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>When I think of "suppressed" demand, I think of economically useful demand that needs to exist.

Because cars have so many unpriced externalities (smog-forming pollution, oil spills, noise-induced stress, tire microplastic dust, undercompensation for pedestrian deaths, etc), often the demand is not actually "economically useful" in the final analysis.

That's the elephant in the room. Since we apparently won't accept carbon/congestion pricing, then (as a fallback) any rational policymaker should want to suppress car demand. Paradoxically this improves economic efficiency, by helping counteract the perverse Externalization Subsidy.

EDIT: Policymakers can sometimes go too far, of course, or not far enough. Policy requires tuning. That's the downside of using central planning instead of Economist's Own(TM) straight sin tax, but again apparently we won't do that.

You are vastly overinflating the negative parts of the a car, and undercounting the positive.

There are figures for the negative externalities of cars, they are not hard to find. They don't even come close to the economic activity made possible by cars.

A policymaker that suppresses car demand will kill his city. And we are going to get front row seats to see if I'm right: Manhattan congestion pricing is coming, so we'll find out. I predict it's gone within 3 years.

I also predict the New Jersey roads that go around Manhattan are going to get slammed as people who just need to go through Manhattan to the rest of New York avoid it and head North to go around it. This will add enormous congestion, and the net result will be far worse traffic everywhere except central Manhattan.

Worse traffic everywhere except Manhattan is the point. Whether it’s so bad that the policy is net-negative is an open question. Over a long period of time I think traffic patterns will shift as society structures itself away from NJ-LI commutes (people moving to the area or accepting new jobs avoid that route, etc)

So it's great if you live in Manhattan and never leave it. It will be worse for you in all other cases.

But since I assume people in Manhattan also travel I suspect it will be a net negative for everyone.

So there is no other way to get to and from Manhattan except driving?

For real, I'm laughing my ass off over here at these people who clearly don't know what they're talking about. Who tf drives in Manhattan unless they don't know better or are doing a day trip?

I don't get how you can be so ignorant that you actually forget public transit even exists. Man, they're missing out, I wish the Paris metro was the norm in any city over 500k

> A policymaker that suppresses car demand will kill his city. And we are going to get front row seats to see if I'm right: Manhattan congestion pricing is coming, so we'll find out. I predict it's gone within 3 years.

Famously dead cities, London, Paris and Tokyo.

I knew someone would say that.

But take a look at a map - how do you get to Brooklyn from New Jersey without going through Manhattan? That's the difference.

Those other cities have vastly different geographies. The congestion is about protecting the city center, but Manhattan traffic is quite different.

Do you have any example of a city that had the effect you claim?

And to push this conversation further into antagonism, why should the people of Manhattan prioritize people going from New Yersey to Brooklyn by car? The person doing that trip would prefer it if all of Manhattan were completely flattened and turned into a collection highways and bridges, but people live there. If anything, the current state of NY and it's surroundings is precisely the result of attempting to do precisely that.

In the cities I mentioned you have the same situation. If someone lived in Croydon but needed to get to Wembley or Edmonton, you're not gonna find a highway connecting those two places. But you will find a train that or tube that gets you there, faster than if you'd driven.

It's pretty normal in other cities to drive around the city center to get to outlying suburbs on the other side. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge (I-278) and George Washington Bridge (I-95) are far better suited to cross-region travel than cutting across Lower Manhattan on roads with intersections every block.

That said, NYC needs to get better at thru-running trains across jurisdictions to make metro area crossing journeys easier

NYC needs a Paris RER clone more than any city in the world. The tracks already mainly exist, it’s just the operating model that doesn’t (and is the true innovation of RER). Run the regional rail exactly the same way you run the subway/metro with through running, all day, high frequency service with short dwell times.

so i am writing this reply from brooklyn and do this regularly to visit my parents in central nj: the direct and perhaps cheeky answer to your question is "staten island," and the one time google maps duped me into thinking manhattan was a better route was one of the most miserable drives of my entire life

we street-park a car here most of the year - if i use the car to visit them the travel time is shortest (20m walk -> 1hr 5m drive)

but i feel very lucky to have a bunch of non-car options - if the weather is nice or i'm off-peak i can ride my bike to NYP in manhattan (8 miles), take my bike on the nj transit train to their stop, and ride the last three miles to them (~2h)

otherwise i can take the subway -> path -> nj transit (~2h 50m, but if schedules were more sensible it could be closer to 2h 20m)

and you might be like "the car is the obvious answer, look at how well you've proven my point!"

but that neglects the time requirement and responsibilities of keeping a car in NYC that i think should be factored into this - either 90m of your time once a week to move it for street parking, or a $65 ticket most of the time. if i'm returning to the city finding a spot can take 25-60 minutes and is often a 15-20m walk from my apartment.

there's a meaningful transaction cost each time the car is used AND in storing the car. and that's with free street parking once you've found a spot, which i don't think nyc should have in the first place!

There is something so blindingly obvious to me. Wish away every goddamn car out of manhattan and replacing them with an electric kei cars and vans, and it'd be twice as nice to live in, to work.

This will eventually happen, just a matter of time. All cities worth their salt are calming traffic. Manhattan is expensive right now, despite it being ghastly polluted by ice cars, it will be 10 times more when it's actually a nice, calm outside environment. The regional economy will not suffer, it will bloom even more.

> When I think of "suppressed" demand, I think of economically useful demand that needs to exist.

Are you certain this isn't just your own personal view? Just casually double-checking on the internet, I don't see "economically useful" as part of any definition. It seems to be all about "willingness and ability to pay" for a good or service, as useless as it may be.

It is economically useful in the subjective eyes of the person who wants to do that. Since it isn't an objective measurement we don't talk about it in economics, but willingness and ability to pay are proxies for it.

As commonly defined, latent demand and induced demand are effectively the same thing, albeit observed at different points in time. With respect to highways, latent demand describes the potential demand before the improvements are made. Induced demand describes the shift from potential to actual demand after the improvements have been made.

While they may measure the same thing the connotation is different and often only applied to cars like the article says. We don't say more low-income housing created demand for low-income people. We don't say building a school created demand for children.

Flipping cause and effect for expansion of roads is wrong.

> the connotation is different

Of course. One speaks to the potential demand before something changes, and one speaks to the potential demand converting to actual demand after something changed. We went over this already.

> We don't say more low-income housing created demand for low-income people. We don't say building a school created demand for children.

Of course. More low-income housing does not create demand for low-income people. Building a school does not create demand for children.

And expanding a road doesn't create demand for driving. It merely induces it, hence why we call it induced demand, not created demand.

> Flipping cause and effect for expansion of roads is wrong.

There's really nothing to flip. Whether you use latent demand or induced demand just depends on the point in time you are referring to. In the case of roads, one applies pre-construction, one applies post-construction.

It's not like anyone thinks that if we turn the countryside dirt road that sees little more than the occasional tractor into a multi-lane highway that the cars are magically going to show up in droves. It is well understood that we only expand the roads that actually show strong indication that more use will occur when expanded. Hence latent and, later, induced demand – never created demand.

>When I think of "suppressed" demand, I think of economically useful demand that needs to exist.

There are cases where this is true:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

When networks are deficient, roads can lead to large benefits:

https://sites.bu.edu/neudc/files/2014/10/paper_243.pdf

As networks reach sufficiency, the impact on economic activity decreases:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X1...

This is not something that can be accurately shoved into an all good or all bad perspective. Whether roads are positive for economic development is a necessarily quantitative question.

>only a subset (which I would bet is minor) would prefer social housing over detached housing.

The author is speaking from a British perspective, and there "social housing" means government-subsidized housing. It is not a form factor and cannot meaningfully be placed in opposition to detached houses.

Ah, my mistake about the regional difference in terminology. Still, I'd continue to argue that the demands are for fast (+safe+comfortable) transit and housing in general, not automobiles and government subsidized housing in general (I'm sure pretty much any mechanism of affordable housing is in high demand in the UK)

Since we're on hacker news,

'the design (need) calls for fast transportation. Claiming we need to build to support more cars is enforcing an implementation without actually considering other design alternatives that will satisfy the need'

> When I think of "suppressed" demand, I think of economically useful demand that needs to exist.

It's really not for you to decide what is a "useful" trip for people. That leads nowhere good. I mean, how far will you take idea that you decide what's "worth it" for people to do?

> This has been debunked and rebuked to death.

Your premise is not supported by your argument, the opposite in fact. If people want to take a trip, but don't because it's too slow, that is indeed the definition of "suppressed".

> demand is not for cars, it's for fast transportation

Those are currently synonyms. After you have created a new world you can redefine things, but in arguments like these you have to use the current meaning of things.

In every place that I've used public transportation, which is not just in the US, public transport takes twice as long as a car. I even went online to Google Maps and picked random addresses in London - supposedly the public transport capital of the Western World, and the law holds: Cars are twice as fast.

> Cars are twice as fast.

With our current infrastructure, yes, but that's because of how we chose to design things. If we built 10 residential towers within a 7 minute walk of a rapid transit station, and run trains every 3 minutes at peak times, you bet your bottom dollar transit will destroy a car commute for every resident of those towers. I'm thinking of places like say, Daly City and Colma BART, for instance, whose locations would be great car commutes at 2AM, but 5-6 stops on a train beat rush hour car traffic every day -- IF the first and last mile doesn't ruin it!

Now, I'm 100% not saying "everyone ought to be forced to live in high-rises over a train station" -- but I would absolutely bet you that if such residences were built with a variety of human needs in mind (for instance, plenty of them with 3-4 bedrooms for larger families instead of the usual urban mix of 1-2 bedroom units), people who presently drive an hour each way to work "downtown" would be tripping over themselves to buy them because they'd get to work faster and get to browse Insta en route as well.

Instead though, for the most part, such things basically don't exist. For instance, the sites I'm describing in the Bay Area are surrounded by large tracts of SFH. (Or in the case of Colma, 1/4 that, 1/4 car-centric malls, and 1/2 cemeteries. Genius location for a transit station, guys.)

Anyway sorry for being long-winded, just all I'm saying is cars are twice as fast because we dedicate enormously more space and subsidies to them, and we don't make much effort to design any part of our cities or suburbs in a way that any other type of transit could really work. It's a conscious choice we have made, and a dumb one.

It's not just the US though, this is the case everywhere in the world!

> If we built 10 residential towers within a 7 minute walk of a rapid transit station, and run trains every 3 minutes at peak times, you bet your bottom dollar transit will destroy a car commute for every resident of those towers.

If you added a parking lot lage enough for all residents of the tower to have a car (otherwise it's not a fair comparision), then I would take that bet: The car will still be twice as fast (don't forget to include walking time).

Trains are slow because they have to start and stop constantly, you have to walk to them, you have to get on and off. None of that applies to a car: it's point-to-point.

> IF the first and last mile doesn't ruin it!

And it always does...... no one has solved that.

> Trains are slow because they have to start and stop constantly, you have to walk to them, you have to get on and off. None of that applies to a car: it's point-to-point.

It does though? In a dense city cars have to constantly stop-and-start thanks to treaffic and pedestrian crossings - there's no gurantee of parking space at the other end - if there is, there's a good chance it's not next to your destination.

I live in Zone 3 London, about 5 miles from my workplace. Point-to-point (so not counting finding a parking space), both driving and the train take about 45 minutes. Cycling takes a bit less time, since cars get stuck in traffic and bikes don't.

> Trains are slow because they have to start and stop constantly, you have to walk to them, you have to get on and off. None of that applies to a car: it's point-to-point.

Wait, are you claiming that cars don't stop at any point in their journey?

Like this isn't even taking into account your distance metric (L0 vs L1 norms) being less efficient than a train has the potential to be, or the 5 minutes it took me to get out of my parking garage before I'd even see a street vs the 1 minute it would take me in the elevator

> car will be twice as fast,

What? I just pointed out that at the time most people need to drive we have traffic. I assure you, in San Francisco, I’d win the race even with a little walk on both ends.

> don’t forget walking time

Are you implying that downtown offices have ample space for every worker to park next to their desk? Or advocating a Texas-like downtown with a huge parking lot or garage on every urban block. Parking in an urban core is prohibitively expensive for most, since it uses a ton of very expensive real estate.

> trains are slow because…

This is a strange take. Trains are fast because they stop exactly 6 times between Daly City and Montgomery. Cars are slow because they have to go about 5MPH through a massive part of San Francisco every day between 7:30-9:30AM and 3-7PM. (Forgive me if I’m off by an hour for that particular commute, I left a few years ago).

Cars are much faster at 2AM though, or in rural Nebraska.

My point was, someone who lived in a sane development in those places does not need a personal car. That would be a large enough population to support a grocery right there. The city itself is a quick ride away, so you can do non-bulky shopping easily via the train. And for weekend trips or IKEA runs or whatever, imagining a car rental office onsite is easy, and again, MUCH cheaper than the cost of ownership, including paying the cost of storage, via having a more expensive residence - since it takes up so much more square footage per unit to provide parking for each resident. (Also don’t forget things like paying for window repair after every car burglary!)

By the way. I live in the suburbs and drive a car basically 100% of my trips. I’m not disputing that they’re the only option for how most of our country is planned. Just that we chose this and we could have chosen otherwise. And in theory, undeveloped areas could be built differently.

>With our current infrastructure, yes, but that's because of how we chose to design things. If we built 10 residential towers within a 7 minute walk of a rapid transit station, and run trains every 3 minutes at peak times, you bet your bottom dollar transit will destroy a car commute for every resident of those towers.

For certain trips like residential cluster A to residential cluster B. Add in a realistic scenario like commuting to work from your residential tower to a warehouse job in a low density light industrial zone and cars will be faster every time. I live in a place with supposedly world class public transportation and it still makes very little sense to take public transportation outside a few scenarios. Most realistic trips you're looking at 2-3 times the travel time you would have by car, even during rush hour.

That isn't world class transit.

> in a low density light industrial zone

In a city with excellent public transport, you get a segregation effect - jobs that don't require (many) vehicles (office work, much of consumer retail, certain kinds of light industry) build up in areas with public transport links. Then industries that do require vehicle access (warehousing, heavy industry, builder's merchants, trade buisnesses) build up in areas without public transport links, since they're cheaper than those with access.

At an individual level driving to your office or training to a warehouse might still work or be necessary, but at a population-level it happens less than you'd think.

There are multiple car factories in several different German cities directly connected to rail rapid transit. Many types of trips can be supported by public transit with the right investments.

> Leisure driving is absolutely a thing

This seems kind of an odd one to throw in. Leisure driving is fun, but you generally do it on empty country roads, no? Or in general when the roads are clear. Nobody goes to stop-and-go down a congested interstate or suburban stroad for leisure.

I'm throwing it in for the sticklers as an example of something which truly is induced.

They wouldn't be driving for leisure in those geographic locations without roads with low traffic existing. The demand requires a certain low utilization for this cohort.

Also, as someone who lived next to the convention center (and thus i5) in Seattle for ~5 years, there are absolutely people who will drive down i5 for leisure driving. Lots of people racing or otherwise speeding. Hell I would do the same (minus speeding and reckless driving) along 76 and the Schuylkill when I lived on the east coast. Heck some of the biggest opposition in Seattle to tearing down the viaduct (damaged by the nisqually, unlikely to survive another earthquake) was from people who 'would miss the view/drive coming into the city's, and would wax poetic about their literal Sunday drives down such, especially right at sunset.

> 1. The suppressed demand is not for cars, it's for fast transportation

This is moot. Yes, people demand fast transportation. Fast transportation in practice means cars. In other words, people demand cars.

... or railways? Just got back from Tokyo and it didn't seem like anybody was demanding cars. North America seems to have a tremendous, gargantuan shortage of passenger rail, especially in comparison to how much land we dedicate to freeways.

To be fair, traffic in Tokyo is still pretty bad. However the city would definitely collapse if it weren’t for public transport

North America has had 50 years of focused effort from Koch's Americans for Prosperity and other similarly themed lobby groups spreading the word that public transport bad, individual FreeDumb coal rolling good.

You'd almost think they profit from that message somehow.

    Luckily for transit enthusiasts, the Kochs have not always been successful, even in sprawling cities with a sizable Republican base. Phoenix, Arizona[1], successfully expanded its light rail system in the face of opposition from the organization’s state branch.

[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2015/08/2...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/koch-activis...

https://grist.org/article/the-koch-brothers-hate-public-tran...

https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/290/

> Yes, people demand fast transportation. Fast transportation in practice means cars. In other words, people demand cars.

It's can be quite a lot faster to travel through populated areas via train than car. When you have 30k+ people per square mile, cars do not work. Trains work really well.

> Fast transportation in practice means cars.

I'm remorseful we made it such in practice. It didn't used to be that way, and I disagree that it should continue to be that way, for enough reasons that several popular YouTube channels with millions of viewers have already put in the effort to elucidate better than I could.