The idea that induced demand entirely compensates for new road capacity is ridiculous on its face. This would only be nearly the case if the road infrastructure is vastly behind what's needed. Even then, much of the newly accommodated traffic will be of economic benefit.
Consider that the theory states that traffic is unchanged because people will be incentivized to drive more because of less traffic. This is self contradictory - there can't be both less traffic and the same traffic.
Inertia makes things react late to forces. Same here. The article clearly states that the new capacity is essentially filled in the long (10 year range) term, not the short one.
Wow, what an illuminating study. If you build roads and the population continues to grow and/or pent up demand is release, those roads will eventually/immediately clog up.
Obviously people use roads until the equilibrium of pain is met (like any economic decision). But, there is a point where you can supply so much capacity that there won't be traffic. It's a lie to say that no amount of capacity can overwhelm all forms of demand.
The only real question is how much road would it take to fully satisfy demand and what would that cost vs the alternatives. (Ignoring pollution issues)
And what is that point? More roads mean less living area which means more roads to get out to where there is living area. A poorly designed response to a problem makes the problem even worse.
There are better ways of dealing with pent up demand for movement than to build more roads. Ones that are more efficient of resources, that are better for the environment and that provide a better quality of life for everyone.
Nobody is saying that. The problem with induced demand for roads is induced demand for personal cars. Transport is a zero-sum game, someone who takes the personal car to work is someone not taking the train. As countless studies attest, this is not of economic (or personal) benefit. It locks people into a life-long dependency on cars with the terrible health outcomes for them personally and the humongous cost of human life in traffic deaths every year.
"the terrible health outcomes for them personally"
Cite this, I dare you.
edit: the part I'm not buying is the combination of "terrible" and "personal"
It matters little whether you're sitting on your but for 45min in a car or on a bus, you're still not getting exercise. That's not really "terrible" as it's something that can easily be counteracted unlike (for example) working in a loud environment for 45min twice per day without hearing protection.
The "terrible" stuff (accidents) isn't really personal because it only comes into play on a statistical level (seeing as most people will never be seriously injured in a vehicle accident)
Many countries in Europe have a clear generational change ongoing: young people are much less likely to get a car or a driver's license. I would expect HN just to reflect this general trend.
*The vast, vast, VAST majority of people _in the US_ don't hate cars
People generally don't hate their own culture. But it's obvious from a european perspective that the US has an unhealthy obsession about cars. Not that we hate cars, but we don't worship them either.
And I don't think HN hates cars. All I've seen is people pointing out real issues. Maybe some exaggeration here and there, but everyone is guilty of that.
Actually many people on HN live in the pro-car-obsession bubble. Which seems strange for a group of people that is collectively educated, aware of issues, good at analysis of problems, and generally dreams of a better future.
There is no hive-mind about this issue on HN. About half the comments here are from people who dispute the article.
From my own personal experience(real life, not on-line), techies are by FAR more pro-car, and dismissive off traditional urbanism. Real Engineers outside software even more so. I think it is because suburban homes have a lot of space for all the crap tinkerers collect. Hobbies in this crowd tend to skew to things with stuff; drones, cars, ... A more introverted disposition may drive engineers to the quiet and seclusion of the suburbs too. Plus, engineers like to optimize things. Keep the process intact, but strive for less travel time, less fuel consumption, less pollution, less casualties. Hence electrical cars. Hence self-driving cars. But always "cars".
Not necessarily related to what you were saying, but I'll sneak it in anyway:
Traffic is not a technological challenge, it is a human one, with all the messiness that entails. An anthropologist can just as well study traffic (and propose solutions) as a traffic engineer. The big mistake in the US was to hand over the governance and implementation of our urban environment to technocrats. The planning profession has long since come around, precisely because often they were educated in sociology departments (Oh, the affront an engineer must feel when he has to justify building codes to this numbnut planner who probably only passed intro to stats by schmoozing with the TA!). Anyway, eventually the bureaucrats, legislators, and building professionals will come around too. But it requires for a lot of people to reject what they have - literally - bought into. The suburbs are NOT doomed though, there's a lot of good about it. But they are expensive. So the suburbs at all cost are most definitely coming at an end. Municipalities are strained financially, precisely because the financial obligations of maintaining car sprawl are high. On an individual level, the suburbs just cost a lot too. Everybody needs a car, maintenance & utilities costs of the home are born by just a single household, etc... The suburbs are massive social engineering, a federal project to promote home ownership and promote financial independence. Plus, a sprawling city would be more resilient should a nuclear war breakout, that paranoia was also something in the 50s. The home ownership part has succeeded, but the financial independence part has been a total failure.
I don't hate cars. I want people to understand how much we subsidize them. I want to bust the myth that they are the only way in the US and I want that to lead to subsidizing alternatives.
In the USA the car is the solution to every city building problem. This is the problem as I see it.
I can't reply to Andys627 directly, so from his citation
Background Public health must continually respond to new threats reflecting wider societal changes. Ecological public health recognizes the links between human health and global sustainability. We argue that these links are typified by the harms caused by dependence on private cars.
Right there off the bat tells us that they have a political ideology that they're trying to justify with their "study".
What's to cite? Sitting in your car is not physical activity, no physical activity is strongly associated with any number of bad health outcomes (cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes 2). All of the alternatives provide lots (cycling) to moderate (walking) physical activity.
What about actually spending 10 seconds to Google it yourself, rather than implying that there couldn't be such a study?
(a note: you'd have a point if you're pointing out that "terrible" is exaggerated, but that would silly since it's obvious, so I'm assuming you think that there's no health benefit)
Transport is not a zero-sum game. People optionally telecommute. People work odd hours (or don't work at all) and take optional trips at peak times. People move closer to or farther away from the places they routinely go (e.g. work).
I think in some major metro areas, the road capacity is vastly behind what is needed. My commute is is 26 miles of limited access highway that occurs at nearly 1/3 to 1/2 of the posted speed limit.
The only reason there is induced demand is that the infrastructure is too small to support the way our cities and metro areas have evolved. Maybe the way they have evolved is a product of the Eisenhower Interstate highway system, but we're already invested in that infrastructure. It would take an inordinate amount of money, resources, and effort to relocate and redesign our cities than to just build the correct size (and number) of highways to support the population.
In addition - one thing that it seems highway planners rarely plan correctly for is growth. The population of the Washington DC metro area has grown from about 3 million in 1980 to over 6 million currently. Many of the highways are nearly the same size over that span.
DC actually did plan for growth when they build the metro. Everyday it transports a staggering number of people which would be intractable for ANY highway system if these same people drove.
What they failed to account for, however, is the growth of exburbs like Ashburn VA and other places even further out like Frederick MD.
These remote places are built by developers who literally put ZERO thought into infrastructure and what will happen to traffic and many other things when thousands of well-paid people move into their McMansions in the middle of nowhere.
They just buy up farmland from farmers who want to retire, sell a fake dream of idyllic rural living, plop down a bunch of cookie-cutter houses, then take the money and do all over again somewhere else. People have been finally getting wise to this anti-pattern (it was known in Maryland since the 90's) and the citylab article is an example.
The DC Metro has a daily ridership of about 700,000 trips. This is nothing to sneeze at, and it is impressive. However, I'm not positive how they calculate a trip, but my guess is that it's a card swipe entry and exit. Most people are traveling to and from work, so that is likely half that number in unique people. So say 350,000 - 400,000 a day. On the other hand, I-270 through Maryland sees about 200,000 cars daily. That's one highway - with at least some cars carrying more than 1 person. Interstates 66 and 95, US route 50, MD route 295, and VA route 267 all carry similar amounts of traffic. And lets not forget the other minor routes and streets that carry additional traffic. Your assertion that it "would be intractable for ANY highway system" to handle this is absurd - it already does.
While I too find some scorn for the McMansion culture, it is not really a local developers job or role to plan for medium to long distance infrastructure. I don't think it would even be legally possible for a private entity to take on a highway project that crossed multiple counties and/or states without a massive amount of support from local and state governments.
Also, I wouldn't call suburban and rural development an anti-pattern. Unless you want the cities to be double the density they already are, some people are going to have to live in the suburbs and rural parts of the country.
There's a more to a car trip than just going through a highway. Trips have endpoints. If you increase the size of your pipe into the city, you also have to increase the volume of the parking within the city. That means parking garages, lots of them. In addition to more costs for everybody, you're then deteriorating the urban fabric and making drivers within the city miserable in process (whether they recognize it or not).
As far as # of daily metro rides. My point is that if the metro were shutdown, the highways in and around DC would be a nightmare and people would not enjoy travelling in or through it. Getting around in DC, without the metro, would BE INTRACTABLE.
As for developers, while it is not "their job" to plan for infrastructure, it is very disturbing that they can simply buy land for cheap, put down and sell thousands of homes and walk away while forcing the nearby cities to deal with the mess they made. In response, many localities are now pushing "smart growth", we simply can't allow developers to make short-term selfish choices and pass the long-term costs onto everyone else.
Note that developers pay very large development fees to cities. In many cities, those fees are their primary source of revenue. These fees are supposed to pay for infrastructure: water, sewer, roads, schools, parks, et cetera.
The biggest problem with these fees is that they are "local". Bedroom communities use these fees for local infrastructure, whereas a portion should be paid towards metro infrastructure.
> On the other hand, I-270 through Maryland sees about 200,000 cars daily.
Daily... so one commuter to work and back home counts as two? So the road enables 100,000 commuters, or somewhat less than that, if we subtract people who drive through during other times than commute hours.
The 200,000 is a "summary" at best. The traffic counts are measured between intersections. Some are higher, some are lower, and some people could be getting off before the next intersection, etc. I'm not exactly sure how the traffic counts work - if they are just the on and off ramps, then the highway itself carries a hell of a lot more cars than 200,000.
Federal, state, and local governments have ignored "induced demand" for 50 years and the result has been endless highway building. This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does. Most of the US is "car dependent" - ie you must have a car to reasonably participate in the city - yes there are buses but they are not as convenient as having a car, yes there are bike lanes but they are dangerous and sparse.
I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain.
Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it.
We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.
Just to be clear for all the readers, the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic.
The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road.
With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that.
I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
Suppose you want to build a railway from TownA to TownB. It's ten miles and you can prove in every conceivable way that it will be profitable for both you and the two towns.
You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical.
Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact.
All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
Consider 2 outcomes. One is that the project moves forward with the owner getting x+y for their land. The other is that the project doesn't move forward and they are able to sell it for roughly x.
There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
There are a ton of stories about people holding out for more money from developers trying to buy up swathes of land. Some of them hold out for so much (including the effective infinity of "simply will not sell") that it actually ends up more practical to build around them. This is the extreme, but here's some pictures of the results of that sort of thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=eminent+domain+holdouts
I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
This is exactly what eminent domain is for. The state needs to build a railway, they give fair market for the property, and then take the property. This isn't a new problem and was solved 150 years ago. The Kelo case (wrongly I believe) cleared up some confusion on if the a government can take the land in order to give it to businesses who will use it in a way the government prefers.
That's not the real problem. If it were, then there's a time-honored mechanism for clearing the way, eminent domain. To employ it, you need a politician with enormous political capital.
The problem is generating that capital. Most Americans simply don't care enough about transit for a politician running on the "Moar railways" platform to get elected.
Most of our passenger rail mass transit systems got built before reliable auto transportation became cheap. Now that cars are ubiquitous, the political will isn't there anymore.
This is my reply to everybody suggesting that the "solution" is eminent domain: The topic under discussion is why you can't build private mass transport system. Once you've invoked eminent domain, you've got a government project, because as the entity with the power to say "yes", the government is in charge. Even if they are nominally using a private company to do the actual work. (Which is also appropriate anyhow since governments should not be bothering themselves with internally developing such capabilities.)
I'm sorry I didn't spell out what I thought was a common-knowledge topic.
None of this is criticism; for exactly the reasons I discussed I don't see any practical alternatives to collective action at the governmental level.
The topic under discussion is why you can't build private mass transport system.
Not quite - I think that's why you've got so many replies. The comment you were replying to said "subsidised" not "private", which are different things, so it looked like you were answering a question nobody had asked.
You can have unsubsidised state mass transport and subsidised private mass transport. Although not having a subsidy is rare, there are a few state services which are required to run at operational breakeven.
Historically trains, and street cars were privately funded and operated in a lot of US cities. For example in the early 1900's Baltimore was one of the largest cities in the US and had a massive street car network that was privately operated.
Transportation is a classic externality. The costs of building infrastructure are direct, while the benefits diffuse. You tend only to see that sort of behavior by monopolies, like the examples you mentioned applying to companies that own very large swaths of land. You can sometimes see this behavior in R&D, too. Bell spent a lot of money on research and development because they knew as the only major telephone company they would be the only ones to benefit.
Sprawl isn't simply because of subsidies, a lot of it has to with people changing jobs and ending up further from work or having work relocate and doing the same. Throw in trying to live closer to work in many towns is impractical because of cost.
When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.
To substantially reduce road traffic, you need to offer people an alternative that is cheaper and/or faster and/or more convenient.
Since most of the cost of a car is sunk costs (you have to pay your insurance & depreciation on your car whether you use it to commute or not), if there's free parking at work the car is going to be the cheapest option for most people.
So either you have to substantially increase the cost of driving (aka tolls), or you have to give them an option that's faster and/or more convenient. A bus using the same roads as cars can never be faster or more convenient.
Bus rapid transit (buses on dedicated roadways) may be an option, but a good BRT (aka one without traffic lights) isn't substantially cheaper than LRT.
> For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options.
For many people, Light Rail (or trains / subways) are the only decent mass transit they have ever experienced in the US.
Every single major and minor city has a bus system. Most of them are nearly useless, often intentionally so by design. It's natural for people to demand something useful, and light rail is nearly universally more useful than busing (including BRT) in any given market.
> It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
Those are benefits of light rail, not drawbacks. The higher costs and inflexibility of light rail represents an authentic long-term commitment to good useful transit in that area.
To replicate that value with a Bus system requires you to build grade separated, dedicated right of way. Which is where 90% of Light Rail's cost comes from. So if your going to spend that money, you might as well put in real Light Rail and get all of the benefit.
No, I'm saying there is no such thing as "two identical systems where one costs X, and the other costs 2X".
The "X cost system" is worse than the "2X system". That's why it's cheaper.
The "X" system is slower or carries less passengers or runs less often or goes to less places, or gets stuck in traffic, or is less reliable, or changes it's routes.
--
It's like comparing a WalMart Netbook to a MacBook Pro and saying "they're both 'identical' computers, why are we spending 2X on the MacBook Pro?".
We spend the extra cash because they aren't identical, the 2X one is better.
You said the cost itself was a benefit. What you're describing here is when the extra cost allows for other features which are benefits.
With your notebook computer analogy, the extra cost of a MacBook Pro is not a benefit. The benefits are all the various things that are better about it, with the extra cost being worth it to have those benefits. The only way you'd say the extra cost of a MacBook Pro was itself a benefit would be if you wanted to show off how rich you are or something equally silly.
The context of calling the cost a benefit was in picking between reasonable and competitively-priced options. You're not arguing against the point that it's a commitment to better transit, you're trying to pull a cheap gotcha.
I'm not trying to pull a gotcha anything. I'm legitimately trying to understand the point that was being made. The point looked to me to be that spending more money is by itself a benefit because it represents a greater commitment. I then verified that I was understanding correctly, and was told that this was not in fact what was intended.
No, the comment is saying that front-loading a large cost is good, because once you make that right of way you'll have good service that's much safer from budget issues.
In a lot of US cities, (particularly the mid-size and smaller cities that don't have Trains/Subways/Light Rail) busing isn't treated as transportation, it's treated like a welfare program, similar to Food Stamps / EBT or Section 8 / subsidized housing.
This is compounded by the fact that in most of these types of cities, most of the jobs and/or the "best" jobs (highest paying, most stable, best health insurance benefits, etc) are located in the suburbs, where transit is least available. Often these places can "opt-out" of transit altogether.
What's the solution, if not more trains or more frequent train service? Take a commute to the South Bay from my neighborhood: a little over 50 miles on three interstate highways (I-580, I-680, I-880), which takes 2+ hours during rush hours, due entirely to road congestion. How do you fix this? Bike lanes?
Increase cost of "sprawl" and car ownership - increase price of parking, add tolls, increase property tax for "sprawl". Decrease price of more dense, transit oriented (ie development where walking or taking the bus is just as convenient as driving a car) - get rid of parking minimums, make FHA loans available on condos, add bike lanes, add transit.
So, essentially, make my life and home even more expensive, pushing me further and further out into a cheaper area, making my (still car-centric) commute even longer?
I'd love it if you could wave a magic wand and simply "make" bikeable-to-work housing in the Bay Area more affordable, but good luck with that.
BUT also decrease cost of density... pretty hard considering the momentum behind sprawl. Sprawl looks less attractive when it's more expensive. Density looks more attractive when it's cheaper.
I'd love it if I could wave a magic wand too. This is going to be a generation long effort. But it's taken a generation long effort to build car land.
That part may be a feature. A bus stop next to your apartment building might be gone next week, but a light rail station is staying put and developers can more confidently build "transit-oriented" neighborhoods (denser, less parking, etc.).
Yes, but a good public transportation system usually requires heavy government support and sponsorship. The subsidies to suburban, sprawling neighborhoods are much more difficult to see than the direct costs associated with building and maintaining public transportation. The perceived quality of public transportation also have a big impact. It's a very difficult thing to do politically, so I'm more surprised by the areas that have managed to create good transit than places that have failed to do so.
>Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it.
That cuts both ways. There are very few subway systems in the world that are self-sustaining. You can't just say to not subsidize one way of life while demanding people subsidize another.
The argument being used is pointing out that roads are only sustainable financially because everyone is subsidizing them. The same applies for many subway systems and other forms of public transit.
Firstly, there are more transit operators that are considered profitable outside of Japan (for example Hong Kong, Singapore).
Secondly, it depends a lot on accounting. Consider that in Europe, most infrastructure doesn't get built until it has a positive cost-benefit ratio. Since transit does get build, it's overall positive economic impact apparently outweighs the cost - so overall they do 'bring in' more money than they take.
Thirdly, if you require a strict sense of 'bringing in more money than they take' as a specific organization building the infrastructure then charging for the access, I have to tell you that there are relatively few roads that 'make money'. In fact it's basically only some highways, and bridges -- high capacity trunk lines, and lines across choke points. This ignores the cost of large feeder networks, which are generally paid for by taxes. In North America, municipal taxes. This gets interesting when people who don't have cars subsidize single occupancy drivers via municipal taxes.
If you ignore feeder networks for transit, for example ignoring the cost of bus feeders, and only considering the cost of major trunk lines relative to the income of the whole system, then I'd say many subway systems in the world 'bring in more money than they take'.
I guess the obvious argument would be that its worth subsidizing public transport as it has additional benefits, in terms of the environment and being open to the entire population not just those who are able and can afford to drive.
I've been saying this for years: federal interstates have contributed to sprawl by effectively subsidizing both land and driving. It creates all sorts of disincentives.
"This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does."
To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor.
The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate.
Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking.
So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.
Sprawl in the US, and the lack of public transport, is influenced by the legacy of racism. There are still plenty of people who will oppose public transport on this basis.
This is a huge issue IMHO. It's interesting to see comparisons of different transit solutions by how many people they get to switch modes. For example buses usually are very cheap but get few people to switch. Streetcars on the same route are much more expensive but get lots of people to switch.
I really dislike "induced demand" as a reason to maintain a terrible experience of a desired product or service. Increase fuel taxes or even do demand charging, but don't have this thing where you make a car trip take three times longer because it discourages people from using their cars.
I think the argument isn't "let's not improve things because people will use things more" but "let's not spend resources for little improvement". The induced demand argument suggests that the pain and utility of traffic are in equilibrium, and that there's so much latent demand that no feasible amount of pavement will reduce the pain appreciably. It seems to me of a similar genre to studies showing that safety equipment increases risky behavior.
That's the point, "induced demand" is simply the fact of making it easier to travel by car, encourages more people to choose to travel by car. It is not that the trip takes three times as long, it's the fact, they built a wider road and the journey took half as long, prior to the road being widened.
You want more people to choose any other option, other than the car. This, however, is hard when traffic modelling still focuses on traffic flow (maximising car throughput) over modal share.
In the UK, it estimated that the school run is 20%-25% of rush hour. Our road design precludes kids cycling to school.
I have to disagree here. Various Council Highways departments are absolutely focused on traffic flow. I would go as far as to say that the two top priorities are traffic flow and not affecting on-street parking.
If you have a 30mph road, it needs a protected cycle track. We need space where an 8 year old cycling to school does not have to share road space with HGVs. Where one mistake does not get punished by death.
I cycle all over London and I don't feel safe a lot of the time. Big roads have inconsistent cycle lanes that start and stop at random or are ignored by drivers. Side roads have people who think 35mph is a reasonable speed to go on a road that doesn't even have space for two cars to pass side by side.
The UK needs a lot more investment in cycle infrastructure before it could be considered safe.
This is the streetview of London Road, Bath. https://goo.gl/maps/BF8dHyqetow Local cycling groups campaigned for a 2 way protected track along here, but were over-ruled by a council officer who chose a design, where you can be cycling along with your child on a bike, be overtaken by a bus, that then pulls in forcing you to pull out into 30mph traffic. They chose a design where dead space in the middle of the road was more important than providing a design that encouraged modal shift.
This road also breaks the EU legal limits on pollution. They knew this when they put in this design.
Yeah I see this a lot. The first "cycle superhighways" in London were along these lines. Thankfully they've started building properly segregated cycle lanes and are rebuilding quite a few junctions. I think it helps that now cyclists are the majority of traffic over quite a few bridges in London. It'll continue to be a very long fight but I think there is hope. That being said it does seem like other UK cities are lagging behind London which in itself is nowhere near where it needs to be.
I think the true sign that cycling has finally been acknowledged will be the implementation of green wave traffic signalling for commuter routes into the city.
Honestly, the only way I see this ever being taken seriously is when the DfT has to ringfence 10% of their budget to the development of high-quality cycle infrastructure. When a road can be identified as a major "arterial route" and councils have to prioritise cycling over the provision of on-street parking. That one is an absolute killer for many schemes. As a resident, you can object to the removal of an on-street parking space, creating a major weak link in a good cycle transport corridor.
Yeah on street parking is the bane of cycling. So many roads have on street parking on both sides and yet there's no space for two cars to pass each other.
I don't know what will make the difference. I think in London it's taken years of campaigning and highlighting to deaths to get a change. Having an elected mayor controlling transport also helps a bit to because it gives a focus for the campaigning. It'll remain to be seen if London continues it's improvements or gives up on them. I hope we have now reached the tipping point where cyclists start to outnumber other road users on so many roads that the 5% argument can't be used anymore.
About 2% of English children cycle to school, which is very few — the lowest in Europe.
A neighbouring country, the Netherlands, has 49%, the highest in Europe.
Given the lack of joined-up cycle lanes in most English settlements, a default speed limit of 30mph (50km/h), and a ban on cycling on the pavement, a fear of traffic seems very reasonable.
A road accident is the most common cause of accidental death for a child, and most of these are child pedestrians. (This is followed by asphyxiation and drowning.)
No, travel demand modeling includes transit shares and modeling.
More roads are a fantastic solution for encouraging mobility of individuals. Yes, it is difficult from a group planning point of view, but think about it from the users point of view. There is a single dad who is restricted by her availability of time to a thirty minute commute window. If he has no available car, he is forced to a bus route based job, or bicycle / walking distance job. Locations for bus routes are chosen by top-down planning based on productions and attractions, with a preference for utilization based on larger employers, think hospital and hospitality. The buses drive the single dad to a certain area and precludes him from looking for jobs in non-bus route areas. You are forcing an individual to choose a non-ideal job based on a push for modal share and the "Planners" basis of what is best, not the individual.
Road diets are dangerous for the populace. Look at Los Angeles current push for road diets that will decrease the levels of service across the city from 18% failure to 30% failure and the warnings that the emergency services say about the corresponding decrease in response times.
The school run in the mornings is a good thing to focus on, here in the United States, we force the kids onto a crazy schedule of arriving in class before 8:00am.
This completely goes against the point the article is making. The premise that building more roads creates more congestion. Road diets enable modal shift.
Oslo and Berlin are planning to ban the car from the city centre. It is about recognising that the car is a very bad form of transport for cities. It also has severe negative health effects on the population.
Your argument feels like a smoker trying to justify why they should be allowed to smoke wherever they like.
I have started taking every article of complaint from citylab with a grain of salt. It always seems like there is an agenda with these articles.
In this case, they are trying to curb the building of roads. I do not know how that helps. Alleviating traffic and bringing increased capacity to roads helps spur economic activity.
The Big Dig Project on the Central Artery in Boston helped alleviate traffic and resume economic growth in an area where it had stalled. The capacity of the artery is expected to be fully realized by 2050.
In NJ, we are always stuck in traffic. And that is the main reason why NJ's economy has stalled. No more room for growth.
The point of the article and citylab's purpose is probably to direct more use of public transportation. But likewise, the more public transportation you have, the more use you will have there too.
The point is that building more roads doesn't reduce congestion. This is because the number of car trips increases as well. As the supply of roads grow, the demand for car trips goes up as well, to the benefit of no one.
It is definitely an editorial decision of Citylab to evangelize this finding. But in this case, not in a mendacious way, more in an exasperating i told you once i told you a million times kind of way.
That NJs economy stalled due to not having enough roads is a conjecture.
You don't need physical room for economic growth (well, I'd say in the US you don't). The US is incredibly wasteful, to the point of it being obscene, with its physical space. The upside is dubious. But the negative results of car slavery are clear: it excludes children and seniors of being independently mobile, it creates a terribly unattractive environment, high speed roads - aka car sewers - are a killer on property values since nobody wants to live next to on, driving claims more than 30000 lives per year in this country alone.
Cars have benefits though!!! I have three, should that factoid help convince you. But they work best in a handful of use cases: longer trips, hauling stuff, recreational driving in the country, ... Basically, what the commercials show you. But when you're shackled to them to do daily errands that you could just as well do on your own two feet if only the built environment wasn't so hostile to humans, they are terrible.
Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years.
So... sounds like less traffic. Wonder why the title says "more traffic".
Some of the cars on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled, or shifting development patterns, and so on.
Those all sound like good things. The point of roads is to use them. So people use them to have a shorter commute, or live a bit further away from work to lower rent, etc etc etc.
What is the actual problem? Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?
Because there are alternatives that also increase people's mobility, as 'hammock' wrote below: "the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic."
"Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?"
I think that's exactly it.
Perhaps all road building initiatives should be publicised as short term congestion relief and long term preference of cars over other forms of transport.
The problem is you get into an endless cycle of adding more and more road capacity and still ending up with the same amount of congestion. If you invest that money in public transport or cycle infrastructure you end up lowering congestion and speeding up everyone's movement including those that still want to drive.
I still don't see why "Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years" is being interpreted as "ending up with the same amount of congestion".
If public transit or bike lanes would provide a better benefit for the same cost, then I would support them. But that's a separate and complicated discussion. Instead, this article seems designed to mislead people into thinking that expanding roads has literally no benefit, when obviously it does even if congestion remained the same (which it doesn't).
Well first congestion isn't linear to vehicle miles. In traffic movement small things have a massive knock on effect. On my daily route to work I see the effect that adding just a few more cars to a road does. Adding 5% more cars doesn't increase congestion by 5% it actually brings traffic to a standstill where it was moving at an effective pace before.
Adding extra capacity can even make the problem worse because of what happens when increased capacity meets lower capacity. Human driver are terrible at going from two lanes down to two. You could say that this is bad design but in cities especially there are constraints that you can't really design around very easily without destroying massive parts of the city. This was done in the past to allow highways to penetrate right into cities but those highways just slowed to a crawl.
As for cost effectiveness bike lanes are a lot cheaper than extra road lanes and very much cheaper than elevated highways. Bus rapid transit is also extremely cheap. That's before you start looking at other cost benefits such as increased health for more exercise and less pollution.
>Adding 5% more cars doesn't increase congestion by 5% it actually brings traffic to a standstill where it was moving at an effective pace before.
That seems to argue in favor of the expansion. The 10% road increase may only lead to a 4% decrease in car density, but that could be enough to bring traffic out of standstill.
In terms of resources used to gain ratio that's terrible. Methods that reduce traffic density are much better than ones that increase it.
And that's before you think about what adding extra capacity does to a city. I've lived in quite a few cities in my time and the wider the roads in the city the worse the traffic, pollution and enjoyability of the city.
Yes, when you build useful things, people generally use them. Consider: "The parks are too crowded. But if we build parks, this mostly just lowers the density of park-goers in the short term. In the long term, people move to live near the parks and use the parks more, so that the density of park-goers rises again, and we loose most of the benefit!"
There's lots of constructive arguments to be had about the relative benefits of investment in roads vs. rail vs. whatever, and tons of good criticism to level against subsidies and un-taxed externalities (for all those options). But arguments complaining about the "endless cycle" of building useful things that subsequently get used are silly. This lowers the quality of the conversation about public transit, making it more difficult to convince others of the relative merits.
The use of roads is to get people and goods from A to B. If there's a way of doing that that doesn't involve endlessly building roads then do that. Roads are inherently inefficient for moving people around because use about 2 tons of car that takes up a great deal of space to move one person. They're slightly more efficient for goods but even then there are much more efficient ways to move goods most places.
Endless cycle of building an inefficient solution to fix a problem caused by inefficient design is a perfectly valid argument.
And yes the inefficiency was implied by the contrast to public transport investment.
Should we be focused on traffic--i.e. the density of vehicles on the road--or throughput of travelers? Because if you don't build roads, and let traffic build too high, there is a point where congestion becomes a major impediment and throughput plummets.
Being someone who is familiar the Connecticut segments of the highways mentioned it seems much like a false comparision. I-95 in that segment is the major artery from the US west of New Jersey and New York to Boston and most of the northeast, and I-84 is much the same (except it goes through Hartford and is consistently a disaster).
Most of the segments of I-95 and I-84 they will want to improve already are 2-lanes and are frequently stopped due to accidents. While I agree with the article's claim that the increase in economic activity in those areas is dubious it's something that is needed. If anything it's going to increase tourism traffic to points north as well as Connecticut as there is already plenty of traffic from NYC/NJ through to other coastal areas (RI, Cape Cod). Also this includes traffic from points north to the Connecticut casinos that are in the heart of the state which is another major inflow.
I just don't understand if the roads CalTrans are describing and the author is trying to demonstrate are really equivalent, where 'thru' traffic is just as vital as in-state to in-state traffic.
Yeah not sure if I'm down for larger highway 84, where are they going to push out into? Ardenwood Farms? The Fremont city board already has told residents that it does not plan to slow down the building of new homes in the area. Which is a big issue because current public schools cannot fit all these students here... 1LTC says that y'all are being paid for by the same development companies from SF to build housing here.
I live in NJ, in the shadow of NYC, and commute to work every day on some of the busiest roads in the state. The real problem I see are trucks. Big stupid semi-trailers and dumptrucks, queued up by the dozens with shipments fresh from the nearby *ports. Trucks, which exceed the lane space of a bus yet carry a single person. Sitting comfy in the left lane doing 15 under while traffic piles up behind them, another semi alongside blocking any traffic.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadConsider that the theory states that traffic is unchanged because people will be incentivized to drive more because of less traffic. This is self contradictory - there can't be both less traffic and the same traffic.
Obviously people use roads until the equilibrium of pain is met (like any economic decision). But, there is a point where you can supply so much capacity that there won't be traffic. It's a lie to say that no amount of capacity can overwhelm all forms of demand.
The only real question is how much road would it take to fully satisfy demand and what would that cost vs the alternatives. (Ignoring pollution issues)
Cite this, I dare you.
edit: the part I'm not buying is the combination of "terrible" and "personal"
It matters little whether you're sitting on your but for 45min in a car or on a bus, you're still not getting exercise. That's not really "terrible" as it's something that can easily be counteracted unlike (for example) working in a loud environment for 45min twice per day without hearing protection.
The "terrible" stuff (accidents) isn't really personal because it only comes into play on a statistical level (seeing as most people will never be seriously injured in a vehicle accident)
Sorry people, you're living in a bubble. The vast, vast, VAST majority of people don't hate cars like the HN collective does.
People generally don't hate their own culture. But it's obvious from a european perspective that the US has an unhealthy obsession about cars. Not that we hate cars, but we don't worship them either.
And I don't think HN hates cars. All I've seen is people pointing out real issues. Maybe some exaggeration here and there, but everyone is guilty of that.
From my own personal experience(real life, not on-line), techies are by FAR more pro-car, and dismissive off traditional urbanism. Real Engineers outside software even more so. I think it is because suburban homes have a lot of space for all the crap tinkerers collect. Hobbies in this crowd tend to skew to things with stuff; drones, cars, ... A more introverted disposition may drive engineers to the quiet and seclusion of the suburbs too. Plus, engineers like to optimize things. Keep the process intact, but strive for less travel time, less fuel consumption, less pollution, less casualties. Hence electrical cars. Hence self-driving cars. But always "cars".
Not necessarily related to what you were saying, but I'll sneak it in anyway:
Traffic is not a technological challenge, it is a human one, with all the messiness that entails. An anthropologist can just as well study traffic (and propose solutions) as a traffic engineer. The big mistake in the US was to hand over the governance and implementation of our urban environment to technocrats. The planning profession has long since come around, precisely because often they were educated in sociology departments (Oh, the affront an engineer must feel when he has to justify building codes to this numbnut planner who probably only passed intro to stats by schmoozing with the TA!). Anyway, eventually the bureaucrats, legislators, and building professionals will come around too. But it requires for a lot of people to reject what they have - literally - bought into. The suburbs are NOT doomed though, there's a lot of good about it. But they are expensive. So the suburbs at all cost are most definitely coming at an end. Municipalities are strained financially, precisely because the financial obligations of maintaining car sprawl are high. On an individual level, the suburbs just cost a lot too. Everybody needs a car, maintenance & utilities costs of the home are born by just a single household, etc... The suburbs are massive social engineering, a federal project to promote home ownership and promote financial independence. Plus, a sprawling city would be more resilient should a nuclear war breakout, that paranoia was also something in the 50s. The home ownership part has succeeded, but the financial independence part has been a total failure.
In the USA the car is the solution to every city building problem. This is the problem as I see it.
Background Public health must continually respond to new threats reflecting wider societal changes. Ecological public health recognizes the links between human health and global sustainability. We argue that these links are typified by the harms caused by dependence on private cars.
Right there off the bat tells us that they have a political ideology that they're trying to justify with their "study".
(a note: you'd have a point if you're pointing out that "terrible" is exaggerated, but that would silly since it's obvious, so I'm assuming you think that there's no health benefit)
Much of the point of public planning is that in practice that definition of need isn't one that really creates fantastic outcomes.
The only reason there is induced demand is that the infrastructure is too small to support the way our cities and metro areas have evolved. Maybe the way they have evolved is a product of the Eisenhower Interstate highway system, but we're already invested in that infrastructure. It would take an inordinate amount of money, resources, and effort to relocate and redesign our cities than to just build the correct size (and number) of highways to support the population.
In addition - one thing that it seems highway planners rarely plan correctly for is growth. The population of the Washington DC metro area has grown from about 3 million in 1980 to over 6 million currently. Many of the highways are nearly the same size over that span.
What they failed to account for, however, is the growth of exburbs like Ashburn VA and other places even further out like Frederick MD.
These remote places are built by developers who literally put ZERO thought into infrastructure and what will happen to traffic and many other things when thousands of well-paid people move into their McMansions in the middle of nowhere.
They just buy up farmland from farmers who want to retire, sell a fake dream of idyllic rural living, plop down a bunch of cookie-cutter houses, then take the money and do all over again somewhere else. People have been finally getting wise to this anti-pattern (it was known in Maryland since the 90's) and the citylab article is an example.
While I too find some scorn for the McMansion culture, it is not really a local developers job or role to plan for medium to long distance infrastructure. I don't think it would even be legally possible for a private entity to take on a highway project that crossed multiple counties and/or states without a massive amount of support from local and state governments.
Also, I wouldn't call suburban and rural development an anti-pattern. Unless you want the cities to be double the density they already are, some people are going to have to live in the suburbs and rural parts of the country.
As far as # of daily metro rides. My point is that if the metro were shutdown, the highways in and around DC would be a nightmare and people would not enjoy travelling in or through it. Getting around in DC, without the metro, would BE INTRACTABLE.
As for developers, while it is not "their job" to plan for infrastructure, it is very disturbing that they can simply buy land for cheap, put down and sell thousands of homes and walk away while forcing the nearby cities to deal with the mess they made. In response, many localities are now pushing "smart growth", we simply can't allow developers to make short-term selfish choices and pass the long-term costs onto everyone else.
The biggest problem with these fees is that they are "local". Bedroom communities use these fees for local infrastructure, whereas a portion should be paid towards metro infrastructure.
Daily... so one commuter to work and back home counts as two? So the road enables 100,000 commuters, or somewhat less than that, if we subtract people who drive through during other times than commute hours.
I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain.
Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it.
We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.
The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road.
With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that.
I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical.
Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact.
All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
Please explain this further.
There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
The problem is generating that capital. Most Americans simply don't care enough about transit for a politician running on the "Moar railways" platform to get elected.
Most of our passenger rail mass transit systems got built before reliable auto transportation became cheap. Now that cars are ubiquitous, the political will isn't there anymore.
I'm sorry I didn't spell out what I thought was a common-knowledge topic.
None of this is criticism; for exactly the reasons I discussed I don't see any practical alternatives to collective action at the governmental level.
Not quite - I think that's why you've got so many replies. The comment you were replying to said "subsidised" not "private", which are different things, so it looked like you were answering a question nobody had asked.
You can have unsubsidised state mass transport and subsidised private mass transport. Although not having a subsidy is rare, there are a few state services which are required to run at operational breakeven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltim...
When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.
To substantially reduce road traffic, you need to offer people an alternative that is cheaper and/or faster and/or more convenient.
Since most of the cost of a car is sunk costs (you have to pay your insurance & depreciation on your car whether you use it to commute or not), if there's free parking at work the car is going to be the cheapest option for most people.
So either you have to substantially increase the cost of driving (aka tolls), or you have to give them an option that's faster and/or more convenient. A bus using the same roads as cars can never be faster or more convenient.
Bus rapid transit (buses on dedicated roadways) may be an option, but a good BRT (aka one without traffic lights) isn't substantially cheaper than LRT.
For many people, Light Rail (or trains / subways) are the only decent mass transit they have ever experienced in the US.
Every single major and minor city has a bus system. Most of them are nearly useless, often intentionally so by design. It's natural for people to demand something useful, and light rail is nearly universally more useful than busing (including BRT) in any given market.
> It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
Those are benefits of light rail, not drawbacks. The higher costs and inflexibility of light rail represents an authentic long-term commitment to good useful transit in that area.
To replicate that value with a Bus system requires you to build grade separated, dedicated right of way. Which is where 90% of Light Rail's cost comes from. So if your going to spend that money, you might as well put in real Light Rail and get all of the benefit.
The "X cost system" is worse than the "2X system". That's why it's cheaper.
The "X" system is slower or carries less passengers or runs less often or goes to less places, or gets stuck in traffic, or is less reliable, or changes it's routes.
--
It's like comparing a WalMart Netbook to a MacBook Pro and saying "they're both 'identical' computers, why are we spending 2X on the MacBook Pro?".
We spend the extra cash because they aren't identical, the 2X one is better.
With your notebook computer analogy, the extra cost of a MacBook Pro is not a benefit. The benefits are all the various things that are better about it, with the extra cost being worth it to have those benefits. The only way you'd say the extra cost of a MacBook Pro was itself a benefit would be if you wanted to show off how rich you are or something equally silly.
European here. Why would someone intentionally design a useless bus system?
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9118199/public-transportation-s...
This is compounded by the fact that in most of these types of cities, most of the jobs and/or the "best" jobs (highest paying, most stable, best health insurance benefits, etc) are located in the suburbs, where transit is least available. Often these places can "opt-out" of transit altogether.
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-hender... (subheading: "Designed for failure")
I'd love it if you could wave a magic wand and simply "make" bikeable-to-work housing in the Bay Area more affordable, but good luck with that.
BUT also decrease cost of density... pretty hard considering the momentum behind sprawl. Sprawl looks less attractive when it's more expensive. Density looks more attractive when it's cheaper.
I'd love it if I could wave a magic wand too. This is going to be a generation long effort. But it's taken a generation long effort to build car land.
That part may be a feature. A bus stop next to your apartment building might be gone next week, but a light rail station is staying put and developers can more confidently build "transit-oriented" neighborhoods (denser, less parking, etc.).
That cuts both ways. There are very few subway systems in the world that are self-sustaining. You can't just say to not subsidize one way of life while demanding people subsidize another.
Secondly, it depends a lot on accounting. Consider that in Europe, most infrastructure doesn't get built until it has a positive cost-benefit ratio. Since transit does get build, it's overall positive economic impact apparently outweighs the cost - so overall they do 'bring in' more money than they take.
Thirdly, if you require a strict sense of 'bringing in more money than they take' as a specific organization building the infrastructure then charging for the access, I have to tell you that there are relatively few roads that 'make money'. In fact it's basically only some highways, and bridges -- high capacity trunk lines, and lines across choke points. This ignores the cost of large feeder networks, which are generally paid for by taxes. In North America, municipal taxes. This gets interesting when people who don't have cars subsidize single occupancy drivers via municipal taxes.
If you ignore feeder networks for transit, for example ignoring the cost of bus feeders, and only considering the cost of major trunk lines relative to the income of the whole system, then I'd say many subway systems in the world 'bring in more money than they take'.
You absolutely can. And you absolutely should, if the one you say should not be subsidized has net social cost compared to the other.
To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor.
The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate.
Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking.
So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.
This is also observed in countries in Europe that don't have similar history in racism as the US. The perceived comfort is better in trams.
(Also me personally, I get motion sickness if I read in a bus, but in a tram I can read just fine.)
You cannot solve this by building more roads. You solve it by putting roads on a "road diet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet enabling modal share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share . You create segregated space for walking, for cycling. You prioritise public transport.
You want more people to choose any other option, other than the car. This, however, is hard when traffic modelling still focuses on traffic flow (maximising car throughput) over modal share.
In the UK, it estimated that the school run is 20%-25% of rush hour. Our road design precludes kids cycling to school.
No, there are plenty of children who cycle to school and in safety in the UK. The bigger issue is parents' fears of abduction and/or traffic.
It's changing. This table comes from the Welsh Active Travel Act Design Guidance https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-20...
If you have a 30mph road, it needs a protected cycle track. We need space where an 8 year old cycling to school does not have to share road space with HGVs. Where one mistake does not get punished by death.
This road also breaks the EU legal limits on pollution. They knew this when they put in this design.
I wrote about it here http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of... however the real issue is that a lot of Highways officers still consider cycling a joke.
"Why should we cater for the 2%" is a line I hear a lot. However, you do not build a bridge because of the number of people swimming the river.
I don't know what will make the difference. I think in London it's taken years of campaigning and highlighting to deaths to get a change. Having an elected mayor controlling transport also helps a bit to because it gives a focus for the campaigning. It'll remain to be seen if London continues it's improvements or gives up on them. I hope we have now reached the tipping point where cyclists start to outnumber other road users on so many roads that the 5% argument can't be used anymore.
A neighbouring country, the Netherlands, has 49%, the highest in Europe.
Given the lack of joined-up cycle lanes in most English settlements, a default speed limit of 30mph (50km/h), and a ban on cycling on the pavement, a fear of traffic seems very reasonable.
A road accident is the most common cause of accidental death for a child, and most of these are child pedestrians. (This is followed by asphyxiation and drowning.)
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/walking-and-cyclin...
More roads are a fantastic solution for encouraging mobility of individuals. Yes, it is difficult from a group planning point of view, but think about it from the users point of view. There is a single dad who is restricted by her availability of time to a thirty minute commute window. If he has no available car, he is forced to a bus route based job, or bicycle / walking distance job. Locations for bus routes are chosen by top-down planning based on productions and attractions, with a preference for utilization based on larger employers, think hospital and hospitality. The buses drive the single dad to a certain area and precludes him from looking for jobs in non-bus route areas. You are forcing an individual to choose a non-ideal job based on a push for modal share and the "Planners" basis of what is best, not the individual.
Road diets are dangerous for the populace. Look at Los Angeles current push for road diets that will decrease the levels of service across the city from 18% failure to 30% failure and the warnings that the emergency services say about the corresponding decrease in response times.
The school run in the mornings is a good thing to focus on, here in the United States, we force the kids onto a crazy schedule of arriving in class before 8:00am.
Oslo and Berlin are planning to ban the car from the city centre. It is about recognising that the car is a very bad form of transport for cities. It also has severe negative health effects on the population.
Your argument feels like a smoker trying to justify why they should be allowed to smoke wherever they like.
In this case, they are trying to curb the building of roads. I do not know how that helps. Alleviating traffic and bringing increased capacity to roads helps spur economic activity.
The Big Dig Project on the Central Artery in Boston helped alleviate traffic and resume economic growth in an area where it had stalled. The capacity of the artery is expected to be fully realized by 2050.
In NJ, we are always stuck in traffic. And that is the main reason why NJ's economy has stalled. No more room for growth.
The point of the article and citylab's purpose is probably to direct more use of public transportation. But likewise, the more public transportation you have, the more use you will have there too.
I really don't see the point of this article.
It is definitely an editorial decision of Citylab to evangelize this finding. But in this case, not in a mendacious way, more in an exasperating i told you once i told you a million times kind of way.
That NJs economy stalled due to not having enough roads is a conjecture.
You don't need physical room for economic growth (well, I'd say in the US you don't). The US is incredibly wasteful, to the point of it being obscene, with its physical space. The upside is dubious. But the negative results of car slavery are clear: it excludes children and seniors of being independently mobile, it creates a terribly unattractive environment, high speed roads - aka car sewers - are a killer on property values since nobody wants to live next to on, driving claims more than 30000 lives per year in this country alone.
Cars have benefits though!!! I have three, should that factoid help convince you. But they work best in a handful of use cases: longer trips, hauling stuff, recreational driving in the country, ... Basically, what the commercials show you. But when you're shackled to them to do daily errands that you could just as well do on your own two feet if only the built environment wasn't so hostile to humans, they are terrible.
Each person riding the bus, is one less car on the road.
So... sounds like less traffic. Wonder why the title says "more traffic".
Some of the cars on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled, or shifting development patterns, and so on.
Those all sound like good things. The point of roads is to use them. So people use them to have a shorter commute, or live a bit further away from work to lower rent, etc etc etc.
What is the actual problem? Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?
I think that's exactly it.
Perhaps all road building initiatives should be publicised as short term congestion relief and long term preference of cars over other forms of transport.
If public transit or bike lanes would provide a better benefit for the same cost, then I would support them. But that's a separate and complicated discussion. Instead, this article seems designed to mislead people into thinking that expanding roads has literally no benefit, when obviously it does even if congestion remained the same (which it doesn't).
Maybe I'm too cynical...
Adding extra capacity can even make the problem worse because of what happens when increased capacity meets lower capacity. Human driver are terrible at going from two lanes down to two. You could say that this is bad design but in cities especially there are constraints that you can't really design around very easily without destroying massive parts of the city. This was done in the past to allow highways to penetrate right into cities but those highways just slowed to a crawl.
As for cost effectiveness bike lanes are a lot cheaper than extra road lanes and very much cheaper than elevated highways. Bus rapid transit is also extremely cheap. That's before you start looking at other cost benefits such as increased health for more exercise and less pollution.
That seems to argue in favor of the expansion. The 10% road increase may only lead to a 4% decrease in car density, but that could be enough to bring traffic out of standstill.
There's lots of constructive arguments to be had about the relative benefits of investment in roads vs. rail vs. whatever, and tons of good criticism to level against subsidies and un-taxed externalities (for all those options). But arguments complaining about the "endless cycle" of building useful things that subsequently get used are silly. This lowers the quality of the conversation about public transit, making it more difficult to convince others of the relative merits.
Most of the segments of I-95 and I-84 they will want to improve already are 2-lanes and are frequently stopped due to accidents. While I agree with the article's claim that the increase in economic activity in those areas is dubious it's something that is needed. If anything it's going to increase tourism traffic to points north as well as Connecticut as there is already plenty of traffic from NYC/NJ through to other coastal areas (RI, Cape Cod). Also this includes traffic from points north to the Connecticut casinos that are in the heart of the state which is another major inflow.
I just don't understand if the roads CalTrans are describing and the author is trying to demonstrate are really equivalent, where 'thru' traffic is just as vital as in-state to in-state traffic.