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How we can reduce traffic congestion

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Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#321

Post by ryandrake »

alistairSH wrote: post #291
philipallstar wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making driving worse instead of making public transport better is such a public sector-brained take.

IMO, it's not so much "make driving worse" (ie actively make roads worse, etc). Instead, it's actively make transit better be reallocating road funds... Add buses or light rail or dedicated/separated bike lanes instead of brainlessly adding traffic lanes. Every bike added to that bike lane is one less car (very roughly). Additionally, tax car infrastructure appropriately. Free road-side parking is not an entitlement.…

You said it's not to make driving worse, but then listed multiple examples of making driving worse:

- reallocating road funds (away from driving and toward busses/rail/bikes)

- tax car infrastructure appropriately, presumably higher

- reduce parking minimums

Not that I'm against these, but they will surely make driving worse.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#322

Post by nitwit005 »

This will just result in cities making one way streets, blocking roads, or removing turns, because raw traffic throughput is rarely the only goal.

My city already has some signs and traffic signals trying to prevent making a left turn after 5PM, because of maps apps attempting to redirect highway traffic through, which added a substantial delay to the commutes of everyone who actually lived there. That later resulted in a city council meeting about the safety problem caused by people making illegal left turns.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#323

Post by thunderfork »

philipallstar wrote: post #304
thunderfork wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you have to nerf something because it's been buffed too many times, beyond what's sustainable or reasonable

It's only really been buffed by the facts you don't have to pay for massive custom vehicles or drivers, and market dynamics (and the corresponding incredible features and amazing factory and transportation efficiencies) mean cars are extremely good value for money for a lot of people. In other words: there's a profit motive, so people get something really good for their money. Public transport is frequently a monopol…

Going over the patch notes, here's some buffs you might have missed:

Mandatory parking minimums, high speed limits, car lanes without bus lanes or bike lanes, tearing down neighborhoods to build interchanges and highways...

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#324

Post by ryandrake »

HEmanZ wrote: post #296
Aurornis wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world) Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises. The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your w…

Most people who live in dense cities don’t live in high rises… It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.

I'm sure there are plenty of people, who, regardless of how well functioning a city is, don't want to live in one. Myself included.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#325

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

philipallstar wrote: post #276
simondotau wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will generally choose whichever mode of transport is most convenient and cost-effective, based on how they rationally (or irrationally) weigh various factors. If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere. The only way to shift people onto public trans…

Making driving worse instead of making public transport better is such a public sector-brained take.

Driving is currently subsidized in a variety of ways that hide it's true costs. Almost any effort to make driving's perceived cost closer to the real cost, including externalities, is a good thing.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#326

Post by n4r9 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #318
dghlsakjg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another random fact is that Norman Mailer coined ‘factoid’ to refer to a fabrication presented as fact, but now means the opposite (as in, a fact presented as a fact, not a fact presented as fabrication). So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.

I second guessed my usage, but decided it was a good way to communicate my lack of experience and confidence in the specifics.

It's a nice self-referential loop. The definition of factoid is, itself, a factoid.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#327

Post by AnthonyMouse »

inigyou wrote: post #253
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's widely accepted that less congestion will encourage people to travel by car more, which will soon eat up the gains This is not only not widely accepted but extremely misleading. The nature of "induced demand" is really that congestion suppresses demand. Which behaves in an entirely different way than the name implies. If demand was being induced then all attempts to relieve congestion would be permanently impo…

There's a related paradox - I don't remember the name - that the speed of traffic is determined by the speed of public transit. Cities with less car congestion probably have faster public transit.

That doesn't seem like a paradox at all. If you have more convenient public transit then more people use it. If more people use it then there is less traffic.

This is also why things like bus lanes are ridiculous. The theory is supposed to be that making the bus faster than cars will get more people to use it. But if that actually created a benefit that exceeds its cost, i.e. got more people to take the bus than the wasted capacity of not allowing cars to use that lane when a bus isn't, then it would reduce the traffic congestion that it inherently requires. It's a thing that can't even be part of the solution to the problem because any means of actually solving the problem would eliminate its mechanism of operation.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#328

Post by inigyou »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #327
inigyou wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a related paradox - I don't remember the name - that the speed of traffic is determined by the speed of public transit. Cities with less car congestion probably have faster public transit.

That doesn't seem like a paradox at all. If you have more convenient public transit then more people use it. If more people use it then there is less traffic. This is also why things like bus lanes are ridiculous. The theory is supposed to be that making the bus faster than cars will get more people to use it. But if that actually created a benefit that exceeds its cost, i.e. got more people to take the bus than the…

It's a paradox because making car traffic faster doesn't make car traffic faster, but making metro trains faster makes car traffic faster.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#329

Post by bluGill »

mcbobgorge wrote: post #312
bluGill wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of a city is all the destinations you can teach. Less km means you can go less places. No density isn't an answer, because some destinations are not dense, and even if they are we can cram more places in.

Air travel is the best way to go long distances, but some small islands are not easily accessible by plane. For those places, we have ferries. In a similar vein, most places in a city can be accessed via density + transit. But cars are great for those non-dense destinations you describe, like wilderness areas or farms or whatever else.

There is a large gap between distances where flying makes S and and what you can walk. Even with an ebike the distance you can reach in a reasonable time is vastly less that a car for most trips.

Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion

#330

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jcranmer wrote: post #216
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> here's a good graph The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car. From which we can observe the problem. Alice is at home and wants to go to work. She travels along a low density street for a few miles, enters a congested thoroughfare for a few more miles, then travels along another l…

I've been traveling around in Europe without a car for several days now, including several fairly rural areas. There's a distinctly American trope in play, that if the bus or train doesn't stop more or less exactly at your destination, then it's going to be totally useless. Except, you look at the rural European countryside, and there is still a fairly reliable--and well-used, certainly not "only one rider on the bus…

It's not a matter of stopping exactly at your destination. If people had to walk two blocks it would do them some good.

The problem is that in a low density area, both frequent service and infrequent service result in a low number of riders. You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it who go to work and back once a day. If you run a bus there every 15 minutes for 12 hours a day, the average bus carries less than one passenger in each direction. If you only run one bus in the morning and one in the evening then in theory it would be 75% full but in practice then nobody takes it at all because the bus comes at 7:30AM but they have to go to work at 7AM or 8:30 so they all just drive instead.

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