NomNew

And also - thanks for the comments and questions!

Ah, I see. The key question the authors look at is what is the impact of adding a lane to VKT - this they found one-for-one growth. They control for many other factors that may have led to the growth over the observed time period (population being the big control).

The broad question is what would reduce congestion - currently, on the margin, adding a lane will not reduce it. I imagine that hypothetically adding many lanes may reduce congestion, although there may be city driven bottlenecks that don't make this feasible at all.

I'm not sure I see the nuance in the two issues you point to. The paper looks at how adding new lanes changed congestion on these roads. The results found no change in congestion, as shown by VKT growing the same amount as the increase in road capacity.

A driver, besides the cost of the car and fuel, faces a time cost. An extra lane will reduce the time-cost, assuming no new vehicles enter the road. But if time costs fall, it's in effect 'cheaper' to drive. So previous car trips that were not happening, because the time-cost was too high, are now occurring. The amount of extra car-trips is such that we are back to the same time-cost as before the road expansion. That's why VKT ends up growing one for one with road expansion.

The study looked at what is the source of extra traffic. In most cases it was individuals living in the area doing more car trips.

Basically, an extra lane temporarily reduces congestion. The main cost of congestion to road users is time. Since now it's faster to travel, you're more likely to do an extra car trip. You continue taking extra car trips, until the cost in time is the same as pre-road expansion.

The question then is are the extra car-trips valuable.