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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

nytimes.com

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Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#51

Post by languagehacker »

I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free.

A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.

Similarly for housing, the well substantiated claim from modern urban planners is that we've been prioritizing housing for cars well beyond housing for people, and the best solution for that is to overturn minimum parking requirements and unbundle the cost of parking from the cost of housing.

Personally, I still find these opinions somewhat counterintuitive. The weirdest part about it is that it all posits that the solution to a centralized planning problem is market solutions, and it's coming from people you'd expect to have the opposite opinion. However, what we've had in terms of transportation clearly doesn't work for people and for the environment, and the last 20 years of "Shoupism" has shown some serious promise in terms of reversing the trend.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#52

Post by ambyra »

someguydave wrote: post #32
ambyra wrote: post #24

Earlier 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

Pollution caused by congestion and manufacturing cars kills everyone. By riding a bike people can put their money where their mouth is regarding views on climate change; you're making a statement that says "I'm putting the environment ahead of my personal safety". Also, if you convert enough people, motorcycle riding becomes safer for everyone. Getting bumped by another 150lb Vespa isn't as nasty as getting hit by a "green" 6000lb tesla truck.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#53

Post by jcranmer »

ambyra wrote: post #24
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds 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.

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.

As a passenger in a car, watching motorcyclists zip down at high speed on the lane markers between cars in dense, stop-and-go traffic was incredibly unnerving. I can't see how that's safe.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#54

Post by tomrod »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #43
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds 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.

The US is not a democracy. Not even at the state level. For many aspects and holons it is a representative republic.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#55

Post by rufus_foreman »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
someguydave wrote: post #6

I 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

The induced demand argument is sort of crazy. It is saying you shouldn't build something because if you do, it will be extremely popular and widely used. We shouldn't build libraries - if we do, people will want to check out books. Instead, let's penalize people who read books. That will destroy the demand for books. Problem solved.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#56

Post by someguydave »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #27
someguydave wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to hurt people by costing their time in order to teach them to desire your morals?

This is the philosophy by which progressives have been leading cities across the west for a few years.

Not just the west! You can sit in traffic on horrible roads all across the country, especially on the east coast

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#57

Post by rpcope1 »

Widening I-25 probably won't do any good (didn't do much good last time we did that), but we keep talking about light rail all the way as far north as Fort Collins, and nothing ever happens other than RTD making money earmarked for new light rail disappear into the aether.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#58

Post by wongarsu »

mdorazio wrote: post #25
duxup wrote: post #17

I'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.

Ideally you would have to change how zoning and planning works to create denser more integrated neighborhoods that can be efficiently used with public transit.

If that's too difficult the next best compromise is a park-and-ride scheme. Put a couple stations with huge parking lots in strategic locations between suburbs, and offer good rail or subway connections to work places and shopping destinations. That doesn't enable anyone to get rid of their car, but it gives people a faster alternative to the most congested roads

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#59

Post by ElevenLathe »

fastball wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical systems don't care about your feelings. Live somewhere that ignores science and is financially irresponsible with infra dollars if that is your MO. We're not going to spend to build roads forever because people are ignorant and selfish, we can't even pay for the road infra we have today. And some folks are demanding more ? Absolutely silly. "I'm not happy they're not building roads we cannot afford and will…

What science is being ignored? Traffic expanding to fill capacity is not a bad thing, that is efficient use of capacity?

Fossil energy is artificially cheap (the price its consumers pay does not even begin to pay for the negative externalities of producing and burning it -- and most of it goes into private hands that don't intend to use it for any kind of mitigation anyway).

This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at the very least we shouldn't deliberately make it worse by also artificially juicing demand in one of the main fossil-fuel-burning sectors of the economy (any more than we already are). Every petroleum-powered mile not traveled (and energy is to a certain extent fungible, so in principle this also applies to electric cars burning "free" solar energy) is a win for human civilization.

This isn't hippy-dippy environmentalism, just soulless Chicago economics: mispriced commodities do real damage to a political economy, and in the globalized era, there is effectively only one political economy anymore.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#60

Post by someguydave »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #55
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The induced demand argument is sort of crazy. It is saying you shouldn't build something because if you do, it will be extremely popular and widely used. We shouldn't build libraries - if we do, people will want to check out books. Instead, let's penalize people who read books. That will destroy the demand for books. Problem solved.

Yep, being simply “anti-induced demand” is pro-human suffering.

I agree that there could be alternatives to widening highways that will make everyone better off but I rarely see all the tradeoffs being carefully considered.

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