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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)

#281

Post by kbenson »

CalRobert wrote: post #238
kbenson wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the 500 square miles of Los Angeles and the 4 million people population, that's about a 60' by 60' plot of land per person. Given that doesn't include roads, highways, industrial or commercial zoning, and that people will group in housing (families), I think that's fairly dense for the type of housing which is currently in place , which is homes homes with yards. It's not dense relative to other types of metro…

Whwn the vikings settled Dublin they set up some huts along the river. Therefore the riverfront should be low density huts forever I guess.

That has little to do with what I'm saying. I'm not saying development shouldn't happen, I'm saying it won't on any quick timescale because of the existing infrastructure and how people fight to avoid change. All I'm saying is that rezoning to allow different building types won't lead to enough new housing immediately starting, nor even the change a decade from now being sufficient. A lot of things are required to fix the problem, and new zoning is just one of them.

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

#282

Post by bb88 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #259
bb88 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. 50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes. > The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traf…

The paper has the number of bikers. But I’m sure your statistically representative research of ‘watching for bikers while driving once’ is much more worthwhile.

My apologies. It was 0 over the course of 30 days of commuting. Exactly 0.

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

#283

Post by bb88 »

ubercow13 wrote: post #256
bb88 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. 50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes. > The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traf…

Have you considered using the bike lane yourself?

Yes, but I have a life long history of listening to horror stories of people on bikes getting hit by cars.

These days, I fly back and forth to work, so it makes little sense to use a bike.

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

#284

Post by bb88 »

alistairSH wrote: post #260
int_19h wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of places in US that are exactly as OP has described. This is not because bike lanes aren't inefficient per se, but because they're often built in the wrong places, or lack other infrastructure.

Lack of related infrastructure is a real problem. Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car. Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything mo…

> Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected.

That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes.

The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular.

> Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating

Or there's snow on the ground 4 months out of the year, and makes it a real pain to commute on a bike. Or in several places, you have both. Chicago comes to mind.

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

#285

Post by baddox »

lazyjones wrote: post #246
baddox wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it’s true that people and cars are finite, but that doesn’t mean that new roads are satisfying existing demands. In fact, the term in economics is “induced demand.” Building more roads around a city often won’t decrease traffic in the city, it will just make more people commute to the city from further away.

> In fact, the term in economics is “induced demand.” Building more roads around a city often won’t decrease traffic in the city, it will just make more people commute to the city from further away. It's a theoretical concept with no basis in reality as far as traffic is concerned. Every statistic I know of shows that more people move to cities, not farther away despite new roads. What drives people to longer commute…

I’m not so sure about that. The Wikipedia article on induced demand has no shortage of cited studies.

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

#286

Post by Too »

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…

Increase congestion...for the people still using the car instead of the shiny new bike lane. Use the bike and problem solved, for those that don't, well suit yourself.

And as others noted. A single bike line without connecting lanes will not change people's commute. Changing habit is also something that doesn't happen over a day or even a year. It might take 5 years for the effect to show.

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

#287

Post by throwawayjava »

sulam wrote: post #151
throwawayjava wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of mid-distance transit is also a huge problem. Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable). However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.

We have regional commute rail in the SF Bay Area and in the NYC Metropolitan Region. It doesn't seem to have done much except drive up housing prices near rail stations and create silliness like 5-yr waiting lists for parking at them. It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.

Counter-anecdotes: in Chicago (e.g., UP-N), Boston (e.g., Fitchburg), and much of Europe (e.g., many major cities in Germany), the commuter rail systems do take you out into very affordable areas.

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

#288

Post by closeparen »

zozbot123 wrote: post #173
ryandrake wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The usual response here is that existing residents shouldn’t be taxed to pay for later arrivals’ infrastructure needs.

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

#289

Post by llampx »

leetcrew wrote: post #162
mklingen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Come to Berlin or any other major European metropolis to see how that works out. Plenty of bigger office buildings in the middle of the city where lots of people commute to them with bicycles, public transport and even walking. Right next to apartment buildings with small businesses and restaurants and cafes.

Turns out when you don't need to allocate space for 500 cars around a building, you can build it in a single city block and coexist with other types of buildings. And you even get a rooftop with a view as a bonus.

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

#290

Post by llampx »

sulam wrote: post #151
throwawayjava wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of mid-distance transit is also a huge problem. Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable). However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.

We have regional commute rail in the SF Bay Area and in the NYC Metropolitan Region. It doesn't seem to have done much except drive up housing prices near rail stations and create silliness like 5-yr waiting lists for parking at them. It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.

I used to commute into SF from Redwood City with the Caltrain. If I couldn't have taken a bike with me on the train, it would have been impossible because the last mile at both ends was completely undoable with local buses.
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