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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

> The issue is the space that's required by them and building more lanes doesn't really help due to induced demand

No, you're measuring what you care about, not the actual goal.

More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! If you have 4 lanes, and 20,000 people can commute to work, and with 8 lanes, 40,000 people can commute to work, that's a huge win for the people who wanted to use the highway! Think about this honestly — if you doubled the capacity of a subway, and twice as many people took it so it was just as crowded, you'd be thrilled.

You're going to be perpetually confused by infrastructure decisions if you measure a goal that nobody else is trying to solve for.

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It's a zero sum game. More lanes/roads for commuters means less land for other productive uses. And given the geometry and passenger density of cars (how many traffic jams are moving 1 person per X cubic feet/meters?) Adding another lane doesn't give you much for the amount of land it uses compared to alternatives.

It's unfortunate that low-density areas and the highways they depend on are subsidized by more productive uses of land. It's a tragedy that the people benefiting from that subsidy feel entitled to it and prevent society from developing the land in more sustainable ways.

Part of it is a chicken-and-egg problem though... even my city where I live is not immune. Those who live in less developed areas vote against public transportation solutions and stymie progress at every turn while voting for more roads/lanes. It appears rational: they can't get to the public transportation where they are since every amenity is incredibly far (due to cars and road infrastructure, wah wah). So who has to suffer more while we figure out the solution?

From a larger ecological perspective, we need to reduce car infrastructure. It's a significant contributor to climate change, air pollution, and unnecessary deaths every year and there are ways to avoid a good deal of those problems (or at least reduce them).

And they apparently hated you for you spoke the truth. Like sure there's the "adding more lanes to one highway doesn't reduce congestion" thing but that's not a good faith reading of your point.

If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. It's literally providing more value to people and acting as an economic multiplier. If you improve the bus system and more people use it that's also a win because it's providing more value to people.

If your plan doesn't start with here's all the ways the roads provide value and why individuals and businesses overwhelmingly prefer them to current alternatives and how we're taking that as table stakes for our new system, then of course people are gonna push back. Just because you think a trade-off is worth it or some perceived downside is fine for you doesn't mean it will be true for everyone.

> If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win.

This ignores the cost/benefit of constructing more car infrastructure in heavily urbanized areas and the cost of owning a car for transportation. It ceases to be an economic multiplier when you compare it to cheaper alternatives. You are also painting car infrastructure as some sort of panacea, but it costs households a lot of money (almost 1/5th of their total income[1]) to use a car for transportation.

Not only are cars expensive, but their expense is inversely correlated with income (poor people spend more money on cars). In the USA we spend much more on transportation than in EU countries[2]. From the standpoint of the average American family, car infrastructure is much costlier than the alternatives.

1. https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend... 2. https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-uni...

> More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go!

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but no one wants to get to the 5 or 6 lane highway. They are using the highway to get to smaller 1-2 lane surface roads and parking areas with limited capacity. Eventually you will hit a bottleneck in surface roads or parking that you cannot improve easily or cheaply. The larger highways only serve to get people to the bottlenecks in the system faster.

You'll end up with 20k more cars needing parking too.

This is too often forgotten.

You'll also end up with 20K happy voters.

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