I wonder if a picture like this could be used to fool future archeologists (or paleontologists or historic internetologists, or whichever would be studying it) into thinking we put great effort into segregating people with white lights and scum with red lights from using the same roads.
Not forcing everyone to go to a big centralized city rather than spreading everything out will actually fix it. We started doing that long ago but recently have started listening to greedy real estate developers gentrifying cities and now EVERYONE GO TO CITY TO DO THING and people are now shocked, SHOCKED that traffic into and out of cities is out of control.
And love how other "solutions" are LOL MASS TRANSIT. Yep, going somewhere on a track that doesn't go immediately to a certain place then having to get on a damn bus or in a taxi or a freaking Uber scam to actually get where they need to go which is not only ableist because it's difficult for people with mobility issues to do that, but also problematic if you need to actually transport any decent amout/size of goods on said public transportation. Cars are the best at getting places and no amount of whining and bitching and complaining is going to change it.
Could the problem be that all the money went into building roads and car centric cities, and no money was spent on making mass transit better or rethink on how urban sprawl might cause massive traffic problems?
Buses and trains. That, or spaghetti interchange that are bigger than the rest of the city. Also, replace key arterial roads with a pedestrian path, call that path a park, and charge $20 for entry. That will easily fund all the city services and nobody will be too inconvenienced by having to pocket their car as they walk across the "park" to get between neighborhoods. Now excuse me, I have to go murder a little blue bird that won't shut up about the garbage piling up
Nah, very little of congestion is trucks. You can even see that in this picture. Plus, you're not trying to make driving easier, that will just cause more people to drive (one more lane bro). You make everything else easier and people choose to walk/bike/bus and the roads clear up because there's fewer people choosing to drive.
The other point to make here is, obviously you look at this highway trip and say “Well I am obviously not walking or biking it.” But, the expansive gaps between home and destination are often caused by many many roads and parking lots like this one. We have dedicated gigantic land masses specifically to cars, and it actually lengthens travel time to our destinations.
I have been to countries where, even if thin highways exist, they’re not the rule and it’s easy for other modes to get under or around them; and their roads don’t dominate the urban areas. There, the answer is simple: Just walk, you don’t even need a bike.
Um acttschually, we knew about induced demand as early as 1920, but the government just doesn't care about science. (It used to be called traffic generation)
Part of it is that the organisations that design and build roads are also the ones who assess whether a road is needed. No big surprise that they "forget" about induced demand
The approach worked as intended, more perfectly even.
Look at all those useless expenses on the pic, some people profited on products that weren't necessary to begin with, and put a lot of moneys in so the system wouldn't accidentally change for the better.
I don't really like including pedestrians in there. Like sure, you can fit a bunch of people in a small area, but another point you shouldn't ignore is the throughput over time, and pedestrians are by their nature rather slow. Obviously if you're looking at shopping in a street lined by shops left and right, then that street becomes tailor-made for pedestrian traffic (and nothing else except perhaps bicycles). But public transport is much better suited for travelling any further distances, and that should be the main focus when deciding to ditch cars.
Sure! Both speed and distance matters a lot for throughput. The advantage of pedestrian traffic is that designing for it reduces the distance people have to travel and that it combines very well in conjunction with public transport, unlike cars. Also, the speed of mixed traffic is inverse correlated to the number of vehicles, hence is a special case in this regard where throughput may decrease as the volume per lane increases. The overall point however is that a single train can substitute a staggering amount of private vehicles (and who doesn't love leaning back, listening to music and reading the news while commuting?).
The units are passengers per hour. If they didn't account for speed, pedestrians would theoretically be one of the highest, since you can pack people together fairly tightly and still have them walk.
That reminds me of how shipping hard drives full of data is technically faster than downloading over the internet. Technically true, but almost always a poor choice in practice.
I wonder what the people/hour max is on something like a stadium entrance or hallway? I bet it's insanely high. Definitely some safety concerns though with crushing or trampling
That may be true for smaller cities, but in bigger cities it becomes impossible, because there just isn't enough space to house all the people near areas of interest. Cars don't factor in there at all. Give me a subway for the major areas, and perhaps a tram or bus system so you don't need that many subway stations in the residential areas, and you can have car-free city centers.
Well, no one is saying cars are worse for all purposes. If you want to take your family and dogs to a cabin in the mountains while also shopping for food along the way, it is probably going to be your best bet. Still, that is not what is pictured in the post. These are commuters that are probably moving from work to home (or vice versa), where cars really are the worst of most options. If the bus takes longer, it is probably an issue of allocation of funds for a shorter route and exclusive lanes for it.
Public transport is shit where I live. If I want to go and visit my grandma, it's a 20 minute drive, 15 on a good traffic day.
If I want to use public transport, its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station, then a 30 minute train journey, then a 40 minute walk to grandma's.
its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station,
Yeah, this is a really, really, really big problem with designing society for cars. Tons of people live in suburbia, with no mixed zoning, where they're a 2 hour walk from their nearest church, a 4 hour walk if they want a coffee; and so like you say, driving becomes their only option. It's the only thing they can do, realistically. And if they ever lose their car somehow, uh, say hello to poverty. Good luck getting a job at that coffee shop 4 hours away.
In situations where someone who lives very far from a city is visiting someone else very far, cars probably still make some sense. In the OP picture example, though, that is a prime candidate for transit refactoring. The presence of cars there is actually hurting them.
My town does buses better than that, but peak hour buses get stuck in traffic
So times when it's a 20 minute drive, it's 30 or 40 minutes by bus, when the same drive is 45 minutes in slow traffic, the bus is not a lot worse, at 1 hr
Anyway the better solution has busses only as a last mile solution, with trunks covered by rail
I don't really understand, how can the bus be so much worse? I assume it's on the same lanes as the cars? Is it that busses are forced to drive significantly slower than cars, or are you including the time to+from the bus station perhaps?
The bus must stop at other stops, wait at an interchange for passengers, then drive in the same lanes as cars (though there are limited lanes on some major roads)
There are no dedicated lanes on the route in my example, though it also is an express bus which doesn't stop at the interchange between where I live and the town centre. Also it is speed limited slower than the rest of traffic on the main road of the route
I guess everything I've been calling light rail fits into the suburban rail category. Multiple cities I've lived in are adding in "light rail" tracks between major centers
A step heavier. For the London example, think more like the Overground, the Purple Train or Thameslink. Or the many railways radiating out.
For other examples, think systems like the LIRR in NYC, the RER in Paris or the S-bahn in most major German cities. (though the Berlin one functions more as a metro that's just legally a train)
Re: legally a train
Metros and anything lighter are governed by different laws than trains. So German U-bahn is legally a tram, governed by the BOStrab, while S-bahn is legally a train, governed by the EBO
People will talk about induced demand and all that. But those people really just want to be able to get around. The fact that they just don't because the traffic is so bad doesn't mean you shouldn't add more lanes. It means you should add a lot more. Same with the one lane at a time approach. The fact that it didn't work does mean you are doing something wrong, but it maybe that you need to add 5 lanes at a time, not one.
Now I'm not saying they should actually do that, just that the arguments against are BS.
A comprehensive public transit system, well maintained and well patrolled is what LA really needs. I am talking Paris metro on steroids. And it is going to cost in the trillions. But it isn't getting any cheaper by waiting.
People on here love to shit on Houston's massive expansion of I-10 as a failure.
It worked great for years, but the population continued to grow. Having 5 fewer lanes on each side would just make things worse or increase sprawl by pushing people further out to thin the traffic. They ain't gonna mass-adopt bicycles in a city where the heat index is 115° + for months at a time
But that's the thing about induced demand. Of course widening a road temporarily improves traffic. But only temporary. That temporary improved leads to more people deciding to drive a car when they didn't in the past or even having different moving options in mind now which they didn't because if traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse than before.
That's not something the Internet came up with. It's been studied and researched for years.
It works on the simple principle of: If you make something more convenient to use, more people will use it.
Cars just don't scale. They can't do mass transport and aren't meant for that.
You need to make a city walkable and have a proper public transport system otherwise you will only ever lose even more money on car infrastructure while continuing to worsen traffic, heating up the city because of the sealed surfaces, making the city less desirable to actually exist in and worsening it's economy.
Build the city properly and people will actually choose a different option. No matter the climate in that city. Especially because heat is only worse with massive amounts of car infrastructure because they usually result in less green spaces and trees which provide shade and a cooling effect in the city.
What creates demand on I-10 in Houston is population growth. People haven't swapped from taking the bus to using a car. Houston leads the country in population growth. You add a couple million people to a me triplex and the infrastructure needs upgrading.
And trying to make people swap to a car by making traffic shitty works in some areas, but major cities that were largely developed after the invention of the car are almost impossible to retrofit for public transit. It's even worse in hot climates where the city was largely developed after air conditioning. My commute in a different Texas metroplex has gone from 45 minutes to 2 hours because of traffic, but between housing costs in the city and the lack of infrastructure to build transit I still drive every day and can't consider anything else.
Houston spends bonkers money on its light rail that nobody uses between May and October because last-mile transit is a problem in a city where you'll sweat through your clothes waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop. The office would smell like a gym if people used it.
I work in municipal development, and it's a rite of passage for planners to come in from out of state all excited to kill parking standards and shut down roads to make downtown pedestrian-only. Then they spend their first summer here and realize that when you have months of uninterrupted 100°+ days that you can't just wish away the necessity of door to door transportation.
I always feel like these induced demand arguments are suggesting that adding more lanes means the same number of people are just choosing to do more driving. Maybe, as you add more lanes you create the infrastructure for a city to grow, and it adds more people which then fill up the new lanes. People aren't just going out and buying a new car or rolling an existing car out of the driveway that they were previously not using because a new lane is built. These are net new drivers, who would not be in that city if the infrastructure for them hadn't been built.
Induced demand actually means that more people drive now because the people that didn't drive in the past / lived somewhere else because it was less convenient because of the traffic to commute by car or live somewhere else where they would have needed a car now decide to commute by car / actually move (yeah that also something we have observed) because the widening temporarily improved traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse.
Induced demand isn't something the Internet has come up with. It's actually a real thing that has been studied and researched. We know it exists.
It functions on the basic principle of: If you improve something and make it more convenient to use that something, more people will actually use it.
But the demand was always there. They wanted to move, they just didn't. So the lane didn't induce it. The choice of that word was intentional. It was to argue against more lanes. It is really unserved demand that they just ignored originally.
Exactly, thank you. If you build a 6-lane highway in Montana it's not going to magically fill up with traffic, thus one can conclude that context is missing from the Reddit-tier explanation of induced demand or that the entire idea of induced demand is wrong.
Adding, say, a sixth lane doesn't increase capacity as much as adding a 2nd lane, because traffic jams are generally because of interactions. It's very rarely the straight road that has a capacity problem. Adding a sixth lane adds capacity, but also creates more interactions.
Also, car lanes have a shit capacity, which goes down massively when it's busy. Like you said, mass transit is vastly superior, but even a dedicated bus lane would help. In contested traffic, a car lane transports less than a single bus per hour.
Yeah, the interactions suck. But if dealt with earlier, they could have been mitigated. Same way mass transit does. Express trains. Have a highway over a highway that goes to a specific place. If you stack enough of those, people get on the one they need and go straight to where they need to get. Not realistic though unless planned in advance.
That's the whole thing about induced demand though: People want to get somewhere and believe it or not, not everyone does so by car. But if you decide to add more lanes it temporarily improves traffic leading to those people that didn't take a car in the past or lived somewhere else because they knew traffic would be horrible if they moved, to actually commute by car now / go forth with their plan to move, increasing the amount of traffic again until it's as bad if not even worse than before.
Cars don't scale. Cars aren't for mass transport and shouldnt be used for that. A city with a highway like in the picture really needs a transit system/a better one and fever lanes
See you are missing the point. The demand isn't induced, it was always there. They wanted to move and use thier car, but traffic was too bad. My complaint is with the BS argument that the extra lane caused demand to materialize out of no where. It was always there, just unserved.
Did they though? To some extent, yes. But most people just want to get places and will take whichever mode makes the most sense for that journey, and what a city invests in will make that mode make more sense for more journeys. There is also a portion of journeys that just won't happen if they are too difficult.
Beyond the fact that adding five more lanes would still leave you with a horribly inefficient transport system, you also ignore that externalities that you are exacerbating by doing so. You're displacing thousands more people, worsening the division of communities, creating a lot of noise and air pollution, increasing car dependency etc
Your last paragraph is tangential to what I said. It doesn't disagree because it says something different. It's also oversimplified in some ways and just wrong in others.
In a place with essentially nothing but narrow two lane roads, no bike lanes or sidewalks, a little wider might serve some good. Adding a turn lane and a bike lane would free up tons of traffic.
If the highway increases in size, then more off ramps or more lanes in the off ramps are needed, which in turn need more lanes on the main street that connect to the off ramps. It's basic filtration system dynamics.
I'm not talking about highways, I'm taking about roads connecting suburbs etc. The only way I can get to work. They're terrible and only accessible to cars.
My town wants to widen a section of road near me. It's the only part of the road with only one lane each way
I'm torn. I know widening the road won't help traffic (right now that narrow bit reduces through traffic, making it a nice bit of road to drive) but if they do widen it, they will also add cycle lanes.
