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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)

#171

Post by max76 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #136
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…

> 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. Nitpicking this from a physical perspective, consuming this amount of travel fundamentally requires you to experience a certain amount of acceleration. I'm pretty sure that the itinerary you describe here would kill you, regardless of how che…

Piling on the nitpicking.

Portugal isn't 'on the way' to New Zealand from Tokyo regardless of speed or timelines.

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

#172

Post by mikeash »

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.

Increased taxes are extremely unpopular. Gas taxes, which are supposed to fund road maintenance, are almost always a fixed per-gallon amount, so they gradually erode due to inflation. They also effectively shrink due to increasing fuel efficiency. Just keeping gas taxes actually steady looks like an increase, and voting for that is a good way for politicians to lose elections.

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

#173

Post by zozbot123 »

ryandrake wrote: post #154
closeparen wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only bring a proposal to a planning session if it's close enough to existing zoning that the variance might be considered reasonable. Dramatic upzoning is only brought to the table when the NIMBYs are seen as weak enough that it might stand a chance.

Plus, you can’t just go into an area with infrastructure capable of supporting 10k people and Just Add Housing™. What about the electric grid? Water and sewer? Schools, parking, trash pickup, etc. You have to have a plan to update all of these. The simple solution of just building urban apartment blocks everywhere won’t work.

>What about the electric grid? Water and sewer? Schools, parking, trash pickup, etc.

Property taxes can pay for these updates once the additional housing is built, it's self-financing. (Of course this won't work in CA, due to Prop 13. But then again, it was a ballot initiative, and those crazy folks in California voted for it. It's all self-inflicted pain on their part.)

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

#174

Post by Isinlor »

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…

Adding a single bike line is like adding a single road in middle of nowhere. Dutch have bike infrastructure. Here you can go on a bike everywhere and leave bike everywhere. They have very clever solutions to avoid conflicts between cars and bikes, so it feels very safe and you can simply relax. Actually, some cities in Netherlands start to have issues with bike lines congestion :) .

https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/groningen07...

I was studying in Groningen and I can tell you this is a daily occurrence there, sometimes it's even worse since the photo is from a rainy day in winter :P .

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

By 2012 cycling had grown tremendously in popularity. In Amsterdam alone, 490,000 cyclists took to the road to cycle 2 million kilometres every day, according to its city council statistics. This has caused some problems as, despite 35,000 kilometers of bicycle paths, the country's 18 million bicycles (1.3 per citizen old enough to ride) sometimes clog Dutch cities' busiest streets. This is being addressed by building even more bike lanes to tackle a problem many other cities in the world would envy — that of bicycle traffic congestion.

Also, it takes time to build biking culture. And as a side note, biking infrastructure in Groningen was build on anti-car sentiments. They wanted to get rid of cars from the city, not to relive car congestion. They did get rid of them especially from the center and the city is now lovely for pedestrians and cyclists. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...

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

#175

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

magduf wrote: post #92
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…

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…

> So many of them think nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic, each way, every workday, just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend.

That would be a poor decision indeed. But more likely, in my experience, is that they live far from their work because there is no affordable housing near their work.

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

#176

Post by max76 »

closeparen wrote: post #89
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-…

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 su…

Countercounter point.

When comparing the best roads in the world (Say the German Autobahn) to the best mass transportation in the world (Japan Railways Group) we see that when mass transportation is done correctly it can be timely and reliable. It is also cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient than roads.

We shouldn't limit our sources of inspiration to one continent when developing transportation solutions.

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

#177

Post by lazyjones »

Kalium wrote: post #26
JimboOmega wrote: post #4

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 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? 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…

> When traffic expands to fill all available roads, this solution is an expensive way to not fix anything.

It always surprises me to see people actually believe this utter illogical nonsense. There's a finite amount of people and cars, so new roads satisfy existing demands but do not magically increase traffic until everybody drives 24/7 and beyond.

There are plenty of roads with very little traffic. Hasn't anyone of those anti-car-activists noticed?

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

#178

Post by lazyjones »

scythe wrote: post #116
Johnny555 wrote: post #85

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? 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"

Personally I’d rather be in traffic. I’ll grant trains are way better for the atmosphere and take up less space, but people are noisy and smelly.

> people are noisy and smelly.

Indeed. And trains usually don't go from people's homes to their destination, so they typically cause traffic of some sort around train stations.

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

#179

Post by lazyjones »

fabioborellini wrote: post #6
paulsutter wrote: post #2

It's called "elastic demand" and it just means that roads are useful. The Boring Company has a twofold solution (a) charge for usage, and (b) build to 30 levels or more to meet demand

In the Old World we have public mass transit. One vehicle can transport a thousand commuters, and it does not need to be stored in the most desired area of the city for the duration of a working day. Sometimes it looks like the Silicon Valley is trying to solve transit problems either against the laws of physics and economics or, alternatively, ignoring solutions that were there already in the 1800s.

> Sometimes it looks like the Silicon Valley is trying to solve transit problems either against the laws of physics and economics or, alternatively, ignoring solutions that were there already in the 1800s.

That, or the Old World is simply stuck with cities where no more roads can be built without tearing down many inhabited buildings, so people are forced to use smelly, uncomfortable public transport. I'd appreciate more honesty and less ideology in such debates.

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

#180

Post by marcosdumay »

caravaggi0 wrote: post #58

and building trains makes people ride trains. The fundamental rule is path of least resistance, literally and figuratively. It also matters who has the powerful interest. Seen this? Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4

> and building trains makes people ride trains.

Only if the trains carry people to a place they want to go.

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