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Comment by currymj | Hacker News Reader

i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown.

it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize.

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>> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown

But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?

> What am I missing here?

That downtown is now a concrete hellscape instead of a pleasant place to be. Your solution ensures that always happens, overall people prefer less infrastructure built for cars, but if it is there of course they will use it.

This just isnt true. Every metro area in the US has highways. Including the dense ones. NYC and Chicago are not concrete hellscapes

You say NYC and Chicago has enough highways to fill demand so there is no congestion? I am fairly certain that isn't true, I've read so much about congestion problems in NYC at least. Adding enough roads to fill all demand leads to concrete hellscapes, that was the point, the guy I responded to thought it was reasonable to add roads until all demand was satisfied.

No one is saying no congestion. The idea of highway expansion is to allow more people to travel while keeping congestion about constant. NYC and Chicago's highways allow the massive suburban areas and the tens of millions that live in them to semi conveniently go to the city. To do that with trains would require driving to a commuter rail station and then transferring to the metro to get where you want to go. Suburbanites just wouldnt go to the city in that case unless the destination is easily accessible on the commuter rail

Chicago and NYC have huge commuter rail networks that accomplish exactly what you’re claiming is impractical.

The Metra commuter rail in Chicago handles over 2.5 million trips per month.

59 percent of the people who commute to Manhattan do so via public transit. People commute to work to Manhattan from Connecticut and New Jersey by train.

Penn Station is the busiest transportation facility in the Western hemisphere, serving 600,000 passengers a day, primarily commuter rail and regional rail. And that’s just one station.

One subway tunnel with two tracks is equivalent to something like a 15 lane highway in passenger throughput. That’s where highway expansion truly falls apart: it only really scales up to a small to mid-sized cities before the land waste becomes a burden.

A lot of urban highways have no way to add lanes because there is no more physical space, or you have to destroy the actual destinations that the highway is supposed to serve to expand it.

I will also add that there are a decent amount of suburbs with walkable downtowns along those NYC and Chicago (and Boston!) commuter rail networks where you can buy a condo, rent an apartment, or even a buy a single family home within walking or biking distance of commuters rail and go downtown. In addition, suburban bus lines that feed people into commuter rail stops also exist. So it’s not all park and rides.

And park and rides still help spread traffic across the metro area highway network instead of sending all traffic into to a handful of highways going downtown. If I drive to my town’s commuter rail stop my car is probably not even getting on a highway.

Commuter rail only works if you want to go within a mile of one of the stations. No one wants to take the commuter rail and then get on another train. The people who use commuter rail in Chicago at least all also have a car that they use to get to the city whenever they’re doing anything else since the train only goes to the business area

I think that detractors of transit believe that eliminating cars is the goal like it’s this black and white thing. It’s either 100% cars or 0% cars. “If I can’t do 100% of every possible trip on transit, it’s not a good investment.”

But the reality is that reducing car trips is really helpful to congestion and traffic for everyone, and having alternative options can make a lot of sense to a lot of people if they’re planned well.

If I take all my daily commutes in with the Metra but then my weekend trip to the city outside the business center is in a car, I still reduced my dependency on my car by huge percentage. That means more of my miles are being spent on safer, more energy efficient, less costly mass transit.

And anyway, you’re not really correct here in the first place. Chicago commuter rail stations downtown have easy connectivity to the L and numerous buses.

You just brazenly claim that nobody wants to transfer but it happens all the time.

Yes, it can take longer than driving…except when it doesn’t, because Chicago has two or three of the nation’s slowest highways. Metra plus a transfer is often a trivial difference in travel time, plus on the Metra you can relax, use the bathroom, and even legally drink a beer if you wish.

Many trips using the L plus Metra transfer are pretty competitive to drive times. Obviously it doesn’t work for every trip but doing a Metra ride plus a $10 Taxi ride will beat parking costs, plus you’re not operating and maintaining a personal vehicle.

Finally, for those who can’t drive at all or have difficulty doing so, having an option that’s slower or less convenient than driving is still a godsend. Being able to get somewhere via transit in 2 hours will beat a 1 hour car ride when the alternative is not taking the trip at all because you’re elderly or disabled and can’t drive yourself. If your car got totaled and you can’t afford a new one having a transit option solved the catch 22 of needing a job to pay for a car and needing a car to get to your job.

I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and have never heard of anyone transferring to cta after taking the metra. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s not scalable solution that people will buy into. The vast majority of people will just drive in that case

Your anecdote versus mine.

As an example, there are 12 different bus lines that are directly adjacent to Millennium Station. You barely even have to step outside to use them.

Hell, you don’t have to step outside at all to transfer from the blue or red line to Millennium station trains.

All loop CTA lines are a 10 minute walk to Union Station and Ogilvie.

You really think with these kind of stats that nobody is transferring?

Not to mention the fact that the Metra runs express trains during rush hour to high population suburbs. You can get from Downer’s Grove to non-downtown neighborhoods like Lincoln Park or Wrigleyville faster than a car during rush hour via express trains + purple line.

The advantage of cars isnt that they are faster than public transit. Its that they are private space and usually a bit more convenient. Arguments about speed will convince no one. The loop buses are doing horribly fyi, the BRT is a complete failure in terms of ridership.

I did it every day getting to Ignatius from Beverly, and again getting to my office in South Loop when I lived in Evanston. One advantage the Metra often has is better parking, so even if I could end-to-end take CTA, I might park and ride a scheduled Metra instead. (Doesn't matter anymore, I live a short walk from the Green Line).

At some point when you clear out all the actual places to go in order to add parking and make it easy to drive there, people realize there is nothing down there and stop going, at which point you just have what happened to Detroit.

Have you been to downtown Detroit lately? It's beautiful (and easily navigable by car anytime the Detroit GP isn't going on...)

My experience is the opposite. The harder it becomes to visit a locale, the less likely I become to visit it. Eventually I decide it's not worth visiting at all.

I think the counterpart question to that is, given how space-inefficient cars are, how many actual people do you enable by adding that car capacity, and how does that number compare to even basic public transit options?

If it means way fewer people took alternative means, then perhaps it is not good. Particularly when OP mentioned the original goal was to reduce travel times - which the widening did not.

"it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize."

the dream is that if i already have to drive downtown, if only there were more parking spots, i could always find one easily instead of driving around searching. but this often won’t happen.

That the roads were added based on a request to make it quicker for existing commuters, not to get more commuters there in the same amount of time. And that if you’d used that time, space and money for a dedicated bus lane, a train, a tram or whatever, you might have done better on both adding to the number of people downtown and making it quicker to get there.

I simply would have refrained from writing multiple paragraphs about how good induced demand is until I understood the answer to this question.

Of all the times I have been downtown, I have never once wished there were more cars. A downtown without cars could be so much better.

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