*to not build them
In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
41–50 of 783 posts
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on, this isn't taking anything away from drivers at all - the roads aren't suddenly going away or falling into ruin, they're just not getting enlarged. It's not much of a stick and nor is it a punishment, any more than building a road without bike lanes is a punishment for cyclists.
It is punishment if you are intentionally engineering the roads to cost people more time using them.
But induced demand shows that traffic will only increase… more lanes means you're waiting more.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#43Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.
>> you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen
You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#44California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost nothing for 5 decades!
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#45I am skeptical that all the tradeoffs are being considered here, it sounds like a recipe for permanent bad traffic justified with dubious moralizing. By the way, she is the daughter of Jack Lew who was President Obama’a Chief of Staff.
Bad traffic will expand to fill the road you give it (induced demand). You destroy demand instead. https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.nber.org/papers/w15376
This is quoted a lot but misunderstood.
The conclusion people seem to draw from this is that widening the highway didn't help. This is wrong.
4 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph is still creating twice the value of 2 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph. With the 2-lane highway you were just forcing half the people to divert to other roads or to give up on their plans entirely. With 4 lanes you're serving twice the people.
But if the highway is still full it implies that there is still demand for more travel. By refusing to widen the highway further you are still forcing some number of people into a worse outcome where they aren't able to exercise the travel that they wanted.
I'm all for public transit alternatives (I personally love taking trains when I can), but the goal should be to make the public transit better, not to make the highways worse.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try a motorcycle! The laws for lane splitting are the best in the country. You could probably fit 6 motorcycles in the space of one car.
Motorcyles have a roughly 30 times higher fatality rate per mile driven compared to cars
And are also not great for air pollution - they burn less gas per mile, but the engines are very dirty.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#47Some pretty solid skepticism all around in the comments.
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Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#48I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the e…
People are driven by the cattle prod. If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use, i.e. sin taxes. It's worked on cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc. to varying degrees. The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.
I ultimately agree with the approach they're taking. It isn't going to be accomplished by building additional lanes and subsequently asking people to pretty-please take transit.
It does need to be weighed against the practicality of transportation to/from where your transit riders need to go. Given the vast majority of Western states are sparsely populated, transit dollars can only go so far.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is punishment if you are intentionally engineering the roads to cost people more time using them.
But induced demand shows that traffic will only increase… more lanes means you're waiting more.
That’s because people are waiting too long on other roads! There is a point where traffic will not increase as all the demand has been sated.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#50I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the e…
How do you propose doing that, though? Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already and if we're talking buses then there's a significant driver shortage. In the US the distances and routes required outside of dense urban centers also pretty much necessitate a huge increase in transit time compared to driving, making the whole thing a bad value for people who can afford a car.
In TFA, they're literally taking roads and turning them into housing near transit hubs? This policy goes hand in hand with densifying housing.