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If you believe that car travel must be innately evil, then induced demand is a problem with building more roads. More roads mean more people using them to do so

If you believe that car travel must be innately evil, then induced demand is a problem with building more roads. More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. These tunnels will be toll roads, so if you just up the tolls you can have them not get jammed up. You then have a real idea of how much a tunnel can make and you can get people to invest in building more of them. Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.

astrodust 7y ago
The bad externalities of cars are numerous and extend well beyond those things you list, but primarily they create an astoundingly expensive barrier to being part of society and not someone who's left behind. There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get. Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people. What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  A lot of this stuff, 'ride sharing', self driving cars, boring company tunnels, and electric flopters seems not like a way to solve societies transportation/congestion issues but to solve it for the small percentage of well to do people.
paranoidrobot 7y ago
> More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision. My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options. For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic. If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.

astrodust 7y ago

The bad externalities of cars are numerous and extend well beyond those things you list, but primarily they create an astoundingly expensive barrier to being part of society and not someone who's left behind. There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get. Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people. What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?

Gibbon1 7y ago
A lot of this stuff, 'ride sharing', self driving cars, boring company tunnels, and electric flopters seems not like a way to solve societies transportation/congestion issues but to solve it for the small percentage of well to do people.

paranoidrobot 7y ago

> More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision. My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options. For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic. If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.