Widening highways doesn’t fix traffic
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“The Texas Constitution mandates that the majority of transportation funds go to improving the highway system.”
No wonder the Katy Freeway in Houston is “one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.”
I’m sorry to be rude but that’s incredibly dumb.
Navigation SW: "Please align on lane 23" :)
I've been pretty sure for a long time that this is one of the most overlooked results of building/widening freeways/highways - a large number of us make decisions on where to live based on travel times of relatively newly-built or improved roads (not to mention cheap fuel etc.). That then effectively locks us in to a car-dependent city layout whereby too many of us live too far from the places we need to visit regularly (incl. where our family/friends live) for anything other than car-based travel to be convenient. Obviously there are huge benefits in making it easy for people to travel significant distances quickly and cheaply, but at some point the costs start to outweigh those, and it's not clear we have any sort of process in place for assessing when we've reached that point.
I was recently in Taipei. I stayed in New Taipei City, which is not the center of town. And yet, within a 10 minute walk there was (1) a very large, beautiful park (2) all the shops, food, barbers, medical clinics, etc you could ever need (3) a metro station.
From that station I could get to most anywhere in Taipei & New Taipei, a metro area of 7 million, in under an hour. I could ride it 3 stops and board a high speed train 200 miles away, fully the other end of the country, in less than 90 minutes. In the month I was there, we probably rode transit 150 times, and only one train was ever late. By 4 minutes.
What we've done in America is a complete disaster. Instead of being able to simply walk out your front door and get groceries, walk your kid to school, walk to the doctor, walk to the restaurant, we have to get in a car and drive FOR LONGER than the walk!
A similar trunk from Boston through to Florida would cover another 100 million.
These are absolute no-brainers. Obviously people going from Boston to Miami may still choose to fly, but all the destinations point to point between will be much faster by rail.
The best time to start doing this was 50 years ago, but now is also a good time.
Take Section 9 housing. Originally, it was setup for everyone to live in, with the idea that tenants would have the skill to maintain their housing,and local governments would provide funding.
However, what happened is that suburbs got built and setup rules so only whites could get loans & move there. The feds dramatically subsidized building these suburbs (billions in roads, sewage, etc), so the buying cost for houses in suburbia was massively low relative to true cost. So the whites moved to the suburbs on the basis of good personal economics (via gov subsidy and cheap credit) and good marketing (suburb developers sold the dream).
The suburbs thus became politically powerful (white & somewhat wealthy now, bc of subsidized housing). Suburbs didn't want (and still don't) want to pay for city expenses, but since suburbs are generally part of the same municipality, they could use their political power to cripple inner city services. Which they did.
Then the urbanites (mostly not white, bc suburbs where racially zoned) gradually became destitute as businesses couldn't survive without adequate services. And with destitution we see the rise of homelessness, drugs, etc that you rightfully point out.
Seems like it's high time to recognize the calamitous mistake and fix it
Right now the burbs are able to zone out or otherwise not have to deal with homeless, poverty, subsidized households, and lock in local tax revenue to high earners. As such burbs are the only good individual choice
However, I do think there is a growing body of urbanites who are pushing for change. California recently passed SB9, hopefully the first of many densification bills.
Perhaps if a leader-state like California gets far enough down the road for the economic benefits to start accelerating, greed will work in the urbanists' favor
But yeah to your point I don't think homeless prompted people to leave urban areas, people leaving urban areas caused homelessness. The causality is reversed, is my point.
The reason people left, as alluded to above, was largely government subsidy + good marketing/lobbying by suburb developers, auto companies, and road builders.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a45e028d-4b81-4bef-9546-970838ab9...
Most cities want it too -- if you don't need to be in the city then its going to lose tax revenue, both in terms of residents, but also things like sales tax from people who work downtown and eat lunch nearby. And the downtown donut shop -- what are they going to do for income now that everyone who used to work there is in the burbs or out of state?
Point is there are a lot of forces trying to to undo that, not just the automotive lobby.
To analogize to technology, this is like saying "more bandwidth doesn't improve connectivity; increases in bandwidth get eaten up by more bandwidth-hungry applications". Sure, broadband connections were "eaten up" by new applications, like YouTube. But that's good! New things are possible that weren't before and users are benefiting!
Similarly, if 20% more cars are traveling on a freeway now... they're choosing to do that for some reason. They're benefiting somehow, either because it's not actually as bad as before, or more people can be carried at the same speed (and they've switched away from an alternate route that was slower and reduced traffic on that route, or they're able to go somewhere at a certain time when they previously weren't, or something). No one's like "there's a new lane on the 5 and it's not moving any faster than it was before, I think I'll start taking it".
The grandparent wasn't making a general case for the net benefit of added lanes, they were addressing the narrow argument of "induced demand" somehow proving that improvements are futile. And for that purpose the analogy was pretty good.
People are going to drive to work. Attempts at carpooling have been utter failures. Wider highways means more capacity means more people will take them, which is actually better for noise and pollution and safety, than driving on surface streets. Idling waiting for a red light is far worse, emissions-wise, than 15-20 mph in a freeway "traffic jam". People don't expect to walk across a freeway, they do expect to be able to walk across the streets near their home, which becomes nearly impossible when traffic is so bad on the freeway that everybody starts taking the off-freeway "shortcut" or "bypass" that your kids ride their bike on.
lol, what?
You’ll be happy to know traffic accidents and fatalities have been on a much steeper decline in the Netherlands than in the US, ever since in the 70s they implemented their transit&bike-first policies and started demolishing freeways. Also, ever hear of roundabouts? :)
Obviously most US cities are extremely car-centric today but that's hardly evidence that it necessarily must always be so.
Having everyone use individual vehicles for all transportation needs is generally fine when cities are small but it scales very poorly. That's what we're witnessing here.
Interestingly enough, transit projects in the US are actually funded based on how competitive their CBA is, but highway projects are not and are funded via formulas defined in law by Congress.
One of them is the Braess network paradox[1]. In short, under a model with simple game-theoretic assumptions about behaviour ("people find the shortcuts") and traffic/speed congestion functions an added road/connection can do more harm than good -- in the extreme case, slowing down every actor.
The toy model may not actually be realistic, but I think reality might not be too different. Say the congestion delay function is smooth, and one added car doesn't change travel time much. How much does one of the new trips with the new infrastructure improve the life of the driver over the status quo?
Very little: if travel times are the same, they only benefit to the extent that their trip would have slowed down traffic before. So generally you might say,
- Adding the lanes but leaving behaviour the same would speed up traffic, improving global utility,
- Letting traffic reach equilibrium (if speeds go back to what they were before -- big assumption) removes that benefit for existing travellers and doesn't much improve the life of new travellers, and is a net negative for global utility nearly equal in size to the earlier increase.
- Maybe an argument for tolls?
Also, those little squeezes are the very points where the Braess paradox actually shows up. Why let it?
This is not the only example either. Motorists are compared with rats in other situations [1].
Quite frankly, it is impossible to build your way out of highway congestion, without totally gutting American metropolitan areas, because there isn't just empty land in the middle of those for new highways. Which is also the root cause of most highway opposition these days, in existing areas; but new areas are not much better, in that usually this results in playing musical chairs with regional development rather than totally new net growth.
That’s not the complete cost benefit calculation. A 4-lane highway costs $5-10 million per mile in suburban areas. Meanwhile, the DC Metro’s recent expansion through exurban Virginia mostly along an existing right of way cost $200 million per mile: https://www.heritage.org/transportation/commentary/washingto.... So even if the rail carries three times as many people, it costs 20 to 40 times as much money per mile.
That’s the cost side. On the benefit side, few places can saturate a subway line that carries 30,000 passengers per hour. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, just 5,000 people per day used the new Silver Line stops in Virginia. Even the design estimate of the Silver Line was 30,000 per day, and actual use has been a fraction of that. So the benefit side of the equation is a lot lower than the theoretical peak.
The current project to expand I-66 in the DC suburbs of Virginia is $3.7B, which is $160M per mile along an existing right of way.
The 4 new express lanes will also carry 5,000 vehicles per hour in each direction, which is as much as the total ridership of the Silver Line (outside the Beltway) in an entire day. Also, the actual cost to the state will be much lower. People highly value point to point driving access. So the express lanes can charge tolls up to $40.
It should be noted, that this is actually pretty good; this is an investment that will last decades, because it will take that long to fill it up, whereas a highway investment will easily need to be repeated over, and over, and over again. (There's a joke that in some states there are two seasons: winter and road construction.)
They should be allowing construction of unlimited density within a quarter-mile of stations. Instead, many of the stations are surrounded by basically nothing.
Think about it. Let's take the bay area as an example. We have 7 million people or so. I would wager cars per capita is like 0.8 or something but let's round down to 5 million cars in the bay. Car ownership is about 9k per year. So that's about 45 billion a year in car ownership costs alone.
Now, let's say we built a good metro/ public transit in the bay, such that a family doesn't need a car, but some will still have them. So maybe there are still a million cars, saving us about 35 billion a year.
Operating costs for NYC metro are about 400 million a year. Let's say the bay is 20x more expensive and spends 8 billion a year on operating costs for a truly world-class transit system.
That means every year we'd save about 20 billion by using transit. So even if the capitol cost of building out a good transit system in the bay is 300 billion, we'd be saving money in just 15 years.
And of course this completely discounts the astonishing negative externalities of cars w.r.t land use and economic value.
The math is just not going to work out in favor of cars. The development model is trash. And of course it's trash when you think about how it scales. Every person needs a car! Every person needs an extremely complex, expensive machine that consumes vastly more energy than the alternative! A subway car presumably services thousands of people a day. The average car services one person.
Car manufacturers have been exceedingly successful at gaslighting Americans for the better part of a century. A little critical thinking can help
> Operating costs for NYC metro are about 400 million a year.
I don’t know where you got this figure from, but this is off by a factor 20x. $400M won’t even cover NYC MTA’s electricity bill. The actual operating cost is closer to $8B.
Does being completely off with your calculations affect your thinking about transportation economics? I seriously doubt that.
Then, when you were made aware how much off you were, instead of coming to terms with how much you do not know that you don’t know, and getting some humility, you come up with a second estimate, just as crude, and still pronounce how much we could save, as if there was more standing behind it than a back of a napkin estimate using 2-3 scalar input variables. This is literally a perfectly spherical cow level of analysis.
The point is that car-dependency is quite astonishingly more expensive than public transit based systems.
You are welcome to do the math yourself and reach the same conclusion. Actually if you have the time, I'd very much like to see how you'd compare them
Bell peppers are also astonishingly more expensive than wheat, and oysters are more expensive still. Imagine the cost savings we could make if we just all exclusively ate wheat and beans.
The point is that cars are more expensive in a sense that people spend more money on them, but they are very much not more expensive if you compare them like for like in terms of actual service. They simply offer a different thing, which in the mind of the huge majority of population is superior service despite higher cost (most people who do use public transit would prefer personal cars, but they cannot afford it, so they use heavily subsidized public transit). It is just not viable with today technology to provide public transit service that offers similar travel times with similar schedules, in fact it is barely cost effective to run existing public transit with lousy service quality today (e.g. here in Seattle, a $2.75 bus ride actually has operational costs of something like $7 on average, which is way more than operational costs of driving your own car).
You do not, however, compare the actual service. Instead, you just take 3 random numbers that carry very little information about actual problem being solved, at least one of which is off by a factor of 20x, multiply them, and pretend that what you do is a serious economic analysis. This is basically assuming that humans are identical, uniformly distributed spheres etc etc.
The people who believe that public transit can be made cheaper than cars while offering similar service apparently are so clueless about actual costs of operation public transit that they are off by a factor of 20x, and see absolutely no reason to change their mind when they are corrected about it.
One of the primary motivations for building the Silver Line was to allow denser construction in the areas around the new stations. It will take years or decades for all of the new construction unlocked by the Silver Line to finish.
The issue at the end of the day is that, assuming a certain population density and a growing population, roads tend to become extremely expensive (because of the required property buybacks, etc.) while at the same time cars fundamentally take up too much space in urban/suburban areas for the number of people they tend to carry. (Obviously this is almost never an issue in rural areas, given the low population density).
So it's not so much the issue that you couldn't theoretically build enough capacity, it's for most brownfield areas, you won't add enough capacity to fix traffic because of the huge cost - not to mention environmental destruction, or knocking down people's houses to replace with more and more roads, etc.. This is of course very different to, your example of internet bandwidth, where you can trivially increase the capacity by many multiples without taking up any more space physically. The closest analog in the transport world would be rail, which uses very little real estate compared to huge potential capacity.
Given that fundamental issue (the cost and space that roads take up, and the fact that cars are one of the least volumetrically efficient modes of transport), what becomes observable is the ironic fact that the cities that tend to be best to drive in are the ones that have provided many good alternatives of good public transit, bikeways, etc. as opposed to the cities that were designed around the car.
> No one's like "there's a new lane on the 5 and it's not moving any faster than it was before, I think I'll start taking it".
The point here is that the new lane does actually "solve" traffic immediately after it has been opened. The improved travel times create the demand and eventually this leads to more congestion.
Not that some targeted improvements to fix road bottlenecks isn't often warranted, but unless you're shifting trips to other modes, the traffic will only eventually create more bottlenecks for each one you fix!
More housing is needed, but it needs to be in the city center, and the city needs to have public transit so that the residents of that housing don't need cars.