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The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic

161 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Fixing congestion by speeding up traffic is a red herring. Think of peak usage (rush hour) like pouring a 5-gallon bucket into a sink. The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big the pipe is but a big pipe sure helps it go away faster. This principal applies to mass transit as well. There will always be backup, like on the subway platform at 5:05pm, but more capacity (more lanes, faster flow, more frequent service, etc) means it will cycle through faster. This article's gripes about measuring the cost of congestion are mostly accurate. That TTI study is laughable. Their gripes about mobility not being a goal are totally bunk. I understand their agenda and why they feel this way but the reduction in cost of moving a fixed distance has enabled us to massively increase our standard of living. They just don't like it because it's made certain other societal problems more bearable so we haven't fixed them yet (e.g. terrible zoning in some places) and it's environmentally unfriendly. Barring some revolution in transportation on par with the automobile I doubt they'll go unfixed that much longer. I'm not in the least bit sympathetic to the author's belief that increased difficulty of travel is good. I grew up somewhere that was hard to get to and the economic reality that bring sucks (your dollars only go like 80% as far) and people would be stupid to want to impose on this on themselves. The author is conflating his distaste for the automobile (which is fashionable and has some merit,especially on environmental grounds) with a distaste for lower cost/higher speed transportation in general. If you were to re-write his article and instead complain about how city buses and subways have made it possible for people's range to extend beyond their neighborhood or imagine some alternative reality in which cars are replaced with carbon neutral mass transit of equivalent cost/throughput it would become immediately apparent how nonsensical this distaste for reducing the time/money cost of physical distance is. Edit: My analogy is for reasonable pipe sizes only.
- elcomet 7y ago
  The issue is that new usages appear as soon as the pipes get bigger. So you're never making it go away faster.
  - YZF 7y ago
    It's one of those things everyone always says but doesn't seem to always be true. There used to be a spot on my commute that always had traffic jams. It was a single lane turn coming off a bridge and having to merge with a busy road. Traffic always used to back up and block the entire bridge. A couple of years ago they changed the one lane into two lanes and put a light. No issues since. But adding a big highway before a congestion point, that doesn't help.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    And why is that a bad thing? It means people are not forgoing trips because the cost (time, money, either, both) is too high.
    - oftenwrong 7y ago
      Maintaining a sprawling network of massive pipes costs a lot of money, and precludes more efficient forms of plumbing.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big the pipe This doesn't make sense? If your sink's pipe was 1 meter in diameter you wouldn't overwhelm it with 5 gallons would you? Not saying that should be the goal, but the reasoning seems wrong...
  - SilasX 7y ago
    True, but the point is, making pipes big enough to actually make this work ... is physically impossible with current constraints.
  - beefalo 7y ago
    That would be like having a 1 mile wide freeway
40acres 7y ago
Would love to see a study that examines the level of racial segregation within a city and how it correlates with commute times from suburbs / exurbs into that city. Segregation, and the lack of resources that go to certain neighborhoods because of it, generally make large swaths of an area undesirable to people who have enough means for options. Dealing with a longer commute seems like a trade-off that many Americans have made given the choice of 'undesirable segregated neighborhood' and 'too rich for my blood'.
whalesalad 7y ago
The only way to fix traffic is to fix the problem plaguing virtually every human in the world right now: the inability to be deliberate, focused, and mindful about the task that they’re currently engaged in. Doesn’t matter what bandaids we slap on it, more rail, more carpool lanes, wider roads, etc... those are all treatments to the symptoms not the root cause. I would posit that if people were mindful and conscious about driving, traffic would improve dramatically. Get off your phone. Stop thinking about the emails in your inbox. Don’t worry about the dinner date you have tonight. Focus. Drive. Be mindful. Be aware.
- a1exyz 7y ago
  can you elaborate?
  - whalesalad 7y ago
    There is a podcast episode that touches on this concept under a totally different lens that might be meaningful: https://www.npr.org/2019/08/26/754336716/you-2-0-deep-work https://www.npr.org/2019/08/26/754336716/you-2-0-deep-work It’s a discussion with the author of a book called Deep Work, that intends to help the reader learn how to focus deeply on challenging problems, and avoid distraction. The EXACT same shit that plagues knowledge workers working on deep issues also plagues the rest of the planet: cognitive overload and distractions. It’s way bigger than deep work. We are all walking around with the equivalent of a dog shock collar in our pockets, on our wrists, and on our desks: anyone can steal our attention in the blink of an eye. Email. Text. Tinder notification. Instagram like. A lot of people cannot detach from these signals, and it consumes their ability to think and focus. Why do we allow this, as a society and culture?
- Swenrekcah 7y ago
  While getting people off their phones would certainly reduce injuries and fatalities, the fundamental problem of traffic is that a car takes up way too much physical space for only one person.
  - whalesalad 7y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
>So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work farther away from each other. That is a good thing. One of the reasons why the Bay Area is so expensive is that the commute to cheaper areas in Central Valley is so long. Mobility allows choices. The type of home and the neighborhood you want to live in, is no longer as tightly coupled to the type of job you want to do, the place of worship you want to attend, the school you want your kids to go to, or the doctor your family wants to see. Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety, or higher fewer people and having less service. Mobility means more choice, and more decoupling. This means you not having to live in a high priced, crappy home because of proximity to your job. The further the distance we can make 30 minutes of commute, the more choices people have.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Right. Some people want to live on top of each other in dense urban areas. That's fine and this should be an allowed pattern of development. "Enable them to live and work farther away from each other" is, simplified, pretty much the entire reason I wake up in the morning. I opt out of dense urban living. If the towns want to opt out of having people like me working there, so be it.
  - cmurphycode 7y ago
    Well, right. But, I think that a lot of people are frustrated because living in dense urban areas is NOT an allowed pattern of development in most cities, especially the Bay Area.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Right. It doesn't work for anyone. I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. Zone the ring road to kill sprawl. Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc. Best of both worlds. It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).
esotericn 7y ago
Increasing the number of lanes of traffic available increases the number of people who can get from A to B using that network during a specific time period. Whether "congestion" increases or decreases is besides the point. Congestion is definitional in economically successful urban areas. The trivial example is to imagine a theoretical road with free-flowing traffic and a 10mph speed limit. Add another lane and now twice as many cars can get from A to B (if the demand comes). No individual car will make the journey faster.
Reedx 7y ago
One of the biggest reasons I'm looking forward to self-driving cars is to solve the traffic wave[1] problem. These are so unnecessary and deeply frustrating. When I started paying attention to what was causing traffic in the Bay Area I saw them all the time. There's so much added congestion due to erratic speeds, merging too late, rubbernecking and so on. 1) https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_persons_sudden_brake_can_create_a_wave_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_person...
- epistasis 7y ago
  The entire point of this article is that doing something to solve the traffic wave problem still won't fix congestion, and is in fact the entire wrong problem to solve! I think that the article is a great refutation of the value of self-driving cars as a solution to our traffic woes. Self-driving cars optimize the wrong thing, enabling out-size use of miles travelled, and will make us less happy than if we instead optimized for accessibility, as this article argues.
  - wozniacki 7y ago
    As much as its in-vogue thing to push for higher density living some of us dread living close to each other like the plague, for very well founded reasons that have been proven right over and over again. Our population density (in the United States) is very high as it is in, most metropolitan regions. I'm sure there are perfectly valid reasons for some to want to live in close quarters to one another. But it isn't for everyone given the intense polarization of the American public off late, around even issues that were unchallenged only a few years ago. Unfortunately, there is no end in sight for this development. It's better for everyone to choose to live as they see fit for their safety & security. (Tim Ferriss even cites risk of terrorism for him leaving the Bay area entirely! [1]) Fully autonomous zero-waste cars should be welcomed and not shunned. [1] I am Tim Ferriss, host of “The Tim Ferriss Show” and author of “Tribe of Mentors.” AMA! https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6zrh1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...
    - 7y ago
tempsy 7y ago
If the Green New Deal passes, a really interesting consideration would be a bill that would actually require employers to let (or require) employees to work from home a certain number of days a week.
- 693471 7y ago
  I swear this was part of Hillary's platform. I remember a big news article about it.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Do you have a source or article about that? I would be interested to see what that means for places where you can't work from home (restaurants, doctor's offices, etc.) I work from home full time and it's pretty incredible (despite being a little bit lonely.)
  - tempsy 7y ago
    No because it is my personal idea. Obviously this is really only relevant for knowledge workers. There would be of course exceptions for anyone who needs to physically be at their workplace to do their job.
- masonic 7y ago
  Congress has no such power.
readams 7y ago
There are two dimensions under which we can alleviate traffic problems. One is to increase throughput of roads and transportatio, and the other is to increase density and otherwise make efforts to allow people to live closer to their jobs and services they need. The article would have us believe that only one of these things exists or could be useful, when in fact both can be true and both can help to improve the situation.
- wnoise 7y ago
  Both can be true, but if society has already spent a lot on one, than it can be much much more efficient to gather the low hanging fruit on the other.
- igornadj 7y ago
  Well, in some cases big overpasses or 5 lane roads make high density difficult or unpleasant. You can't have both a high density area and a freeway.
epx 7y ago
I have a first-hand experience: my town created a lot of "binaries", that is, converted pairs of streets into one-way avenues, in order to speed traffic. But now one needs to drive 4x longer to reach the same destination. Even if average speed increased 2x (and it did not), everybody stays on road 2x longer.
- wnoise 7y ago
  Making lots of one-way streets is certainly an overused hammer, but it shouldn't double the distance traveled, it should add at most three blocks, and usually far less.
  - epx 7y ago
    Sure, the changes went beyond one-way streets, that was one of the tools; but the final result was, you used to be able to go A to E almost straight, now you need to go A,B,C,D,E.
atlantictopacif 7y ago
Unstated assumption: living in an inner city is the best way to live; living in the suburbs is worse, and living in a rural area is the worst.
ghobs91 7y ago
Road traffic is caused by two main things: congestion and bottlenecks. Congestion is solved by properly designing cities and their transit systems so that there's an optimal ratio of car/bus/train/bike use. Bottlenecks are solved by properly designing the road network itself so that you don't have situations where 5 lanes become 2, or highway onramps/off-ramps that are too short and cause an entire lane to be backed up by people entering and leaving. Yes adding more lanes by itself doesn't solve the problem due to induced demand, but refusing to expand highways while simultaneously neglecting to have transit keep up with growth is even worse. I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to keep up with growth.
- YokoZar 7y ago
  > I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to keep up with growth. Why not just tax the transit use directly? That way you remove the complexity of determining which new housing is reducing traffic (by letting people commute less) and which housing is increasing traffic by how much.
  - me_again 7y ago
    Taxing transit use directly is called a bus ticket. However when you provide unmetered road usage you also need to provide subsidies to persuade people to use transit, which is what transit taxes do.
    - YokoZar 7y ago
      There are other ways to do road pricing: odometer taxes, toll roads, even fuel taxes.
- 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
  > Congestion is solved by properly designing cities and their transit systems Redesigning a city/system won't eliminate congestion because it can form even in straight-line conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZC9h8jgSj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZC9h8jgSj4 It all starts when a single car slows down, causing the car behind slow further, the chain reaction continues until all traffic stops. The phenomena can be seen as waves in the video. However, breaking is not the cause of the problem because this situation wouldn't exist if individual cars were able to accelerate at the same time as those in front. The answer are smart vehicles capable of accelerating with zero reaction time. I don't think congestion is a problem by itself as long as there are no traffic waves and no bottlenecks ahead. Just imagine congested traffic moving uniformly at high speed.
mjevans 7y ago
This isn't what they studied, but a simple thought experiment shows a limited use case where traffic absolutely can be helped by speeding things up. Let's imagine a world where self driving cars are required for freeway driving; this allows them to respond in a predictable and timely manor with respect to directives to avoid lanes (and not jump the line) as well as to go at an exact speed. An event (accident, whatever) obstructs One of Five possible lanes for use (including the HOV lane) on a section normally rated at 60 MPH. This reduces the capacity of the road by 1/5th, or alternately, one lane of flow should be re-distributed across 4 lanes (1/4th per lane). Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self-driving cars. There is a lead up zone where the speed is expected to ramp up to the new target, followed by a merge zone where the lanes reduce and the flow is re-shaped to balance traffic evenly. The cars would then pass the incident zone in this higher speed lane-compressed flow, before expanding out and then slowing back down to normal speed. Due to the unexpected nature of the incident there has also been a buildup of volume before the incident, so to alleviate that slightly higher flow will be allowed to drain the high pressure area. In the above hypothetical case, for 4 out of 5 lanes nornally at 60MPH, I would prefer to imagine: (1 + 1/4) * 60MPH => 75, but round up another 5 MPH for the bypass flow for a total of 80MPH in the corrected flow area. Many sections of freeway could likely support that safely ; they're often engineered very well but have conservative speed limits set for political and driver quality reasons. However some sections would 'cap out' at a lower actually safe speed; in those sections the above procedure could help minimize the traffic flow impact. However... CGP Grey really nailed the real problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
- dev_dull 7y ago
  > Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self-driving cars. There’s so many great opportunities like this once the cars are self driving and connected. For example, a ten lane highway without dividers! 8v2 split depending on the time of day and traffic patterns. How many times have you been stuck in a lane with the other lanes in the other direction completely open?
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
alephnan 7y ago
How about max-flow min-cut theorem?
- anticensor 7y ago
  That assumes complete control of the network. Even one unknown link would break the flow optimisation.
jldugger 7y ago
It's pretty straightforward logic: if driving places cost you 10 percent less time, would you drive less, or more?
zajio1am 7y ago
Seems to me that the article does not get the reason why people move to big cities: > So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work farther away from each other. If people can live and work farther away while keeping travel time the same, then they have more opportunities for work and leisure in their reachable distance. That is major advantage of living in a big city compared to a small town.
rayiner 7y ago
This article disproves itself. The two chief errors are as follows: 1) The article incorrectly discounts the value of time saved by avoiding congestion. The study the article cites actually estimates $7/hour for time saved on a commute, plus a whopping $22/hour for increasing reliability on a commute: http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf. Both figures are critically important. As to time savings, transit commutes are significantly longer: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. 30% of public transit commutes in NYC are over 1 hour, compared to just 10% of car commutes. 28% of car commutes are under 30 minutes, versus just 6% of transit commutes. In Dallas, a place without the geographic constraints of NYC, 57% of car commutes are under 30 minutes. People in Dallas are accruing tremendous time value savings by driving as compared to people taking transit in NYC. As to reliability--while in theory transit should be highly reliable, in practice it isn't. In DC, rail on-time performance is just 87%, meaning you'll be late once a week on average. NYC's performance is worse--it recently just broke 80% on-time performance: https://www.metro-magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway-on-time-performance-passes-80-for-first-time-in-6-years/74646 https://www.metro-magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway.... All this has a practical ramification. The US has some of the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling.... 48 minutes per day for the US, versus 101 for heavily transit-dependent Korea. 2) The article acknowledges that from 1982 to present, we have been able to increase vehicle miles traveled per day by 60% without significantly increasing daily commutes. The article illogically assumes that there is no value to that increased mobility. But if there wasn't nobody would do it. People do it because they would rather have a bigger, newer house, in a place with better schools, than a shorter commute. The article not only fails to quantify the value of those additional amenities, it refuses to acknowledge they even exist.
- robocat 7y ago
  Whenever I read a smalltowns article, the article assumes high density living is great or can be drastically improved, and usually bakes in some arguments about why low density suburbs are evil. They seem to completely ignore the votes made by people's feet on something so important to most of those people. I have experienced some of the costs and benefits of both city and rural lifestyles, in a variety of countries. I dislike anyone trying to restrict that choice (even if it is for the good of X).
hnal943 7y ago
> We can always travel more miles at higher speeds to reach the same stuff—family, friends, jobs, dining, shopping—if technology and cheap energy enable us to keep spreading out. Heck, some of us might commute to the moon if we could. This is where the argument unravels for me. Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an obvious good. Also, I'm not sure about commuting to the moon (although if it was fast enough, why not?), but it would be cool to visit. The increased ability to travel broadens people's perspectives. I don't understand why this is the fight they want to have.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an obvious good. That's fine for freeways that people are taking across multiple states. When trips are too long to work as commutes, the level of traffic is low lower and you're immune to induced demand from everyday traffic. But this is about the roads that get you around a city. If you make those roads a lot wider, but the housing density drops 3x, your ability to visit family doesn't improve at all. Increasing the distance you can go in 6+ hours broadens horizons. Increasing the distance you can go in 30 minutes inflames sprawl and congestion, unless you have some kind of efficiency miracle to apply to the construction.
whycombagator 7y ago
> very rarely would anyone be willing to spend 6 minutes worth of their wages (say, on an express toll lane) to avoid that congestion—turns out this has been studied and people will pay, on average, more like $3 an hour, or well under minimum wage. That doesn't quite make sense to me. If someone makes 60k a year (USA GDP per capita) then, roughly speaking, isn't 6 mins of pay for them $3? Most tolls are <= $3 in my experience
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me either. Most people would gladly spend $3 to save an hour of their life.
  - comicjk 7y ago
    If they thought about the trade-off that way, sure, but people have a desire not to feel "taken advantage of", a feeling which might be triggered by road tolls.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    Express tolls here max out at $10 - I'll pay the $10 if it saves me 30 minutes (the toll signs also give expected travel times for the express (toll) lanes compared to the regular lanes).
cadence- 7y ago
Perhaps the solution to traffic is remote work + Starlink? Most of the jobs in downtowns of big cities seem to be office jobs in skyscrapers. Can’t most of those people just work from home instead? This would also increase demand for local restaurants and shops to serve all those people working from home.
Causality1 7y ago
>a staggering tripling of the developed land area with zero net population growth Sounds like a good thing to me. Cramming twenty-six thousand human beings into each square mile of space is every bit as perverse as our modern diet of fat and sugar, or spending sixteen hours a day sitting down staring at a screen.
wwarco 7y ago
Uhhhhhhhh.... Okay let the bridges fall.. let that be on responsibility on the locals? Engineers? As opposed to a trading system that works?
dbalbright 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Huh, nothing about the potential for self driving cars to optimize road usage? Yes, it does require 100% buy in, and it will probably happen in Asia and Europe before the USA, but a fleet of self driving vehicles can theoretically coordinate in ways people can’t (not to mention the standard lack of parking needed for taxi-like personal transportation). But then would people just live even further out, given that even drive time is now free?
cromwellian 7y ago
This is like arguing having a faster CPU, GPU, more memory, or more networking speed always ends up with the same delays. Your modern word processing software seems as low or slower at reacting to UX than old 16/32-bit processors from the 90s, even though your computer is exponentially faster. But this completely ignores the RADICAL improvement in capability. The latest word processors may not render at 60Hz, with 16ms latency to UI events, but they are multilingual, they support vector fonts, they have collaboration features, and on and on. Some basic phone operations might be more convenient on an old feature phone than a modern touch phone, but the smartphone delivers to much more. Our transportation infrastructure is our nervous system, our circulatory system. Maybe adding more neurons won't let you think faster. But it might make you think in ways you couldn't before. Other animals can process and react to stimuli vastly faster than we can, but our 'latency' perhaps affords us greater capabilities. More than thinking about individual latency, it might be worth considering whether hyper-mobility benefits the overall system granting group benefits that exceed individual costs. (or positive externalities that exceed negative externalities)
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  Props for actually thinking.
- 24gttghh 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the negative externality of burning more fossil fuels because we're driving farther than ever before is a big enough problem that no positives like being able to live in a house with a big lawn is worth it.
known 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry purchased a London cab so that he could use bus and taxi lanes to efficiently drive around London

161 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

Fixing congestion by speeding up traffic is a red herring. Think of peak usage (rush hour) like pouring a 5-gallon bucket into a sink. The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big the pipe is but a big pipe sure helps it go away faster. This principal applies to mass transit as well. There will always be backup, like on the subway platform at 5:05pm, but more capacity (more lanes, faster flow, more frequent service, etc) means it will cycle through faster. This article's gripes about measuring the cost of congestion are mostly accurate. That TTI study is laughable. Their gripes about mobility not being a goal are totally bunk. I understand their agenda and why they feel this way but the reduction in cost of moving a fixed distance has enabled us to massively increase our standard of living. They just don't like it because it's made certain other societal problems more bearable so we haven't fixed them yet (e.g. terrible zoning in some places) and it's environmentally unfriendly. Barring some revolution in transportation on par with the automobile I doubt they'll go unfixed that much longer. I'm not in the least bit sympathetic to the author's belief that increased difficulty of travel is good. I grew up somewhere that was hard to get to and the economic reality that bring sucks (your dollars only go like 80% as far) and people would be stupid to want to impose on this on themselves. The author is conflating his distaste for the automobile (which is fashionable and has some merit,especially on environmental grounds) with a distaste for lower cost/higher speed transportation in general. If you were to re-write his article and instead complain about how city buses and subways have made it possible for people's range to extend beyond their neighborhood or imagine some alternative reality in which cars are replaced with carbon neutral mass transit of equivalent cost/throughput it would become immediately apparent how nonsensical this distaste for reducing the time/money cost of physical distance is. Edit: My analogy is for reasonable pipe sizes only.

elcomet 7y ago
The issue is that new usages appear as soon as the pipes get bigger. So you're never making it go away faster.
- YZF 7y ago
  It's one of those things everyone always says but doesn't seem to always be true. There used to be a spot on my commute that always had traffic jams. It was a single lane turn coming off a bridge and having to merge with a busy road. Traffic always used to back up and block the entire bridge. A couple of years ago they changed the one lane into two lanes and put a light. No issues since. But adding a big highway before a congestion point, that doesn't help.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  And why is that a bad thing? It means people are not forgoing trips because the cost (time, money, either, both) is too high.
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    Maintaining a sprawling network of massive pipes costs a lot of money, and precludes more efficient forms of plumbing.
mehrdadn 7y ago
> The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big the pipe This doesn't make sense? If your sink's pipe was 1 meter in diameter you wouldn't overwhelm it with 5 gallons would you? Not saying that should be the goal, but the reasoning seems wrong...
- SilasX 7y ago
  True, but the point is, making pipes big enough to actually make this work ... is physically impossible with current constraints.
- beefalo 7y ago
  That would be like having a 1 mile wide freeway

40acres 7y ago

Would love to see a study that examines the level of racial segregation within a city and how it correlates with commute times from suburbs / exurbs into that city. Segregation, and the lack of resources that go to certain neighborhoods because of it, generally make large swaths of an area undesirable to people who have enough means for options. Dealing with a longer commute seems like a trade-off that many Americans have made given the choice of 'undesirable segregated neighborhood' and 'too rich for my blood'.

whalesalad 7y ago

The only way to fix traffic is to fix the problem plaguing virtually every human in the world right now: the inability to be deliberate, focused, and mindful about the task that they’re currently engaged in. Doesn’t matter what bandaids we slap on it, more rail, more carpool lanes, wider roads, etc... those are all treatments to the symptoms not the root cause. I would posit that if people were mindful and conscious about driving, traffic would improve dramatically. Get off your phone. Stop thinking about the emails in your inbox. Don’t worry about the dinner date you have tonight. Focus. Drive. Be mindful. Be aware.

a1exyz 7y ago
can you elaborate?
- whalesalad 7y ago
  There is a podcast episode that touches on this concept under a totally different lens that might be meaningful: https://www.npr.org/2019/08/26/754336716/you-2-0-deep-work https://www.npr.org/2019/08/26/754336716/you-2-0-deep-work It’s a discussion with the author of a book called Deep Work, that intends to help the reader learn how to focus deeply on challenging problems, and avoid distraction. The EXACT same shit that plagues knowledge workers working on deep issues also plagues the rest of the planet: cognitive overload and distractions. It’s way bigger than deep work. We are all walking around with the equivalent of a dog shock collar in our pockets, on our wrists, and on our desks: anyone can steal our attention in the blink of an eye. Email. Text. Tinder notification. Instagram like. A lot of people cannot detach from these signals, and it consumes their ability to think and focus. Why do we allow this, as a society and culture?
Swenrekcah 7y ago
While getting people off their phones would certainly reduce injuries and fatalities, the fundamental problem of traffic is that a car takes up way too much physical space for only one person.
- whalesalad 7y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

>So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work farther away from each other. That is a good thing. One of the reasons why the Bay Area is so expensive is that the commute to cheaper areas in Central Valley is so long. Mobility allows choices. The type of home and the neighborhood you want to live in, is no longer as tightly coupled to the type of job you want to do, the place of worship you want to attend, the school you want your kids to go to, or the doctor your family wants to see. Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety, or higher fewer people and having less service. Mobility means more choice, and more decoupling. This means you not having to live in a high priced, crappy home because of proximity to your job. The further the distance we can make 30 minutes of commute, the more choices people have.

esotericn 7y ago
Right. Some people want to live on top of each other in dense urban areas. That's fine and this should be an allowed pattern of development. "Enable them to live and work farther away from each other" is, simplified, pretty much the entire reason I wake up in the morning. I opt out of dense urban living. If the towns want to opt out of having people like me working there, so be it.
- cmurphycode 7y ago
  Well, right. But, I think that a lot of people are frustrated because living in dense urban areas is NOT an allowed pattern of development in most cities, especially the Bay Area.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Right. It doesn't work for anyone. I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. Zone the ring road to kill sprawl. Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc. Best of both worlds. It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).

esotericn 7y ago

Increasing the number of lanes of traffic available increases the number of people who can get from A to B using that network during a specific time period. Whether "congestion" increases or decreases is besides the point. Congestion is definitional in economically successful urban areas. The trivial example is to imagine a theoretical road with free-flowing traffic and a 10mph speed limit. Add another lane and now twice as many cars can get from A to B (if the demand comes). No individual car will make the journey faster.

Reedx 7y ago

One of the biggest reasons I'm looking forward to self-driving cars is to solve the traffic wave[1] problem. These are so unnecessary and deeply frustrating. When I started paying attention to what was causing traffic in the Bay Area I saw them all the time. There's so much added congestion due to erratic speeds, merging too late, rubbernecking and so on. 1) https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_persons_sudden_brake_can_create_a_wave_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_person...

epistasis 7y ago
The entire point of this article is that doing something to solve the traffic wave problem still won't fix congestion, and is in fact the entire wrong problem to solve! I think that the article is a great refutation of the value of self-driving cars as a solution to our traffic woes. Self-driving cars optimize the wrong thing, enabling out-size use of miles travelled, and will make us less happy than if we instead optimized for accessibility, as this article argues.
- wozniacki 7y ago
  As much as its in-vogue thing to push for higher density living some of us dread living close to each other like the plague, for very well founded reasons that have been proven right over and over again. Our population density (in the United States) is very high as it is in, most metropolitan regions. I'm sure there are perfectly valid reasons for some to want to live in close quarters to one another. But it isn't for everyone given the intense polarization of the American public off late, around even issues that were unchallenged only a few years ago. Unfortunately, there is no end in sight for this development. It's better for everyone to choose to live as they see fit for their safety & security. (Tim Ferriss even cites risk of terrorism for him leaving the Bay area entirely! [1]) Fully autonomous zero-waste cars should be welcomed and not shunned. [1] I am Tim Ferriss, host of “The Tim Ferriss Show” and author of “Tribe of Mentors.” AMA! https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6zrh1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...
  - 7y ago

tempsy 7y ago

If the Green New Deal passes, a really interesting consideration would be a bill that would actually require employers to let (or require) employees to work from home a certain number of days a week.

693471 7y ago
I swear this was part of Hillary's platform. I remember a big news article about it.
RandallBrown 7y ago
Do you have a source or article about that? I would be interested to see what that means for places where you can't work from home (restaurants, doctor's offices, etc.) I work from home full time and it's pretty incredible (despite being a little bit lonely.)
- tempsy 7y ago
  No because it is my personal idea. Obviously this is really only relevant for knowledge workers. There would be of course exceptions for anyone who needs to physically be at their workplace to do their job.
masonic 7y ago
Congress has no such power.

readams 7y ago

There are two dimensions under which we can alleviate traffic problems. One is to increase throughput of roads and transportatio, and the other is to increase density and otherwise make efforts to allow people to live closer to their jobs and services they need. The article would have us believe that only one of these things exists or could be useful, when in fact both can be true and both can help to improve the situation.

wnoise 7y ago
Both can be true, but if society has already spent a lot on one, than it can be much much more efficient to gather the low hanging fruit on the other.
igornadj 7y ago
Well, in some cases big overpasses or 5 lane roads make high density difficult or unpleasant. You can't have both a high density area and a freeway.

epx 7y ago

I have a first-hand experience: my town created a lot of "binaries", that is, converted pairs of streets into one-way avenues, in order to speed traffic. But now one needs to drive 4x longer to reach the same destination. Even if average speed increased 2x (and it did not), everybody stays on road 2x longer.

wnoise 7y ago
Making lots of one-way streets is certainly an overused hammer, but it shouldn't double the distance traveled, it should add at most three blocks, and usually far less.
- epx 7y ago
  Sure, the changes went beyond one-way streets, that was one of the tools; but the final result was, you used to be able to go A to E almost straight, now you need to go A,B,C,D,E.

atlantictopacif 7y ago

Unstated assumption: living in an inner city is the best way to live; living in the suburbs is worse, and living in a rural area is the worst.

ghobs91 7y ago

Road traffic is caused by two main things: congestion and bottlenecks. Congestion is solved by properly designing cities and their transit systems so that there's an optimal ratio of car/bus/train/bike use. Bottlenecks are solved by properly designing the road network itself so that you don't have situations where 5 lanes become 2, or highway onramps/off-ramps that are too short and cause an entire lane to be backed up by people entering and leaving. Yes adding more lanes by itself doesn't solve the problem due to induced demand, but refusing to expand highways while simultaneously neglecting to have transit keep up with growth is even worse. I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to keep up with growth.

YokoZar 7y ago
> I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to keep up with growth. Why not just tax the transit use directly? That way you remove the complexity of determining which new housing is reducing traffic (by letting people commute less) and which housing is increasing traffic by how much.
- me_again 7y ago
  Taxing transit use directly is called a bus ticket. However when you provide unmetered road usage you also need to provide subsidies to persuade people to use transit, which is what transit taxes do.
  - YokoZar 7y ago
    There are other ways to do road pricing: odometer taxes, toll roads, even fuel taxes.
2_listerine_pls 7y ago
> Congestion is solved by properly designing cities and their transit systems Redesigning a city/system won't eliminate congestion because it can form even in straight-line conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZC9h8jgSj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZC9h8jgSj4 It all starts when a single car slows down, causing the car behind slow further, the chain reaction continues until all traffic stops. The phenomena can be seen as waves in the video. However, breaking is not the cause of the problem because this situation wouldn't exist if individual cars were able to accelerate at the same time as those in front. The answer are smart vehicles capable of accelerating with zero reaction time. I don't think congestion is a problem by itself as long as there are no traffic waves and no bottlenecks ahead. Just imagine congested traffic moving uniformly at high speed.

mjevans 7y ago

This isn't what they studied, but a simple thought experiment shows a limited use case where traffic absolutely can be helped by speeding things up. Let's imagine a world where self driving cars are required for freeway driving; this allows them to respond in a predictable and timely manor with respect to directives to avoid lanes (and not jump the line) as well as to go at an exact speed. An event (accident, whatever) obstructs One of Five possible lanes for use (including the HOV lane) on a section normally rated at 60 MPH. This reduces the capacity of the road by 1/5th, or alternately, one lane of flow should be re-distributed across 4 lanes (1/4th per lane). Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self-driving cars. There is a lead up zone where the speed is expected to ramp up to the new target, followed by a merge zone where the lanes reduce and the flow is re-shaped to balance traffic evenly. The cars would then pass the incident zone in this higher speed lane-compressed flow, before expanding out and then slowing back down to normal speed. Due to the unexpected nature of the incident there has also been a buildup of volume before the incident, so to alleviate that slightly higher flow will be allowed to drain the high pressure area. In the above hypothetical case, for 4 out of 5 lanes nornally at 60MPH, I would prefer to imagine: (1 + 1/4) * 60MPH => 75, but round up another 5 MPH for the bypass flow for a total of 80MPH in the corrected flow area. Many sections of freeway could likely support that safely ; they're often engineered very well but have conservative speed limits set for political and driver quality reasons. However some sections would 'cap out' at a lower actually safe speed; in those sections the above procedure could help minimize the traffic flow impact. However... CGP Grey really nailed the real problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

dev_dull 7y ago
> Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self-driving cars. There’s so many great opportunities like this once the cars are self driving and connected. For example, a ten lane highway without dividers! 8v2 split depending on the time of day and traffic patterns. How many times have you been stuck in a lane with the other lanes in the other direction completely open?
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago

alephnan 7y ago

How about max-flow min-cut theorem?

anticensor 7y ago
That assumes complete control of the network. Even one unknown link would break the flow optimisation.

jldugger 7y ago

It's pretty straightforward logic: if driving places cost you 10 percent less time, would you drive less, or more?

zajio1am 7y ago

Seems to me that the article does not get the reason why people move to big cities: > So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work farther away from each other. If people can live and work farther away while keeping travel time the same, then they have more opportunities for work and leisure in their reachable distance. That is major advantage of living in a big city compared to a small town.

rayiner 7y ago

This article disproves itself. The two chief errors are as follows: 1) The article incorrectly discounts the value of time saved by avoiding congestion. The study the article cites actually estimates $7/hour for time saved on a commute, plus a whopping $22/hour for increasing reliability on a commute: http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf. Both figures are critically important. As to time savings, transit commutes are significantly longer: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. 30% of public transit commutes in NYC are over 1 hour, compared to just 10% of car commutes. 28% of car commutes are under 30 minutes, versus just 6% of transit commutes. In Dallas, a place without the geographic constraints of NYC, 57% of car commutes are under 30 minutes. People in Dallas are accruing tremendous time value savings by driving as compared to people taking transit in NYC. As to reliability--while in theory transit should be highly reliable, in practice it isn't. In DC, rail on-time performance is just 87%, meaning you'll be late once a week on average. NYC's performance is worse--it recently just broke 80% on-time performance: https://www.metro-magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway-on-time-performance-passes-80-for-first-time-in-6-years/74646 https://www.metro-magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway.... All this has a practical ramification. The US has some of the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling.... 48 minutes per day for the US, versus 101 for heavily transit-dependent Korea. 2) The article acknowledges that from 1982 to present, we have been able to increase vehicle miles traveled per day by 60% without significantly increasing daily commutes. The article illogically assumes that there is no value to that increased mobility. But if there wasn't nobody would do it. People do it because they would rather have a bigger, newer house, in a place with better schools, than a shorter commute. The article not only fails to quantify the value of those additional amenities, it refuses to acknowledge they even exist.

robocat 7y ago
Whenever I read a smalltowns article, the article assumes high density living is great or can be drastically improved, and usually bakes in some arguments about why low density suburbs are evil. They seem to completely ignore the votes made by people's feet on something so important to most of those people. I have experienced some of the costs and benefits of both city and rural lifestyles, in a variety of countries. I dislike anyone trying to restrict that choice (even if it is for the good of X).

hnal943 7y ago

> We can always travel more miles at higher speeds to reach the same stuff—family, friends, jobs, dining, shopping—if technology and cheap energy enable us to keep spreading out. Heck, some of us might commute to the moon if we could. This is where the argument unravels for me. Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an obvious good. Also, I'm not sure about commuting to the moon (although if it was fast enough, why not?), but it would be cool to visit. The increased ability to travel broadens people's perspectives. I don't understand why this is the fight they want to have.

Dylan16807 7y ago
> Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an obvious good. That's fine for freeways that people are taking across multiple states. When trips are too long to work as commutes, the level of traffic is low lower and you're immune to induced demand from everyday traffic. But this is about the roads that get you around a city. If you make those roads a lot wider, but the housing density drops 3x, your ability to visit family doesn't improve at all. Increasing the distance you can go in 6+ hours broadens horizons. Increasing the distance you can go in 30 minutes inflames sprawl and congestion, unless you have some kind of efficiency miracle to apply to the construction.

whycombagator 7y ago

> very rarely would anyone be willing to spend 6 minutes worth of their wages (say, on an express toll lane) to avoid that congestion—turns out this has been studied and people will pay, on average, more like $3 an hour, or well under minimum wage. That doesn't quite make sense to me. If someone makes 60k a year (USA GDP per capita) then, roughly speaking, isn't 6 mins of pay for them $3? Most tolls are <= $3 in my experience

xyzzyz 7y ago
This doesn't make sense to me either. Most people would gladly spend $3 to save an hour of their life.
- comicjk 7y ago
  If they thought about the trade-off that way, sure, but people have a desire not to feel "taken advantage of", a feeling which might be triggered by road tolls.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  Express tolls here max out at $10 - I'll pay the $10 if it saves me 30 minutes (the toll signs also give expected travel times for the express (toll) lanes compared to the regular lanes).

cadence- 7y ago

Perhaps the solution to traffic is remote work + Starlink? Most of the jobs in downtowns of big cities seem to be office jobs in skyscrapers. Can’t most of those people just work from home instead? This would also increase demand for local restaurants and shops to serve all those people working from home.

Causality1 7y ago

>a staggering tripling of the developed land area with zero net population growth Sounds like a good thing to me. Cramming twenty-six thousand human beings into each square mile of space is every bit as perverse as our modern diet of fat and sugar, or spending sixteen hours a day sitting down staring at a screen.

wwarco 7y ago

Uhhhhhhhh.... Okay let the bridges fall.. let that be on responsibility on the locals? Engineers? As opposed to a trading system that works?

dbalbright 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Huh, nothing about the potential for self driving cars to optimize road usage? Yes, it does require 100% buy in, and it will probably happen in Asia and Europe before the USA, but a fleet of self driving vehicles can theoretically coordinate in ways people can’t (not to mention the standard lack of parking needed for taxi-like personal transportation). But then would people just live even further out, given that even drive time is now free?

cromwellian 7y ago

This is like arguing having a faster CPU, GPU, more memory, or more networking speed always ends up with the same delays. Your modern word processing software seems as low or slower at reacting to UX than old 16/32-bit processors from the 90s, even though your computer is exponentially faster. But this completely ignores the RADICAL improvement in capability. The latest word processors may not render at 60Hz, with 16ms latency to UI events, but they are multilingual, they support vector fonts, they have collaboration features, and on and on. Some basic phone operations might be more convenient on an old feature phone than a modern touch phone, but the smartphone delivers to much more. Our transportation infrastructure is our nervous system, our circulatory system. Maybe adding more neurons won't let you think faster. But it might make you think in ways you couldn't before. Other animals can process and react to stimuli vastly faster than we can, but our 'latency' perhaps affords us greater capabilities. More than thinking about individual latency, it might be worth considering whether hyper-mobility benefits the overall system granting group benefits that exceed individual costs. (or positive externalities that exceed negative externalities)

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
Props for actually thinking.
24gttghh 7y ago
I'm pretty sure the negative externality of burning more fossil fuels because we're driving farther than ever before is a big enough problem that no positives like being able to live in a house with a big lawn is worth it.

known 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry purchased a London cab so that he could use bus and taxi lanes to efficiently drive around London