There's a large body of evidence [0][1] indicating that adding road capacity does not alleviate congestion. In the short run, one tends to see immediate rises in traffic on the new infrastructure. Over a longer period, the amount of traffic utilizing new infrastructure increases until all added capacity is being consumed. This is known as induced demand [2].
Congestion pricing [3] is a more economically viable manner of reducing congestion on shared infrastructure, but it comes with its own set of concerns [4].
[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-d...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/nyregion/congestion-prici...
If we should reject road expansion because it fails to decrease travel times, then we should certainly reject a shift towards public transit, which actively makes them much worse.
"Congestion" is a non-problem. You get no points for "solving congestion" by kicking everyone off the road. It's quite likely that a highly congested road is still delivering better end-to-end travel times and user experience than a realistic bus system.
"Solving congestion" is great for you if you can afford the congestion charge, but it's not clear why a democratic society should let the rich kick the poor off the roads for their personal convenience. Really the only angle under which it's a coherent goal is reducing carbon emissions, but then you don't even need to talk about induced demand - it's sort of obvious that more road capacity means more driving.
In a city with bicycle lanes, bikes are a lot faster than cars for short trips, and they require far less infrastructure - since bike lanes are about a third of the width of a road, and they require no dedicated parking space. Not to mention the fact that bikes are far cheaper to own and operate.
I can understand having a sentimental attachment to cars - but in practical terms, they're a ridiculous solution to the problem of mass transit.
Because we don't all share an origin, destination, and schedule. Public transit can be extremely effective for the parts of the journey that it covers, but the extreme ineffectiveness of walking the other parts can cancel all that out. You have to completely rethink density and development patterns to get to a point where most origins and destinations are near stations. That would take decades even if we wanted to do it, and SB827 was just defeated in California. Then you have to run trains frequently enough that schedules don't matter. That's expensive as hell and the necessary capital projects take decades. And even if you do them, they might deteriorate and regress later if you don't keep up with the maintenance (see: New York).
When I lived in Berkeley, BART covered 90% of my commute distance, station to station, in 25 minutes. My actual end-to-end commute time was over an hour, basically a wash compared to taking an Uber over the Bay Bridge at rush hour. Bicycling to my local station got it down to maybe 50.
25 minutes is an entire commute the average American. Being just 1.5 miles away from a station doubled that. Public transit has a wickedly hard problem to solve - even 90% coverage is still next to useless.
I live in a city with very good public transport. My average tram trip is about 20 minutes, and there is usually one that goes directly to where I want to go. I live within a hundred meters of a tram stop - and this is far from unusual. I also live within a mile of a rail station, and there is a bus stop within a hundred meters.
As I see it, there are two intertwined problems: 1. American cities are built around the car. Homes are distributed across vast areas, in the form of suburbs. 2. Many cities have very bad public transport options. This makes cars more viable, despite the inherent inefficiency of what is essentially a road-train with a hundred drivers.
If you experience transport in the context of a society built around the car, then sure, a car is going to seem viable. Vast amounts of capital has gone into the system that makes it viable. Living and working patterns are all built around it. It doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, physically, a car takes more money to build, run, takes up more space to carry fewer people, requires more infrastructure - and, even given a network of roads vastly more comprehensive than any train or tram system ever designed, works very badly.
Suburbs are also horrible from an efficiency perspective.
We practically used to, until cars encouraged development to spread out.
> You have to completely rethink density and development patterns to get to a point where most origins and destinations are near stations.
In other words, go back to what the world was like before cars.
> Public transit has a wickedly hard problem to solve
But not impossible. European cities seem to have a less difficult time.
European cities had the good fortune to lock in a healthy level of density as "neighborhood character" thousands of years ago, so that the same sorts of structures Americans read as the rapacious excesses of a new era of unfettered capitalism and runaway inequality (i.e. 5-story apartment buildings) are instead seen as historic. They also aren't in a position of having to unwind the "mistake" of certain neighborhood communities existing.
>In other words, go back to what the world was like before cars.
The places we would invade to "go back" to, and the places we would abandon to "go back" from, are now all occupied by humans with voting rights and a preference for the status quo. Not to mention that the population is simply larger, and more concentrated in metro areas. The city centers abandoned during suburban flight were quickly claimed by low-income people of color, and also a bunch of extra people were born in (or migrated from farmland and small towns to) suburbia.
>We practically used to, until cars encouraged development to spread out.
The tenements of pre-car industrial cities were so traumatic that we still have the scar tissue today, in the form of wildly overbearing zoning and building codes. The Progressive movement's obsession with making sure buildings have enough light and air and open space, which holds back San Francisco from even European-level density today, is rooted in the outrage felt towards living conditions 100+ years ago, which the car saved us from.
Obviously there's a healthy middle ground and it's frustrating that we don't take it, but our culture has the memory of what it was like to live too close together, and quite likes the ability to spread out.
Why does public transit increase travel times?
But the journey from Cambridge train station to Coventry train station takes 1h47m by car and 2h16m by train [1], as the train takes a V shaped route via London. Birmingham New Street station to Norwich station takes 3h6m by car, 3h57m by public transport [2]. Kings Lynn to Cromer, 1h7m by car, 2h27m by public transit [3].
And that's going from train station door to train station door in major cities - if you're going to somewhere out-of-town, the public transport penalty can be even greater.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't build public transport, of course. I'm not a car owner, so I rely on public transport to get around. But we also shouldn't deny the downsides of public transport.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Cambridge+Station+[CBG],+S... [2] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Birmingham+New+Street+Stat... [3] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/kings+lynn+train+station,+...
Buses are like Open Seating offices, but for transportation - just like sharing one big table at work, there's little privacy on the bus. You're going to learn about this person's skin condition because they're yelling into their cell phone.
The trunk of a car is a mobile secure locker, allowing the car to become a sort of mobile base in a remote city - you can repeatedly visit to stash purchases in the trunk, and have a cooler of food and drinks stored there as well.
I'd hesitate to specify that certain equilibria are reasonable while others are not. Building more roads to reduce congestion does not achieve that goal, in part because of the latent demand you describe (see [0] "Effect in transportation systems").
Ultimately, if your goal is to decrease time spent traveling, you will see more benefit from alternative policies. Such policies may include:
* increasing cost of using the roads (e.g. congestion pricing)
* constructing alternate, denser forms of public infrastructure (e.g. subways)
* increasing the density of passengers in vehicles (buses, carpooling, etc.)
* funding technological advances that increase the density of vehicles utilizing the road (e.g. self driving cars)
You could do this by decreasing the efficiency of the non-freeway roads, or increasing the cost of using the roads, which both only ‘solve’ the problem by reducing general quality of life (especially for poorer people, who might just get even poorer if they can’t commute affordably).
Or you can increase road capacity to keep up with population growth, and invest in alternative transport that people actually want to use. That means no cycle lanes or buses, because people really don’t want to use them (buses are only really efficient for short trips, if you have to change buses to get to work then it ends up taking so long you may as well just be inefficiently sitting in the comfort of your own car).
This doesn't work because in a city you'll eventually you end up with more roads and parking lots than buildings. US cities were built like this, and the more road capacity you build, the more sprawl you get (everything is further apart), which increases how much people have to drive which increases the traffic... It's an evil spiral of congestion.
The scaling doesn't work.
For another similar example, think of how much percentsge space you need in a 2 story building devoted to elevators (almost none) vs a 200 story building (a significant percentage of the middle core of the building is nothing but elevators). Take that and scale it even worse, and you have roughly the small town vs big city traffic issue.
The truth is that you can, in fact, build enough roads to reduce congestion. It may be too expensive. The road land use fraction may be too high. There may be political problems. All of these factors have to be taken into account before deciding to build more roads.
Nevertheless, it is physically possible to build enough roads, and anyone who doesn't acknowledge this basic reality isn't having a serious conversation.
Sure it's probably possible, but by the time we've built that many roads we'd need to cycle from the carpark to the building anyway.
If roads took up zero physical space, I'd agree with you, but the perverse thing is that as population density goes up, you not only have more people on the roads (requiring more road), but you also have more need for living space, stores, and office buildings (all which take up space, giving less room for roads).
As it is, comparing it to a small town is meaningless.
More traffic is what those roads are for. More traffic means more activity. Focusing only on the capacity / congestion couple is myopic. If you really want 0 traffic just remove all roads: not sure the side effects will be as easily dismissed.
Increasing road capacity can cut commute times, for like a week. When people know they can get somewhere more quickly and more reliably because of increase road capacity, they drive more, which in aggregate, causes the new roads to become as gridlocked as the old roads, and the old roads are still gridlocked.
Single occupancy vehicles are just not efficient for moving large numbers of people around. In order of preference you basically want people to 1. not have to commute (telecommute) 2. walk 3. ride a light vehicle (bike, electric scooter, whatever) 4. take a train or Ferry 5. take a shuttle 6. take a bus 7. carpool 8. drive 9. take a plane.
(Actually not sure where Lyft and Uber fall in that stack given there's evidence that ridesharing platforms seem to be increasing traffic in the areas they operate in.)
Of course you can mix any and all of those but your city's transportation infrastructure ought to accommodate each of them and prioritize each in kind.
To talk about efficiency, it's also not very efficient to assign a whole dwelling to each family. But that's what people want to have, so you can either plan for that, where you at least have the possibility of success, or you can continue to plan cities based upon utopian fictions, and continue to get the same results.
Are you suggesting that if cities upzoned more areas for smaller dwelling like townhomes and duplexes, families would, what, refuse to live in them? Those units would just remain empty? Because if so, you're wrong.
It's not the free market, it's not individual choice blocking smaller dwellings, it's zoning regulations.
The popularity of detached housing is really only a post-WWII phenomenon created by massive infrastructure investments in highways and tax incentives for homeownership (versus renting, which is basically pouring money down a hole in the US). It's a historical anomaly, and I don't think you can disentangle the desire for detached homes from the policy structures that incentivize it.
But saying [t]he popularity of detached housing...[is] a historical anomaly is somewhat misleading.
Widespread prosperity is new by historical standards. Penicillin is new by historical standards. Air conditioning is new by historical standards. It's unclear why owning detached housing - similar to what only richer people used to own - is any different.
If Texas can't build enough roads to solve the problem, no one can. Houston's road system is enormous.
"We built everything for cars, and now everyone is driving!" What a shock.
The idea that politicians pledge to spend "billions" on biking (and actually do so) is particularly laughable. Where exactly is this biketopia? (It doesn't exist)
Your position is based entirely upon a utopian fiction, where if only we could tear the whole city down and rebuild it from the ground up, then maybe people would want to bike to work.
Look, if you want a serious discussion, maybe don't, like, lie?
> In LA less than 50% of the transit budget is spent on roads, despite them being the primary facilitator of transport.
1. What's the cumulative investment there? LA spent decades building out freeways, after all. It takes a while to turn that ship around.
2. LA is explicitly turning away from car-centric design and spending because it didn't work. They're the poster child for it, and traffic is the worst in the country. Maybe more transit and bike spending won't completely 'solve' traffic, but going by other cities' examples, they should be able to make it less bad.
Excess capacity induces demand, attracts it, by enabling people from further away to consume the capacity.
Right, but commutable land grows exponentially as roads are improved further from the city center. So, depending on what you value, it's a net win when a twenty minute commute gets you ten miles away instead of five.
2. People like to bike, and unlike cars, you can make the case that not very many people bike because the infrastructure doesn’t support biking. If less than 5% of the people are biking, but the politician who promotes biking is popular, that tells you something about reality vs. what people want.
3. Car companies have undermined attitudes that made driving a secondary mode of transportation (not to mention the streetcar conspiracy). It’s due time for a correction that allows North Americans to live a lifestyle less reliant on cars.
Why can't we have well-designed public transport? Edinburgh manages to do this, so I'm sure other cities could if they wanted to. The basic ideas are bus lanes and lots of high-density housing.
This would also have advantage of making housing affordable.
Oh who am i kidding. Thats politically impossible.
Not EVERYONE would have to live in the city. A lot are interested, and would move there themselves, and this would cut down on traffic significantly.
Because those people are going somewhere and increasing capacity of one road typically just moves the bottleneck. The only exceptions to this are when the traffic is going through the area with the new capacity and other other side has excess capacity. So something like increasing the capacity on a city bypass will reduce congestion, but increasing capacity into the city wont.
The other problem is induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand), when driving is quick and easy more people will drive until that's no longer the case.
> A politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new cycle paths" is somehow going to be more popular than a politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new roads".
How many (non-dutch) cities in the world have spent billions on cycle paths? They should be more popular because they're doing something that will actually reduce traffic and save money long term (cycle paths require a lot less maintenance), but IME it's the ones promising new roads that keep getting elected.
You don't have to be a genius to figure out that only devoting 50% of your transport budget to the mode used by 90% of the population is not a recipe for success.
Shifting even tiny numbers of people from cars to bicycles shaves off peaks of car traffic. Bicycle throughput is several times higher per unit of infrastructure. That has incredible potential to hugely benefit people driving cars by improving car traffic flow. Crazy high ROI potentially!
According to your logic too, one could argue that only devoting 1.5% of the transport budget to the mode used by 3.9% of its population is serious underfunding.
[0] https://blog.sfgate.com/bicycle/2014/04/21/new-sfmta-budget-...
(Also incorrect is that people "don't want to cycle to work", I see literally hundreds of them every morning in SF, and it's growing every year.)
There are many arguments in favor of cycling infrastructure, but unfortunately I'm versed enough in anti-bike comment threads to recognize someone who won't be convinced :) But here goes...
* bikes do less damage to road than cars, and therefore the maintenance cost of bike lanes is lower than car lanes, which require frequent paving
* bikes are important as a "last mile" transportation option for public transit commuters. densely-placed bike share stations improve the feasibility of public transit for people whose homes or offices are 1-2 miles from a train station.
* bikes are far smaller than cars and so you can push more traffic through a given width of road than with cars. this is especially relevant if you ever get to a downtown stretch where one car turning right at a pedestrian crossing causes an entire green light to be wasted on the rest of the cars (basically every light along Market Street in SF). cars are just wide and clumsy when driving in dense downtowns.
* the government frequently subsidizes behaviors that are considered virtuous (or conversely, imposes "sin taxes"), and also subsidizes services that benefit lower-income citizens. both of those apply here. car parking in downtowns can run $40+ for a day. bike share and bus commutes are $2-5 and keep people active.
I could go on, but again, I don't think your mind will be changed much.
You’re also falling for the same fallacy that cycling advocates fall for by obscuring the impact of cycling spending. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of people want to cycle to work, or if cycling adoption is up 10% if all you’ve done is gone from 3% of commuters to 3.4% of commuters (which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it). It’s the same as the startup that says they’re growing faster than google because they managed to go from 50 customers to 100. We all know it’s bullshit, it’s just a popular self-delusion that people enjoy.
Wrong. Vancouver, for example, built a network of protected bike lanes in a few years, and saw bike rates skyrocket. Bike commute mode share is now 10%, despite having much less than 10% of available road space, making bikes highly land-efficient.
> There are no cases in the world where cycling infrastructure has been successful in having a measurable impact on congestion.
That's because the number of cars increases to fill the amount of road space. But if you look at Amsterdam or Copenhagen, plenty of people are willing to bike when there's good bike lanes and paths for doing so.
In contrast, cities like SF or Seattle have a bare handful of protected bike lanes, a smattering of walk/bike trails, and they hardly connect to each other. It's hardly a surprise that most people don't want to bike in those conditions.
> which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it
If SF had spent "billions" the city would be covered in protected bike lanes. Needless to say, it isn't. This is a made-up figure.
There’s a lot of examples of cities spending huge sums of money on cycling (SF has spent far more than a billion on it), and none of them have been successful in drivingcycling adoption.
Also the only studies that show road building as ineffective are looking at cities that have many years of population growth where road spending didn’t even remotely keep up. People don’t materialize out of thin air to fill up new roads. You’re using neglect of infrastructure to justify further neglect of infrastructure.
This is wrong.
Biking is popular in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, it's popular in Munich, it's recently gained popularity in Vancouver, it's popular in Davis, CA, it's popular in Tokyo. Believe it or not, those cities don't all have the same climate.
Geography is more of an issue, but it's becoming less and less of one over time thanks to the steadily increasing popularity -- and steadily decreasing cost -- of ebikes.
Also, you claimed SF spent many billions on bike infrastructure. Where's the source?
Hills are becoming less of an issue due to ebikes (and electric bikeshare). The other possible solution is installing bike lifts, but, well, most cities still treat biking as a toy, and are unwilling to spend significant sums on it.
What would make me feel confident enough to cycle to work? Protected bike lanes and/or a massive shift in attitude among the drivers I encounter as a pedestrian and watch through the bus window.
I never said building infrastructure would convince everyone to bike. Rather, the government can (and often does) move society as a whole in one direction using money as a lever. Do taxes on gas or alcohol prevent everyone from driving or drinking? No, but they move the needle, just like building cycling infrastructure does.
And I never cited the "10% increase" as an important metric for the success of cycling infrastructure, you did. None of my arguments is about the absolute number of people cycling, although others have pointed out that biking is likely underfunded relative to the number of people who use the infrastructure. I just cited the increasing number of people on bikes as a counterpoint to your claim that "no matter what people say, they don't want to cycle to work".
And I can't see how SF could have invested nearly what you claim in biking infrastructure. Their cycling infrastructure is not particularly good compared to most "bike friendly" cities.
Can you cite any of those figures?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
(Source: https://www.bikebiz.com/news/traffic-in-the-city-2018 )
I think the source goes against both your claim and its own headline. Diagram 3.11 shows cycling to be a small part of the makeup.
3.11 appears to cover the whole day rather than just the rush hour, and again, the context of AmericanChopper's comments was "commuters". 3.5 in the original report (search for 'Traffic in the City 2018') gives more context as to how modal share varies throughout the day.
Sounds like people didn't want to cycle to work, but it was the next best thing after the car reduction measures.
Meanwhile, you talk sneeringly about "invest[ing] billions into poorly designed public transport". Public transport is, of course, something London does very well. Car commuting across the whole of London, inner and outer, is around 25%. Public transport commuting is around 50%. (Source: LTDS. This covers London residents only, so is probably an underestimate given the vast numbers of people from outside London who commute into the city by rail.)
It's also been measurably more successful than many other cities in driving cycling adoption. But if your argument in support of that (overall relatively minor) success involves statements such as "define London", and cherry picking particular suburbs, then I think that speaks to the strength of it.
Less than 2%. Not 50%. Not even 5%.
Maybe you have more up-to-date information to counter these numbers? If so, let's see them, please, as currently it seems like you're making wildly inaccurate unsubstantiated claims as the foundation for all of your comments on this subject.
Thanks.
https://blog.sfgate.com/bicycle/2014/04/21/new-sfmta-budget-...
That number is ludicrous, you made it up.
The problem is a lack of rationality. A politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new cycle paths" is somehow going to be more popular than a politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new roads". Even in cities where cyclists make up <5% of commuters.