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Traffic jams may have complicated causes for any fixed number of cars on the road, but it's worth noting that they don't often have traffic jams in rural Kansas
by mhartl 18y ago
Traffic jams may have complicated causes for any fixed number of cars on the road, but it's worth noting that they don't often have traffic jams in rural Kansas. The fundamental problem of traffic is that there are too many cars on the road, and that's because road usage is priced too low. The predictable result is queueing, i.e., traffic. Most of the fancy investigations into the psychology of drivers, etc., are simply higher-order corrections to this basic 0th-order result.
- mleonhard 18y agoPublic transportation is the answer to traffic jams. If the government stopped renting out street-side parking for artificially low prices then the cost of parking would become a bigger incentive to use public transportation.
- mhartl 18y agoAgreed. Pricing parking correctly would be one big step. A potentially even bigger step would be to repeal the medallion laws that currently give taxis weird cartel status in most cities. This would allow anyone to offer transport for money, i.e., you could form jitneys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitney). I secretly want to find a large city with bad public transport (Los Angeles? San Jose?) and start a jitney company---which, on its way to making billions, would solve the problem of urban mass transit. (Talk about "Be good" and "Make something people want"...)