17 ms·

In practical terms, we can consume as much transport as we get. If it was cheap and fast I could have ramen lunch in Tokyo. Pick up the kids from crèche in Port

by netcan 8y ago

In practical terms, we can consume as much transport as we get. If it was cheap and fast I could have ramen lunch in Tokyo. Pick up the kids from crèche in Portugal on my way home to New Zealand. So, unless we get teleport watches... congestion is the "price," the thing that limits consumption. Economists would prefer the price to be price, being economists. One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.

reaperducer 8y ago
Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value. It does, which is one reason why (in the United States, anyway), highways are paid for by the governments — to spur commerce. In contrast, railroads (at least in the United States) still mostly have to pay for their infrastructure, which is one reason why passenger rail is in the shape it's in.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  It kind of does. But only to a certain point; in some cases you're just shuffling growth around the region rather than stimulating new regional growth. A lot of road capacity is needed, but a lot of it is also purely wasteful and entirely caused by social choice. E.g., the parking lot for the store needs to hold the Black Friday parking demand -> the store is now too far from the street to walk home with bags -> everyone drives to the store and there is congestion -> the street must be widened to accommodate the congestion --> the street is now too wide to cross or walk along safely --> everybody drives, etc. The suburbs are now vastly overbuilt as a result. Nassau County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country yet has been fiscally monitored by New York State since 2000 because it cannot afford the lifecycle cost of infrastructure or services for such a low-density, sprawly environment. And this is despite very high property taxes, to the point where the population is starting to decline.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Nassau county isn’t a city, so the state pays almost all of its major road costs on its behalf.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      They cover some of it, but in FY2019 $24.9M of County Debt will be issued for $44.5M of capital expenditure on roads: https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/23320#page=29 https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/23320#pag... This is actually part of the problem of the American model; larger entities are always willing to foot the bill, so why bother assessing the economic feasibility of a project?
      - Spooky23 8y ago
        That’s peanuts for that kind of work. New York spends something like $17B annually on transportation with about 40% federal share. I agree with your second point, especially as the feds only fund capital costs and state and local has to do maintenance, which they are awful at. The smart strategy is to fund minimum viable operations costs, let stuff crumble and get more capital $ to rebuild!
  - sbov 8y ago
    Looks like New York State did a terrible job at fiscally monitoring them then: https://theislandnow.com/featured/nassaus-fiscal-crisis-borders-on-emergency-comptroller/ https://theislandnow.com/featured/nassaus-fiscal-crisis-bord... It reads like that county is a complete shit show and not necessarily indicative of the sustainability of low density.
Isinlor 8y ago
There is also question of externalities. Building roads is not without hidden costs. Splitting communities in cities, making distances to travel longer because adding places for streets and parking places spreads infrastructure, air pollution killing people, lack of movement killing people, noise pollution, ugliness etc. I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastructure. I live second year in Netherlands and I love it.
- User23 8y ago
  That works great in countries one can bike across in a day. It’s not really a solution for American commuters. People mainly choose long commutes for housing affordability. When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution.
  - mklingen 8y ago
    > When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution. This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.
    - throwawayjava 8y ago
      Lack of mid-distance transit is also a huge problem. Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable). However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.
      - sulam 8y ago
        We have regional commute rail in the SF Bay Area and in the NYC Metropolitan Region. It doesn't seem to have done much except drive up housing prices near rail stations and create silliness like 5-yr waiting lists for parking at them. It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.
stefan_ 8y ago
It's opportunity cost that kills it. Building more roads is a lousy investment for the money spent.
- hyperdo 8y ago
  Source? Would be really curious to see how you measure roi on something like this
honkycat 8y ago
Except for the fact that building more roads != more commerce. In fact, roads often DECIMATE the communities they are built through. Ask the rural United States how building a bunch of highways through their towns to the local Walmart has gone for them. Roads for cars are much less efficient for commerce than community oriented walkable streets.[0] Also, maintaining roads is expensive. Once you build a new road it is politically unpopular to get rid of it. Who really benefits from the new road being built? The businesses that can afford to build a long the new highway and have a massive amount of parking around it. IE: Taco Bell, WalMart, etc. The people road construction businesses the government shovels money to. [1] We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have! [0] 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... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
- kortilla 8y ago
  >Ask the rural United States how building a bunch of highways through their towns to the local Walmart has gone for them. Might be hard to get an answer given that most places didn’t build highways to Walmarts. Either way, consumers tend to shop at their local Walmart regardless of the road to it. Consumers seem to consistently pick Walmart over overpriced local businesses nearly everywhere except for wealthy, dense cities where people can afford to avoid the unpleasantness of shopping the giant things with lower class people.
magduf 8y ago
If I could teleport around like that instantly, I'd be acting like that too. However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there. The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them think nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic, each way, every workday, just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend. >Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value. When people don't do anything with all those kms traveled than move farther out of the metro area and extend their commute, no, I don't really see the value to society there. Rather, I see that it has a real cost to society for people to waste their time and money on these things, rather than things that provide positive economic value to the society at large. Don't forget that more miles driven means more accidents, more traffic deaths and maimings, etc., all of which cost society. Plus all the pollution produced.
- sbov 8y ago
  I don't know a single American commuter who thinks nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic each way. Every commuter I know balks at a single way commute of more than 30 minutes. Any commuter I know that has ever spent more than 1 hour in traffic each way moved within a couple years to be closer. You're assigning beliefs to Americans that, in my experience, they don't have in any significant numbers.
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    When I lived and worked in the DC area from 1989 to 1998, it was automatically assumed by everyone I knew that if you were going to commute anywhere by car and you had to intersect with major infrastructure like the beltway, then you'd be spending at least an hour on the road, just to go one way. So, that's a one-hour commute right there for many people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Suburban Maryland area. And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way. When I lived in Brussels, Belgium from 1999 to 2006 and worked for a Dutch consulting company, there was a period of time where my commute was 1.5-2.0 hours one-way to go up to the company offices in Veldhoven, or to a customer site at Eindhoven. Living here in Austin since 2006, during rush hour, any commute involving any of the major infrastructure (360, MoPac, I-35, etc...) is likely to take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour or more. When there isn't any traffic, that same commute might take just fifteen minutes. When my brother-in-law lived and worked in the LA area many years ago, until he made a point of moving to an apartment that was ridiculously close to the office, he was frequently spending two or more hours on the road, one-way. And that's when traffic was reasonably good and there weren't major jams that turned into eighteen-plus hours on the road, one-way. Just because you don't have a given type or amount of experience, doesn't mean that your experience is universal in this regard. I certainly realize that my experience is not universal, but I do have multiple instances in my life where I saw those kinds of numbers on a regular basis. And I knew plenty of people at the time who had similar experiences to mine.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
clairity 8y ago
in just economic terms, it means our supply and demand curves are out of whack. we have an insatiable demand for additional roads at the current price level. alternatively speaking, we "use up" all new road capacity because the price is so low (it feels like it costs us nothing extra). road users are insulated from actual costs, since road costs are both subsidized and pass through an intermediary (government, taxes). since it's costly, inefficient, and politically unpalatable to directly create an efficient marketplace for roads themselves (by building a bunch of competing ones), economists urge regulators to create a market for road use and price in maintenance costs and externalities (pollution, things that Isinlor mentions): tolling, congestion pricing, gas taxes, etc. if we correctly price road use and there is still great demand, it means we should build more roads. instead, the perverse logic currently employed is that insatiable demand should be a reason not to build roads because (it seems like) we'd never meet that demand.
CalRobert 8y ago
"more Kms travelled. " might have some value if it means a trip that wasn't taken before is taken now. It has _negative_ value, massively so, if it means people who used to have 10km commutes all move farther out and have 20km commutes instead but cheaper housing. This seems to be what happens. More people will die horrible deaths in their cars, more people will die walking and cycling, more people will die because their understandable fear of walking and cycling gives them a sedentary lifestyle, more people will die from cancer, lung disease, etc, more wildlife habitat will be destroyed, more sound and light pollution will destroy mental health and disturb wildlife, and the planet will boil a little bit sooner. But those are externalities and not borne by the person choosing to drive more. But all of this is apparently just fine. Adults matter too of course, but it's striking that cars (drivers, really) are the thing that kills more kids than anything else, and yet people do. not. care. I'm astonished how much outrage there is over kids being killed by bullets but not those killed by cars. People in the US accept it as normal, though. When I pointed out I cared more about automotive violence than gun violence people would look at me like I had 3 heads. And then joke about running over cyclists. On the bright side, it might encourage those who are able to emigrate somewhere nicer (Netherlands and the Nordics, basically), so I guess it's a gain to those countries.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > It has _negative_ value, massively so, if it means people who used to have 10km commutes all move farther out and have 20km commutes instead but cheaper housing. Is that because affordable houses are worthless? So, instead of solving the housing crisis, city planners do nothing on the matter, but go and ration transportation too, so people... well, gain nothing because they will be the same time in traffic.
  - CalRobert 8y ago
    Of course not - affordable homes are great. Building more homes near the places people need to be will help make them more affordable. But nobody ever got votes by campaigning to reduce home prices. Perhaps because you have to live in a place to vote for those governing said place.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> we can consume as much transport as we get. If it was cheap and fast I could have ramen lunch in Tokyo. Pick up the kids from crèche in Portugal on my way home to New Zealand. Nitpicking this from a physical perspective, consuming this amount of travel fundamentally requires you to experience a certain amount of acceleration. I'm pretty sure that the itinerary you describe here would kill you, regardless of how cheap it was.
- max76 8y ago
  Piling on the nitpicking. Portugal isn't 'on the way' to New Zealand from Tokyo regardless of speed or timelines.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    It is "on the way" if that's what your schedule shows. If you need to leave work, pick up the kids, and arrive at home in that order, then you'll pick up the kids on your way home regardless of spatial arrangements.
    - max76 8y ago
      Even as a native speaker, the way people use the language still surprises me.
- A2017U1 8y ago
  At 1g constant acceleration/decceleration you could make it to the Moon (380,000 km) in 3 hours.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Fair enough. A six hour commute is unrealistic, but by my calculations a constant 1g of acceleration is enough to cover a round trip from Wellington, New Zealand to Tokyo and another from Wellington to Lisbon in under 90 minutes of daily commute. I note that in reality, we don't ever travel with constant nonzero acceleration, but it's fair to ignore that under the explicit assumption that there are no costs involved.
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
>Economists would prefer the price to be price, being economists. I mean, of course. If you pay for something with money, then someone else gets the money. If you pay for something with time, then that time is just gone. >One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value. A lot of the "value" winds up in making far-flung homes part of the housing market for people working at centers of employment. Suburbanization, basically.
ip26 8y ago
One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Trips do have value. When you sell something on Craigslist, the economic activity you are generating depends on the road network, and that transport event can be said to have value. The epiphany that hit me though is that all the most valuable transport is already happening. Less valuable transport that isn't worth sitting in traffic for, is passed over. This is key- it means that having roads is good, as it provides transport for those most valuable trips. However expanding the road adds only the less valuable trips. It's wicked diminishing returns- the road is more and more expensive to expand, and the trips/economic activity it adds are less and less valuable. The first two lanes were the cheapest to build and the most valuable to society, and every pair after that is worth less & less.
mikeash 8y ago
Agreed. I don’t get why induced demand is always presented as a bad thing. The title here is a perfect example. It “makes” people travel more, as if this is a bad thing people are being forced to do against their will. If we reframe it by saying it “allows” people to travel more then suddenly it becomes a good thing! Of course we should carefully consider all the costs and externalities of road expansion before doing it. But it’s all too often presented as being completely pointless or having no redeeming features at all, so there’s no point in even considering it.
natmaka 8y ago
Thoreau and Illitch, among others, had interesting ideas. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.576.1031&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.576...
- netcan 8y ago
  thanks. Interesting

by netcan 8y ago

reaperducer 8y ago

Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value. It does, which is one reason why (in the United States, anyway), highways are paid for by the governments — to spur commerce. In contrast, railroads (at least in the United States) still mostly have to pay for their infrastructure, which is one reason why passenger rail is in the shape it's in.

bobthepanda 8y ago
It kind of does. But only to a certain point; in some cases you're just shuffling growth around the region rather than stimulating new regional growth. A lot of road capacity is needed, but a lot of it is also purely wasteful and entirely caused by social choice. E.g., the parking lot for the store needs to hold the Black Friday parking demand -> the store is now too far from the street to walk home with bags -> everyone drives to the store and there is congestion -> the street must be widened to accommodate the congestion --> the street is now too wide to cross or walk along safely --> everybody drives, etc. The suburbs are now vastly overbuilt as a result. Nassau County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country yet has been fiscally monitored by New York State since 2000 because it cannot afford the lifecycle cost of infrastructure or services for such a low-density, sprawly environment. And this is despite very high property taxes, to the point where the population is starting to decline.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Nassau county isn’t a city, so the state pays almost all of its major road costs on its behalf.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    They cover some of it, but in FY2019 $24.9M of County Debt will be issued for $44.5M of capital expenditure on roads: https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/23320#page=29 https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/23320#pag... This is actually part of the problem of the American model; larger entities are always willing to foot the bill, so why bother assessing the economic feasibility of a project?
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      That’s peanuts for that kind of work. New York spends something like $17B annually on transportation with about 40% federal share. I agree with your second point, especially as the feds only fund capital costs and state and local has to do maintenance, which they are awful at. The smart strategy is to fund minimum viable operations costs, let stuff crumble and get more capital $ to rebuild!
- sbov 8y ago
  Looks like New York State did a terrible job at fiscally monitoring them then: https://theislandnow.com/featured/nassaus-fiscal-crisis-borders-on-emergency-comptroller/ https://theislandnow.com/featured/nassaus-fiscal-crisis-bord... It reads like that county is a complete shit show and not necessarily indicative of the sustainability of low density.

Isinlor 8y ago

There is also question of externalities. Building roads is not without hidden costs. Splitting communities in cities, making distances to travel longer because adding places for streets and parking places spreads infrastructure, air pollution killing people, lack of movement killing people, noise pollution, ugliness etc. I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastructure. I live second year in Netherlands and I love it.

User23 8y ago
That works great in countries one can bike across in a day. It’s not really a solution for American commuters. People mainly choose long commutes for housing affordability. When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution.
- mklingen 8y ago
  > When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution. This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    Lack of mid-distance transit is also a huge problem. Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable). However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.
    - sulam 8y ago
      We have regional commute rail in the SF Bay Area and in the NYC Metropolitan Region. It doesn't seem to have done much except drive up housing prices near rail stations and create silliness like 5-yr waiting lists for parking at them. It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.

stefan_ 8y ago

It's opportunity cost that kills it. Building more roads is a lousy investment for the money spent.

hyperdo 8y ago
Source? Would be really curious to see how you measure roi on something like this

honkycat 8y ago

Except for the fact that building more roads != more commerce. In fact, roads often DECIMATE the communities they are built through. Ask the rural United States how building a bunch of highways through their towns to the local Walmart has gone for them. Roads for cars are much less efficient for commerce than community oriented walkable streets.[0] Also, maintaining roads is expensive. Once you build a new road it is politically unpopular to get rid of it. Who really benefits from the new road being built? The businesses that can afford to build a long the new highway and have a massive amount of parking around it. IE: Taco Bell, WalMart, etc. The people road construction businesses the government shovels money to. [1] We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have! [0] 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... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

kortilla 8y ago
>Ask the rural United States how building a bunch of highways through their towns to the local Walmart has gone for them. Might be hard to get an answer given that most places didn’t build highways to Walmarts. Either way, consumers tend to shop at their local Walmart regardless of the road to it. Consumers seem to consistently pick Walmart over overpriced local businesses nearly everywhere except for wealthy, dense cities where people can afford to avoid the unpleasantness of shopping the giant things with lower class people.

magduf 8y ago

If I could teleport around like that instantly, I'd be acting like that too. However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there. The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them think nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic, each way, every workday, just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend. >Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value. When people don't do anything with all those kms traveled than move farther out of the metro area and extend their commute, no, I don't really see the value to society there. Rather, I see that it has a real cost to society for people to waste their time and money on these things, rather than things that provide positive economic value to the society at large. Don't forget that more miles driven means more accidents, more traffic deaths and maimings, etc., all of which cost society. Plus all the pollution produced.

sbov 8y ago
I don't know a single American commuter who thinks nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic each way. Every commuter I know balks at a single way commute of more than 30 minutes. Any commuter I know that has ever spent more than 1 hour in traffic each way moved within a couple years to be closer. You're assigning beliefs to Americans that, in my experience, they don't have in any significant numbers.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  When I lived and worked in the DC area from 1989 to 1998, it was automatically assumed by everyone I knew that if you were going to commute anywhere by car and you had to intersect with major infrastructure like the beltway, then you'd be spending at least an hour on the road, just to go one way. So, that's a one-hour commute right there for many people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Suburban Maryland area. And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way. When I lived in Brussels, Belgium from 1999 to 2006 and worked for a Dutch consulting company, there was a period of time where my commute was 1.5-2.0 hours one-way to go up to the company offices in Veldhoven, or to a customer site at Eindhoven. Living here in Austin since 2006, during rush hour, any commute involving any of the major infrastructure (360, MoPac, I-35, etc...) is likely to take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour or more. When there isn't any traffic, that same commute might take just fifteen minutes. When my brother-in-law lived and worked in the LA area many years ago, until he made a point of moving to an apartment that was ridiculously close to the office, he was frequently spending two or more hours on the road, one-way. And that's when traffic was reasonably good and there weren't major jams that turned into eighteen-plus hours on the road, one-way. Just because you don't have a given type or amount of experience, doesn't mean that your experience is universal in this regard. I certainly realize that my experience is not universal, but I do have multiple instances in my life where I saw those kinds of numbers on a regular basis. And I knew plenty of people at the time who had similar experiences to mine.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

clairity 8y ago

in just economic terms, it means our supply and demand curves are out of whack. we have an insatiable demand for additional roads at the current price level. alternatively speaking, we "use up" all new road capacity because the price is so low (it feels like it costs us nothing extra). road users are insulated from actual costs, since road costs are both subsidized and pass through an intermediary (government, taxes). since it's costly, inefficient, and politically unpalatable to directly create an efficient marketplace for roads themselves (by building a bunch of competing ones), economists urge regulators to create a market for road use and price in maintenance costs and externalities (pollution, things that Isinlor mentions): tolling, congestion pricing, gas taxes, etc. if we correctly price road use and there is still great demand, it means we should build more roads. instead, the perverse logic currently employed is that insatiable demand should be a reason not to build roads because (it seems like) we'd never meet that demand.

CalRobert 8y ago

"more Kms travelled. " might have some value if it means a trip that wasn't taken before is taken now. It has _negative_ value, massively so, if it means people who used to have 10km commutes all move farther out and have 20km commutes instead but cheaper housing. This seems to be what happens. More people will die horrible deaths in their cars, more people will die walking and cycling, more people will die because their understandable fear of walking and cycling gives them a sedentary lifestyle, more people will die from cancer, lung disease, etc, more wildlife habitat will be destroyed, more sound and light pollution will destroy mental health and disturb wildlife, and the planet will boil a little bit sooner. But those are externalities and not borne by the person choosing to drive more. But all of this is apparently just fine. Adults matter too of course, but it's striking that cars (drivers, really) are the thing that kills more kids than anything else, and yet people do. not. care. I'm astonished how much outrage there is over kids being killed by bullets but not those killed by cars. People in the US accept it as normal, though. When I pointed out I cared more about automotive violence than gun violence people would look at me like I had 3 heads. And then joke about running over cyclists. On the bright side, it might encourage those who are able to emigrate somewhere nicer (Netherlands and the Nordics, basically), so I guess it's a gain to those countries.

marcosdumay 8y ago
> It has _negative_ value, massively so, if it means people who used to have 10km commutes all move farther out and have 20km commutes instead but cheaper housing. Is that because affordable houses are worthless? So, instead of solving the housing crisis, city planners do nothing on the matter, but go and ration transportation too, so people... well, gain nothing because they will be the same time in traffic.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  Of course not - affordable homes are great. Building more homes near the places people need to be will help make them more affordable. But nobody ever got votes by campaigning to reduce home prices. Perhaps because you have to live in a place to vote for those governing said place.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> we can consume as much transport as we get. If it was cheap and fast I could have ramen lunch in Tokyo. Pick up the kids from crèche in Portugal on my way home to New Zealand. Nitpicking this from a physical perspective, consuming this amount of travel fundamentally requires you to experience a certain amount of acceleration. I'm pretty sure that the itinerary you describe here would kill you, regardless of how cheap it was.

max76 8y ago
Piling on the nitpicking. Portugal isn't 'on the way' to New Zealand from Tokyo regardless of speed or timelines.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  It is "on the way" if that's what your schedule shows. If you need to leave work, pick up the kids, and arrive at home in that order, then you'll pick up the kids on your way home regardless of spatial arrangements.
  - max76 8y ago
    Even as a native speaker, the way people use the language still surprises me.
A2017U1 8y ago
At 1g constant acceleration/decceleration you could make it to the Moon (380,000 km) in 3 hours.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Fair enough. A six hour commute is unrealistic, but by my calculations a constant 1g of acceleration is enough to cover a round trip from Wellington, New Zealand to Tokyo and another from Wellington to Lisbon in under 90 minutes of daily commute. I note that in reality, we don't ever travel with constant nonzero acceleration, but it's fair to ignore that under the explicit assumption that there are no costs involved.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago

>Economists would prefer the price to be price, being economists. I mean, of course. If you pay for something with money, then someone else gets the money. If you pay for something with time, then that time is just gone. >One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value. A lot of the "value" winds up in making far-flung homes part of the housing market for people working at centers of employment. Suburbanization, basically.

ip26 8y ago

One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Trips do have value. When you sell something on Craigslist, the economic activity you are generating depends on the road network, and that transport event can be said to have value. The epiphany that hit me though is that all the most valuable transport is already happening. Less valuable transport that isn't worth sitting in traffic for, is passed over. This is key- it means that having roads is good, as it provides transport for those most valuable trips. However expanding the road adds only the less valuable trips. It's wicked diminishing returns- the road is more and more expensive to expand, and the trips/economic activity it adds are less and less valuable. The first two lanes were the cheapest to build and the most valuable to society, and every pair after that is worth less & less.

mikeash 8y ago

Agreed. I don’t get why induced demand is always presented as a bad thing. The title here is a perfect example. It “makes” people travel more, as if this is a bad thing people are being forced to do against their will. If we reframe it by saying it “allows” people to travel more then suddenly it becomes a good thing! Of course we should carefully consider all the costs and externalities of road expansion before doing it. But it’s all too often presented as being completely pointless or having no redeeming features at all, so there’s no point in even considering it.

natmaka 8y ago

Thoreau and Illitch, among others, had interesting ideas. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.576.1031&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.576...

netcan 8y ago
thanks. Interesting