Sigh, this again.
Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.
Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.
Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.
has this kind of initial dismissal ever won anyone any favor in an argument?
I see it all over the thread, and I find myself having a hard time wanting to consider the argument afterwards even if I am personally aligned with them just because it seems so inconsiderate and rude.
Is it supposed to signal your experience in the field, having heard this argument so many times -- or does it signal the opponents inexperience? Either way I find that approach to come off as arrogant and rude.
The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work."
Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.
I guess that depends on your perspective. I see expanding freeways as enabling further sub-urban growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable (from an energy, logistics, and municipal funding perspective).
increasing demand on a highway gets more people to where they are going, but if the destination doesn't have more parking spots, you've caused an imbalance in the system. same as the electrical generation - if it suddenly becomes absurdly cheap to manufacture more consumer goods, we've just increased the pressure on the whole system that needs to manage the rest of the lifecycle of those goods after manufacture. sure, some people will make money, but that's not the point.
One of the underlying assumptions of all mainstream economic theories since the XIXe century is that EVERYTHING that comes from nature is infinite and has been provided to us for free, whether it's resources, clean air, a durably nice temperature, animals etc. What has a cost is to pay people and machines to extract those things, but not the things in the first place.
Based on this assumption, we've acted as if nature was infinite and increased our rate of extraction to ridiculous heights, reaching the limits of a system that is sadly, due to the laws of physics, finite. One example : China has used in 3 years roughly as much sand for construction as the US has in the entire XXth century (btw sand is the new gold and a huge black market for it is now in place...)
Economic demand is just a metric.
You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.
That does not justify it.