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Comment by hansworst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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