4 ms·

> 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 co

> 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.

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.