It spreads out businesses and makes our cities utilities spending less efficient. The roads need to be maintained, and it is very expensive to maintain them.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s...

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

It's a problem insofar as building more roads is often sold as a way to resolve traffic problems. When traffic expands to fill all available roads, this solution is an expensive way to not fix anything.

There are probably more useful options, and faster ways to waste money, available to polities.

Saying "traffic will be solved by this!" is clearly misleading. But those extra cars on the road must be benefitting, or else they wouldn't make the trip.

This may be slightly different from a political cycle that spends ever-increasing amounts of resources on roads without examining if the results obtained provide a reasonable level of value for money. Or indeed address the issues that drove the construction of additional roads in the first place.

Broadly, fully utilized resources are not always an ideal goal. For example, my experience is that meeting rooms in offices are almost always in constant use, no matter how many there are. This may not be the same as all uses of meeting rooms being desirable and efficient uses of the time and other resources used. I know I have been in meetings, enabled by a sizable of supply of meeting rooms, that could have been handled much faster with a handful of emails.

Have you ever worked on a shared compute cluster? In general, disks fill to capacity & machines run at capacity, no matter what those capacities are. It's bloat; files that don't get deleted until you run out of disk, because deleting files takes ten seconds. Massive processes that are left always-running to save ten seconds of launch time. So on and so forth. Basically, the user is getting some value. But it's very small, and thus makes a poor reason to make expensive upgrades to the cluster.

It always surprises me to see people actually believe this utter illogical nonsense. There's a finite amount of people and cars, so new roads satisfy existing demands but do not magically increase traffic until everybody drives 24/7 and beyond.

There are plenty of roads with very little traffic. Hasn't anyone of those anti-car-activists noticed?

It's a theoretical concept with no basis in reality as far as traffic is concerned. Every statistic I know of shows that more people move to cities, not farther away despite new roads. What drives people to longer commutes is not new roads, but high housing prices in cities.

Also, when you build useful roads, traffic there certainly increases, but somehow ideologists neglect to measure how traffic on other roads previously used for the same route decreases.

It’s a problem if your assumption was that demand was closer to fixed and building more roads would “spread drivers out”, reducing congestion.

This was for decades, and still to some extent is, a very wide-spread assumption in local politics, leading to incredibly questionable urban planning decisions.

It seems reasonable to assume that latent demand per capita is fixed, but at a level too high for a city to accommodate without destroying its density advantages.

The problem always seemed to me to be less about road capacity, and more about city density and poor planning. I think we need to rethink the central urban hub model for cities. I suspect small hubs throughout the city would dramatically reduce congestion. We face similar scalability problems in tech. Typically if you have too much traffic going to your server you won't upgrade the server, but spin up more nodes. We distribute the traffic instead of spending larges amounts of money on infrastructure to send it all to a single node.

And another problem of this is that it causes feedback loops. I'm now in a position where I either have to continue to find working outside my city or relocate closer to the city centre contributing more to the urbanisation and population density problem.

With the right government incentives I see no reason why we could reestablish the city centre as a consumer hub. A place for shopping and leisure, etc. Then outside the city centre we could have tech hubs, financial hubs, industrial hubs, etc, all with good (perhaps even free) transportation between them. The time and money this would save seems like a no brainer to me. But then again, I don't really know anything. Perhaps there is a good reason to continue densely packing people into small 2-3 mile radiuses, where space is so limited most people can't afford a car, a decent size home, or even a decent sized office to work out of.

I don't see city center commerce and leisure hubs as being particularly able to dominate neighborhood and suburban equivalents. I need a car to get out to work anyway (8 miles away from the city center), so once all the fixed costs of the car are covered, it's incredibly cheaper and more convenient for us to shop and eat in the suburbs.

I don't see government incentives changing that in a meaningful way.

What I'd advocate for is governments to tax the hell out of companies who want to buy offices in city cores without a good reason. All a lot of these companies do is contribute to congestion and unaffordable property prices through increased urbanisation which forces people into the city or to deal with the congestion. A few years ago my girlfriend use to have to travel an hour every day to get to the city centre to work in a call centre. What's the point in that?

If instead governments allocated certain areas of cities which have low congestion and offered companies tax breaks for opening offices there you probably would see many moving out of the cities to the suburbs, reducing congestion and making properties more affordable.

I honestly think one of the main factors contributing to depress and mental-illness today, and why people don't have kids like they used to is because of the way we're living. Who the hell is going to raise a kid on £35,000 in 10m x 10m one-bed "flat" in a city like London? However, if on that money living in the suburbs of a city like Birmingham you'd be able to afford a reasonable two-bed home with a driveway and garden. The problem is uncontrolled urbanisation is driving businesses to city centres, and often to the major cities, then forcing anyone who wants to decent job to follow along whether they can afford to or not.

I bet most well paid developers living in the UK here live in London. And that's by no accident. It's not that they all just love London so much that they're happy to live in tiny apartments with no hope of raising a family or affording a mortgage. They do it because that's where all the decent tech jobs are. And why? Who is benefiting from this? A few very rich people and large businesses who can afford offices in city centres?

Not sure whether you made a mistake in conversion, but 100 sqm is actually a fairly decent living space here in a city like London (Tokyo).

My 90-odd sqm house has been plenty large enough to raise a family. Small garden, no driveway. But who needs car ownersip when there's three well-connected rail lines within a 7-minute walk?

Density need not be the problem you imagine.

This is fantastic to hear, what forward thinking city do you live in?

If we didn't subsidise highways so much, demand for them would be reduced, and it would make more sense to build denser housing and provide public transportation.

I've never sat in stop-and-go traffic, looked around and thought "Gee, this is great utilization of this road!"

Oddly, I have looked around a crowded standing-room-only train and thought "Gee, these load factors must be good for farebox recovery"

My solution to noisy transit is to wear headphones.

I think the problem is more cultural conditioning, I've been riding transit for 25+ years, and I like taking transit to work. Others who haven't ridden transit don't understand why I'd ride a bus to work even though we get "free" parking.

On the way to work the bus is usually faster than driving (the bus takes the carpool lane), on the way home, traffic is bad enough that the bus is probably about the same speed as driving (maybe a bit longer since for one stop it needs to leave the freeway express lane so needs to cut through 4 lanes of traffic to get to the stop and then again to get back into the express lane), but I don't care since I'm usually reading.

The land use required to merely own cars is not great but it’s not the primary cause of sprawl in the US. There are plenty of examples that show car-oriented development with transit to a city center can work at up to 2000 people per km^2 and a typical American suburb has less than a fourth of that population density.

The traffic deaths can be reduced dramatically by reducing miles travelled and speed, but if we’re playing that game they also rank lower than infectious disease which spreads just fine on transit. Traffic deaths also are only a bit higher than suicide in America and lower than it in Europe; suicide is a crude example of the excess death burden of unhappiness, which ought to be considered.

And furthermore I’m not even convinced you’ve been on a crowded train. BART is almost never truly crowded. Trains in Wuhan are crowded. Crowded often means literally shoving your way in if you want to go anywhere. And the person I responded to claimed he thinks about the tollbox operator on a crowded train.

So yeah, dying in traffic on an ugly highway? Cool story bro.

Which Bay Area trains are you taking that are not crowded? Both BART and Caltrain are full during commute hours -- Caltrain express trains are usually standing room only (in rail cars that aren't well designed for standing passengers) and BART is running crush-loads out of Embarcadero in the evening.

The Caltrain local trains are usually less full but those all stop trains take forever to go any significant distance. (SF to RWC is about twice as long on a local as on a baby-bullet)

Indeed. And trains usually don't go from people's homes to their destination, so they typically cause traffic of some sort around train stations.

But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.

Commuters don't all drive to the city center, they drive to 1000s of working places and arguably that's easier to handle traffic-wise than the traffic around fewer train stations (in one city!).

If businesses were spread out near major transit lines, that'd be another matter, but as it is now, the density is too low to serve well, transfers are a hard sell to commuters, no one wants to commute 40 minutes by train only to have to wait 15 minutes to transfer to a bus that takes another 15 minutes to get them to work.

VTA transit tries to serve a huge area with light rail, but everything is so spread out and there are so many stops that it takes forever, you can take light rail the 12 miles from downtown San Jose to Mountain View, but it'll take over an hour with 28 (!) stops in between. You could bike faster.

If you don't put a price on it then people won't prioritise, and the demand becomes endless. And you can never have supply to meet an endless demand.

That's the point -- we should incentivize people who can time shift to do so thereby alleviating traffic for those who can't.

There are, however, a lot of people for whom that $50 more in weekly commute costs, would be financially deadly and almost unavoidable.

It's easy for me to advocate for congestion charges; they clearly benefit me. Those who make a lot less than I do might feel very differently.

If the McDonalds employee has to pay $50 in fees to get to their job, it changes their financial calculations around whether that is a viable job. If enough of them decide to quit because of this, the restaurant will need to pay its employees more, subsidize their commutes or shut down.

If the restaurant shuts down, then it didn't make sense for them to be in an expensive urban hub, and the negative externality of the traffic their employees generated is gone. I suspect a lot of only-barely-viable jobs would go this way, and that's where traffic reduction would come from.

If they pay more, or subsidize commutes, they are paying to paying for the negative externality of filling up the highways to bring their employees in. The people who want cheap cheeseburgers in an expensive urban hub will decide if they want to pay more for cheap cheeseburgers to cover the cost. If they don't, it doesn't make sense for it to be there and the traffic isn't worth it.

What’s the point in me commuting to work to write code on a couch in an office that feels like my living room anyway?

The alternative is not Walmart paying stickers $50K/yr. The alternative is no or fewer Walmart jobs in locales with these laws. IMO, that makes things worse, not better, for prospective Walmart employees.

I also feel like where I live is none of my employer’s business, provided I can do the job. Maybe I’d make an exception for fire or police, but even there I’d rather not make the employer totally paternalistic.

Poor people would likely benefit overall from more efficient use of roads.

Interstate roads allowed people to live far from things they need (e.g. jobs). Your suggestion is backwards, people should be located near things, not the other way around. Roads with no fees have distorted supply and demand. The market can't function.