industry had been full of speculation about what devices we would use on these networks, how they might work and what they would look like. Before the iPhone was even announced I could tell you very clearly what I needed a mobile device to be able to do for me, but not how it would do it. Apple figured that bit out.
Think about it this way. If latent demand didn’t exist, how could Apple have figured out what device to design? How could they select the features and capabilities and prioritise them? They had to target a market, even though that market didn’t exist yet. Without thinking about latent demand that sort of novel product development would be just random feature selection and then see what gets traction. For sure some companies do that, but not all. Some of them think it through and target a market they hypothesise exists.
The iPhone was terrible at everything when it came out except capacitive touch and coolness. That's fine, but let's not pretend otherwise.
Terming "people wanting to buy something better/cool" as latent demand is silly. It's a new/cool thing. There's no need to pretend there's anything latent about it. Make new shiny; people buy new shiny. And that's just for Apple. Most products require massive amounts of marketing to explain to people why they should be bought. That wouldn't be needed in a world with latent demand, just waiting to be fulfilled.
Invention is the mother of necessity. — Marshal McLuhan
> In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
Until that new capacity is filled up and now you have even more people sitting in traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to get people out of cars, otherwise you're just spending money to kick the can down the road.
See "What People Get Wrong About Induced Demand" by the Oh The Urbanity! channel:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc
Also "Does Induced Demand Apply to Housing?":
Traffic is people, if you increase road capacity, you'll just have more people taking the road until it's full enough for everyone to be stuck again.