Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that same logic, purchasing hamburgers is regressive.
No, you don’t have to purchase a hamburger to earn a living, but you probably have to travel.
You have to purchase food.
Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
81–90 of 302 posts
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#82I don't understand why this is happening. The article attempts to come up with explanations, but I find them hard to believe. Although (most) roads are free to use, we pay for travel in gas, car upkeep, and—perhaps most importantly—time. All of which can be quite costly! I live in upper Manhattan and have an unlimited-ride metrocard. But I would much rather go shopping at the store that's a five minute walk away than…
This is a specific case of induced demand: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Induced_demand
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this even a problem? It’s a problem if your assumption was that demand was closer to fixed and building more roads would “spread drivers out”, reducing congestion. This was for decades, and still to some extent is, a very wide-spread assumption in local politics, leading to incredibly questionable urban planning decisions.
If we paved every square inch, traffic wouldn't go to infinity. It's pretty rare to go driving for no reason. Country roads don't have rush hour. It seems reasonable to assume that latent demand per capita is fixed, but at a level too high for a city to accommodate without destroying its density advantages.
In my city they're removing roads left, right, and centre, and using the argument that this will reduce congestion, which admittedly is really bad here. However what's actually happened is people in the suburbans like myself who don't have to good public transportation into the city have effectively become isolated from the city hub. There is really no good way for me to get into the city at rush hour anymore unless I want to spend 2 hours in traffic there and back. There has been minimal investment in public transportation as an alternative, and there has been no attempt to more evenly distribute commercial activity throughout the city.
The problem always seemed to me to be less about road capacity, and more about city density and poor planning. I think we need to rethink the central urban hub model for cities. I suspect small hubs throughout the city would dramatically reduce congestion. We face similar scalability problems in tech. Typically if you have too much traffic going to your server you won't upgrade the server, but spin up more nodes. We distribute the traffic instead of spending larges amounts of money on infrastructure to send it all to a single node.
And another problem of this is that it causes feedback loops. I'm now in a position where I either have to continue to find working outside my city or relocate closer to the city centre contributing more to the urbanisation and population density problem.
With the right government incentives I see no reason why we could reestablish the city centre as a consumer hub. A place for shopping and leisure, etc. Then outside the city centre we could have tech hubs, financial hubs, industrial hubs, etc, all with good (perhaps even free) transportation between them. The time and money this would save seems like a no brainer to me. But then again, I don't really know anything. Perhaps there is a good reason to continue densely packing people into small 2-3 mile radiuses, where space is so limited most people can't afford a car, a decent size home, or even a decent sized office to work out of.
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#84It's interesting to apply these findings and conclusions to other areas.
For example, Bitcoin is a lot like the interstate highway system in that it's prone to traffic jams. The Great Bitcoin Scaling Debate of 2016 and 2017 attempted to address this problem
One camp argued strongly like the old-school urban planners in the linked article: more capacity = less congestion.
Another group argued that variable-rate fees (a feature built into Bitcoin from the beginning) would take care of the problem. When transaction volume spikes, so do fees. This discourages use during spikes and incentivizes off-peak use.
Bitcoin ended up adding a small increase to capacity in the form of segwit.
The result followed the prediction in the article. After a massive spike in usage during the later part of 2017, fees spiked to $50 or more per transaction. This was followed by a marked decrease in on-chain transaction volume to the point that blocks aren't full today. Fees have likewise decreased by more than two orders of magnitude.
Two other developments during 2018 may be relevant:
1. The BTC/USD exchange rate collapsed.
2. The Lightning Network (a way to route more transaction volume with fewer on-chain transactions) was deployed on mainnet.
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#85Is this even a problem? People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. That's way better than new roads going unused, isn't it? I like congestion charging alright, which the article advocates at the very end, but it has a habit of being regressive - it's easy for me, as a software engineer, to show up at work at 11AM, but that might not be the case for those who can less afford to pay those char…
Is this even a problem? People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. That's way better than new roads going unused, isn't it?
I've never sat in stop-and-go traffic, looked around and thought "Gee, this is great utilization of this road!"
Oddly, I have looked around a crowded standing-room-only train and thought "Gee, these load factors must be good for farebox recovery"
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#86The more intelligent approach to building roads is one i've seen in Washington DC. While the metro system isnt perfect, they allocated a portion of the highway to rail (middle track between both directions on the highway.) This way, the community expanded outwards via longer and longer highways and there was an obvious way to eventually simultaneously also expand the metro system outwards. They did this with the Oran…
DC has increasing traffic congestion, but decreasing Metro ridership. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...
These statistics are no doubt skewed by the Metro's deferred maintenance roosters coming home to roost and forcing the system to degrade service to accommodate repairs. It remains to be seen if the ridership numbers bounce back now that we are nearing the end of the extended closures.
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#87Why are roads an elastic demand but it seems that other transportation methods, like light rail, aren't? I've seen cases of quite a few expensive lines and rail-stops that have lower than expected utilization, but it seems like new highway roads and lanes get immediate use. Is it down to the fact that there is simply more "freedom" with regards to roads over rail?
> Is it down to the fact that there is simply more "freedom" with regards to roads over rail?
Yup. I live in a metro with the longest light rail system in the US (almost 100 miles) and I don't go anywhere near one during my commute and many don't. It doesn't get half the riders that the second-longest gets. I would not vote for light rail funding...different strokes and all that.
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#88I don't understand why this is happening. The article attempts to come up with explanations, but I find them hard to believe. Although (most) roads are free to use, we pay for travel in gas, car upkeep, and—perhaps most importantly—time. All of which can be quite costly! I live in upper Manhattan and have an unlimited-ride metrocard. But I would much rather go shopping at the store that's a five minute walk away than…
Well... a whopping 45% of Americans have no access to public transit[0], in any form. So I would hazard a guess that those with access to light rail/subways is significantly less than 45%.
Light and commuter rail ridership makes up only 300M/quarter riders out of a total ridership of 2.5B/quarter for all forms of mass transit, if I'm reading this right.[1]
[0]https://www.apta.com/mediacenter/ptbenefits/Pages/FactSheet....
[1]https://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Pages/ridershiprep...
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#89If you are sitting there thinking: "So what", I highly recommend you educate yourself on how building roads actually affects US infrastructure. We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have! Recommended reading: - https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-…
Counterpoint: I grew up in an area which allegedly has some of the worst roads in the country. They're fine. Sure they're not silky-smooth surfaces ready for MotoGP but contemporary mass-market vehicles have no problem traversing them. At worst you're going to feel uncomfortable for half a second. Really bad construction might slow you down 10-20 minutes.
Meanwhile America's best, most expensive, most politically supported public transit systems barely work, and can be expected to fail you completely several times each month.
The lived experiences don't match the theory. Roads usually work fine, and degrade gracefully when they don't. Transit is obnoxious on a good day, and when it fails it cascades catastrophically.
I want to be a good urbanist, but the quality just isn't there, nor does it seem to be a budget priority (instead new money goes to fare subsidies, empty bus routes, etc).
Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
#90If you are sitting there thinking: "So what", I highly recommend you educate yourself on how building roads actually affects US infrastructure. We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have! Recommended reading: - https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-…
I don't understand how is it possible that you can't maintain roads. Use car taxes to maintain roads. Increase them if necessary. Introduce paid roads where applicable. If taxes were too high, some people would prefer cheaper public transportation, so market will find a balance automatically.