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Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

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Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#161

Post by ip26 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #90
honkycat wrote: post #71

If 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.

Increase them if necessary.

Good luck.

Introduce paid roads where applicable.

Oh my god do the voters scream about this. They are entitled to free roads.

We struggle to maintain roads because the voting public wants $1.00 worth of services for $0.90

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#162

Post by leetcrew »

mklingen wrote: post #65
User23 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works great in countries one can bike across in a day. It’s not really a solution for American commuters. People mainly choose long commutes for housing affordability. When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution.

> When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution. This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and publi…

I can easily see that it would improve my quality of life a lot if there were a bunch of customer-facing businesses interspersed with housing in a dense city block. I would love to be able to take a quick five minute walk to grab that random tool I need or that last ingredient I need for a recipe; my life could be so much more spontaneous!

I have more trouble seeing where the 500 seat office for a global enterprise should go on my city block. it seems like that sort of space would lead to a dead feeling at night when everyone goes home and the space sits empty.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#163

Post by AlexB138 »

sokoloff wrote: post #156
AlexB138 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groceries are generally taxed differently because people need to eat. It is not a human necessity to travel long distances to work. It seems to me, if you subsidize travel for low earner you're subsidizing companies that pay their employees poorly, not benefiting the employees themselves. Maybe a subsidy for low earning jobs that are a public good make sense (teachers, for instance), but why should we give subsidies…

Where their employees choose to live is not an externality caused by the business IMO.

Choosing to open a business that pays minimum wage in an area without housing that is affordable for minimum wage workers inherently generates traffic, doesn't it? I don't have a very solid opinion on all this, honestly, but it seems logical. What do you think?

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#164

Post by throw0u1t »

ip26 wrote: post #158
magduf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could teleport around like that instantly, I'd be acting like that too. However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there. The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them…

The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. Some studies have basically found that people chronically overvalue how happy a nice house will make them, and undervalue how unhappy a long commute will make them. I don't know if Americans are uniquely guilty of this, but humans are prone to lots of little errors like this.

I spent the last year living 30 minutes walk from work in Central London.

Neither the 4 mile walk through congested, diesel-fumed London or the small, expensive flat with single glazed windows did make me happier.

I now live 30 miles outside London and take a 30 minute train to work. It is much cheaper, much more pleasant (I stand on the train most of the time) and I get to hear the birds and smell the fresh air when I wake up or go outside.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#165

Post by sokoloff »

AlexB138 wrote: post #163
sokoloff wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where their employees choose to live is not an externality caused by the business IMO.

Choosing to open a business that pays minimum wage in an area without housing that is affordable for minimum wage workers inherently generates traffic, doesn't it? I don't have a very solid opinion on all this, honestly, but it seems logical. What do you think?

I suppose that choosing to open a business not in someone’s house generates traffic.

The alternative is not Walmart paying stickers $50K/yr. The alternative is no or fewer Walmart jobs in locales with these laws. IMO, that makes things worse, not better, for prospective Walmart employees.

I also feel like where I live is none of my employer’s business, provided I can do the job. Maybe I’d make an exception for fire or police, but even there I’d rather not make the employer totally paternalistic.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#166

Post by ip26 »

JimboOmega wrote: post #44
Kalium wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It's a problem insofar as building more roads is often sold as a way to resolve traffic problems. When traffic expands to fill all available roads, this solution is an expensive way to not fix anything. There are probably more useful options, and faster ways to waste…

But it is making trips possible that weren't before; it's not strictly money going down the drain. I have trouble seeing a fully utilized resource as "a waste". Saying "traffic will be solved by this!" is clearly misleading. But those extra cars on the road must be benefitting, or else they wouldn't make the trip.

Fully utilizing the resource means some benefit is obtained, certainly. But when the cost of the resource to the user is zero, that means the benefit only need be greater than zero.

Have you ever worked on a shared compute cluster? In general, disks fill to capacity & machines run at capacity, no matter what those capacities are. It's bloat; files that don't get deleted until you run out of disk, because deleting files takes ten seconds. Massive processes that are left always-running to save ten seconds of launch time. So on and so forth. Basically, the user is getting some value. But it's very small, and thus makes a poor reason to make expensive upgrades to the cluster.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#167

Post by ip26 »

whoisnnamdi wrote: post #41

This is an important point that is commonly overlooked. Traffic is a sign of something. It’s a sign that the benefits of transportation outweighs the costs of transportation. Given this, high traffic often implies that there is pent up demand out there - more cars that would be on the road right now if only the roads could support it. When more roads are built, this unlocks some of the pent up demand, as the cost of…

It’s a sign that the benefits of transportation outweighs the costs of transportation

Which, given the way roads are funded, is something of a broken equation. The costs of transportation are not fully borne by the user proportionally to consumption.

You pay fuel taxes & buy tires, yes, but they by no means cover the full per-mile cost of your trip.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#168

Post by realityczeque »

bb88 wrote: post #159
Isinlor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also question of externalities. Building roads is not without hidden costs. Splitting communities in cities, making distances to travel longer because adding places for streets and parking places spreads infrastructure, air pollution killing people, lack of movement killing people, noise pollution, ugliness etc. I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastruct…

Bike infrastructure can in fact increase congestion. Fivethirtyeight did a study in Minneapolis on bike lanes constructed earlier this decade and showed that bike lanes did increase congestion for 10 roads they looked at. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t... Anecdotally, the mid sized city I lived in added a bike lane experimentally on my commute to work. The lanes going into the city decre…

Your windshield perspective is showing. The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. Fifty cars in the same place is an epic disaster but fifty bikes in the same place is not a problem.

Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.

http://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-1235-1718/20170317%20STB%20CSEW%20...

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#169

Post by mikeash »

netcan wrote: post #12

In practical terms, we can consume as much transport as we get. If it was cheap and fast I could have ramen lunch in Tokyo. Pick up the kids from crèche in Portugal on my way home to New Zealand. So, unless we get teleport watches... congestion is the "price," the thing that limits consumption. Economists would prefer the price to be price, being economists. One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all…

Agreed. I don’t get why induced demand is always presented as a bad thing. The title here is a perfect example. It “makes” people travel more, as if this is a bad thing people are being forced to do against their will. If we reframe it by saying it “allows” people to travel more then suddenly it becomes a good thing!

Of course we should carefully consider all the costs and externalities of road expansion before doing it. But it’s all too often presented as being completely pointless or having no redeeming features at all, so there’s no point in even considering it.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#170

Post by village-idiot »

closeparen wrote: post #122
village-idiot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will also adjust their housing and working decisions based on road availability, although the lag here is a little long.

If the center is already built and occupied to its legal limit, you can't get a population-level change from this.

But people will move to the periphery and commute farther, or change where their job is.
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