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Comment by sapiogram | Hacker News Reader

> The critique of induced demand is pretty much centered on the fact that urban sprawl is widely considered as bad, which the author does not seem to even acknowledge.

Isn't this exactly what the author's point #2 ("More and better infrastructure lets us spread out and enjoy more space") was about?

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This actually the opposite: he sees it as a positive, which might be sensible on a first look. But there are various problems with it, which completely counterbalance the initial benefits, and which he does not aknowledge. For instance - traffic will tend to grow until congestion negates the initial decrease in generalized cost. For instance, someone living 15 min from downtown might decide to move out in the suburbs due to the low cost of travel: 25 minutea to town is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in housing quality. But after 10 or 15 years, downtown ends up being 60 minutes away: the household ends up being worst off than if they had stayed downtown. - car need space also when they do not move. If more people go somewhere by car, you meed more parking spaces. Parking space is dead and depressing, and replaced dense accessible neighborhoods, in particular in the USA - transport in general, but in particular car, has negative externalities (negative effects experienced by persons different from the ones benefiting from it). Air pollution or increased travel time to cross the urban area are examples

> Isn't this exactly what the author's point #2 ("More and better infrastructure lets us spread out and enjoy more space") was about?

What is there to enjoy with sprawl? Every place ends up being like every other place: (strip) malls, parking lots, stroads, highways, Nature bulldozed, etc.

Everywhere becomes nowhere:

> The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is a book written in 1993 by James Howard Kunstler exploring the effects of suburban sprawl, civil planning, and the automobile on American society and is an attempt to discover how and why suburbia has ceased to be a credible human habitat, and what society might do about it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere

It misses the core point of the people spouting "induced demand", which is that if you were to satisfy the demand for cars, there won't be a city to drive to or to park in at the end

They just take too much space

"More and better infrastructure lets us spread out and enjoy more space" only works to the point where you can still get to the centers of activity in your city within a reasonable time, and past a certain point you either have to bulldoze the center to make space for the vehicles of the suburbanites, or densify

It is insane to me that they decided to write an entire blog post about something like that if they didn't even address this

So honestly I agree, it's a trashy piece

Not only too much space, but an insanely huge amount of money that is spent by future generations via debt. If you happen to lose the popularity contest as a city/state you now have a trillion dollars of crumbling infrastructure demanding ever higher taxation on those that remain.

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