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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

Thank god this didn’t go ahead. It would have made london into a car centric hellhole, and I suspect traffic would still be terrible. I’ve never been to any large city where the traffic flows freely, regardless of how much road infrastructure there is.

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It feels like building more infrastructure just causes people to use more of it, because the "cost" of using it goes down. Kind of similar to how having faster computers has just resulted in us creating more bloated software, instead of everything becoming snappier.

Your feeling is generally observed to be correct. Induced demand [1] is a fairly well observed phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...

Exactly. Another related and very relevant economic concept is elasticity of demand [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

Induced demand doesn’t mean the additional infrastructure is useless. It just means it likely won’t reduce traffic. You’ll get greater population, more economic growth. More people able to get to where they want to go.

And induced demand applies to all kinds of things, not just automobile infrastructure. So it should help you be more thoughtful about what infrastructure you want to actually build, but crucially it does NOT mean that the infrastructure is worthless.

That's the point.

High usage of resources for low expenditure of man-hours directly correlates to higher quality of living.

You couldn't afford an air conditioner if transportation was expensive, power was expensive and every step along the way was running on paper records.

But transportation, power and administrative overhead (and a whole laundry list of other things) are cheap enough (in terms of labor) that you can afford to get and use an air conditioner and you are better off for it.

We want fast and efficient transportation, power generation, record keeping and information management (and other things) because those things add a labor cost to just about everything in our word.

It helps to think of money and time as being convertible to and from each other.

> I’ve never been to any large city where the traffic flows freely, regardless of how much road infrastructure there is.

singapore and dubai off the top of my head.

Dubai is plainly not a human scale city. You need a car to get around it, walking anywhere is a complete nightmare

>Dubai is plainly not a human scale city.

Ok and?

If their median/average/<whatever> quality of life is greater that way then so what?

Every ideologue latches onto buzzwords like "human scale" but forgets that the whole point of that buzzword is that the thing is represents theoretically goes hand in hand with quality of life.

Look at the local climate and land situation for Dubai. It's not exactly a surprise that they prefer to just spread everything out and travel in cars. Just a 1/4mi walk from subway station to destination would be pretty uncomfortable for large parts of the year. At least in St. Petersburg you can put on a big jacket during the uncomfortable part of the year.

> Every ideologue latches onto buzzwords like "human scale"

I started hating this term, because it appears to reflect a very particular lifestyle which in turn fits a very particular demographic and just assumes this is better than alternatives.

One thing that I never see mentioned is how this affects availability of real estate. In my corner of the world people are generally leaving large cities, because at least half of the working population isn't eligible for a mortgage for an apartment within city limits.

You can only go so far on foot or on a bicycle in a day. With a car you at least have a bargaining chip against the local real estate market.

The problem is often that people want to live in a place that is cheap and with space and then drive to where jobs are and the pay is high (city), which means wide roads to get to city, which means lots of pollution, noise, lack of safety for those in the city. As far as real estate, there are often other reasons for the high prices. The root cause is often not just land.

Dubai is usually over 38 °C (100°F) for half the year, usually reaching 40°C (105°C) and once reached 49°C (121°F). Humans can't really cope with temperatures that high unless it's insanely dry out. I would argue Dubai can really only be lived in through artificial means.

Singapore works because congestion charges are high.

I am hoping that self driving electric medium sized buses giving a hybrid between public transport and uber would solve that. Move people away from car ownership.

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