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This nonsense gets repeated over and over again: What you get is what you build. New roads just create more incentive for driving. It's been well documented ov
by lazyjones 7y ago
This nonsense gets repeated over and over again:
What you get is what you build. New roads just create more incentive for driving. It's been well documented over and over again that vehicle miles driven increases proportionally to roadway created. Lewis Mumford famously said “Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity.”
It's not the roads that cause traffic, it's the convenience of driving. To show how absurd the argument is, let's use it for housing - I'm sure it can be easily "documented" that building housing leads to higher population figures. So it must be bad, let's not do it!
- ahoy 7y agoI don't think you disagree. If new roads make driving more convenient, doesn't it stand to reason that building new roads also increases the number of miles driven?
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago> It's not the roads that cause traffic, it's the convenience of driving. That's a tautology, roads are a convenience for driving.
- kube-system 7y agoBusses and commercial traffic also use and require roads. They don’t exist just for those commuting by car.
- dzamie 7y agoSo the article goes on to suggest expanding a bus network or other public transportation. In this manner, it increases the convenience of a more traffic-efficient bus and decreases the convenience of the less traffic-efficient car.
- CPLX 7y ago> It's not the roads that cause traffic, it's the convenience of driving. Exactly. Roads make driving more convenient. Build trains and that makes taking the train more convenient so you get more of that. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
- Ntrails 7y agoConvenience is only part of the story though. Price matters - and for me at least it is often as cheap or cheaper as a single person in a car to drive than get a train. I live in London, I can train anywhere pretty conveniently. But, somehow, if I decide that I want to go to Leeds next weekend to see my friend - it's £100. Well, shit. The train is more convenient - but that's over twice the cost of petrol. Now imagine that I wanted to take another friend with me. It's absurd. The same scenario, but to a friend in Rugby (about half as far, different train line) costs me £23. Bargain! There are multiple axes on which to nudge behaviour - and one of them is definitely price.
- yakshaving_jgt 7y agoThe trains in the UK are an outlier here. You're not wrong, it's outrageously expensive — it was cheaper for me to rent a car for 24 hours and drive from London to Bristol and back than it was to take the train. Between London and Newcastle it's sometimes cheaper to fly (and I don't even mean with a budget airline!). This is utterly insane. It doesn't need to be this way though. Trains work great in continental Europe. In fact the trains here in Poland are fantastic. I'm a total petrolhead and I'm often irritated by the kind of cyclist that hates all cars and anyone who drives one, but I would like to see fewer cars on the road. Trains are an excellent way to achieve that goal (just not the way the UK does it).
- fock 7y agoThis reminds me of Germany, where flights between Munich and Berlin are at a constant 40€(easyjet)/50€(Lufthansa) for booking next day, since the public train company has a 4hr service during "rush-hour" now (nextday booking costs 150€ without a discount card - which is 250€ for a 50% rebate for a year)
- laughinghan 7y agoIt's only cheaper because you're not paying for how much it will cost to get the combusted petrol back out of the air again. You're stealing that from future generations.
- riffic 7y agoInduced demand is not nonsense.
- thefifthsetpin 7y agoI'm willing to believe that, but it always sounds like nonsense to me. Normally, I hear people use it to describe the basic economics of a demand already greatly in excess of supply. If there's not enough food to go around, providing a little more food just means people will eat that additional food and they will still be hungry. We don't conclude that induced hunger is a thing. Going back to traffic as the example, if I want to drive downtown to see a ballet but decide against it because traffic is bad, then they add more lanes and next year I do decide to drive to see that ballet, then I'm creating more traffic because they added more lanes. That demand wasn't induced -- it just transitioned from unmet demand to met demand. If induced demand isn't nonsense, then I must be oversimplifying it. What am I missing?
- triceratops 7y ago> We don't conclude that induced hunger is a thing. Certain foods are more expensive than others. That's why we don't eat steak and lobster for every meal. But if the price of those foods went down, you can bet there would be a lot more demand. That's induced demand. Everyone was already getting enough calories and nutrients, but making something desirable a lot cheaper had the effect of more people trying to buy it.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> But if the price of those foods went down, you can bet there would be a lot more demand. No, you can bet there'd be a greater market-clearing quantity. Greater demand would mean people were willing to buy more at thesame price. If anything, over time, lower prices should reduce demand by setting s lower expectation of the “right” price and reducing the quantity people are willing to buy at higher prices. Demand is the function mapping price to quantity people are willing to buy.
- pkulak 7y agoYou guys are saying the same thing. More roads make driving more convenient than other modes, increasing the incentive. And yes, increasing housing supply lowers the price, and increases population. That's the point; to move people into the core who want to be there but otherwise couldn't afford it.
- Spivak 7y agoTaking away roads doesn’t make cars any less convenient. It just means that fewer people will travel to that area. Mission success I guess?
- rwz 7y agoWell, it actually does. The convenience of a car is determined by how likely you choose a car over other means when you need to get somewhere. If there's less roads, you're less likely to choose car, thus the lowering the convenience factor. If there's no roads at all, owning a car is meaningless since you can't drive anywhere, and its convenience is pretty much zero.
- jimmaswell 7y agoSo you've still made the whole experience less convenient in absolute terms but made another option more convenient relatively. That is not a success. It's like dumping a pile of venomous snakes in the upstairs bathtub so now I have to go downstairs, thus now the downstairs bathtub is more convenient.
- rwz 7y agoI'm not arguing about that and not trying to call it a success. I'm just stating that taking away roads does in fact make cars less convenient.
- TremendousJudge 7y agoRoads make driving more convenient at the expense of other transportation methods; being able to walk to the store is more convenient that driving there. You can't do it though if there's this huge highway in the way and your city is so low density that the store is miles away. If this argument doesn't convince you, think also that driving may be convenient, but I find more convenient if we lived in a planet that's not a literal oven
- benj111 7y agoYour example is poor. Housing may lead to a higher local population, but no one copulates based on the national availability of housing. Anyway no ones mentioned induced demand, which is the relevant term https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
- mantas 7y agoVast majority of people don't drive just because a road got wider either. Build a 2x3 highway pointing nowhere and you'll get just a dozen of enthusiasts hold an illegal race on an empty road...
- benj111 7y agoNo, but your commute is probably bounded by time, not distance. If you can only travel 5 miles in X time, you'll get the best job in that radius. If you can travel 60 miles, the odds are your job will end up being further away. Rinse and repeat for shopping, socialising, etc, etc, etc.
- mantas 7y agoCool. Now you have more job opportunities, can keep up with your friends further away and have wider choice of shopping/eating out/etc place. No need to stick to shitty place next door.
- Marinlemaignan 7y agoreally cool
- rags2riches 7y agoActually, that nowhere place then becomes possible to develop. And that development will increase traffic, on the new road and on the roads it connects to. That's the real reason you build more and wider roads. But it's for some reason sold as a way to reduce traffic.
- tryitnow 7y agoDowns-Thomson Paradox is useful to cite here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
- lazyjones 7y agoThese are dubious theories from decades ago, if taken literally, they'd mean we'd just need to remove all transport (public included) and there would be zero demand for them. Behind such absurd claims there's always a simplistic model with wrong assumptions and too few variables. Thankfully, new roads are still getting built despite every attempt to refer to these bogus paradoxes.
- shados 7y agoWe're unfortunately in a place where public transit systems are starting to fall apart in many major US cities (I dont know if its all), such as Boston and NYC. At the same time, we're trying to reduce car usage. That's a pretty hard pill to swallow for many people. If it was a cohesive strategy, where housing and transportation plans are moving together, there would be a lot less friction.
- sswezey 7y agoIf it's nonsense, care to provide some supporting links? The author provided 4 links, one of which was from the California DOT supporting the statement.
- refurb 7y agoIt's easy to prove that statement false just by getting outside of big cities. I'm sure if they expanded I-5 in Weed, CA from 4 lanes to 6 you'd see zero impact on traffic.
- jimbokun 7y ago> It's not the roads that cause traffic, it's the convenience of driving. But more roads increase the convenience of driving, no?