I'm the author of that piece. Just pointing out that I am a traffic engineer, I have seen, analyzed and criticized traffic studies. Believe me, your faith in tr

I'm the author of that piece. Just pointing out that I am a traffic engineer, I have seen, analyzed and criticized traffic studies. Believe me, your faith in traffic engineering is quite misplaced. Most cities do not have the resources to do complex dynamic simulations. In Québec, the Transport Ministry has a model (EMME) supposed to take into account trip choices and modal choices, but I haven't heard any confirmation of its prediction capabilities. The big issue with such simulations is the amount of input data you would need to adequately model reality. A metropolitan area has hundreds of thousands of workers, or even millions, to have a reliable model, you would need to know where everyone lives, where they work, what is their work schedule, their income level, etc... Obviously, collecting that data is essentially impossible, after you add up the uncertainty of the inputs, you often realize that the uncertainty makes the results completely unreliable, almost no better than an educated guess.