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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

But let's be fair, "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars.

The real question is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?

Edited to change "problem" to "question" - problems are things like "we need to get people to work, etc" and "how do we reduce pollution" not "I saw too many cars".

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For me, who can't drive, a big chunk of it is the crime aspect of public transit.

In the last two months alone, two people have been murdered on my local transit system, including a 13-year-old-kid shooting some dude for no reason [0][1].

This, combined with it taking at least three times as long to get literally anywhere, with many trips resulting in a detour to a central hub station or similar means the Uber is a far better value if you care at all about your time.

If you are trying to visit friends 10 minutes away, this is 20 minutes by car or (if you're lucky and the time windows line up) an hour out of your day by transit.

[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/02/boy-13-arrested-fatal-...

[1]: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/27/man-accused-of-longmon...

Ya, safety is important. Metro and Sound transit here in Seattle want increased funding for more routes, while the routes they have are becoming unusable as anything more than unhoused neighbor day centers. Fix the safety problem first, and then expand.

I still take the D line into Downtown Seattle when we go there, but will always have one or two situations on the bus where I regret the choice. It keeps me from using the bus more often.

It says a lot that you evaluate traffic deaths as “crime”

I've never been to Denver but I would guess auto fatalities are a higher percentage than public transit fatalities.

It's one of those things that may work out mathematically, but the true fact of it is if someone dies in a car accident everyone is sad and gets back in their car after the funeral (and to be fair, a decent number auto fatalities involve drugs or alcohol). Crime hits in a completely different way.

Same way that no amount of "more people died in car accidents than on Boeing planes" would ever get people to agree that fixing the MCAS was not needed.

There's an element of control when you're in a personal vehicle that's lacking when you're on transit with the general public, and fatalities aren't necessarily the only risk factor to be considered.

e.g. I'm less likely to be mugged or assaulted in a personal vehicle compared to public transit but I'm also more likely to have my vehicle broken into or stolen. Public transit is also _very_ different during typical commute times, compared to off hours.

I think this is a critical aspect: the current statistics on who takes which mode of transportation are hopelessly distorted. The current system is broken every which way. For the San Francisco Bay Area you don't take one or the other because you like it. You take one because the other is even more messed up. You can't even "like" one if it's right under your door. Parking is (deliberately) terrible. Car windows broken entirely expected to happen sooner or later (pretty deliberately also really). Transit shows up or not. And is slow. And might break down right under you. And is a war zone. The potholes are massive enough they affect the busses just fine, etc, etc. Back to the point at hand: looking at how many trips are taken in one or the other tells you nothing about people's preferences. The preference would be NEITHER.

> The real problem is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?

Time is the answer. Very rarely, covering typical US population density to the routes and schedules allow people to get from point a to b in a reasonable time. I once tried to hire a person to work for our company who thought she could take the bus. To get three miles, it would take her roughly 3 hours and require her to change busses five times. In the end, spending six hours on a bus or waiting for one just wasn't worth it to work eight hours.

This is almost always the answer. I’ve written up before “how does driving compare to transit for my commute?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197

It’s not hard to understand why I’d choose to drive when there is an alternative (at least technically, if not practically).

I was going to say "as opposed to a little less than an hour's walk", but in the US there is the question of how many 14-lane highways and Costco parking lots you would need to cross during that hour.

And no matter how we try to sell it, people will almost always prefer a 15 minute drive to a 30 minute walk, or even a 15 minute walk.

Hell, I could walk my children to school (it's a mile away) in freezing weather through a blizzard, but will I? I could lie and say I would, but damn that heated seat feels nice ...

I dated a woman from Uganda for a while and she said to me that she (and other Ugandan immigrants) Americans were crazy. Why would you want to walk anywhere when you have a car. She explained that back in Uganda, you had to walk everywhere and it was not a good life.

Also even if the right geography exists for walking, does the climate locally support it?

Under 50 outside, most folks just nope out, same with over 80 outside.

Heck, most people cannot walk three miles without breaking some sort of sweat in a temperate climate, so for work, you need to be presentable.

Also a three mile distance "as the bird flies" may be double that as the person walks or drives.

People, including me, are lazy. I could walk almost all the time, I don't.

I could make up excuses, but I'm just kinda lazy.

The issue with this particular walk was surviving a four block jaunt though the worst neighborhood in town.

I used to have a 3 mile walking commute and was almost always in a great mood, full of ideas and inspiration by the time I arrived at work or home. It took about 35 minutes each way.

probably twice as slow as driving, but 10x more enjoyable

3 hours to commute 3 miles is literally 1 mile an hour. about the speed of a baby's crawl

>Why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives?

In my experience as an American who prefers public transport but lives in the Midwest, where public transport is essentially nonexistent: people have a skewed view of public transport thanks to horror stories about NYC subways and whatnot. So even if public transport were available, many people wouldn't take it because it would mean being around other people.

How skewed is the perception? Riding transit isn't a death sentence, but it does suck: slow, unreliable, expensive, dirty/smelly/germy, and with the potential of being a victim of violent crime.

It really depends on the city. Some places it's just fine, and pretty popular, some places it's a rolling bathroom and pretty popular - the problems are the ones where it is unpopular and a rolling bathroom; that's the hardest to expand - which means it is perpetually stuck in a dead zone where it can't be used because it can't be expanded because it can't be used.

Meanwhile things like the San Diego Trolley has gone from 16 miles and 17 stops in 1981 to 47,000 people a weekday in 1996 and to almost 70 miles and 62 stations today, with ridership peaking at around 38 million a year in 2019 (and slowly recovering back up).

(Some of the original cars are still riding, down in Mendoza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza )

Something to note: that is a very successful light transit line and the total track is about the same as some people's daily commute.

> "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars.

I don’t think anybody claims induced demand happens instantly and doesn’t have limits.

It won’t happen instantly, but over time, a new road to the middle of nowhere will lead to people moving there, increasing traffic.

Also, in the case of widening roads, part of induced demand is of people that used to leave early to avoid the traffic that now will leave home a bit later. That doesn’t increase demand for going from A to B, but does increase demand for going from A to B between 7 AM and 9 AM.

Another effect is that, all other things being equal, using more space for roads decreases population density and thus increases distance traveled, also increasing road usage.

The problem with cars is the geometry. It's just very inefficient for the amount of people you are trying to move. For example, many cars are able to seat four or more passengers. What frequently happens is that only one person is driving it. You need empty space for maneuvering and ability to stop safely, especially at high speed.

If you design for the car, you need to design spaces for cars to park in, which increases distance between places, which worsen alternatives.

Coupled with parking minimum and inefficient urban planning, everything is too far apart. Traffic engineer design for convenience of cars with everything else an afterthought. It's either too dangerous or too inconvenient to walk and bike.

When you need to drive everywhere, that also increases demand for driving.

With cheap land and access to highways, this cause suburban sprawls and of course additional traffic. Given that jobs are found within the city, it's no surprise that we have traffic congestion.

Compare people to car, we just need less space in general to move and you don't have the problem of car seating only the driver majority of the time instead of four or five people.

So yeah, geometry hates car.

It hates busses worse if the busses are regular enough not to be annoying.

If the busses are only every couple of hours, they might get packed, but the number of nearly empty busses driving around would amaze people.

Example: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58861#_idTextAnchor012 where busses beat personal vehicle but only slightly; compared to rail transit it's obscene.

But that's because the average transit bus has 8 passengers and gets 3.4 mpg! https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html

Even if you "fill" the bus to 40 people, it still is matched by a car with 5 people in it.

Easy. Time and incremental cost.

I live in a small city. I work a 8 minute drive, or 20 minute bus ride from my home. In the summer, I frequently walk. During the school year, I have to drive to get my kid to school and other events.

For distance trips, I frequently go to NYC for personal trips. I live in upstate NY and can quickly use Amtrak to get to NYC. The problem is, even though NYC has great transit, I can get to any single point in NYC faster and likely cheaper from upstate than most arbitrary points within NYC. I only take the train for Manhattan or overnight trips.

If you live in suburbia, forget it. Cycling is dangerous, and walking is time consuming with poor infrastructure in most places.

Convenience and cost.

I take the train or bus when it's the right combination of faster, easier, and cheaper. I drive when the alternative is slower, harder, or more expensive. Sometimes it's a coinflip.

> But let's be fair, "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars.

No, "induced demand" is a variation on "if you build it, they will come".

e.g. Traffic is heavy to the new suburb, so you add lanes. But now people are willing to expand the new suburb, or to build houses even farther out because of the new highway. So you need to add even more lanes ...

Yeah, I've always found that particular argument unconvincing. If road usage grows, that means more people are benefiting, right?

There are some fundamental problems with cars crowding out alternatives (either due to cost or space). But saying that utilization is evidence that something is bad seems backwards to me.

There are a number of problems with increasing car utilization. They tend to prevent other forms of transport from co-existing as busy roads are not attractive to walk/cycle/scooter along. There's also the sizable amount of pollution from tire and break wear which is not solved by EVs (except electric scooters/bikes - they produce a negligible amount of tire particulates due to their reduced weight).

When you have increased car usage, there's also a demand for car parking and once you start assigning a large amount of space for car parking, you end up pushing facilities further apart. This means that more journeys then become impractical except via cars and the problems increase.

Because there aren't alternatives in most cases. I 100% could not reach my job with any sort of public transport because there is none in that suburb, and bike is out of the question unless I want to spend 3-4 hours a day commuting.

> The real problem is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?

Often people don't appreciate that there are alternatives. People will often claim that alternatives aren't practical such as cycling in cold or wet areas which is despite many European countries that provide counter examples. It's also a matter of habit and people will gradually get used to their commutes becoming longer and more stressful rather than evaluating whether driving is the best option. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel that the vehicle they drive is a key part of their personality or signals their social position.

I was in Scandinavia a couple of years ago. Drove around 4000 kilometers around the Baltic. There was no way I could've done that on public transit. In fact, in the whole time, the only public transit I saw was in Stockholm or Helsinki. In Helsinki, it was far easier to rent a bike and experience more of the city than it was to take the tram. In Talin and Tartu, driving, walking, and biking was orders of magnitude faster than transit because it still didn't go or you needed to go.

In Sweden I saw separate pathways for bicycles complete with roadway lighting. Didn't see many people using them but at least they were there.

> when there are alternatives

Because these alternatives are usually kept subpar. In many areas of the world with good mass transit options, people don’t choose to drive (London, UK for ex.)

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