Live data from Hacker News

Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

cityobservatory.org

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#31
post #18

Possibly, but I don't believe that the 99 closure is a good test of this. - We know it's only temporary, and we knew about it ahead of time. It can be easy to put off many types of errands, or work from home (lots of tech workers here), for a little while. That doesn't mean it's sustainable. - They've upped the water taxi routes for the closure (but not buses, AFAICT?), and they're taking hundreds more passengers per…

> There's 3-block section near me that Google says is orange-to-red on a typical weekday at 4-6pm, but I avoid it entirely because it literally takes 45 minutes to drive down those 3 blocks.

Howell St towards I-5? Basically impossible. Everyone zips down Boren from Capitol Hill and jumps in front of the line.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#32
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of this article is that people say "complete gridlock will happen", and it doesn't. (Not even close)

The only things I've seen that causes complete gridlock in Seattle were a freak snowstorm/ice at 3pm, a butane truck closing i5 and major arteries downtown and Obama. And Obama wasn't that bad most of the time. But those were literally no one can move anywhere nor can people reparj and stop. This is know and plannable. Seattle has a remarkable amount of work hour flexibility in the short term. They closed 90 a few ye…

Obama made me late to work twice in a two month time period, I found this amusing at the time, and still do.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is not about whether mobility is valuable or not, it is about how valuable it is. When it comes to infrastructure development, we throw tons of other people's money at the problem, but if drivers were paying their full costs via gas taxes and congestion charges, how much demand would there be? This article suggests that driving demand is a lot more elastic than we like to claim.

Can't you make this argument against any public service? We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost. We throw a bunch of other people's money at the military. If people had to pay the true cost of America's autonomy, they'd suck it up and learn Russian. The compelling cost argument, IMO, is that a subway system could offer mor…

>We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost.

Education is fundamentally (mostly) a positional good - what it buys is the right to be considered for white-collar jobs ahead of competitors who haven't spent as much time getting educated. Families already spend as much as they can afford in education to win this tournament, the only thing that would reduce education spending is if everyone else stopped buying as much education.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#34
I wonder if the panic helps prevent the congestion. They said people avoid the closed areas, but they wouldn't avoid them if they didn't already know about them.

Panic would cause awareness to skyrocket, motivating people to prevent the thing they were panicking about.

Perhaps the system is working exactly as it should.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#35
post #9

Traffic is induced demand. Traffic is induced demand. Traffic is induced demand.

It's urban planning and infrastructure and social policy. The once common walkable and street car serviced urban areas were destroyed by "civil rights" and public education taxation. The deliberate decision to federally fund highway infrastructure at the expense of local solutions also played a big role.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is not about whether mobility is valuable or not, it is about how valuable it is. When it comes to infrastructure development, we throw tons of other people's money at the problem, but if drivers were paying their full costs via gas taxes and congestion charges, how much demand would there be? This article suggests that driving demand is a lot more elastic than we like to claim.

Can't you make this argument against any public service? We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost. We throw a bunch of other people's money at the military. If people had to pay the true cost of America's autonomy, they'd suck it up and learn Russian. The compelling cost argument, IMO, is that a subway system could offer mor…

Yes, you can make that argument against any public service. And it is worth discussing for any public service. All public services have benefits, and all of them are capable of being overprovisioned.

In the context of schools, literally everybody benefits from population wide literacy and education. The benefits are diffuse enough that it is worth subsidizing...although we're probably hitting diminishing returns on the amount that we do spend. And the idea that we need to learn russian if we don't have a military 10x bigger than the rest of the world is a cold war rhetorical relic. Of course we could do with less military funding.

Cars though, are mostly a benefit to the occupant, and either a detriment to everybody around them, or entirely capable of being priced into the benefit of the goods they buy. Yes, I can afford paying $0.0025 more for a pound of apples if it means the trucking company pays their true costs. And why should we subsidize your drive in a BMW to your office when you can easily pay for the whole cost yourself, or take transit? Why should we be subsidizing cars over the much more efficient alternatives?

Cars and transit are competing forms of transportation...a vehicle mile not traveled is very often a fare paid. Car costs scale linearly with the number of people-miles driven, until congestion and space constraints hit and then costs scale exponentially. Transit costs are step fixed costs, and therefore the more riders the less they cost per person. When we subsidize car travel, it forces us to subsidize transit travel even more, because taking away riders makes transit less efficient. It should be remembered that before we started price capping transit companies and subsidizing roads, transit was one of the most profitable industries in the world. That's the power of the cost efficiency of transit.

So yes, mobility is important and roads shouldn't just go away, but the amount of roads and car infrastructure that we fund through general taxes is absolutely obscene and should be scaled back dramatically. Mobility can be much more efficiently provisioned to the public with transit.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#37
post #9

Traffic is induced demand. Traffic is induced demand. Traffic is induced demand.

This whole notion of "induced demand" seems like a suspicious artificial label used to position roads as a negative. The reality is that roads provide something people want - the ability to get around quickly, on one's own terms, without dealing with waiting times or trip planning, and without some of the unsavory experiences that can sour public transit (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robber…

>The reality is that roads provide something people want - the ability to get around quickly, on one's own terms, without dealing with waiting times or trip planning, and without some of the unsavory experiences that can sour public transit (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...).

Build public transit out enough, and you get that as well. And funny enough, cities in developed nations other than the United States don't have issues with crime on public transit. Is it a problem inherit to public transit or is it systematic underinvestment?

>Building roads doesn't "induce" demand. Rather, it _fulfills_ demand. There is a limit to that demand - it's not like supplying infinitely more of something would infinitely scale the associated behavior. There are only so many humans and only so many trips they are willing to make in a day. And an area that is 100% roads obviously would not have any destinations worth traveling to (leaving aside edge cases like race tracks).

First of all – building roads absolutely does induce demand. In fact, _any_ sort of transportation infrastructure, _including public transit_, induces demand. This is pretty well-known. Induced demand isn't about creating larger trips - it's about creating demand through trips that were once not possible. For example, a new train line or highway out in the suburbs will induce people to move close to that piece of infrastructure. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and it happens even for public transit.

The problem is that roads for one-person cars don't scale. Downtown Seattle, in particular, is constrained by Elliott Bay on one side and Lake Washington on the other. Amazon is building out tons of towers in the last bit of open land near downtown Seattle. If every Amazon worker were to commute by driving alone, it just wouldn't work because there's no place to put in new highways! Public transit (or living close to where you work, or not commuting at all and teleworking) simply scales better.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#38
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason "total gridlock" hasn't happened is as simple as the city, businesses, and individuals enacting different timings/routes/operations to avoid issues. This is the claim of the article.

Yes, but as OP mentions, the article totally discounts any negative affects to QOL.

Explaining how changes to transportation patterns effect quality of life in general was way outside the scope of the article. It’s claim was limited and it argued it well: road closures don’t necessarily cause traffic congestion. It’s unclear if to me if less automobile throughput is a net positive or negative to quality of life, but that’s a separate discussion.

Re: Why Carmaggedon never comes – Seattle edition

#39
post #9

Traffic is induced demand. Traffic is induced demand. Traffic is induced demand.

This whole notion of "induced demand" seems like a suspicious artificial label used to position roads as a negative. The reality is that roads provide something people want - the ability to get around quickly, on one's own terms, without dealing with waiting times or trip planning, and without some of the unsavory experiences that can sour public transit (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robber…

It sounds like you're caught up on the terminology, do you disagree with the underlying concept?

https://www.ibtta.org/sites/default/files/Generated%20Traffi...

Coming from a chemistry background, the idea of traffic and travel choices being an equilibrium process is a very natural and easy concept to grok.

Post reply on HN