Calling the demand "induced" seems a little strange.
Did creating the iPhone induce demand for iPhones that otherwise would not have been there? Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation?
Or did people like the utility of iPhones, and buy them in spades?
In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
The creation of a new good isn’t really an example of this effect. This is discussing systems that are basically stable, then new supply causes a higher quantity demanded. iPhones aren’t really supply limited. The traffic example is salient.
> Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
You've got it in one. People think that the biggest highway with the most lanes will mean less sitting in traffic, so they plan their trips to include it.
People think that a satellite city connected to the big city with a big highway will have a short car commute, so they choose to live there.
This kind of thinking induces demand until the experience of sitting in traffic for an hour on one of the widest highways in the world—like Ontario's 401—discourages people from taking the highway.
So politicians spend billions widening the highway some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Right, but this usually turns into the argument that we shouldn't add new capacity because then it would be used, and that's such a staggeringly stupid argument that I cannot comprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead someone to embrace it.
What's worse, I hear this awful argument deployed under the flag of a cause I believe in: more public transport, less roads. Guess what? If we deploy more public transport, I bet people will use it more, too! Does that mean we shouldn't? Ugh. It's so dumb it almost feels like it has to be a false flag, but I've heard it from people who I know believe what they say, so I think it's just a meme at this point. A pejorative that people throw at cars without thinking about what they are saying.
"Cars are bad at scaling throughput" is the argument we need. Not this "induced demand" garbage.
You're arguing with someone who isn't present. If and when someone makes that argument here, you can refute the argument they actually make, rather than the one in your own head. Until then, you're actually arguing with your own personal straw-man.
Also, and this is an actual thing in the HN guidelines, when you do argue, calling ideas staggeringly stupid and so forth is strongly discouraged.
Again, you're making things up. I never said that, I didn't even say you were wrong. I actually said you were not even wrong, and I'll say it again here:
When you decide for yourself what somebody else might say—but hasn't said, or decide for yourself why you think somebody didn't say something, you're arguing with yourself.
"Not even wrong" has a very specific meaning here, it means arguing from speculative premises that cannot be falsified. Like, "But other people will argue X," or, "You declined to engage because Y."
> Right, but this usually turns into the argument that we shouldn't add new capacity because then it would be used, and that's such a staggeringly stupid argument that I cannot comprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead someone to embrace it.
Well... I hope this explanation is soothing then.
It's about what the investment in more capacity is meant to accomplish.
Accommodating more cars? Sure, but why did you want to accommodate more cars?
To move more people from A to B, more comfortably.
Now, what happens when you create this capacity is that it gets used to the same point it did before you built it, until moving people in cars through roads becomes untenable due to congestion. By making it temporarily better, you put more vehicles on the road, made it more viable to move to the suburb, and allowed the problem to grow.
So, describing this phenomenon as an argument not to build more capacity for cars as it won't have the expected pay off in quality of life for people is important. It can and often is an either/or building more capacity for private cars or allocating that money to public transportation.
Trains have the exact same pathology, though: add more capacity and people will use it until they can't, and then they'll either stop or fund more. It's a social coordination pattern, not a car pattern.
> It's a social coordination pattern, not a car pattern.
So making it easier for automobile transportation is throwing money at the symptom. Money and policy decisions should be focused on moving people around generally and not on cars specifically.
> Right, but this usually turns into the argument that we shouldn't add new capacity because then it would be used, and that's such a staggeringly stupid argument that I cannot comprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead someone to embrace it.
The argument is "we should not add new road capacity to solve traffic problems because it will just create more traffic".
You're not solving anything by spending the money on road capacity. If you want to get rid of traffic you need to spend the money on alternatives that get people using roads less or more efficiently.
The more you add road capacity, the less 'demand is induced', because there's limited amount of people. In other words, at some point the traffic problem is solved by adding more roads.
It's another question if it makes sense to add that amount of road. It probably depends on the particular case.
> The more you add road capacity, the less 'demand is induced', because there's limited amount of people.
And how much money would it cost to build out enough road infrastructure to 'overwhelm all possible demand'? How much would it cost to move the same amount of people via some other form of transportation?
The province of Ontario finds it cheaper to run an entire railway (GO Transit) compared to being able to build out enough highway infrastructure (and it's not like they've stop building that):
And that's just the road infrastructure: what about things like parking space at the destination(s) of where all these folks are going? How much area would have to be bulldozed for all of this?
But you can turn this around and look at the large scale problem.
Let's say that 500K people can successfully make a mid-length car journey in London per day. Number pulled out of a hat.
You widen all of the roads where it's viable. Now 700K people can successfully make a mid-length car journey.
Sure, I'm still stuck in traffic, I can't go further, it's no more "convenient", but it literally improves the situation.
By the same token, it makes no difference to me whether 200K new homes are built in the capital - they'll probably all get filled up and I'll end up paying the same or close to. Hell I have a mortgage anyway.
But that's another 200K people that can live in the place they want to.
The kind that comes from 30 years in a country considered to have "amazing" public transport.
Rail is great if you're going long distances, or if traffic is an absolute nightmare. Not so much for the much shorter distances inday to day travel. Worse, if you're walking out to the train station, that's even more time spent that would have been covered by a car.
Right. I live super super metroland central compared to like 99% of the world.
The tube station is ten mins away and then on the other side it's ten mins from my friend. If it's close enough I just drive or cycle the whole thing in 15.
Roads and paths are everywhere by definition, they're like, what "outside" is.
I live in London, we have a billion trains and shit, my mate 4 miles away is still 45 mins by train/bus because public transport is worse by definition for rarely travelled routes.
I'm sorry, but London's public transit is horrible. I've moved there from Vienna and it was a huge downgrade. Don't think it's fair to use that city as benchmark.
That goes in both senses though, and that becomes a tougher sell.
Both the "there shouldn't be places" and the "where the rail doesn't go"
Sprawl just doesn't pay for itself[1]. The more of it there is, more a government will bleed money building and maintaining infrastructure for few people per square kilometer. It doesn't make economic sense.
Now, of course "does it make money" is not a criterion to be applied to everything in life and society, but sprawl just makes it harder to fund everything, and you can end up subsidizing low-density well-to-do neighborhoods with the tax collected from lower-income people if they live in more densely zoned areas.
It's just a road to not having money to maintain the infrastructure, or improve education, or provide daycares, or anything else that would improve the life of the population.
> Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation?
Yes, correct. That’s spot on. A lot of people were crying out for a powerful, capable, usable mobile computer to access email, the web and use applications on the go. The mobile networks had invested billions building network capacity to meet these needs. This is why there were huge queues for the very first iPhone before hardly anyone had even touched one.
The mobile industry had been full of speculation about what devices we would use on these networks, how they might work and what they would look like. Before the iPhone was even announced I could tell you very clearly what I needed a mobile device to be able to do for me, but not how it would do it. Apple figured that bit out.
Think about it this way. If latent demand didn’t exist, how could Apple have figured out what device to design? How could they select the features and capabilities and prioritise them? They had to target a market, even though that market didn’t exist yet. Without thinking about latent demand that sort of novel product development would be just random feature selection and then see what gets traction. For sure some companies do that, but not all. Some of them think it through and target a market they hypothesise exists.
Well, it didn't have applications when it came out. You're retrofitting history with your argument, instead of keeping your argument to history.
The iPhone was terrible at everything when it came out except capacitive touch and coolness. That's fine, but let's not pretend otherwise.
Terming "people wanting to buy something better/cool" as latent demand is silly. It's a new/cool thing. There's no need to pretend there's anything latent about it. Make new shiny; people buy new shiny. And that's just for Apple. Most products require massive amounts of marketing to explain to people why they should be bought. That wouldn't be needed in a world with latent demand, just waiting to be fulfilled.
> Did creating the iPhone induce demand for iPhones that otherwise would not have been there? Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation?
Invention is the mother of necessity. — Marshal McLuhan
> In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
Until that new capacity is filled up and now you have even more people sitting in traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to get people out of cars, otherwise you're just spending money to kick the can down the road.
See "What People Get Wrong About Induced Demand" by the Oh The Urbanity! channel:
That isn't the scenario. Also it's not true; people don't buy things they don't want, even if they're below cost, unless they want to sell them for more. That's not wanting the product; just the profit.
What's with the editorialized title? The linked Wikipedia article is just titled "Induced Demand". That should be the HN title as well; OP please fix the title to match the linked page.
If you want to then post a common with your view or reason for posting, that sounds great too. Then we can discuss it.
Congestion is a non-pecuniary cost, so there's no reason to use a different term. Every time I hear someone use the words 'induced demand', it is meant to indicate that it should be reduced/prevented; I know someone who works in Vancouver's city planning department, and uses the term in this way.
I love how anyone can leave their two cents on this site, even for subjects they have absolutely no credentials on (you're answering on a throwaway so that's another strike against your expertise).
I would personally reserve that for the folks who actually study the problem space, but whatevs.
Please post a substantive reply, instead of a shallow dismissal. If you have no substantive reply to the parent commenter, it would be best to refrain from commenting. As per the HN Guidelines:
>"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""
>"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
The substantive point in my reply is that the topic (induced demand) is one that is widely studied and acknowledged.
The popular approach on this site to allow anyone with unstudied and naive assumptions of how the world works freedom to dismiss these concerns should be shunned, derisively if necessary.
I see that as being a shallow dismissal, but I think I understand your point.
If the thoughts and views of non-experts are worthless (or harmful) in a causal setting (here), why should they be permitted to express them in a consequential environment (voting)?
This is internet - what do You expect ? Moderators with expertise in every subject and infinite attention span?
The validation of meritoric side of comments on this site is on You as a reader. If You pay attention to what You read its quite easy to tell the difference between someone who knows what he's talking about and a contrarian who wants just to talk about meta topics on shallow level.
My daughter is off to study civil engineering this summer and has a particular interest in traffic engineering. This isn’t an ivory tower concern, it’s a real engineering discipline because roads need to be built and planned in the real world. In that world, the real one, you need to be able to talk about the reasons why you are or are not building a road here or there and the effect that will have so that real people can drive on them.
My impression of the parent comment is that they were saying that the specific term "induced demand" seems to be used to dismiss the needs and concerns of people in an out-group.
The economics term "elasticity of demand" is probably older, has a very similar meaning, broader application, and a clearer definition.
As nickff posts below, there are other, less provocative ways to refer to the fact that demand can outstrip supply.
I'd argue that most of the time in the case of road networks the demand isn't even induced; it's not even elastic! It's already there, there's just no supply for it. At least in the short term - you might have an actual increase in demand over decades as a city/region grows.
> the demand [..] It's already there, there's just no supply for it.
This is the case if those people do not take alternative form of travel, a single subway can take hundreds of cars off the street, even in car-centric suburban hellscape (I am showing my bias here) there are secondary longer routes.
In terms of congestion demand is very path-specific.
A recent viral videos it recently made focuses why approaches that are complementary to suburban sprawl and high speed roads are necessary in North America (where I am assuming you are from).
I live in a different continent, but I am quite passionate about the topic and I believe that most people are good actors that want a better world around them. Egoistically I hope these material might change someone opinion on what that better world looks like.
I don't think it's slimy. Saying "a grocery store opened in the low-income neighborhood and demand was induced for fresh vegetables", if the people there actually are now purchasing fresh vegetables at an increased rate, is accurate and probably correct. If you view that as a "slimy" thing to say, then that exists as a negative connotation on the word "induced" for you, an experience which may not be what others experience.
The basic idea of "if you build it, they will come" is the same as "induced demand", but with different words. "Induced demand" though has been used lately though when you need to say:
No, you can't just 'more infrastructure' your way out of a problem of high utilization, since utilization will probably rise to meet new availability.
You may reply with "well then we'll build more when we get there", but specifically related to roads, that leads to it's own set of problems like "we will run out of space to realistically build more" and "building more has massive adverse effects" and "building more will cost more than it's worth". Those downsides around building roads can be ignored in the name of increased convenience or because in specific cases the downsides may not apply as much. But it doesn't make the downsides go away. And ultimately, the downsides will exist because induced demand is real; if you build it they will come (even if you'd prefer they not).
Induced demand is a term used in the context of congestion; any kind of congestion. If your site get faster/better you get more visitors, if car trip get faster/cheaper you get more car trips, if trains get cheaper/better you get more train trips, if your ISP upgrade to fiber you get more internet traffic.
Induced demand is the idea that if doing X is a miserable experience due to too many people wanting to do X, then improving the experience will induce more people to want to do X so upgrading the infrastructure need to account for all the people that currently are giving up but start X-ing once it get marginally better.
In a vicious cycle of congestion -> upgrades -> congestion again.
The implication is that often rather than scaling X you are better off finding a different path that suffer less congestion, as is the case with car travel.
Induced demand of non-scarce resource is just growth.
The end goal of adding lanes to a freeway shouldn't be to "reduce congestion" but increase total throughput. Seems like a pretty basic misunderstanding.
Adding lanes also has the effect of more lane changes, which are a big part of what slows traffic down to begin with.
If we're going to put it in computery terms, latency matters. People want decreased latency for themselves, not just to be in the company of more people sitting in the same traffic jam.
Trying to remember an adage on nanog back in the day about why ISPs should provision 2x average capacity, and how traffic in the 1990s expanded to fill the bandwidth available to it. If I remember, it was about only making extra circuits available for burst traffic, and not available otherwise. At the time I remember thinking this had obvious paralells to road traffic.
For express traffic, I've often thought periodically tapering off passing lanes using painted lines and forcing drivers who passively drive in them back into the active flow of traffic would increase the average speed and consistency of flow for related reasons and the idea of "smooth is fast." Physical dynamic traffic shaping, essentially. Adding complexity or even randomness to interrupt the dynamics that induce the increased demand would be a design consideration.
I'd wonder where network protocol design ends and car traffic engineering begins, or if they are essentially the same thing.
Urbanists way overstate the importance of induced demand and make it seem like gospel truth that adding roads is pointless
I went down the rabbit hole of induced demand studies a few years back, the evidence for the idea that adding lanes or roads does not reduce congestion is pretty weak. There just aren't that many roads being built, theres a ton of confounding factors ( population growth ) , and even some of these studies like the A&M one in this wikipedia are mixed.
I prefer to think of it as either unmet or unsurfaced demand. It's easier to think about the two places where "induced demand" shows up in arguments: traffic and housing.
For traffic and housing there's tons of people who would drive more or live somewhere dense if more roads/housing were provided. The big difference is whether the demand is exhaustible. For roads it's not: you would have to pave all of LA into a freeway system to eliminate traffic. Housing might be different though. Densifying the region around the downtown could outpace the influx of people. The difference is whether trying to exhaust the demand leads to a pleasant collection of neighborhoods or a 60-lane freeway hellscape.
These ideas were popular when real estate developers wanted to build and sell a lot of downtown/centrally located condos.
As downtowns run out of land and demand declines (because of work from home and the decline of downtowns) a new business plan will be created and a new ideology will be developed to support it.
I just want to know what it'll be so I can front run it. Anyone have any idea?
64 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadDid creating the iPhone induce demand for iPhones that otherwise would not have been there? Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation?
Or did people like the utility of iPhones, and buy them in spades?
In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
Traffic is people, if you increase road capacity, you'll just have more people taking the road until it's full enough for everyone to be stuck again.
You've got it in one. People think that the biggest highway with the most lanes will mean less sitting in traffic, so they plan their trips to include it.
People think that a satellite city connected to the big city with a big highway will have a short car commute, so they choose to live there.
This kind of thinking induces demand until the experience of sitting in traffic for an hour on one of the widest highways in the world—like Ontario's 401—discourages people from taking the highway.
So politicians spend billions widening the highway some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
What's worse, I hear this awful argument deployed under the flag of a cause I believe in: more public transport, less roads. Guess what? If we deploy more public transport, I bet people will use it more, too! Does that mean we shouldn't? Ugh. It's so dumb it almost feels like it has to be a false flag, but I've heard it from people who I know believe what they say, so I think it's just a meme at this point. A pejorative that people throw at cars without thinking about what they are saying.
"Cars are bad at scaling throughput" is the argument we need. Not this "induced demand" garbage.
You're arguing with someone who isn't present. If and when someone makes that argument here, you can refute the argument they actually make, rather than the one in your own head. Until then, you're actually arguing with your own personal straw-man.
Also, and this is an actual thing in the HN guidelines, when you do argue, calling ideas staggeringly stupid and so forth is strongly discouraged.
Fair enough.
When you decide for yourself what somebody else might say—but hasn't said, or decide for yourself why you think somebody didn't say something, you're arguing with yourself.
"Not even wrong" has a very specific meaning here, it means arguing from speculative premises that cannot be falsified. Like, "But other people will argue X," or, "You declined to engage because Y."
Both of these statement forms are not even wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Well... I hope this explanation is soothing then.
It's about what the investment in more capacity is meant to accomplish.
Accommodating more cars? Sure, but why did you want to accommodate more cars?
To move more people from A to B, more comfortably.
Now, what happens when you create this capacity is that it gets used to the same point it did before you built it, until moving people in cars through roads becomes untenable due to congestion. By making it temporarily better, you put more vehicles on the road, made it more viable to move to the suburb, and allowed the problem to grow.
So, describing this phenomenon as an argument not to build more capacity for cars as it won't have the expected pay off in quality of life for people is important. It can and often is an either/or building more capacity for private cars or allocating that money to public transportation.
Scaling arguments do not have this problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity
> It's a social coordination pattern, not a car pattern.
So making it easier for automobile transportation is throwing money at the symptom. Money and policy decisions should be focused on moving people around generally and not on cars specifically.
The argument is "we should not add new road capacity to solve traffic problems because it will just create more traffic".
You're not solving anything by spending the money on road capacity. If you want to get rid of traffic you need to spend the money on alternatives that get people using roads less or more efficiently.
It's another question if it makes sense to add that amount of road. It probably depends on the particular case.
And how much money would it cost to build out enough road infrastructure to 'overwhelm all possible demand'? How much would it cost to move the same amount of people via some other form of transportation?
The province of Ontario finds it cheaper to run an entire railway (GO Transit) compared to being able to build out enough highway infrastructure (and it's not like they've stop building that):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA
And that's just the road infrastructure: what about things like parking space at the destination(s) of where all these folks are going? How much area would have to be bulldozed for all of this?
Let's say that 500K people can successfully make a mid-length car journey in London per day. Number pulled out of a hat.
You widen all of the roads where it's viable. Now 700K people can successfully make a mid-length car journey.
Sure, I'm still stuck in traffic, I can't go further, it's no more "convenient", but it literally improves the situation.
By the same token, it makes no difference to me whether 200K new homes are built in the capital - they'll probably all get filled up and I'll end up paying the same or close to. Hell I have a mortgage anyway.
But that's another 200K people that can live in the place they want to.
We use trains, there are lots of them, they solve different problems.
I live in a small village of 800 people and we have a rail connection. Remoteness is not an excuse.
Rail is great if you're going long distances, or if traffic is an absolute nightmare. Not so much for the much shorter distances inday to day travel. Worse, if you're walking out to the train station, that's even more time spent that would have been covered by a car.
The tube station is ten mins away and then on the other side it's ten mins from my friend. If it's close enough I just drive or cycle the whole thing in 15.
Roads and paths are everywhere by definition, they're like, what "outside" is.
I live in London, we have a billion trains and shit, my mate 4 miles away is still 45 mins by train/bus because public transport is worse by definition for rarely travelled routes.
I can cycle in half the time or drive in 1/4.
Both the "there shouldn't be places" and the "where the rail doesn't go"
Sprawl just doesn't pay for itself[1]. The more of it there is, more a government will bleed money building and maintaining infrastructure for few people per square kilometer. It doesn't make economic sense.
Now, of course "does it make money" is not a criterion to be applied to everything in life and society, but sprawl just makes it harder to fund everything, and you can end up subsidizing low-density well-to-do neighborhoods with the tax collected from lower-income people if they live in more densely zoned areas.
It's just a road to not having money to maintain the infrastructure, or improve education, or provide daycares, or anything else that would improve the life of the population.
1. Youtube "citations" are lame but this is a presentation of a consultancy ran for a few municipalities on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Yes, correct. That’s spot on. A lot of people were crying out for a powerful, capable, usable mobile computer to access email, the web and use applications on the go. The mobile networks had invested billions building network capacity to meet these needs. This is why there were huge queues for the very first iPhone before hardly anyone had even touched one.
The mobile industry had been full of speculation about what devices we would use on these networks, how they might work and what they would look like. Before the iPhone was even announced I could tell you very clearly what I needed a mobile device to be able to do for me, but not how it would do it. Apple figured that bit out.
Think about it this way. If latent demand didn’t exist, how could Apple have figured out what device to design? How could they select the features and capabilities and prioritise them? They had to target a market, even though that market didn’t exist yet. Without thinking about latent demand that sort of novel product development would be just random feature selection and then see what gets traction. For sure some companies do that, but not all. Some of them think it through and target a market they hypothesise exists.
The iPhone was terrible at everything when it came out except capacitive touch and coolness. That's fine, but let's not pretend otherwise.
Terming "people wanting to buy something better/cool" as latent demand is silly. It's a new/cool thing. There's no need to pretend there's anything latent about it. Make new shiny; people buy new shiny. And that's just for Apple. Most products require massive amounts of marketing to explain to people why they should be bought. That wouldn't be needed in a world with latent demand, just waiting to be fulfilled.
Invention is the mother of necessity. — Marshal McLuhan
> In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic.
Until that new capacity is filled up and now you have even more people sitting in traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to get people out of cars, otherwise you're just spending money to kick the can down the road.
See "What People Get Wrong About Induced Demand" by the Oh The Urbanity! channel:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc
Also "Does Induced Demand Apply to Housing?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w
If you want to then post a common with your view or reason for posting, that sounds great too. Then we can discuss it.
I think there is a change in focus, daily car trips are elastic in gas/toll prices and induced by lack of congestion.
I would personally reserve that for the folks who actually study the problem space, but whatevs.
>"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""
>"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
The popular approach on this site to allow anyone with unstudied and naive assumptions of how the world works freedom to dismiss these concerns should be shunned, derisively if necessary.
If the thoughts and views of non-experts are worthless (or harmful) in a causal setting (here), why should they be permitted to express them in a consequential environment (voting)?
The validation of meritoric side of comments on this site is on You as a reader. If You pay attention to what You read its quite easy to tell the difference between someone who knows what he's talking about and a contrarian who wants just to talk about meta topics on shallow level.
The economics term "elasticity of demand" is probably older, has a very similar meaning, broader application, and a clearer definition.
I'd argue that most of the time in the case of road networks the demand isn't even induced; it's not even elastic! It's already there, there's just no supply for it. At least in the short term - you might have an actual increase in demand over decades as a city/region grows.
This is the case if those people do not take alternative form of travel, a single subway can take hundreds of cars off the street, even in car-centric suburban hellscape (I am showing my bias here) there are secondary longer routes.
In terms of congestion demand is very path-specific.
A nice channel that focus on what other priorities could look like is
https://www.youtube.com/NotJustBikes
A recent viral videos it recently made focuses why approaches that are complementary to suburban sprawl and high speed roads are necessary in North America (where I am assuming you are from).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Another resource that might resonate with people theorizes why fatal car crashes went up since in the last couple years.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...
I live in a different continent, but I am quite passionate about the topic and I believe that most people are good actors that want a better world around them. Egoistically I hope these material might change someone opinion on what that better world looks like.
Increasing internet bandwidth and speed for consumers induces demand, like more and higher quality streaming services.
The basic idea of "if you build it, they will come" is the same as "induced demand", but with different words. "Induced demand" though has been used lately though when you need to say:
You may reply with "well then we'll build more when we get there", but specifically related to roads, that leads to it's own set of problems like "we will run out of space to realistically build more" and "building more has massive adverse effects" and "building more will cost more than it's worth". Those downsides around building roads can be ignored in the name of increased convenience or because in specific cases the downsides may not apply as much. But it doesn't make the downsides go away. And ultimately, the downsides will exist because induced demand is real; if you build it they will come (even if you'd prefer they not).Induced demand is the idea that if doing X is a miserable experience due to too many people wanting to do X, then improving the experience will induce more people to want to do X so upgrading the infrastructure need to account for all the people that currently are giving up but start X-ing once it get marginally better.
In a vicious cycle of congestion -> upgrades -> congestion again.
The implication is that often rather than scaling X you are better off finding a different path that suffer less congestion, as is the case with car travel.
Induced demand of non-scarce resource is just growth.
Adding lanes also has the effect of more lane changes, which are a big part of what slows traffic down to begin with.
It sounds closely related to Parkinson's Law about work expanding to fill time allotted to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law) which links back to the OP.
For express traffic, I've often thought periodically tapering off passing lanes using painted lines and forcing drivers who passively drive in them back into the active flow of traffic would increase the average speed and consistency of flow for related reasons and the idea of "smooth is fast." Physical dynamic traffic shaping, essentially. Adding complexity or even randomness to interrupt the dynamics that induce the increased demand would be a design consideration.
I'd wonder where network protocol design ends and car traffic engineering begins, or if they are essentially the same thing.
I went down the rabbit hole of induced demand studies a few years back, the evidence for the idea that adding lanes or roads does not reduce congestion is pretty weak. There just aren't that many roads being built, theres a ton of confounding factors ( population growth ) , and even some of these studies like the A&M one in this wikipedia are mixed.
For traffic and housing there's tons of people who would drive more or live somewhere dense if more roads/housing were provided. The big difference is whether the demand is exhaustible. For roads it's not: you would have to pave all of LA into a freeway system to eliminate traffic. Housing might be different though. Densifying the region around the downtown could outpace the influx of people. The difference is whether trying to exhaust the demand leads to a pleasant collection of neighborhoods or a 60-lane freeway hellscape.
As downtowns run out of land and demand declines (because of work from home and the decline of downtowns) a new business plan will be created and a new ideology will be developed to support it.
I just want to know what it'll be so I can front run it. Anyone have any idea?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cALezV_Fwi0
This also happens in simple physical systems, as shown in the video later on.