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Comment by redrove | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I think a sharp drop in memory requirements of at least an order of magnitude will cause demand to adjust accordingly.

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Department of Transportation always thinks adding more lanes will reduce traffic.

It doesn't, it induces demand. Why? Because there's always too many people with cars who will fill those lanes.

Citation needed. I've heard this quite often, but so far, I haven't seen proof of the stated causality.

PS: This doesn't mean that better public transportation could deliver more bang for the buck than the n-th additional car lane. But never ever have I heard from anybody that they chose to buy a car or use an existing car more often because an additional lane has been built.

Have you tried the "Reference" section on the Wikipedia article?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#cite_note-vande...

You've never heard anyone choose to take side streets instead of the highway because of traffic jams? No one ever goes out of their way to avoid heavily trafficed areas?

I don't understand what the point is you're trying to make. When people at t0 take detours because of traffic jams on the direct route, and then at t1, there are less traffic jam on the direct route due to additional lanes, so they decide to take the direct route, then total traffic is down, because they no longer take a detour. Even if they are still part of a newly induced traffic jam.

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