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> more efficient roads It's not possible. It's a geometry problem. Cars take up too much space. And if you increase the size of the roads well, you simply ind

> more efficient roads It's not possible. It's a geometry problem. Cars take up too much space. And if you increase the size of the roads well, you simply induce demand, adding more space inefficient cars to clog up the road. This is why places like LA and Houston have never solved their traffic problems. There's only really one way to move people faster, and that's to focus on moving the person with more space efficient forms of transportation (ie. trains).

DevKoala 5y ago
That’s good too. Let’s rethink transportation.
toast0 5y ago
> This is why places like LA and Houston have never solved their traffic problems. If you put a population cap on LA or wherever, you could solve traffic with construction. Instead, the goal is to increase road capacity inline with the increased trip demand that's largely driven by population growth. Sure, there are some trips that are taken when there's sufficient capacity, and not when there's not, and you can call discovery of those trips induced demand. But most of the demand increase is from population increase. LA is actually putting in a lot of mass transit, and it gets a surprisingly high (to me anyway) ridership, but it's pretty hard to provide a comprehensive solution to the commute needs of the area when there's no real centralization of workplaces or housing or even retail or amusement. All of those things are more or less distributed throughout the greater LA area, and people live in multi-income households, so relocating to be transit accessible for all earners is difficult. It's really hard to beat point to point time of a flexible, if congested, car vs inflexible transit lines if you have to make more than one transfer.