How we can reduce traffic congestion
research.google
research.google
> Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention
> Averaged across cities, we observe a median increase of around 2% in driving speeds on targeted segments, corresponding to a median decrease of 0.5% to 1.0% in fuel consumption rates
The cities were: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle.
The data and code is also available (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...) from the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x).
Kudos Google! Nice to see this kind of work. That said, let's just build more trains?
Looking it up, the exception where it is required is specifically for clinical investigations regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Netflix personalized recommendations affect only the individual, not those around them who are not using Netflix.
But this isn't that crazy? Most businesses require government approval for changes that have community effects... that's the entire point of government. Stuff like construction permits and regulation around structures, water usage, pollution, building architecture. Mining companies are required to assess environmental impacts. Companies making RF devices need to get confirmation on how the devices affect people and other devices.
And that's not even considering market share/monopoly status, which also regularly invites more scrutiny.
Like compare changing live routing to publishing a paper map showing alternate routes.
In either case it seems to me that the vehicle operator should be most responsible for the impact of the route that they use.
To get to the competence level of a local traffic planner, you need to have stuck it out through a Civ E degree and maybe went through the motions at a firm for for 15 years before getting laid off and then wanting a "cruise control" job with the power you never would have achieved in private industry for the rest of your career.
You end up dealing with guys where you live or die based on the opinion of someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything new since 1991, and have no interest in breaking their "cruise control".
There actually did used to be train service from San Jose to Santa Cruz but it was abandoned in 1940 due to high costs and lack of use. Rebuilding it would cost >$1B.
With increased information comes more efficient utilization and no doubt the free-riders will find that troubling since it’s no longer a free ride with the asymmetric effect where they can use my roads but I can’t use theirs.
In an ideal world, we would use our Fastraks to charge for marginal road use and a locality can recoup capital investments it made by charging appropriately for marginal use.
"just" is doing a lot of work there. Trains are a very (very) expensive way to move people between pre-determined places. We can do a lot better than this in 2026.
1. Extensive support of public transport: metro, tram, dedicated bus routes (separate from car traffic), dedicated paths for bicycles.
2. ... maybe whatever is this ...
UPDATE: here's a good graph - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport#/media/File:P... , i.e. car traffic is often congested because of inherent low passenger bandwith. If google wants to manage traffic as internet routing - why then stick with outdated low bandwith ethernet cable?
Unlike subway fare, bus fare doesn't prevent n'er-do-wells from getting on the bus (they just ignore the fare and get on anyway), and it probably increases ridership and gets some people out of their cars, which reduces congestion (public benefit and therefore deserving of government subsidy).
Though IMHO it's just lack of political will.
Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost. Data centers are infamously now being built at society expense (electricity and water capacity), sometimes literally in peoples backyards.
At the moment I don't have the receipts, but from anecdotes - it's all just political will.
There's a highway extension? Some properties are taken by eminent domain, some other NIMBYs are told to just suck it up.
Data center? Forget about it - foundations are being laid this moment (sometimes no matter the law)!
High speed rail? We must listen to every NIMBY on the proposed path, hence it will take 200 years to listen to all complaints and align opinions of the people impacted. Millions speant on "research, enviornmental impact and public opinion" - project stalls and is closed after 5 years.
NB: I am not from USA, I think this pattern fits many (especially western) countries. Successful projects (I repeat myself) are always based on political will, when rule/law framework is designed to make such projects easier and much cheaper.
NB2: Also as with anything - when you start building you get experience and expertese - the more you build the cheaper it gets. A lot of places havent built new train/metro/tram line in decades - hence all expertese must be built from scratch (from policies, to government clerks knowing how to deal with such projects, to construction businesses who never built rail in 50 years, etc.).
It's like that because it's a misconception that highways are built for passenger cars. They're built for freight and all kinds of business activities - regular people using them are just a bonus.
The majority of petroleum-based fuel, wear and tear on the highways and toll revenue comes from everything but passenger cars on highways.
A very good way to deal with this is to recognize that all infrastructure needs maintenance and periodic replacement. Once it is time to replace a road, that is when you change it to include bike paths, bus lanes and so on.
You need some foresight, planning, make new road designs part of law, and political will. Some countries have made this work very well.
Two miles of any lane shouldn't cost over a hundred million dollars per mile. Repainting a lane should be vastly less and even if they're building a new flyover just for buses it shouldn't cost that much. Something is happening there. It is not getting built in an effective way.
(And it did, the entire roadway, sewer, and water mains were replaced, traffic signals were replaced, etc: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project)
Meanwhile in other countries they build new cities from scratch, including infrastructure based on current-day knowledge of how these things pan out long term.
I think the US has the space and funds to do so. If they were to build a new city from scratch for the next 250 years, what would it look like?
I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.
This is backwards, companies do not choose where employees live. Employees do. That they choose to live with long and unpleasant commutes (typically in exchange for more space, cheaper housing etc) is in general terms on them not the company. I'll allow that the rowback of wfh from a previously fully remote job is on the company - but certainly outside of that I have little agreement.
What would work (at least in my country, and in my head / from my armchair) is sattelite offices. I live in a neat suburb with an industrial estate with some office buildings, if my job opened a sattelite office there I would be much more inclined to go to the office.
But then, they would need to make sure that only people that live nearby go to that office. Given that a lot of teams are multidisciplinary, that would be difficult. Plus, the job would need to offer long-term stability, and only few jobs in software can promise stability for more than a year. If they want people to move close to work, it has to be both affordable and guaranteed stable for at least 5-10 years.
I looked into it once, there was an office for a software company across the street and I applied there. But the two offers they made were both lower than what I was earning at the time, to the point where I wouldn't be able to live there. And second, after the pandemic they closed the office and became a remote-first company.
This is not only not widely accepted but extremely misleading. The nature of "induced demand" is really that congestion suppresses demand. Which behaves in an entirely different way than the name implies.
If demand was being induced then all attempts to relieve congestion would be permanently impossible, which is nonsense. There are empirically places with less traffic congestion. Whereas if demand is being suppressed then an apparent capacity shortfall in the amount of 0.5X may really be a shortfall of X. Adding 0.5X then doesn't work, because congestion will remain until you add X, with the suppressed demand filling back in to the extent that you satisfy it.
In order to relieve the congestion you have to add enough capacity to satisfy the demand that would exist in the absence of congestion, which is more than the amount that exists now, but not an infinite amount that unconditionally consumes all possible capacity or efficiency increases.
This is also why things like bus lanes are ridiculous. The theory is supposed to be that making the bus faster than cars will get more people to use it. But if that actually created a benefit that exceeds its cost, i.e. got more people to take the bus than the wasted capacity of not allowing cars to use that lane when a bus isn't, then it would reduce the traffic congestion that it inherently requires. It's a thing that can't even be part of the solution to the problem because any means of actually solving the problem would eliminate its mechanism of operation.
The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.
From which we can observe the problem. Alice is at home and wants to go to work. She travels along a low density street for a few miles, enters a congested thoroughfare for a few more miles, then travels along another low density street to her destination.
She can't take a bus at the endpoints because she would be the only one on it, but if she took a bus only on the congested thoroughfare then she'd end up on the far side of it without a vehicle to get the rest of the way to her destination.
To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
When the the proposal is to add more mass transit, it would then have to go in the places it currently isn't, i.e. the places where it would have to operate at lower capacity. Which leads to the problem described.
IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.
I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:
> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.
[1] correct me if I am wrong on this.
This is generally not the problem because most of the destinations aren't in the high-scarcity congestion area, people just have to go through it to get to their destination from their point of origin.
> Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones.
Which is the thing the US doesn't. Large percentages of land in the areas around many major cities -- some of them among the most congested -- is zoned exclusively for single family homes. There isn't enough density for mass transit to work and it's residential-only, so working within walking distance of those homes is essentially prohibited by law.
There's a distinctly American trope in play, that if the bus or train doesn't stop more or less exactly at your destination, then it's going to be totally useless. Except, you look at the rural European countryside, and there is still a fairly reliable--and well-used, certainly not "only one rider on the bus"--bus system. And this is in the countryside that is less densely populated than most American suburbs or exurbs. It is totally possible to make mass transit work, even in the car-oriented hellscape of most American cities.
The main thing that American public transit systems seem to be really allergic to is the concept of frequency--a high frequency transit system is generally necessary for usability, but your typical American transit system responds to a perennial funding crisis by cutting frequency, which tends to lead into a ridership death spiral--cutting frequency cuts ridership, loss of ridership leads to loss of funding, which they respond to by cutting frequency.
The problem is that in a low density area, both frequent service and infrequent service result in a low number of riders. You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it who go to work and back once a day. If you run a bus there every 15 minutes for 12 hours a day, the average bus carries less than one passenger in each direction. If you only run one bus in the morning and one in the evening then in theory it would be 75% full but in practice then nobody takes it at all because the bus comes at 7:30AM but they have to go to work at 7AM or 8:30 so they all just drive instead.
The average household size in the US is about 4. Three dozen people means 9 houses. That's not really a neighborhood, and most people don't live in that kind of low-density.
Picking a random cul-de-sac street somewhere in North Carolina (ended up being near Cary, NC), as representative of what a suburban/exurban density environment would look like, it has 22 houses on it by itself. Just guessing where I'd plop a bus stop on a collector road, there's 4 similarly-sized cul-de-sacs within walking distance, and a similar number of houses on the collector road. So that bus stop is going to have 100 houses it can service, or about 300-400-ish people.
One of the primary problems with transit discourse in the US is that people (on both sides!) tend to view transit as a Manhattan-or-Cimmaron-County density dichotomy, thinking that transit is unviable except in the highest density regions. But my point is that transit is absolutely viable at the density available in exurban, even a lot of "rural" regions (although that's rural more like Berkshires rural rather than Oklahoma rural). And because not a lot of people actually live in the lowest density regions where public transit is unviable... it doesn't actually matter: most people live some place where public transit is viable.
1) Time: Taking a trip involving public transport is slower than a car. This is fixable in urban areas with some dedicated paths, modal filters, and very frequent schedules and that kind of thing but this takes up front resources.
2) Safety: It's not safe. Too much antisocial behaviour on public transport. Nobody wants to sit near loud or smelly people. In the worst case people get assaulted. Cyclists are more likely to get seriously hurt in a crash or have their vehicle stolen than cars. It's fixable but policing takes effort.
3) The demand paradox: "See public transport and bikes are unpopular" say the decision makers and don't put in the resources. The thing is the infra needs to be near 100% built for people to want to use it. It's no good if your cycle commute is 80% dedicated bike paths but 20% of it is riding next to trucks and parked cars opening their doors as most people would rather take a car. It's also no good if the trains run every 30mins, so on average your trip is 15min delayed. The politician would think "why would I double it if the trains are already under-utilised" but does not understand latent demand.
I know what you're getting at when you write safety, but I want to be clear that this is not the same thing as safety.
Deaths per billion miles via
car: 7.3 Train: 0.43
From https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8606195/train-safety-driving-c... but you can just google, there are tons of other studies.
That, I have been told, is definitely a problem in the USA. I think that’s because they’ve painted themselves into a car-centric corner that it is very hard to get out of.
It's funny when people see celebrities use the subway in NYC. It's just accepted by New Yorkers that the subway is usually the best way to get around Manhattan and getting mixed in with the entire socioeconomic spectrum is normal. But the crowds of people is also a kind of security blanket if something does happen.
The perception of crime and danger is strangely very inverted
Also, the set of people who feel unsafe by just having somebody who’s noticeably poor in their proximity definitely is not empty.
Staying in your bubble is way easier if you avoid public transport and walking on the street as much as possible.
What was it you said? Assertions made without evidence?
Edit: I looked into it and crime rates are actually lower on transit than in cars. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1077291X2...
You need to examine your assumptions
In a similar vein, most places in a city can be accessed via density + transit. But cars are great for those non-dense destinations you describe, like wilderness areas or farms or whatever else.
The only way to shift people onto public transport is to make it more attractive than driving. That can be done by making driving less convenient or more expensive—through higher ownership, fuel, and parking costs, and by resisting attempts to eliminate congestion. And by making public transport better through greater frequency, reliability, coverage, and convenience.
Then it occurred to me that nobody would actually be reading a book. They would be doom-scrolling Instagram or watching wingnut political propaganda on YouTube. I'm starting to wonder if people might be mentally better off behind the wheel...
At least transit users don't get road rage.
Another benefit is being able to have a drink or go to multiple locations without worrying about bringing the car back somehow.
Forcing the public to abandon the comfort of private travel seems right out of the WEF playbook.
Current situation with prevalent "private travel", i.e. cars in USA (and probably "the west" overall??) IS due to corporate and political interests.
Car manufacturers, "big oil", road construction companies, politicians collecting taxes from cars (fuel sales, road use, cars themselves[0] and car parking), banks leasing money to buy and maintain cars, insurance, landlords owning car parks, etc.
They are very very interested that private car ownership wouldn't go away and are fighting it tooth and nail. You need to own multiple cars per household spend thousands on leasing, hundreds on parking, to just go to work and of course there's fuel.
Though somewhere like London, Paris or Tokyo - why would you want to do daily commute in a car? If you are a billionaire, driven by personal driver in your Bentley or Land Rover - sure, but otherwise metro is cheaper by an order of magnitude and I'd bet often times much faster too. In those places rich and heads of state take trams and metros.
I probably not need to remind you that "richest man" lobbied some failing projects to upsell his car sales, instead of allowing high speed rail to be developed.
[0] this of course depends from country to country and from state to state.
If I lived in London or Paris I wouldn't commute by car. But I don't live in a big city and, at this point in my life, I don't want to (although I'd love to have a little pied-a-terre for part time use). Instead, I live in the 'burbs of a pretty car-friendly city and life is good.
Cars are just really convenient to have when you need them and folks will put up with all kind of costs and other inconveniences to own one.
I think it's really important to have robust and safe public transit so car use can be minimized when it's unnecessary, but I don't have illusions that this will lead to some kind of car-free utopia.
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/707655/suvs-more-popular-europe-...
Even with that unrealistically idealised scenario, if you had similarly idealised public transport (station within 5 minutes walk either end, trains every 5 minutes) I'd still choose the train much of the time. I could actually get something done on my laptop instead of having to concentrate on the road, plus I could get up for a stretch mid journey (without stopping). It would be different if I had a lot of luggage or was bringing the kids, though.
My point is that driving is not always inherently more attractive than public transport.
Describes large parts of London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, etc
But that isn't an ideal scenario for public transit regardless of whether somebody tries to describe it that way. Very frequent stops ("station within 5 minutes walk") mean that your journey through the subway system will take a very, very long time. Driving can easily cut that time in half.
Wait.
What kind of nonsense is this? People take public transport it's better than driving. You don't need to expend mental cycles focusing on the road, you can do something else while you're on the go: chat to friends, browse the internet, read a book, sleep, etc. Driving is dead time.
Public transport is also much more expensive, particularly when you have more than one person in the vehicle, even with loads of tax added to car fuel, doesn't depart from your house or arrive at your destination, and means you can't take much stuff with you.
If driving were more cheaper than public transport then nobody would use it. Yet, almost wherever you go in the world if you go to a station at 8am on a weekday it will be full of people.
This logic is devastatingly simplistic. Think about the most obvious counter-example: people who have car sometimes take the train. Even after they've paid all those car fees, they'll take the train for £50 rather than drive for £8 in car fuel. Why?
It's because there isn't an objective tier list for vehicles. E.g. if I'm going through central London I'll use the Underground because London is so densely populated going by car isn't always feasible. But if you're going somewhere in London with a baby then you might well take the hit and drive, because you have a lot of stuff to bring with you, and the Underground is unpleasant and hot, which the baby will not appreciate.
Cars don't even have tables; let alone toilets, dining areas, sleeping cabins, etc. Even those which do (e.g. RVs) would require a solo traveller to stop in order to use them.
No thanks, I'll stick to the train.
As for toilets, the new Caltrain cars, built by Stadler (from Switzerland, which has the best non-high speed rail train infrastructure in the world) were not going to include toilets at are - I don't believe they do in Switzerland - but were forced to add one by ADA regulations in the USA.
Toilets are useful immediately (speaking from experience!)
Tables are useful even on short trips of a few minutes; e.g. I usually have a notebook and pen in my pocket, and writing much easier on a table (even the little fold-out ones, if I can't get a seat at the proper tables).
I often eat on trains; though I admittedly tend to avoid the dining options, since it's much cheaper to bring my own food and eat my seat's table (fold-out or otherwise). If I'm with others, we can also drink alcohol together, without a "designated driver" having to abstain.
Instead, it's actively make transit better be reallocating road funds... Add buses or light rail or dedicated/separated bike lanes instead of brainlessly adding traffic lanes. Every bike added to that bike lane is one less car (very roughly).
Additionally, tax car infrastructure appropriately. Free road-side parking is not an entitlement. Reduce parking minimums in redevelopment/new development and let the market determine the supply of spaces. A good example - it's increasingly common for apartments in DC to charge extra for a parking space.
Most of the above applies to urban areas as well as moderately dense suburban zones.
Large cities can take additional steps - no car zones (common in Italian towns), congestion pricing (London, NYC, and others already do this), and changes to road design to better accommodate pedestrians (plenty of YT videos about various plans to do this).
- reallocating road funds (away from driving and toward busses/rail/bikes)
- tax car infrastructure appropriately, presumably higher
- reduce parking minimums
Not that I'm against these, but they will surely make driving worse.
Here's a good summary of one case of a small town dealing with absurd parking regulations... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017-11-22-how-parking-m...
And just to add my own recent anecdote... we visited southern Italy (Puglia) last month. Most of the towns have zero traffic* zones (ZTL zones) in the historic centers. In all of them, there were either ample metered street spots just outside the ZTL or small pay lots a short walk away. As far as I could tell, as a tourist, it worked well - the downtowns were vibrant with lots of foot traffic.
* ZTLs allow local traffic and handicapped transport within certain guidelines.
What makes driving worse is the presence of more cars. This can be partially mitigated by piling money into road infrastructure, but infrastructure is a band-aid on a problem created by more people choosing to drive.
What makes driving better is the presence of fewer cars. There's really only one way to reduce the number of cars on the road: build good alternatives to driving. If you love driving, you should be the strongest champion of public transport investment.
In other words: there's a profit motive, so people get something really good for their money.
Public transport is frequently a monopoly or semi-monopoly, and there is power available (the people running the public transport also get to set rules for drivers), and exercising power is much, much easier than competing in a market.
Now you say there are rules to follow on these roads, with enforcement, meaning someone has power over you the entire time? Yikes.
Mandatory parking minimums, high speed limits, car lanes without bus lanes or bike lanes, tearing down neighborhoods to build interchanges and highways...
ok that is one fourth of the conversation, or less.. sure, marketing and economic signals.. got it.
The historic rise of the personal auto versus all else was partly fueled by a social dynamic where "privelage is defined by the ability to remove yourself from the dirty and dangerous crowds of non-privelaged humans".. Autos have dramatically filled the transportation sector because clean and intelligent ME can ride next to foul dangerous person YOU without contact reliably.
Notice the profound growth of personal aircraft for the newly wealthy. Google upper-levels are famous for this. Personal aircraft are some of the most anti-ecological and anti-efficient modes of transport ever.. check out the stocks and sales figures.. huge growth in the last years.
America and others have successfully made ugly reality of social constructs into marketing talk and "rational decisions" but the reality is not fully described by those IMHO
This costs no money to cities and can be rolled out without any political barriers. It will have a small effect.
Public and active transit costs money and requires political buy-in. It will have a large effect but takes time.
Empirically, this pattern is observed repeatedly.
The problem with road congestion is the number of personal vehicles inefficiently carrying 1-2 people while taking up a lot of space on the road.
In any situation where the roads would be clogged with personal vehicles an effective transit network will be carrying dozens or even hundreds of people per vehicle in vehicles that may not even be sharing the same lanes and thus can't contribute to road congestion.
2. Continuing from first point - see linked graph in parent comment. Light rail has an order of magnitude capacity per lane compared to cars. For 20 lane highway you'll need 2 lines of light rail or 1 lane of "heavy rail" (as per graph). Insane difference!
3. There's a reason "one more lane" is a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...
Congestion occurs naturally regardless of capacity due to fluctuations in flow (jitter) more often than being over capacity (this is civil engineering 101). By repurposing lanes for dedicated turn lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, and/or pedestrian walkways, you remove many of the triggers for jitter.
Synchronizing traffic (connected autodrive?) would do much more for removing congestion than just adding high over head capacity.
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/road-diets/road-diet-c...
For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that route needed repairs and repaving soon afterward, much more quickly than it would have ordinarily required.
So yes, drivers can be better dispersed to ease congestion, but we also need to consider the secondary effects to the roadways themselves.
So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.
Long story short: More public transport sounds like a good idea to prevent more situations like you posted.
Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).
And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…
Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)
Or a small town that is surrounded by farms.
Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.
Okay, let's stop spending money on roads then.
How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?
That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front.
If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.
How do you plan on getting food?
How does food get to the shop at the end of your street?
Bicyclists were the ones to first push for paved roads:
* https://www.history.com/articles/good-roads-movement-bicycli...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_American_Bicyclists#...
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.
Used car prices are more like 10k now anyway. Used Mercedes, probably 40k.
The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.
Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.
This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.
It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.
It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
Yup.
And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.
Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2
Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.
If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.
All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.
Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.
Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.
Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.
The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.
Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.
It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.
It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.
Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.
What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.
Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.
And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.
I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k
For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.
Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.
I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.
What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.
I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.
You could live where you work and suddenly your next job is a 30 min drive away.
How could you ensure that enough companies existing within a 10 mile radius to provided varied employment to all the residents?
Seeing this again and again. We call it a "Google detour" in the family, and rarely agree to the change of the route.
So I also stopped using Google Maps for driving.
Who at Google seriously believes that it’s good idea to 1) unpredictably change the route someone chose mid-drive, and 2) to distract them while driving with a pop up notification that must be interacted with just to maintain the route.
If I choose a route, I chose it for a reason. Don’t change it while I’m driving.
It was some kind of dirt road that almost never had this sort of traffic and you could see that from the faces of the locals, as we were passing them by at maybe twice walking speed.
Reminder: you are not in traffic, you are traffic. :)
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
> car owners get to use the infrastructure for free
Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Quite a few areas have their public transit fully funded by users and some even make a substantial profit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio)
The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.
> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)
1. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1890836,-96.7504787,3a,75y,1...
2. https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3698269,-0.1403251,3a,89.7y,...
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
See also Dutch suburbs:
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
The ability to do stuff without needing a car.
I guess I’m saying yes you can make driving less attractive, but I think the better answer is to make public transport more attractive.
There's a hidden cost to this, and that's trust in the mapping app. I've stopped using Google Navigation for routine trips where I know how to get to the destination. It used to be worth it for the traffic information, but now that there's a good chance that it'll take you on a slower route for reasons that may be beneficial to Google but detrimental to you, it's not worth it. My brother-in-law switched to Apple Maps for similar reasons: he's finding it simply gives better results nowadays.
I had the worst experience about 3 weeks ago, when I kept driving on very narrow and congested roads for almost 3 hours and the destination was showing still an hour away. If I had just taken the normal route, it would've taken me only 2 hours total. But Google thought let's make this guy drive around for 4 hours because fuck him.
I can't say this actually happened for me. For straightforward routes with no congestion I never saw random alternate routes being proposed. That makes sense, given that it'd probably tip people off. If this is happening, they must only be doing in cases where there's congestion and the difference is marginal, eg. it's rush hour and the "optimal" route takes 30 minutes but the alternate takes 33 minutes. Moreover you don't really need any deliberate effort to see this effect. If nobody is traveling on a side road, the algorithm will probably revert to historical patterns, which might turn out to be overly optimistic in congestion scenarios (eg. there's nearby road repairs and other people are already using it as an alternate), thereby giving you the impression that you got screwed over by the app.
At least for Apple, iPhones always report this data, not just when using Apple Maps
Perhaps some sort of carpooling profile? That would be a dramatically bigger improvement than, say, routing users through residential neighborhoods.
Every now and then, an especially inventive inventor manages to do both at once. And that's how you get the Shweeb.
They are looking at ways they can improve traffic that are actually in their control. They can change how they route traffic that is using their app, they can’t change public policy or driving choices. They are working with what they have.
Obviously, huge challenges here (is person X a serial killer, etc.) But Google can handle moonshots.
Social credit score? I've seen that Black Mirror episode.
https://trafficwaves.org/trafexp.html or easier at https://web.archive.org/web/20260114173129/https://trafficwa...
https://web.archive.org/web/20251214172912/http://trafficwav... has some nice visualizations.
MIT got more press when they "rediscovered" this in 2017:
https://people.csail.mit.edu/bkph/Traffic_Flow_Animation
I'm a car fan, so I'd rather reward drivers for optimal behaviors vs broad car-reductions. I'll probably turn out to be on the wrong side, but maybe we'll find a good compromise.
-Everyone's creep speed was the same.
-No one figured it would be more beneficial for them slip into that gap.
In my region of the world if someone creeps and leaves a wide gap between them and the next vehicle, eventually someone is bound to change lanes to occupy that space out of the perception that it somehow will help them get ahead in traffic.
We should also take the idea from Finland where the traffic fines scale with each person's ability to pay. $100 for camping the passing lane or failing to maintain a reasonable following distance is not a big consequence for a lot of people. $100k covers the edges a lot better.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
If I ran Google Maps, I'd ask to route stupid drivers away from my routes. The GPS and phone accelerometer should be able to tell us who they are -- "Oh you have Google Maps actively navigating, GPS says you're going 50mph, and the app in focus is WhatsApp and you're using the phone keyboard? Fuck off! Also we recorded 5 swerve events in the last 10 minutes, hard to stay on your lane when you're texting!"
It'd be unethical, but man it'd be magical...
There's custom software for Elon's Tesla, I wonder if the cloud-based navigation system also directs people away from his routes so he can have a ride on emptier roads...
Of course the first step of that is I have to gain control of Google Maps...
Terrible drivers cause traffic jams and accidents, who wouldn't want to be segregated away from them?
Why would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?
Every actor acting rationally in their own interest can get to a worse equilibrium than if they were coordinated(in this case, to completely ignore the new edge). There are many other examples of this in game theory, you should look it up.
I'd imagine there would be a lag between the initial efficiency increase, and the subsequent usage increase; since drivers (current and potential) would have to actually notice the change and adjust for it (consciously or otherwise).
I love how they congratulate themselves on that article (Google being Google, they still think they are the smartest people in the room). But I'm waiting to see the second or third unknown order effects.
Wasn't there some articles a few years ago about communities that filled wheelbarrows with phones connected to Waze and moved them slowly down the road, stop waze from routing cars through residential areas?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170184409A1
(I'm not saying I'm the first or only person to think of it, but I did patent it, as well as the extra claim of compensating those people sent on the slower route).
Also reminds me of that guy in Berlin who caused traffic jams on Google Maps by walking around with a wagon filled with phones:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-ar...
Because an extra ??minutes a day of avoiding stop and go traffic is worth far more than the average speed increase it tells.
People have an amount of time they will tolerate driving for, and adjust everything else around that.
My city already has some signs and traffic signals trying to prevent making a left turn after 5PM, because of maps apps attempting to redirect highway traffic through, which added a substantial delay to the commutes of everyone who actually lived there. That later resulted in a city council meeting about the safety problem caused by people making illegal left turns.
There are solutions to congestion, but they're not technological.
Yep, the virtual universal fast toll road option.
https://vaclavsmil.com/book/speed-how-it-explains-the-world/
One of unforgivable mistakes of Project Zero Vision is sabotage of stroads. If forced more traffic onto local streets, resulting in MORE pedestrian deaths.
Seattle: 7/18
Portland: 11/20
LA: 130/150
SF is unchanged at 24 (they had a HUGE drop from 2024, luckily).
And no, the following excuses do not apply:
COVID - deaths started growing _before_ COVID.
Car size increase - cars did not increase significantly during this time.
Population increase - ditto.
The assholes who sell the big plastic speed bumps they've had to put on the residential streets to slow down all the traffic they diverted onto them are making out like bandits though.
This significantly worsens the lived experience of those on the side streets.
Until you support a feature that simple and obvious, I don't have a lot of interest in your input on this subject.
Most cities have some intelligence on their traffic lights, and they do have traffic sensors to know where cars are waiting.
You might not see any cars and are annoyed waiting at the light, but you don’t know what downstream things they are trying to control for. Maybe if they send you through the light, you are going to join some other traffic event that will cause an issue.
It could also just be suboptimal, but it very hard to know just from what you observe as an individal
When I was in the Netherlands, one of the global gold standards in terms of urban planning and design, I noticed it wasn't only more pleasant as a pedestrian or cyclist, it was more pleasant as a driver as well. Lights were smart and did not sit on red forever if you were the only one waiting at an intersection.
This comic suggests there's some "invisible, massively complicated" mesh of signal interactions we can never possibly fathom, and therefore wasting precious hours over the course of our lives sitting at an intersection is the most optimal one.
The Dutch have figured this out, why can't North America?
There are a ton of factors that go into traffic and traffic patterns. For one thing, I would be curious to see total traffic numbers.
Startup Proposal: Intelligent Traffic Signals
I don’t think this heralds and great change in transport policy.
The best solution involves creating a multitude of non-car transportation options, to allow workers to choose the most convenient mode of transport, maximizing potential non-car commuting. Bike/ebike, e-scooter, motorcycle/scooter, golf cart, bus, tram, subway, train, ferry.
Edit: let’s think of this from a pure scientific point of view - if you had 3 lanes and split traffic across them based on a range of speed - that would be the most optimised in terms of throughput for all lanes. Now, consider a reverse Amdahl's Law… what’s the worst thing you could do to make the fastest lane crawl which in effect kills total throughput across ALL lanes? Put a slow truck in it! Put a few, and you’ve just turned the lane giving you the highest throughput to most likely the slowest lane.
I just parked my car after another morning of commuting. Thought experiments alone in today’s traffic again confirmed my theory.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Who do you think are on bikes and in buses?
What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.
So you agree that most cars are far larger and heavier than required? First search result for "average car occupancy"[1]:
> In 2022 the Average Number of Occupants Per Trip for Household Vehicles in the United States Was 1.5
This discrepancy is the reason for car pooling, ride-sharing, etc. (Note that Uber, Lyft, etc. are taxi services, not "ride sharing"; since the drivers themselves are not typically intending to travel the routes they drive)
> roads also carry buses
Yes, which is why cars should be removed from such roads, to avoid slowing down buses.
> ambulances
Emergency vehicles can drive in places where cars are forbidden (cycle paths, pedestrianised roads, etc.)
> trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
Again, you're undermining your own argument: the subsidies given to private car infrastructure are so large, that freight companies exploiting that infrastructure can end up more cost-effective than those which use rail; despite rail being more efficient not only in terms of fuel, but also in terms of labour (since so many trucks would be required to do the job of a single freight train, and each of those trucks require a separate driver). Also note that heavier vehicles degrade the road infrastructure disproportionately; which is even more reason to reduce the number of trucks as far as possible.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1333-marc...
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.