Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

"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

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com