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Widening highways doesn’t fix traffic
- TedShiller 4y agoGood. More housing/highways is not the answer.
- samename 4y agoWhen is more housing not the answer?
- danny_codes 4y agoA growing population doesn't need more housing silly /s
- midoridensha 4y agoI think his comment was not well worded, and what he meant was that just building more housing farther away from everything, and then more highways to connect that housing, is not the answer. More housing is needed, but it needs to be in the city center, and the city needs to have public transit so that the residents of that housing don't need cars.
- TedShiller 4y agoPeople think more housing lowers housing costs. Those people have never been to a big city.
- recursive 4y agoThen why aren't all highways one lane?
- precommunicator 4y agoSome people will always have to use cars, regardless of how bad the traffic is. Not widening prevents people who wouldn't use cars from using cars. But certain throughout is required.
- DesiLurker 4y agoSo shouldn't the amount of [lanes on] highways be decided by actual physical housing in and out of the employment centers & also coupled with actual rising commuter traffic? thats relatively easy to gauge. otherwise not building highway lanes when really needed is just one more 'we've got standards now go make the sacrifices needed to meet them'. not saying cars are the only solution but then there should be some objectively better alternative investment like busses plus improved local connectivity. Also, the time delta between public transportation & car option should be a consideration.
- recursive 4y agoIf one lane is sometimes too few, then it seems to follow that widening highways is sometimes necessary or at least good, even if it doesn't "fix" traffic.
- metadat 4y agoJS-free archive link: https://archive.today/EVxOk https://archive.today/EVxOk
- missingcolours 4y agoThe entire concept that induced demand means there's no benefit to increased capacity seems so silly to me, and it seems to skate by with little scrutiny in the urban planning world. To analogize to technology, this is like saying "more bandwidth doesn't improve connectivity; increases in bandwidth get eaten up by more bandwidth-hungry applications". Sure, broadband connections were "eaten up" by new applications, like YouTube. But that's good! New things are possible that weren't before and users are benefiting! Similarly, if 20% more cars are traveling on a freeway now... they're choosing to do that for some reason. They're benefiting somehow, either because it's not actually as bad as before, or more people can be carried at the same speed (and they've switched away from an alternate route that was slower and reduced traffic on that route, or they're able to go somewhere at a certain time when they previously weren't, or something). No one's like "there's a new lane on the 5 and it's not moving any faster than it was before, I think I'll start taking it".
- throwaheyy 4y agoPoor analogy. More bandwidth does not occupy more physical space. Wider highways, very much so, to the point of producing an environment hostile to peaceful living, more noise and pollution, barriers to walking and nature etc.
- repsilat 4y agoThat's a different argument. The grandparent wasn't making a general case for the net benefit of added lanes, they were addressing the narrow argument of "induced demand" somehow proving that improvements are futile. And for that purpose the analogy was pretty good.
- throwaheyy 4y agoMy point was that improvements ultimately are futile because there are practical limits on how wide you can make a highway.
- listenallyall 4y agoHighways are typically built away from residential communities. Not always, of course, but far more people live next to (or on) surface streets than freeways. People are going to drive to work. Attempts at carpooling have been utter failures. Wider highways means more capacity means more people will take them, which is actually better for noise and pollution and safety, than driving on surface streets. Idling waiting for a red light is far worse, emissions-wise, than 15-20 mph in a freeway "traffic jam". People don't expect to walk across a freeway, they do expect to be able to walk across the streets near their home, which becomes nearly impossible when traffic is so bad on the freeway that everybody starts taking the off-freeway "shortcut" or "bypass" that your kids ride their bike on.
- ripe 4y agoI did not know this: “The Texas Constitution mandates that the majority of transportation funds go to improving the highway system.” No wonder the Katy Freeway in Houston is “one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.”
- crummy 4y agoI can't believe that's in their constitution. Amazing
- ogre_battle 4y agoBig Oil calls the shots in TX mate. You're surprised?
- jackmott 4y ago[dead]
- pjerem 4y ago> The Texas Constitution mandates that the majority of transportation funds go to improving the highway system I’m sorry to be rude but that’s incredibly dumb.
- hulitu 4y ago26 lanes ? Maybe they forgot some. /s Navigation SW: "Please align on lane 23" :)
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/HIn0U https://archive.ph/HIn0U
- gernb 4y agoTell that to Southern California. They're widening the 15 and the 71 currently
- chriscjcj 4y agoNot widening highways doesn’t fix traffic.
- iknowstuff 4y agoActually, it does, because the trillions of dollars not spent on a useless endeavor can be used on creating alternatives faster than driving. Only when those exist, commutes get shorter.
- stephen_g 4y agoYes, getting people off the road and into alternative transit options is about the only sustainable way to improve traffic over the long term (unless you have a dwindling population, then you could probably build enough road capacity to fix traffic). More transit only makes things better for those who want to continue to drive. Not that some targeted improvements to fix road bottlenecks isn't often warranted, but unless you're shifting trips to other modes, the traffic will only eventually create more bottlenecks for each one you fix!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jackmott 4y ago[dead]
- pasttense01 4y agoWidening highways fixes traffic everywhere except for the 50 to 75 or so biggest urban areas in the U.S. Go to Google maps and use the traffic option at rush hours and you will find that only those areas have congestion problems (except for temporary accident/construction problems).
- danny_codes 4y agoSo, where almost everyone lives?
- askvictor 4y agoInterestingly no discussion here (yet) about work from home, and the impacts this is having, and will continue to have on reducing traffic. This was always the dream in the 90s, but rather than a gradual shift, we got a sudden jolt (and something of a rebound). I wonder if transport planning will take this kind of change into account, or if it's completely beholden to the auto industry.
- ogre_battle 4y agoThis one might not be 100% owned by the oil and car lobby, but it is clear that most companies want people to come back. Most cities want it too -- if you don't need to be in the city then its going to lose tax revenue, both in terms of residents, but also things like sales tax from people who work downtown and eat lunch nearby. And the downtown donut shop -- what are they going to do for income now that everyone who used to work there is in the burbs or out of state? Point is there are a lot of forces trying to to undo that, not just the automotive lobby.
- wizofaus 4y ago> "Some may even choose to move farther away" I've been pretty sure for a long time that this is one of the most overlooked results of building/widening freeways/highways - a large number of us make decisions on where to live based on travel times of relatively newly-built or improved roads (not to mention cheap fuel etc.). That then effectively locks us in to a car-dependent city layout whereby too many of us live too far from the places we need to visit regularly (incl. where our family/friends live) for anything other than car-based travel to be convenient. Obviously there are huge benefits in making it easy for people to travel significant distances quickly and cheaply, but at some point the costs start to outweigh those, and it's not clear we have any sort of process in place for assessing when we've reached that point.
- danny_codes 4y agoI think we can safely say that the suburban experiment (and the car-dependent experiment) have failed completely. I was recently in Taipei. I stayed in New Taipei City, which is not the center of town. And yet, within a 10 minute walk there was (1) a very large, beautiful park (2) all the shops, food, barbers, medical clinics, etc you could ever need (3) a metro station. From that station I could get to most anywhere in Taipei & New Taipei, a metro area of 7 million, in under an hour. I could ride it 3 stops and board a high speed train 200 miles away, fully the other end of the country, in less than 90 minutes. In the month I was there, we probably rode transit 150 times, and only one train was ever late. By 4 minutes. What we've done in America is a complete disaster. Instead of being able to simply walk out your front door and get groceries, walk your kid to school, walk to the doctor, walk to the restaurant, we have to get in a car and drive FOR LONGER than the walk!
- capitalsigma 4y agoI mean, the NY transit system will take you pretty much anywhere in an area with a population of 8M. For scale, note that New York State alone is about 4x larger than Taiwan. I agree that having walkable cities is a good thing but it's not like all of the US is one giant suburb, and it's not like the US has anywhere near the density that would be required to justify "high speed rail across the whole country, just an hour away"
- 7e 4y agoIf more highways doesn’t fix traffic, how does more housing reduce housing cost? It would seem to merely increase the population.
- anticensor 4y agoHousing does not induce reproduction in the same manner as wider highways do more cars.
- closeparen 4y agoWe aren't advocating new housing because we think it will sit empty. That would be weird! The point is that on the margin, more people will be able to fulfill their desire to live in the region instead of being priced out. All induced demand says is that roads work similarly. With a road expansion, more people fulfill their desires to take more and longer car trips, instead of staying local to avoid traffic.
- floppiplopp 4y ago"Adding extra capacity to a network when the moving entities selfishly choose their route can in some cases reduce overall performance. That is because the Nash equilibrium of such a system is not necessarily optimal. The network change induces a new game structure which leads to a (multiplayer) prisoner's dilemma. In a Nash equilibrium, drivers have no incentive to change their routes. While the system is not in a Nash equilibrium, individual drivers are able to improve their respective travel times by changing the routes they take. In the case of Braess's paradox, drivers will continue to switch until they reach Nash equilibrium despite the reduction in overall performance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox