And yes, increasing housing supply lowers the price, and increases population. That's the point; to move people into the core who want to be there but otherwise couldn't afford it.
Mission success I guess?
The convenience of a car is determined by how likely you choose a car over other means when you need to get somewhere. If there's less roads, you're less likely to choose car, thus the lowering the convenience factor. If there's no roads at all, owning a car is meaningless since you can't drive anywhere, and its convenience is pretty much zero.
If this argument doesn't convince you, think also that driving may be convenient, but I find more convenient if we lived in a planet that's not a literal oven
But if SF makes a street pedestrian only, it just means that area is more inconvenient. And it might not even mean that, since the inconvenience will reduce demand so those who still drive there may have about the same level of convenience.
Exactly. Roads make driving more convenient.
Build trains and that makes taking the train more convenient so you get more of that.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Well, shit. The train is more convenient - but that's over twice the cost of petrol. Now imagine that I wanted to take another friend with me. It's absurd. The same scenario, but to a friend in Rugby (about half as far, different train line) costs me £23. Bargain!
There are multiple axes on which to nudge behaviour - and one of them is definitely price.
I'm a total petrolhead and I'm often irritated by the kind of cyclist that hates all cars and anyone who drives one, but I would like to see fewer cars on the road. Trains are an excellent way to achieve that goal (just not the way the UK does it).
I’m being generous that ‘walk a mile’ at source and destination would pass muster for people with difficulties.
Making our infrastructure for cars better seems like a much better solution honestly.
And you can use your car for more than just your daily commute.
Contrast that with me just getting in my car and driving to the downtown parking garage and paying for parking at a place that has a skyway where my feet never touch the street at all, and you can understand the dilemma.
Then I got really smart and just stopped working downtown completely and got a job in the suburbs with free parking and while the traffic is still bad, it's nothing like heading downtown is.
In my case, working downtown would have been the smart move. I lived in a suburb and worked in a neighboring suburb. The drive was 10 minutes and I could avoid the freeway. I looked into taking the bus because there was a bus stop right outside my apartments and found it would take a minimum of 40 minutes, but realistically with traffic and decent timing on the transfer, it would have taken over an hour. The reason? All the bus routes were essentially straight shots to and from the city, so to take the bus I'd have had to go all the way into downtown, switch buses, and ride all the way back out.
Look into a vitamin D3 supplement, approx ~5000 IU daily in the wintertime. Haven't been sick more than a day in the last 5-10 years.
If it was a cohesive strategy, where housing and transportation plans are moving together, there would be a lot less friction.
That's a tautology, roads are a convenience for driving.
Going back to traffic as the example, if I want to drive downtown to see a ballet but decide against it because traffic is bad, then they add more lanes and next year I do decide to drive to see that ballet, then I'm creating more traffic because they added more lanes. That demand wasn't induced -- it just transitioned from unmet demand to met demand.
If induced demand isn't nonsense, then I must be oversimplifying it. What am I missing?
Certain foods are more expensive than others. That's why we don't eat steak and lobster for every meal. But if the price of those foods went down, you can bet there would be a lot more demand. That's induced demand. Everyone was already getting enough calories and nutrients, but making something desirable a lot cheaper had the effect of more people trying to buy it.
No, you can bet there'd be a greater market-clearing quantity. Greater demand would mean people were willing to buy more at thesame price. If anything, over time, lower prices should reduce demand by setting s lower expectation of the “right” price and reducing the quantity people are willing to buy at higher prices.
Demand is the function mapping price to quantity people are willing to buy.
The cost of constructing roads is handled by other taxes, but that doesn't change that the roads themselves need to be priced higher to not have shortages.
That's arguably true of electric vehicles, but ICE engines pay road user fees by way of gas taxes, which are nonzero and related (imperfectly, sure) to road impact.
> causing the induced demand issue.
I think induced demand is not really a road price issue: more road access -> more desirability to attractive businesses -> more demand (at the same price) for road use.
Now, if you charged higher road prices instead of building more roads, to reduce traffic, you'd avoid induced demand by avoiding attracting business and raise revenue, it's true, but the induced demand isn't a product of $0 road cost (which isn't a thing, mostly) but of increased ease of access from the short-term effect of more roads.
Of course I didn't mention cost above. A rural area can meet its demand with a cheap asphalt two lane road. A city would need dozens of levels of bridges at a much higher prize to get ahead of demand. Which is why cities should look to transit which is not cost effective for rural areas.
But more roads increase the convenience of driving, no?
Anyway no ones mentioned induced demand, which is the relevant term
The GP's point is nonsense, but people most definitely do start families based on the overall cost of having kids, and housing plays a major role.
That's the real reason you build more and wider roads. But it's for some reason sold as a way to reduce traffic.
Even if it happens your way... Is it wrong that an interesting location opens up at the end of new road? E.g. a restaurant or trailhead? Yes, it would increase traffic. But on the other hand, this would also let people do things.
What you get is what you build. New roads just create more incentive for driving. It's been well documented over and over again that vehicle miles driven increases proportionally to roadway created. Lewis Mumford famously said “Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity.”
It's not the roads that cause traffic, it's the convenience of driving. To show how absurd the argument is, let's use it for housing - I'm sure it can be easily "documented" that building housing leads to higher population figures. So it must be bad, let's not do it!