8 ms·

Is this even a problem? People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. That's way better than new roads going unused, isn't it? I like co

• msbarnett 8y ago
  > Is this even a problem? It’s a problem if your assumption was that demand was closer to fixed and building more roads would “spread drivers out”, reducing congestion. This was for decades, and still to some extent is, a very wide-spread assumption in local politics, leading to incredibly questionable urban planning decisions.
  • erik_seaberg 8y ago
    If we paved every square inch, traffic wouldn't go to infinity. It's pretty rare to go driving for no reason. Country roads don't have rush hour. It seems reasonable to assume that latent demand per capita is fixed, but at a level too high for a city to accommodate without destroying its density advantages.
    • village-idiot 8y ago
      People will also adjust their housing and working decisions based on road availability, although the lag here is a little long.
      • closeparen 8y ago
        If the center is already built and occupied to its legal limit, you can't get a population-level change from this.
        • village-idiot 8y ago
          But people will move to the periphery and commute farther, or change where their job is.
    • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      I don’t think anyone proposed people would drive for no reason. When there is more road capacity, people find more reasons to drive. More people get cars and more businesses use cars to move goods around. In the future self driving cars can be used on the road for any business reason someone could think of. There’s probably reason for 10x the cars we have today if they could fit on the road, which most cities could not handle.
    • kypro 8y ago
      In my city they're removing roads left, right, and centre, and using the argument that this will reduce congestion, which admittedly is really bad here. However what's actually happened is people in the suburbans like myself who don't have to good public transportation into the city have effectively become isolated from the city hub. There is really no good way for me to get into the city at rush hour anymore unless I want to spend 2 hours in traffic there and back. There has been minimal investment in public transportation as an alternative, and there has been no attempt to more evenly distribute commercial activity throughout the city. The problem always seemed to me to be less about road capacity, and more about city density and poor planning. I think we need to rethink the central urban hub model for cities. I suspect small hubs throughout the city would dramatically reduce congestion. We face similar scalability problems in tech. Typically if you have too much traffic going to your server you won't upgrade the server, but spin up more nodes. We distribute the traffic instead of spending larges amounts of money on infrastructure to send it all to a single node. And another problem of this is that it causes feedback loops. I'm now in a position where I either have to continue to find working outside my city or relocate closer to the city centre contributing more to the urbanisation and population density problem. With the right government incentives I see no reason why we could reestablish the city centre as a consumer hub. A place for shopping and leisure, etc. Then outside the city centre we could have tech hubs, financial hubs, industrial hubs, etc, all with good (perhaps even free) transportation between them. The time and money this would save seems like a no brainer to me. But then again, I don't really know anything. Perhaps there is a good reason to continue densely packing people into small 2-3 mile radiuses, where space is so limited most people can't afford a car, a decent size home, or even a decent sized office to work out of.
      • sokoloff 8y ago
        I live in Cambridge about a mile walk from Harvard Square, so fairly close to a decent sized city area, yet we almost never go there. Real estate in the Harvard Square area is so expensive and there are so many tourists that almost all the establishments there are priced out of reasonability for regular/daily patronage. We take out of town guests there and that's about it. I don't see city center commerce and leisure hubs as being particularly able to dominate neighborhood and suburban equivalents. I need a car to get out to work anyway (8 miles away from the city center), so once all the fixed costs of the car are covered, it's incredibly cheaper and more convenient for us to shop and eat in the suburbs. I don't see government incentives changing that in a meaningful way.
    • baddox 8y ago
      Traffic can’t go to infinity, it can only go to 100%, and yes, if you paved every square inch, then traffic would go to 100% in areas where lots of people want to be, like people driving into urban centers for work.
• Simon_says 8y ago
  > it's easy for me, as a software engineer, to show up at work at 11AM That's the point -- we should incentivize people who can time shift to do so thereby alleviating traffic for those who can't.
  • dbldogdareudang 8y ago
    We should incentivize not driving as much. What’s the point in me commuting to work to write code on a couch in an office that feels like my living room anyway?
  • disantlor 8y ago
    yes but that’s also what makes it regressive
    • Simon_says 8y ago
      By that same logic, purchasing hamburgers is regressive.
      • callalex 8y ago
        No, you don’t have to purchase a hamburger to earn a living, but you probably have to travel.
        • Simon_says 8y ago
          You have to purchase food.
          • sokoloff 8y ago
            Yes, and taxing food would be regressive, just as taxing/tolling commuting would be. (It's for this reason that supermarket/unprepared food is often untaxed.)
        • AlexB138 8y ago
          Groceries are generally taxed differently because people need to eat. It is not a human necessity to travel long distances to work. It seems to me, if you subsidize travel for low earner you're subsidizing companies that pay their employees poorly, not benefiting the employees themselves. Maybe a subsidy for low earning jobs that are a public good make sense (teachers, for instance), but why should we give subsidies to private for-profit companies to allow them to avoid covering the externalities of their business?
• Kalium 8y ago
  > Is this even a problem? People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. That's way better than new roads going unused, isn't it? It's a problem insofar as building more roads is often sold as a way to resolve traffic problems. When traffic expands to fill all available roads, this solution is an expensive way to not fix anything. There are probably more useful options, and faster ways to waste money, available to polities.
  • JimboOmega 8y ago
    But it is making trips possible that weren't before; it's not strictly money going down the drain. I have trouble seeing a fully utilized resource as "a waste". Saying "traffic will be solved by this!" is clearly misleading. But those extra cars on the road must be benefitting, or else they wouldn't make the trip.
    • Kalium 8y ago
      That's an excellent and very wise question! It's one that deserves careful study. At which point different ways of accomplishing the same goals can be compared and the best option(s) selected. I think we can agree this would be a reasonable, level-headed, approach to make informed decisions. This may be slightly different from a political cycle that spends ever-increasing amounts of resources on roads without examining if the results obtained provide a reasonable level of value for money. Or indeed address the issues that drove the construction of additional roads in the first place. Broadly, fully utilized resources are not always an ideal goal. For example, my experience is that meeting rooms in offices are almost always in constant use, no matter how many there are. This may not be the same as all uses of meeting rooms being desirable and efficient uses of the time and other resources used. I know I have been in meetings, enabled by a sizable of supply of meeting rooms, that could have been handled much faster with a handful of emails.
    • ip26 8y ago
      Fully utilizing the resource means some benefit is obtained, certainly. But when the cost of the resource to the user is zero, that means the benefit only need be greater than zero. Have you ever worked on a shared compute cluster? In general, disks fill to capacity & machines run at capacity, no matter what those capacities are. It's bloat; files that don't get deleted until you run out of disk, because deleting files takes ten seconds. Massive processes that are left always-running to save ten seconds of launch time. So on and so forth. Basically, the user is getting some value. But it's very small, and thus makes a poor reason to make expensive upgrades to the cluster.
• mklingen 8y ago
  It's a problem because it's a positive feedback loop. More highways = more traffic, which leads people to want to build more highways to supposedly ease congestion, and this continues ad infinitum. Our cities grow more spread out, less walkable, and less sustainable. Overall it makes our cities worse both for the people who live there and the environment. If we didn't subsidise highways so much, demand for them would be reduced, and it would make more sense to build denser housing and provide public transportation.
• honkycat 8y ago
  It is, yeah. Roads are bad and toxic to the businesses and areas around them. Nobody wants to hang out next to a 4 lane blacktop with cards screaming down it at 60 miles an hour. It spreads out businesses and makes our cities utilities spending less efficient. The roads need to be maintained, and it is very expensive to maintain them. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-streets-are-more-economically-productive-3bzg5 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s... https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
• yason 8y ago
  People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. If you don't put a price on it then people won't prioritise, and the demand becomes endless. And you can never have supply to meet an endless demand.
  • sokoloff 8y ago
    It still costs $0.10-0.20 to drive a marginal mile, so the demand is far from unpriced/infinite.
    • yason 8y ago
      Driving miles anywhere costs the same. Compared to the annual cost of owning a car making an extra 15 mile trip is absolute peanuts. The problem occurs when 1000 people decide to make that very extra trip just because capacity makes it possible and it's otherwise free to use.
• peteey 8y ago
  Yes, it is a problem. I can't recall the details, but I have heard compelling arguments why waiting in lines is awful from an economic perspective. You might enjoy hearing an economist's perspective on time. Poor people would likely benefit overall from more efficient use of roads. Interstate roads allowed people to live far from things they need (e.g. jobs). Your suggestion is backwards, people should be located near things, not the other way around. Roads with no fees have distorted supply and demand. The market can't function.
• Johnny555 8y ago
  Is this even a problem? People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. That's way better than new roads going unused, isn't it? I've never sat in stop-and-go traffic, looked around and thought "Gee, this is great utilization of this road!" Oddly, I have looked around a crowded standing-room-only train and thought "Gee, these load factors must be good for farebox recovery"
  • scythe 8y ago
    Personally I’d rather be in traffic. I’ll grant trains are way better for the atmosphere and take up less space, but people are noisy and smelly.
    • Johnny555 8y ago
      People keep saying they don't want to ride on a train or bus because people are smelly, but with rare exceptions, I just haven't run into that problem. My solution to noisy transit is to wear headphones. I think the problem is more cultural conditioning, I've been riding transit for 25+ years, and I like taking transit to work. Others who haven't ridden transit don't understand why I'd ride a bus to work even though we get "free" parking. On the way to work the bus is usually faster than driving (the bus takes the carpool lane), on the way home, traffic is bad enough that the bus is probably about the same speed as driving (maybe a bit longer since for one stop it needs to leave the freeway express lane so needs to cut through 4 lanes of traffic to get to the stop and then again to get back into the express lane), but I don't care since I'm usually reading.
    • lazyjones 8y ago
      > people are noisy and smelly. Indeed. And trains usually don't go from people's homes to their destination, so they typically cause traffic of some sort around train stations.
      • Johnny555 8y ago
        Ideally, people live near transit (not so common in this country, but Transit Oriented Development near transit stations is becoming more popular), so they don't necessarily need to drive to the station. But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.