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How we can reduce traffic congestion

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Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#121

Post by evandale »

SilverElfin wrote: post #107
halostatue wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to stop congestion is to get cars off the road. Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution. HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc. 1. C…

Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?

Designing for public transit and cycling benefits far more people than designing exclusively for single passenger cars.

Who do you think are on bikes and in buses?

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#122

Post by rconti »

Seems like you're playing a dangerous game if your navigation app becomes known for optimizing for the collective good rather than individual fastest transit time-- people will trust your app less, and use a different, more "selfish" app.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#123

Post by a2dam »

ctkhn wrote: post #52

Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car

And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#124

Post by xnx »

wxw wrote: post #20

> For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments > Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to app…

> let's just build more trains?

"just" is doing a lot of work there. Trains are a very (very) expensive way to move people between pre-determined places. We can do a lot better than this in 2026.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#125

Post by xnx »

bravoetch wrote: post #25
wxw wrote: post #20

> For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments > Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to app…

I read the article and didn't see anywhere if they collaborated with city planners, or just ran this on their own. I get the techno-optimism of making traffic 'better' and also it may be concerning if trucks are being routed through neighborhoods where planners didn't build for it.

City planners and zoning have been a disaster for US cities.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#127

Post by c22 »

cortesoft wrote: post #33
pedrosuave wrote: post #21

Why cant we have smart stop lights. Nothing more annoying than sitting on a street with nobody coming and a red light for some arbitrary time period that's totally incorrect for the time period I'm currently in

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/277/ Most cities have some intelligence on their traffic lights, and they do have traffic sensors to know where cars are waiting. You might not see any cars and are annoyed waiting at the light, but you don’t know what downstream things they are trying to control for. Maybe if they send you through the light, you are going to join some other traffic event that will cause an issue. It c…

If you drive the same route frequently you can definitely figure out which intersections/areas are improperly configured. There's a stretch of road I drive on several times a week where the speed limit was dropped from 40 to 30 a couple years ago, but the lights are all still timed for 40. If you speed you get a sea of green, but if you drive the new speed limit you end up stopping at half the lights.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#128

Post by asdff »

Aurornis wrote: post #76
ctkhn wrote: post #52

Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car

This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence. The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up. Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more h…

The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield.

There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#130

Post by xnx »

evandale wrote: post #121
SilverElfin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?

Designing for public transit and cycling benefits far more people than designing exclusively for single passenger cars. Who do you think are on bikes and in buses?

> designing exclusively for single passenger cars

What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.

* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.

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