Hacker News Reader

Comment by a4isms | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

Right, but this usually turns into the argument that we shouldn't add new capacity because then it would be used, and that's such a staggeringly stupid argument that I cannot comprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead someone to embrace it.

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.

"but this usually turns into..."

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.

You're just declining to engage because you know I'm right :)

Fair enough.

Again, you're making things up. I never said that, I didn't even say you were wrong. I actually said you were not even wrong, and I'll say it again here:

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

> Right, but this usually turns into the argument that we shouldn't add new capacity because then it would be used, and that's such a staggeringly stupid argument that I cannot comprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead someone to embrace it.

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.

Trains have the exact same pathology, though: add more capacity and people will use it until they can't, and then they'll either stop or fund more. It's a social coordination pattern, not a car pattern.

Scaling arguments do not have this problem.

For the same route you get get much more people moved. Like, ridiculously more:

* 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.

The more you add road capacity, the less 'demand is induced', because there's limited amount of people. In other words, at some point the traffic problem is solved by adding more roads.

It's another question if it makes sense to add that amount of road. It probably depends on the particular case.

> The more you add road capacity, the less 'demand is induced', because there's limited amount of people.

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?

But you can turn this around and look at the large scale problem.

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.

Or you could build high-speed rail instead and move those 700k people faster without anyone being stuck in traffic.

Sure, except they're not going to places that the rail will go.

We use trains, there are lots of them, they solve different problems.

Build trams, subways and local rail then. There shouldn't be places where the rail doesn't go.

I live in a small village of 800 people and we have a rail connection. Remoteness is not an excuse.

The catch is that by rail, a trip can take 40min to an hour. By car it's less than half of that.

A car in the US reaches around 100km/h in the best case. Rail reaches thrice that. Not sure what kind of math you did there.

The kind that comes from 30 years in a country considered to have "amazing" public transport.

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.

Right. I live super super metroland central compared to like 99% of the world.

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.

Real world math.

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.

I'm sorry, but London's public transit is horrible. I've moved there from Vienna and it was a huge downgrade. Don't think it's fair to use that city as benchmark.

That goes in both senses though, and that becomes a tougher sell.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com