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The construction of bigger roads is the CAUSE of traffic jams, not the solution. The more you improve a highway system, the more people build and relocate to ta

The construction of bigger roads is the CAUSE of traffic jams, not the solution. The more you improve a highway system, the more people build and relocate to take advantage of the highway. But you can never upgrade the rest of the city streets to absorb all the cars spilling off the highway. The only solution is to invest in mass transit and vigorously control suburban sprawl (by increasing population density, making downtown living more attractive, and restricting new development anywhere within driving distance).

ars 15y ago
That's not a solution, that's giving up and saying "we won't let you live there". My experience is the opposite anyway - the more sprawl the less traffic. Very congested areas with tons of people were always horrible places to live, never a place to park, and it takes forever to get anywhere. (And please don't tell me your "solution" to that is making it so people don't want to go anywhere because it's too much trouble.) Putting underground subways like some cities have is simply unfeasible in most places. Buses are just too slow in congested areas.
- barrkel 15y ago
  If you're living in a very densely populated area and you "never have a place to park", you're doing it wrong. (To be clear: what are you parking? The whole point of a densely populated area is that you don't need a vehicle.)
  - ars 15y ago
    But I do need a vehicle - you try going grocery shopping with a bunch of kids and bringing back 10 or more bags without a car. I do know there are people who manage it, mainly by shopping almost every day, or by buying from stores very close to the house (and paying extra and dealing with a low selection). But, mass transit is not a complete solution. There are other use cases which you are not taking into account. I find very spaced out living, with a car, to be best. Ideally you have a centralized shopping area, so you only need to make one trip and get everything. (And of course no houses anywhere near it - keep all the stores together instead.) Even better is if the store area is right off the freeway so most of the time it's on the way to/from the commute. And if not, it's quick to get to.
    - Goladus 15y ago
      Sprawl does not mean a spread-out, rural area. Rural areas don't really have traffic problems in the way that metro areas do. Even suburbs of small cities don't have traffic problems on the same scale as major cities like NY, Atlanta, DC, LA, and Chicago. Traffic problems happen in dense, economically active areas. You have hundreds of thousands of people trying to move through the region every single day and that is what leads to the traffic jams. Sure, Kansas City is pleasantly spread out. Driving and parking there is very easy. But KC is also very small compared to most of the metro areas with serious traffic problems. Incidentally, food and grocery selection in the city where I live is vastly superior. Within a half-mile I have Trader Joes, Whole Foods and a standard supermarket (which caters to a much more diverse population to begin with) in addition to a number of specialty and ethnic markets. There's a farmer's market every Saturday right down the street. Also in close walking distance: Best Buy, REI, Bed Bath & Beyond, Blick Art Supplies, several bicycle shops. There's even a store that sells vinyl records. I walk to work. I have a car. I use it for groceries sometimes but not often. I never have a problem finding parking at the supermarket or at home. (parking anywhere else is dicey, though)
      - ars 15y ago
        Were you arguing with me, or helping me make my point? Because I agree with what you wrote - that's my experience as well. (And where you live sounds just like where I live.)
        Goladus 15y ago
        Neither, really. Though I might not have been clear-- I live in a densely populated area where there's public transit and I don't use a car much. I grew up in rural areas where the spread-out method works better. What doesn't work is trying to solve traffic problems by spreading everything out. In places that already are spread out, there really isn't a traffic problem to solve and communities can decide whether they want mixed-use environments or segregated environments based on other factors. In places where you already have a critical density (like Eastern MA where I live), spreading things out is no more feasible than a subway in rural Ohio. Right now, trying to drive from Cambridge to Waltham at 6:00pm will probably take 45-60 minutes due to traffic congestion. That's because of all the people trying to leave Boston for the suburbs.
- PakG1 15y ago
  Sprawl works well to reduce traffic only if the sprawl develops well enough so there's no real reason for people to travel between regions regularly. Otherwise, it'll most definitely increase traffic. Why wouldn't it? Increasingly large population spread over an increasingly large area, with all the traffic only going in a few specific directions.
  - ars 15y ago
    If the sprawl is designed properly there are a large number of small roads connecting the regions, so the transit traffic is also spread out.
- gcv 15y ago
  Sprawl reduces traffic only along the leaves of the commuting graph: few people live there, and no one commutes through the leaves to reach inner hubs. When a node stops being a leaf, more and more vehicles travel through it, which means increased congestion. It also means that people living on leaf nodes but who work in the hubs have to travel farther and farther, along more invreasingly congested nodes, than they do in their own remote neighborhoods. This is certainly the case in areas like New York (whose suburbs grew largely because Robert Moses liked cars more than trains, although he himself did not even drive) and San Francisco (which has a unique bi-directional commute traffic jam problem, where both the city and far-flung suburban sprawl nodes are job hubs). I don't have a link handy, but I believe the growth of Atlanta followed this exact pattern and became a classic case study of awful urban planning.
Jun8 15y ago
This sounds counterintuitive but is absolutely true. I know that London instituted a "tax" on all vehicles entering the downtown area, which helped greatly with the congestion. When I was visiting Munich I also saw that some roads were deliberately narrowed to discourage people driving. The infrastructure increase can never match the increase in number of vehicles. One can conjecture a modified version of Peter Principle: (Unless drastic measures are taken) traffic density will always increase to the level of congestion. Or think about the fact that regardless of how big your hard disk is, the rate it's being filled is generally constant. So, bigger roads doesn't make too much sense (there are also arguments from landscape beauty, i.e. remember how they demolished the Beijing Old Town for easier access, more roads mean more of that.)
patrickgzill 15y ago
I wonder if the gridded road construction of Manhattan, with almost all roads about the same size, (save the Avenues), is a solution. Instead of a few big roads, build many smaller roads, which will then allow for efficient travel to many places.
- T-hawk 15y ago
  The problem here is that the number of intersections scales quadratically, as the square of the number of roads. Each intersection cuts the capacity of the roads and represents a potential cause of gridlock and accidents.

ars 15y ago

That's not a solution, that's giving up and saying "we won't let you live there". My experience is the opposite anyway - the more sprawl the less traffic. Very congested areas with tons of people were always horrible places to live, never a place to park, and it takes forever to get anywhere. (And please don't tell me your "solution" to that is making it so people don't want to go anywhere because it's too much trouble.) Putting underground subways like some cities have is simply unfeasible in most places. Buses are just too slow in congested areas.

barrkel 15y ago
If you're living in a very densely populated area and you "never have a place to park", you're doing it wrong. (To be clear: what are you parking? The whole point of a densely populated area is that you don't need a vehicle.)
- ars 15y ago
  But I do need a vehicle - you try going grocery shopping with a bunch of kids and bringing back 10 or more bags without a car. I do know there are people who manage it, mainly by shopping almost every day, or by buying from stores very close to the house (and paying extra and dealing with a low selection). But, mass transit is not a complete solution. There are other use cases which you are not taking into account. I find very spaced out living, with a car, to be best. Ideally you have a centralized shopping area, so you only need to make one trip and get everything. (And of course no houses anywhere near it - keep all the stores together instead.) Even better is if the store area is right off the freeway so most of the time it's on the way to/from the commute. And if not, it's quick to get to.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    Sprawl does not mean a spread-out, rural area. Rural areas don't really have traffic problems in the way that metro areas do. Even suburbs of small cities don't have traffic problems on the same scale as major cities like NY, Atlanta, DC, LA, and Chicago. Traffic problems happen in dense, economically active areas. You have hundreds of thousands of people trying to move through the region every single day and that is what leads to the traffic jams. Sure, Kansas City is pleasantly spread out. Driving and parking there is very easy. But KC is also very small compared to most of the metro areas with serious traffic problems. Incidentally, food and grocery selection in the city where I live is vastly superior. Within a half-mile I have Trader Joes, Whole Foods and a standard supermarket (which caters to a much more diverse population to begin with) in addition to a number of specialty and ethnic markets. There's a farmer's market every Saturday right down the street. Also in close walking distance: Best Buy, REI, Bed Bath & Beyond, Blick Art Supplies, several bicycle shops. There's even a store that sells vinyl records. I walk to work. I have a car. I use it for groceries sometimes but not often. I never have a problem finding parking at the supermarket or at home. (parking anywhere else is dicey, though)
    - ars 15y ago
      Were you arguing with me, or helping me make my point? Because I agree with what you wrote - that's my experience as well. (And where you live sounds just like where I live.)
      - Goladus 15y ago
        Neither, really. Though I might not have been clear-- I live in a densely populated area where there's public transit and I don't use a car much. I grew up in rural areas where the spread-out method works better. What doesn't work is trying to solve traffic problems by spreading everything out. In places that already are spread out, there really isn't a traffic problem to solve and communities can decide whether they want mixed-use environments or segregated environments based on other factors. In places where you already have a critical density (like Eastern MA where I live), spreading things out is no more feasible than a subway in rural Ohio. Right now, trying to drive from Cambridge to Waltham at 6:00pm will probably take 45-60 minutes due to traffic congestion. That's because of all the people trying to leave Boston for the suburbs.
PakG1 15y ago
Sprawl works well to reduce traffic only if the sprawl develops well enough so there's no real reason for people to travel between regions regularly. Otherwise, it'll most definitely increase traffic. Why wouldn't it? Increasingly large population spread over an increasingly large area, with all the traffic only going in a few specific directions.
- ars 15y ago
  If the sprawl is designed properly there are a large number of small roads connecting the regions, so the transit traffic is also spread out.
gcv 15y ago
Sprawl reduces traffic only along the leaves of the commuting graph: few people live there, and no one commutes through the leaves to reach inner hubs. When a node stops being a leaf, more and more vehicles travel through it, which means increased congestion. It also means that people living on leaf nodes but who work in the hubs have to travel farther and farther, along more invreasingly congested nodes, than they do in their own remote neighborhoods. This is certainly the case in areas like New York (whose suburbs grew largely because Robert Moses liked cars more than trains, although he himself did not even drive) and San Francisco (which has a unique bi-directional commute traffic jam problem, where both the city and far-flung suburban sprawl nodes are job hubs). I don't have a link handy, but I believe the growth of Atlanta followed this exact pattern and became a classic case study of awful urban planning.

Jun8 15y ago

This sounds counterintuitive but is absolutely true. I know that London instituted a "tax" on all vehicles entering the downtown area, which helped greatly with the congestion. When I was visiting Munich I also saw that some roads were deliberately narrowed to discourage people driving. The infrastructure increase can never match the increase in number of vehicles. One can conjecture a modified version of Peter Principle: (Unless drastic measures are taken) traffic density will always increase to the level of congestion. Or think about the fact that regardless of how big your hard disk is, the rate it's being filled is generally constant. So, bigger roads doesn't make too much sense (there are also arguments from landscape beauty, i.e. remember how they demolished the Beijing Old Town for easier access, more roads mean more of that.)

patrickgzill 15y ago

I wonder if the gridded road construction of Manhattan, with almost all roads about the same size, (save the Avenues), is a solution. Instead of a few big roads, build many smaller roads, which will then allow for efficient travel to many places.

T-hawk 15y ago
The problem here is that the number of intersections scales quadratically, as the square of the number of roads. Each intersection cuts the capacity of the roads and represents a potential cause of gridlock and accidents.