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> Anytime you make something cheaper, easier to use, more useful and/or more efficient you get an increase in usage. This isn't inherently true. You only get a

> Anytime you make something cheaper, easier to use, more useful and/or more efficient you get an increase in usage. This isn't inherently true. You only get an increase in usage if people want/need that usage but previously couldn't have it. (i.e, if there was already a shortage -- if we were severely undeserving the need previously, or a new undeserved need was discovered). If there is no shortage already and/or no newly-discovered need for something, then making something cheaper or easier does not increase it's usage. (This is the big common mistake nearly everyone makes when talking about "Induced Demand". If you don't understand that Induced Demand is really about critical shortages further up the chain, then you trap yourself into doing nothing under the false belief that any new capacity added will automatically "induce" a failure of the new system).

skybrian 9y ago
Could you expand on "critical shortages up the chain?" It seems like if slightly less-preferable alternatives are already being used, this would be enough to induce demand when the price drops a bit. Many car trips are optional; consider shopping and the ability to combine trips or order online, if you're motivated to do so. Also, there are many alternatives for entertainment, whether by going somewhere else or staying home. And people do take traffic into account when choosing when and where to drive.
- maxsilver 9y ago
  A good example is to focus on things that aren't cars first. For instance, no one says "we shouldn't make the air cleaner. If clean air became too cheap or too easy to breathe, people might breathe too much". Such a thought is ridiculous. It's understood that, once we have enough so that there is no longer any shortage for anyone, demand simply won't rise, no matter how much cheaper or easier to use that becomes. To the extreme that it's infinitely easy and has absolutely no cost for me to breathe extra clean air right now, but I still don't over-breathe because it would be pointless, there's nothing to gain by doing that. Another example is a hospital. No one says "we should never build a new hospital. If healthcare becomes too cheap or too easy to get, people might become overly-healthy." Or "If we build a new hospital, we'll just encourage people to be more sick". Someone will even print up some misleading statistics. They'll say, "see, last year we had a 500-bed hospital, and it was always full of sick people. Now we have two 500-bed hospitals, and they're both full. Sickness has doubled since last year! We have more sick people now than ever before". It's understood that a new hospital does not create sickness, it does not induce sickness. These people were still sick, they just weren't counted because they weren't in the hospital. They were getting ill at home or at work, and not getting recorded at the hospital because it was already full. --- Transportation works the same way. But it's been so under-built, poorly-built, and under-serviced for so many years, that everyone approaches it with starvation mentality to scrape by with, instead of approaching it as a problem to be actually solved well. Cheaper and more convenient cars do not create demand, they expose shortages up the chain. There is already, today, many people who have a shortage of housing and transportation across the US. Clean/cheap/safer cars allow them to meet needs that previously were unmet. This will create the illusion of new congestion (because transportation will be more accessible to people), but that congestion is not new, it already existed. It just was not being not measured, it was spilling out into other areas where it is unaccounted for (such as people who ordering online who would have preferred to shop in stores but couldn't, or people just giving up on life altogether and not going places they want or need to go, because no transportation exists to make the trip possible). For example, Autonomous cars will likely increase total car trips because empty cars will be summoned around to places. That's not really new demand though, that's an exposing of a critical shortage of parking. If Autonomous cars were cheap enough, and parking was cheap enough, Autonomous cars would never need to make empty trips. They could wait for people right where people already are without any problems. But because most cities have a critical shortage of parking, that shortage will spill out into the streets as "induced demand", where cars will waste lots of time and energy driving around empty into and out of cities, just so they can avoid parking in cities. Autonomous cars "solve parking" by moving parked cars into city streets and circulating them. It's not new demand, its old demand being pushed around to different places, hot-potato style. Similarly, autonomous cars will likely increase total driving distances, as they make it easier for people to live further away from cities and endure longer commutes. But this too isn't really induced demand for cars, this is an exposing of the critical shortage of housing that most US cities have. If there was enough quality affordable housing in cities, people wouldn't waste their time commuting further away, even if doing so had zero cost. But because we are not willing to solve that problem, it too will spill out into our transportation infrastructure, and then get blamed on "cars" or "induced demand", when neither is a really accurate representation of the problem, nor an accurate path for finding a solution.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    There's an assumption with induced demand that all the extra trips are mostly unnecessary, because there are slightly-less-convenient alternatives. It sounds like you're making the opposite assumption that they're mostly necessary: "critical shortage of parking". It seems like this isn't likely to be settled via armchair reasoning in an online discussion; someone needs to look at the data (for example, at pricing), and that's likely to lead to a complicated economics discussion.
ghaff 9y ago
That's certainly true but I have to believe that, for most people, effectively having a private driver at their beck and call would increase the amount of time they spend in a car. You're right that it's not infinite; I don't want to spend 8 hours a day commuting just because someone else is doing the driving. But, speaking as someone who lives about an hour outside of the nearest large city, I would absolutely go in more for the evening--as well as take more weekend trips--if I didn't have to drive. That's likely typical of a lot of people, albeit not everyone.

skybrian 9y ago

Could you expand on "critical shortages up the chain?" It seems like if slightly less-preferable alternatives are already being used, this would be enough to induce demand when the price drops a bit. Many car trips are optional; consider shopping and the ability to combine trips or order online, if you're motivated to do so. Also, there are many alternatives for entertainment, whether by going somewhere else or staying home. And people do take traffic into account when choosing when and where to drive.

maxsilver 9y ago
A good example is to focus on things that aren't cars first. For instance, no one says "we shouldn't make the air cleaner. If clean air became too cheap or too easy to breathe, people might breathe too much". Such a thought is ridiculous. It's understood that, once we have enough so that there is no longer any shortage for anyone, demand simply won't rise, no matter how much cheaper or easier to use that becomes. To the extreme that it's infinitely easy and has absolutely no cost for me to breathe extra clean air right now, but I still don't over-breathe because it would be pointless, there's nothing to gain by doing that. Another example is a hospital. No one says "we should never build a new hospital. If healthcare becomes too cheap or too easy to get, people might become overly-healthy." Or "If we build a new hospital, we'll just encourage people to be more sick". Someone will even print up some misleading statistics. They'll say, "see, last year we had a 500-bed hospital, and it was always full of sick people. Now we have two 500-bed hospitals, and they're both full. Sickness has doubled since last year! We have more sick people now than ever before". It's understood that a new hospital does not create sickness, it does not induce sickness. These people were still sick, they just weren't counted because they weren't in the hospital. They were getting ill at home or at work, and not getting recorded at the hospital because it was already full. --- Transportation works the same way. But it's been so under-built, poorly-built, and under-serviced for so many years, that everyone approaches it with starvation mentality to scrape by with, instead of approaching it as a problem to be actually solved well. Cheaper and more convenient cars do not create demand, they expose shortages up the chain. There is already, today, many people who have a shortage of housing and transportation across the US. Clean/cheap/safer cars allow them to meet needs that previously were unmet. This will create the illusion of new congestion (because transportation will be more accessible to people), but that congestion is not new, it already existed. It just was not being not measured, it was spilling out into other areas where it is unaccounted for (such as people who ordering online who would have preferred to shop in stores but couldn't, or people just giving up on life altogether and not going places they want or need to go, because no transportation exists to make the trip possible). For example, Autonomous cars will likely increase total car trips because empty cars will be summoned around to places. That's not really new demand though, that's an exposing of a critical shortage of parking. If Autonomous cars were cheap enough, and parking was cheap enough, Autonomous cars would never need to make empty trips. They could wait for people right where people already are without any problems. But because most cities have a critical shortage of parking, that shortage will spill out into the streets as "induced demand", where cars will waste lots of time and energy driving around empty into and out of cities, just so they can avoid parking in cities. Autonomous cars "solve parking" by moving parked cars into city streets and circulating them. It's not new demand, its old demand being pushed around to different places, hot-potato style. Similarly, autonomous cars will likely increase total driving distances, as they make it easier for people to live further away from cities and endure longer commutes. But this too isn't really induced demand for cars, this is an exposing of the critical shortage of housing that most US cities have. If there was enough quality affordable housing in cities, people wouldn't waste their time commuting further away, even if doing so had zero cost. But because we are not willing to solve that problem, it too will spill out into our transportation infrastructure, and then get blamed on "cars" or "induced demand", when neither is a really accurate representation of the problem, nor an accurate path for finding a solution.
- skybrian 9y ago
  There's an assumption with induced demand that all the extra trips are mostly unnecessary, because there are slightly-less-convenient alternatives. It sounds like you're making the opposite assumption that they're mostly necessary: "critical shortage of parking". It seems like this isn't likely to be settled via armchair reasoning in an online discussion; someone needs to look at the data (for example, at pricing), and that's likely to lead to a complicated economics discussion.

ghaff 9y ago

That's certainly true but I have to believe that, for most people, effectively having a private driver at their beck and call would increase the amount of time they spend in a car. You're right that it's not infinite; I don't want to spend 8 hours a day commuting just because someone else is doing the driving. But, speaking as someone who lives about an hour outside of the nearest large city, I would absolutely go in more for the evening--as well as take more weekend trips--if I didn't have to drive. That's likely typical of a lot of people, albeit not everyone.