5 ms·
There was an article about people's tendency to soak up additional road space posted on HN fairly recently: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-de
by to3m 12y ago
There was an article about people's tendency to soak up additional road space posted on HN fairly recently: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
(You can also see something similar with internet bandwidth. Same principle, I think.)
There's a Wikipedia article about the theory that narrower, signage-free roads are safer on aggregate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
(I don't know/care if these are useful to you - simply a brain dump, as you asked)
- Throwaway12830 12y agoSince we're talking about road space, check out the 20 lane highway in Burma. It has a lot of soaking up to do. http://i.imgur.com/DKRsGZ4.png http://i.imgur.com/DKRsGZ4.png It was on an episode of Top Gear. It's typically empty, and in the above image you have government officials going to work.
- to3m 12y agoYes, and you can also see the same thing in North Korea. But in North America, much less so...
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoI'll see your 20 lanes and raise you the Katy Freeway I-10 West in Houston. http://imgur.com/gallery/TYfGrIY http://imgur.com/gallery/TYfGrIY
- shiftpgdn 12y agoI drive this god forsaken freeway just about every day. Average top speed during commuter hours is about 10-15 Mph in both directions.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago> There was an article about people's tendency to soak up additional road space posted on HN fairly recently Article provides very little useful information. Again, it's obvious that if you expand one road in a congested city then it will get full of cars again, because it takes the overflow from all of the other congested roads. And if you reduce congestion in general then people might choose to drive more often. But this does not persist as a 1:1 relationship. China has proved as much by building a bunch of empty highways and cities, as is also demonstrated by urban highways carrying more traffic than rural highways with the same number of lanes. The "problem" is that if you have a lot of congested highways then you need to add a lot of lanes before you'll hit saturation, but that hardly proves that it can't be done. The observed 1:1 relationship in some locations is easily explained as a result of widespread insufficient infrastructure investment, resulting in roads with insufficient capacity even after the expansion.
- vacri 12y agoI had a recording of Ben Elton's standup in the mid-1980s in the UK, and he raised the issue of adding lanes to clogged roads just inviting more traffic, leaving the road just as clogged as before. He was drawing an analogy to the 'swing-top' bin - how you always try to fit more in and never empty it. "What would be the state of affairs a week from now if I gave you all a brand new swing-top bin to put next to your current one?"
- im3w1l 12y agoImagine if you have an IT company with a server. Your server can handle 1000 concurrent users. It is running slowly because a lot of people try to access it. So you buy another server. Now you have 2000 users, but once again it is starting to run slowly. You decide to stop there. Clearly, more servers wont help. You'd just get more and more users.
- to3m 12y agoI think the discussion here is about roads?
- wtracy 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jorgis 12y agoBy that argument, why don't we just pave everything and let people drive wherever they want?
- nitrogen 12y agoFlying cars would eliminate the need for pavement altogether.
- icebraining 12y agoIf your servers didn't make money, getting more would probably not hell you, no.
- wtallis 12y agoYou say that as though you think there isn't a significant economic benefit to having a more efficient transportation network. Having higher-capacity roads is beneficial even if they aren't toll roads.