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He claims roads are efficient. I'm not so sure. Even a small 2-seater has a lot of space around the (typically) single occupant. To say nothing of the wasted sp
by rconti 3y ago
He claims roads are efficient. I'm not so sure. Even a small 2-seater has a lot of space around the (typically) single occupant. To say nothing of the wasted space between vehicles when traveling at speed. When riding a motorcycle you can easily ride between cars laterally as well.
Of course, train tracks are also vacant almost all of the time, but when there is a train, the passengers are packed much closer together than in a typical road vehicle.
He also equates space with comfort but doesn't seem to consider the 2nd-order consequences. More roads, more space on roads, more space between things, and more infrastructure to accommodate cars shifts people from walking and cycling and so on, to cars, because the distances become greater. It's a kind of zero sum game. I wonder if the author would consider THIS demand-shifting to be "induced demand"?
- estebank 3y agoThere's an additional problem: traffic congestion isn't caused by the number of lanes, but the number of intersections. You can widen the highway all you want, but if the traffic still needs to be absorbed by a city with a handful of sliplanes into the city grid, the backup will continue to exist. When crossing the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the places where the highway has congestion is on the exits. You could even improve traffic on the bridge if you removed a lane and used that for buses, bikes or just emergency vehicles, because you're giving more time to the city to absorb the incoming traffic.
- trgn 3y ago> traffic congestion isn't caused by the number of lanes, but the number of intersections. I wish people understood this more. Parallel travel lanes really just create reptile-brained jostling for position, push-pull accordion effect. it's one thing on highways, but I absolutely can't stand it in city traffic. That constant rush to get to the next intersection, the weaving in&out of lanes just to gain a car length, that mindless churn that when there is a gap it needs to be filled. Like being surrounded by mindless automatons in a weird fill-the-next-gap game of life at best, by insecure typeA losers at worst. Drivers are a lot more calm and considerate when they just chug along in single file. And it doesn't even impact total travel time! The weird thing is. It is absolutely impossible to explain this to anybody. There's always the immediate reaction, but see more lanes, more lanes is better, more cars in more lanes. Intuition really fails here, it's an emergent property of drivers being 90% id the second they step in a car, and then throwing these dumb beasts in a system that doesn't curb their instincts.
- planede 3y agoRoads can be efficient, as buses exist. Cars are not.
- aqme28 3y agoYes. Adding more lanes doesn't help whatsoever if lanes aren't your bottleneck. Knowing your bottlenecks is like 80% of performance management whether it's for software engineering or traffic engineering.
- trgn 3y ago> traffic engineering For sure, but it the purpose of this discussion, and just looking at the real world. People are not packets. Traffic is a social phenomenon mostly. It's been a huge mistake to treat it primarily as an engineering problem.