> You need additional highways (aka: additional offramps) to truly scale day-to-day traffic
Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand [1]. You really need large-scale investments in public transportation for this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
Indeed, there's nothing wrong with induced demand on its own. In any other market, more demand induced by lower costs (whether those costs be monetary or in the form of commute times) would almost certainly be a good thing. The only reason it's a potential issue for roads is that road use is an externality.
Building and maintaining efficient roadways comes at a significant cost, but our current system of road construction funded primarily by income taxes means road users don't pay that cost in a manner proportional to their use of those roads. Road construction is "free" from their perspective, so there's no incentive to use alternative means of transportation even if those alternatives would be superior overall once road construction and maintenance costs were factored in.
Because of this it's hard to be sure whether the demand induced by increased supply of roadways is worth the cost in any particular instance. It could be a worthwhile increase in utility, or it could just be a waste of money.
The most "fair" way to do it would be to charge according to road wear and tear, which would look something like axle load ^2 * miles driven, but this would be hard to implement and also widely unpopular with huge swathes of the population (truck driver is the most common profession in many states)
The "purpose" of expanding lanes and building alterntae highways is to improve efficiency. For people living in a given area, reduce their time spent commuting. There is large economic cost to having large portions of your population spent 10+ of their waking time commuting to and from work each weekday.
The problem with induced demand is that yes you increase capacity and more people then move clogging up the roads until a similar equilibrum is reached as before. A much better option is both expanding the number of people that can commute by living further out, and reducing the per individual commute time by mass transit. That's the true goal.
That's still an improvement over the previous status quo. Commute times are not the only, or even necessarily the most important factor in a transportation system. Your new equilibrium transports a larger number of people than the previous equilibrium. In isolation, that's purely a good thing.
In a world where road users paid for those improvements directly in proportion to their use of the road we could just keep expanding capacity indefinitely until either all the latent demand were met, or until rising construction costs drove demand down to a level where the roads were no longer congested. Since roads are funded by income taxes though, a crucial half of that feedback loop is missing. We can't just keep expanding because there's nothing to stop road users from demanding more and more capacity even after adding that capacity becomes cost-prohibitive.
So adding roads gets half the benefits (as it doesn't gain any efficiency benefits), and comes with a ton of externalities when compared to mass transit.
Only one I can think of is pollution, but that's not even caused by roads, it's caused by burning gasoline.
Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people.
So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere. Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends.
Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too. Success!
I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.
I live in Denver, CO. Cars basically make it impossible to walk around most of the city, even in the more residential areas. Walking is an essential part of the public transit/non-car transportation experience because essentially everyone has to walk a few blocks from a bus stop, train station, bike rack, etc. to complete their trip on both ends. If walking those few blocks is unpleasant, unsafe, or impossible, people will (reasonably) prefer cars.
Unfortunately, car and pedestrian traffic are at odds in most cities. Situations that seem better for cars (turning lanes, right-on-red, faster speed limits, street parking) often make life hell for pedestrians who try to cross the road. Or make life very, very noisy for pedestrians who need to walk or live or work near those roads.
I agree wholeheartedly that we can't just make driving suck to encourage more people to walk or take public transit. But there are aspects of driving that need to be sacrificed to make public transit better. A great example: changing 4-lane roads to 2-lane roads -- if you can introduce a bike lane, bus lane, or both, those methods of transportation become significantly faster, safer, and better. Biking is basically a non-starter without lanes; busses can be so slow as to be not worth using when they get stuck in normal traffic. The same argument applies to parking removal -- instead of using an entire effective lane of traffic for parked cars, we can dedicate it to bikes or buses.
Lowering the speed limit reduces noise at street level, makes streets safer to cross for pedestrians, and allows bikes to peacefully coexist with cars in an environment where you don't need to go that fast anyway.
It would be interesting to hear what holds you back from using buses, walking, or bikes instead of your car to get around town. In Denver, the main issues I encounter are:
- bike theft
- literal crazy people shouting at me on buses/trains
- drivers who park/stop in crosswalks, or try to kill me on my bicycle
- the bus network is extremely slow to get around town
I think there's a fair argument that we should focus on solving these problems first, before we degrade car traffic. Bike theft is a really bike one in Seattle, too, iirc, and a huge blocker for folks trying to switch away from cars. But eventually you need to degrade car traffic to make public transit as good as it can be.
The DC metro deteriorated markedly, and has continued to. A lot of it is a combination of bad initial designs (lack of surplus tunnel capacity to ease maintenance) along with the aggressive, powerful, and corrupt WMATA employees union. (I was on a project to analyze WMATA's staffing issues, and within the first hour, my team identified that there was a huge incentive to understaff the maintenance/technician teams to allow existing employees to collect massive amounts of overtime. Many would simply hide and sleep during the time they claimed to be "working". Hiring more mechanics/techs was foot-dragged, because it reduced the overtime pay for the existing workers who would interview them.). 2 mechanics working normal hours cost the same as 1 mechanic pulling tons of overtime, but the gap in productivity is huge. The WMATA union doesn't care. The rudeness of the staff is pretty legendary amongst locals as well.
Anyway, all of that is a long winded and detailed way of saying that WMATA gradually became a significantly less reliable means of transportation. My brother was on a car that got stuck in a tunnel that started filling with smoke. He stopped riding. And the buses need the metro to be running well. Without that, the buses become far less reliable. It's a shit show. And it's deteriorated markedly since I last lived there.
Do you use public transit in the Denver area at all? I find myself biking to most places because the public transit routes don't really get me where I want to go, but a lot of folks I know in the area used to use the buses and light rail in the before times. Seems like it had a pretty good rep before covid.
Regarding public transit in Denver, I avoid it like the plague. If I'm by myself, I'm a lot more tolerant of it. But I can't take my kids to public places in downtown Denver anymore, including the transit. When my daughter was 4, I had her on my shoulders on Mother's Day while we walked the 16th Street Mall. As we approached the Capitol, a violent altercation occurred within 30 feet of between two chronic drug addicts. One of them had a hiking pole, and he started beating and stabbing the other one. My daughter was terrified. That's just one incident, there are far more like it.
It blows my mind how the current crop of homeless (unhoused, or whatever moronically Orweillian term has been created to signal pious, virtuous sensitivity to ingroup members) activists have pushed the utterly failed policies of San Francisco in other cities. They result is what you and I are complaining about: public spaces that are decidedly unwelcoming and unsafe to children, elderly, and women. The policies seem to do nothing but funnel money to the non-profits that employ the nutbag activists. They certainly don't accomplish anything else. It's the equivalent of the neighborhood cat lady who puts bowls of food out for strays claiming she's a wildlife rehabilitation specialist.
As a concrete example, I grew up near Seattle and regularly drove on East Lake Sammamish Parkway. This road was built and designed to efficiently carry traffic between Redmond and Issaquah at a speed of 45 miles per hour. It has smooth gentle curves, good sightlines, few driveways and intersections, etc. Sometime in the 90s or 00s people built a ton of really expensive lakefront houses between the parkway and the lake, and the new homeowners got the city to lower the speed limit to 35 (presumably to make it easier to get onto the road)
People generally drive 45 on it anyways. It is a road that practically screams "45 mph is safe" at you, and 35 feels downright glacial. If you lowered the limit to 25 people would probably still regularly do 40 on it - you need some kind of traffic calming as park of a major overhaul of the road to get speeds that are safe for pedestrians there. (And even if you could do this, most households in Sammamish travel to or through either Redmond or Issaquah anyhow, so they need some thoroughfare to do so - at best you're overloading and overstressing the other roads in the network)
This is obviously not the solution that anyone is proposing. You're arguing in bad faith against a strawman. The solution to bad public transit is to make public transit better.
Caution against the short-sighted pursuit of easily-quantifiable goals at the expense of actual value is not 'arguing in bad faith'.
The claim was that they put up speed bumps (and other measures) _with the intent of_ making driving worse to encourage public transit. That's obviously false. Speed bumps get put up to discourage unsafe driving.
If, when forced to drive safely, people would rather take public transit, that's kind of scary, but also a good thing I guess to get unsafe drivers off the road? However, that's not what the claim was (and in reality is unlikely to be true, though I have no data to back that up).
That does have the result of increasing trip times by cars, and thus motivating use of public transit.
Guessing intent is a fool’s game, and can’t really be true or false per se. It does antagonize automobile drivers and, from their valid but particular perspective, makes their life worse in (what would seem to them) a gratuitous fashion. Americans don’t like arbitrary and capricious as a whole.
It's way more like the driving folks have absolutely ruined transit in almost every single city in the country.
For cars to be good you need lots of space for parking lots and highways. Otherwise, the car is getting you nowhere fast, and there won't be anywhere to park it when you get there. But that also means those parking lots and highways need space. In all but the densest urban metros, that space is two-dimensional, which means all that car infrastructure is spreading out all the buildings.
Transit needs the exact opposite to happen: buildings need to be close-together so that a single line can aggregate more demand, and riders have to walk less when they arrive at their destinations. This is actually how pretty much all cities used to be built, because cars didn't exist yet, so you had to give that space to pedestrian infrastructure. Not coincidentally, those are also the cities with the best transit, and the absolute worst to drive in. You can't have both cars and people sharing the same space.
I disagree. Regardless of your preferred mode of transit, look at the hours just before and after peak. Roads flow smoothly. Trains run at tight intervals and aren't too crowded. It's great for everyone.
Peak demand time will always be a clusterfuck but with enough infrastructure (ignoring petty ideological bickering about which mode should have what market share) we can probably have a system that's pretty damn decent the other 22hr of the day.
We petitioned to put speed bumps in. Yes, we were hostile to the way at least some people were driving. But also note that we, the people who asked for the bumps, also drove there every day. We weren't hostile to drivers as a class. We were hostile to people trying to drive excessive speeds on suburban side streets.
The real solution is to make transit at least as good as driving (measured roughly by time to get from A-B). Not easy to do in some cities - Seattle has some unique geography to work around. But for someplace like Houston or Dallas? Making transit work shouldn't be that hard (other than the cost to build it out and getting people to agree it can work).
Seattle just opened light rail from Northgate to the U-District to Downtown this year. We will also have light rail from Downtown Seattle to Bellevue opening next year, and light rail to Redmond the year after that.
And the opening of light rail from Downtown to Capitol Hill to Husky Stadium a few years ago drove some pretty big changes in transit in Seattle.
Wow. You just crystalized exactly what I felt was wrong with the argument that induced demand is bad. Thanks.
The goal of transit first infrastructure is to make the majority of trips unnecessary. You shouldn't be required to own a car to participate in American society.
This means we need to rezone our residential sprawl to allow for more frequent, smaller grocery stores. We need to increase the amount of mixed zoning, increase density, decrease the insane quantity of land dedicated solely to the movement and storage of privately owned heavy machinery (automobiles) and focus on easily accessible areas of bike & bus friendly infrastructure.
The Netherlands was fully capable of transitioning from a nation of car dependent choked cities to a bike first micromobility haven in 30 years. The only thing stopping the USA from doing the same is the enormous government subsidies paid to car owners to keep the roads paved.
If the federal government stopped taking 90% of the cost of every road in the US and you had to pay gas tax to support it all do you think you'd still be driving? Do you think you'd support billion dollar bridge extensions and lane additions when it means gas is an extra $5/gallon?
The Federal Highway Trust Fund was fully funded by the gas tax and other user fees until 2008, all while a significant percentage of revenue was allocated not to roads but to mass transit. Congress has topped it up with general revenue since, but the gas tax hike required to eliminate that need would be measured in cents, not dollars.
The Netherlands is smaller than New Jersey and has twice its population - its one of the most densely populated countries. Comparing it to the 3rd largest country on earth is risible.
NYC doesn't even have good bike infrastructure.
Every major city in America could transition to bike infrastructure and the quality of life would improve across the US. We don't have to cross the great plains on a bike: We're talking micromobility here. Who cares if they're smaller? We have enormous cities choked to death with cars.
Death to cars: cars bring death. Cities are for humans, not cars.
I don't drive and I live in Ballard. Driving has always sucked in Seattle since I can remember from the late 1970s. My dad, who lived in Seattle after coming back from Vietnam said the same thing.
And now bicycling and walking suck just a little less. That is a success.
The speeds were reduced because people keep dying when getting hit by speeding cars. And this problem has gotten worse with Americans shifting to SUVs and crossovers that hit humans higher up and toss them under the wheels.
If by building a larger road through your city, you induce people to live outside of your city instead of in it, then you’ve added costs while reducing your economic activity, while creating more total wasted hours in traffic in the process.
Are the trade offs worth it? Sometimes! But induced traffic demand is not by itself a success criteria for regions: it’s only a success if it means more people are able to work and have higher productivity in a region, as opposed to just spreading out the existing workers and reducing their productivity through increased commute times.
Take DC and NoVA, typical large suburb next to a large city. If DC wants to increase economic activity, does it want to invest in a new bridge that allows more people to live in NoVA (where most of their retail/commercial activity will occur)? Or, would DC be better off spending that money on redeveloping run-down neighborhoods and adding some light rail (or other transit improvements)?
But I have no idea how much DC “needs” the vertical space for development. It isn’t nearly as dense as NYC - plenty of infill (re)development to be done, I would guess.
However, what expanding highways actually accomplishes is incentivizing people to move out of the city because they can have a commute which is longer in miles but shorter in minutes. That lasts until enough people move to the suburb that the commute is now longer in miles AND equal time or longer in minutes. You haven't made traffic any better, you've just made sprawl worse and you've increased the vehicle miles traveled to accomplish the same result of getting people where they want to be.
The message of the New Urbanists is that we should make our cities more livable and build/allow more housing units within the cities so that more people can live where their commutes are short (in terms of miles) and the increase in density will make providing transit more cost-effective.
More transportation means more trade, more services, and better life for all who live near the roads. It might be in the form of easier-to-get deliveries (Amazon goods), or new jobs that have popped up close by, or new housing developments (aka: homes that previously weren't possible due to the time of transportation, but are now possible thanks to sped up transportation times).
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It turns out that "individualism" is a crappy reason to do anything. The individual argument must be made because we live in a democracy, and its impossible to get the people to agree to something unless you sell them a story regarding individualism.
The purpose of adding lanes was to REDUCE DELAYS. Not support additional transportation. Your entire post hinges on an incorrect premise
Note, it can be better to add transit other than lanes of road. Even though I said add lanes, adding lanes is but one possible solution. Good transit may well be better. Figure out how to make your city serve the people who want to get around.
Well, there's an annoying edge case that must be considered as well. In some cases, "induced demand" is "stealing demand from somewhere else".
Lets say you have Town Foo and Town Bar. If you build a highway to Foo, all the additional traffic might be "stealing" traffic from Town Bar and benefiting Town Foo. Especially if people emigrate out of Town Bar for closer housing to Town Foo, you didn't really improve the lives of anyone. You just caused everyone to migrate over.
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Ideally, you want to build highways / roads / transportation in ways that benefits people, and causes the least inconvenience to other towns.
Again, I'm not making a value judgement here. Transit is a valid option that could be better
Don't forget that no matter how many lanes you add to a highway heading into a city, eventually that highway ends up... in the city. Too many cars in a city makes for a loud and dangerous-to-navigate environment for those who live there.
I drive 2-3 times a year from NY to South Carolina or Florida for years, always timing crossing through DC around 5AM. Traffic 15-20 years ago coming into DC extended down to Potomac Mills. When I passed though in 2019 it extended almost 60 miles, well past Fredericksburg!
More demand drives more sprawl that drives more demand for roads. Eventually metastasizes into a nightmare like LA or Long Island!
As long as your roads are saturated, they have less throughput, not more. It is kind of like a clog in your toilet: more things are there in your pipes, but not much is getting through.
Fluid analogies are crappy because fluids flow more when you add pressure and traffic doesn't.
Well, traffic can flow when pressure is added, just not in a way that is very safe.
The reason "just shutting down all roads" doesn't make sense is that it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is that people want to both work in places with good jobs (traditionally often dense urban centers) while living in cheaper places that are far away and not spend significant chunks of their lives stuck in traffic. Shutting down all the roads only "solves" the traffic problem in a deliberately ridiculous sense (same as "just kill all humans").
I work for a big central business district employer. You can pay $150-250 a month to park or $75/week to take a motor coach bus from your suburban town. Those numbers drive behavior, and make for a better solution as folks who need flexibility can pay for it.
Induced demand is a terrible name for the real issue here. Perhaps the "one more lane fallacy" would be better. The "one more lane fallacy" is not universal, it only applies in cities and other densely populated areas.
Imagine you are sitting in a suburban traffic jam, getting slowly more and more annoyed. It's easy to imagine adding marginally more road capacity would put an end to traffic jam. That thought is the 'one more lane fallacy'. That, admittedly attractive, idea is wrong because adding more capacity leaves the traffic jam exactly the same, with more lanes and more cars in them - because of induced demand.
The kicker is that in a densely populated area, there is often no realistic prospect of adding enough road capacity to end traffic jams, simply because of there is not enough space. I suspect that in most cases, road building achieves political support through the expectation of ending traffic jams. Nearly always, this expectation will not be met. This is the essence of the induced demand problem - it is not as obvious as is sometimes made out.
So, even if you are die hard driver, if you want to reduce traffic jams, you should advocate for other people to use transport methods that are more space efficient than driving. Of course, you might want to live in an area dominated by constantly congested roads, in which case, induced demand isn't a problem.
It does result in growth for an area, but quality of life stagnates. The traffic in northern Virginia/DC/Maryland is at a point where it noticeably affects the mood of a bulk of the people who live there. Spending 90 minutes each way day after day after day fucks people's heads up.
“Induced demand” in every other industry is described as “latent demand”.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8057171/
The situation with roads is not that different: building more road capacity incentivizes sprawl, leaving the entire network more congested than it was when you started.
Roads just don't scale. The daily commute is like a distributed shuffle: time to complete the shuffle scales superlinearly, probably quadratically given the limited topologies possible with roads. It's not like you can build a hypercube road network.
This is such an oddball perspective: EDGE, 3G, LTE mobile networks all became increasingly congested as demand rose to meet supply. But nobody thought building out 5G was therefore pointless.
That depends on what you see as the goal. If the goal is reducing congestion, then induced demand means that particular goal is harder to achieve. If the goal is to get more people driving then induced demand is a clear success.
When you order goods from Amazon, that gets delivered to you. It might be a road, sea, rail, or plane, but its transportation. The more of packages ordered / delivered, the more things are happening in the city.
The more jobs being created, the more people will need to transport to-and-from work. The more homes built, the more transportation is needed. Etc. etc.
Its a crude measurement with flaws, but generally speaking, the more transportation that's happening, the bigger and better the city is functioning. People wouldn't travel unless they needed to (travel always sucks: traffic accidents, getting stuck, dealing with others on planes/trains/busses, etc. etc.). But we deal with it because without transit, we couldn't do our daily business.
Be it a meeting for work, going to school, delivering goods or other such need.
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Mass transit options, like Rail, get more things done with far less money. But there's a latency issue: rail can be slower for the individual... but its cheaper and more-bandwidth for the city.
This conflicts with individual options like roads: it costs a gross amount of money for an individual to buy a car / use it on the highways (plus the cost of highways themselves: rubber tires wear out faster than steel wheels on trains. Asphalt roads need replacing more often than steel rail lines. Gasoline costs much more than the electricity used to move a train). But the individual latency is such an advantage, that the individual will typically prefer car travel.
What they do have an advantage on is not having to synchronize with a schedule. If you need to travel 15 minutes by light rail, but the train only comes around once an hour, then missing the train adds an hour to your trip. It doesn't matter if the train never breaks down and has separated right-of-way - running on time is useless if you're not.
The way you work around that is by running more trains so that they can come more frequently. My rule of thumb is that if a transit line has a frequency of 15 minutes or less, I don't need to worry about the schedule because the time spent waiting for the train or bus is less than the time of the overall trip.
However, this is expensive; it only makes economic sense if you actually have that many riders that need to travel along that line. In other words, demand needs to be aggregated. The problem is that cars work the opposite way: they exist specifically to segregate demand. This occurs both directly and indirectly. The direct effect is the ability to immediately depart, which I already mentioned; but the indirect effect is the result of all the infrastructure that cars need in order to work at all. Things like wide highways and parking lots spread out where people need to go and make it far more dangerous to walk from a train or bus stop to your final destination.
In other words, cars cheat - they don't make your commute better, they make anyone who does not own a car have a worse one.
Parent comment is saying the only way to scale with higher demand of transportation in a way that feels like an actual improvement to people is public transit, because public transit scales so much better with higher numbers of people commuting.
They tried this in Beijing. People would just buy second cars so they could drive on both days. Eventually they had to restrict new license plates as well.
I as a motorist could not give less of a shit if I'm stuck in traffic for 3 hours a day but the road is able to move hundreds of thousands of cars a day. I'd prefer a road that could only move 20 people a day with 0 traffic. It's the only thing I care about.
Is there still some traffic? Yes. Is it better than it was 30 years ago, even as the roads handle way more traffic? Absolutely.
If you build a new road and it gets just as congested and it takes just as long to travel from A to B, then what did you accomplish?
The number of people who want to use a road is not the metric we're trying to optimize here. If we wanted to do that we should build as few roads as possible. Then there would be tons and tons of people who want to use each road. Hooray! Success!
More lanes generally improves throughput. However, more lanes often increases latency.
City planners may prefer this, but individuals may not.
In a metro area housing prices are generally correlated with how many minutes it takes to get to a city center. If you add highway capacity then people will choose to move further out to the suburbs. (Though that is great for property values, especially around the periphery of the commuting range.)
Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work. I did that for a year before my wife started her job and it was lovely (took Metro North down from Westchester to Manhattan every day). But in a modern family with two jobs in two locations, plus kids with daycare and school and after school activities, it’s not scalable.
My wife and I are “city people.” We really tried to scale the transit lifestyle. We lived in downtown Baltimore for two years and took Amtrak to work each day. We lived in downtown DC and took Metro. We’ve commutes in the Silver line, Orange line, Blue line, MARC, etc. And every year the service got worse, and every time we had another kid the equation got harder to balance. Eventually we threw in the towel, moved to a red county, and bought an SUV that gets 13 mpg. And we’ve never looked back.
You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.
So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?
> Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work.
That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
Again, not talking about public transit in cities (which is amazing and should be scaled up) but about intercity/state/province transport. The distances, and spread are just not comparable to almost anywhere else in the world and you can't just magically make everyone move.
This is like the one region of the country you actually could scale up intercity/state transport, and it sucks so bad that Amtrak is terrible.
1: https://tetcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2040_Vis....
Even here in montreal, while the metro is pretty good and we are currently building a pretty nice light rail system you still can't really depend on the rail system if your job isn't in montreal itself. The whole transit system is based on feeding the big city, not move people in between smaller cities. (Also, It's a bit tiring then to hear about just how dysfunctional the US is and how good they have it everywhere else when it's just not true. The American self loathing just get repetitive honestly)
I think public transit is amazing for city transit but does not scale very well when there's something else than the usual suburb->city->suburb pattern of movement. You can't really interconnect every single medium-small ish city at a north American scale
This problem has been solved for awhile now, at least since the 1960s when the first intra-city/province shinkansen came online. Just because some other countries suck as badly as the USA at it doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
This is just rehashing pop-urban planning buzzwords. Like I'm not sure where the trend of just handwaving every problem as easily solvable by "rail! Shinkansen! City public transit even out of cities!" came from but it particularly does not make sense in this situation considering the commenter you replied to specified he talked about spread out, smaller cities with frequent stops. Which is the opposite of what the shinkansen is for.
Have you ever tried taking these lines before? They have high speed rail between big cities, and tons and tons of small branch/feeder routes out to small towns with the most frequent stops ever imaginable. Getting from huge Tokyo to small Gifu actually works.
It did take some planning however. The USA's model of just "build that office complex wherever you want!" wouldn't work.
Which is exactly my point! That's already the current situation on the ground in the USA. So yes, it wouldn't work there. Unless you'd literally move around millions of jobs, offices etc which is absolutely not feasible. Trying to build public transit around that structure just to fit an idealized vision of somewhere else is weird. Japan built the system that fit their needs and their situation and the USA should do the same.
They did this for a variety of reasons some noble (grand visions of urban renewal based on cars instead of public transit) and some odious (breaking up non-machine voting wards, enforcing de facto redlining post the Supreme Court decisions, etc). They were able to make sections of the city, specifically the near south and south west places you commuted through instead of to. Similar things were done with tearing out el tracks, trolleys and the removal of commuter rail from further south neighborhoods that had been alternate business districts to the loop. These were conscious urban planning decisions to reinforce the pattern of outward/in commutes.
American Pharoah is a not particularly good biography of Richard Daley that happens to include a good book on Chicago urban planning in the late 40s to late 60s era.
“Just completely restructure every single place 80% of the population in one of the country’s largest metro areas lives and works in.”
Yes, there is an argument that Reston, Vienna, etc., shouldn’t exist in their present form (or anything close to it). But that ship sailed long ago.
Efforts to gloss over that reality end badly. The Silver Line and all the adjacent development are monstrosities. Stations are huge concrete edifices in the middle of freeways that are nerve wracking to navigate with a squirrelly three year old. Billions were spent making places that are nice for just a handful of people who can afford $4,000/month for a two bedroom near the McLean Metro so they can take the Silver Line to their job at Google in Reston.
> That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
Those countries are dysfunctional. Birth rates in these transit-oriented metro areas are well below replacement, meaning that their form of civilization is literally sustainable.
Yes, impossible actually to prevent this from happening. Corporations always want a good deal for office space, so they will literally shop around different cities looking at who will give them the biggest tax advantages and the most developable land. City councilmembers literally make careers out of wooing corporations into building suburban office parks, and why wouldn't they? They just injected a thousand white collar workers who will be paying taxes into their school district and another 5 thousand workers who will be driving in every morning and spending money on local sales tax when they get starbucks from the drive through. It's a race to the bottom as long as local governments have local control over their planning processes, and it would probably still continue if planning were done regionally or nationally since it is very easy to bribe American politicians.
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, without name-calling, swipes, and the like. If you'd please do that instead, we'd be grateful.
Hong Kong Area: 427 mi²
Washington DC Metropolitan Area: 5,565 mi²
The DC metro area is just a pretty flat sprawl. It should be an easy case transportation wise, but...Americans.
Go to Dallas and look at all the families with 3-4 kids. That’s what the future looks like. (Except the minivans and pickup trucks are probably electric.)
Define "works". Sure it can move millions of people each day, but those people live miserable lives most of the time. Have you lived in a city where commuting one hour each way by train is considered "very good" ? And some of the worse are around 1.30-1.45 hours each way, each day? Even if for a while the train is fine, if the city is growing it will become unbearably crowded, smelly, hot and just a nightmare to deal with when you're tired and want to get home at 6 PM.
A truly regrettable existence that no human should have to endure. We mourn the lack of a reason to own a second car. My husband’s bike ride to work is an even worse torture.
Because every year we refuse to fund public transport at an appropriate level to prevent it from getting worse let alone improving.
If your idea of public transport is confined to only what the US has to offer currently, then you have already stopped having a conversation in good faith and instead are being myopic in the realm of solutions.
If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there.
1: Fairfax county is rather centrally planned compared to everywhere else in the US I've lived since then, but the DC Metro is funded by MD, VA, DC, and the federal government. The difficulty of building infrastructure seems to scale super-linearly with the number of people paying for the infrastructure...
I agree. But we can’t. It’s a cluster fuck even when it’s just one state. Maryland spent $7 billion building the Purple line, which is what Western European countries spent for similar amounts of fully automated underground heavy rail.
At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems. This is a keen insight Lee Kuan Yew had in building Singapore. He admired many aspects of Anglo culture, but realized that not all of them would work in an Asian country: https://web.colby.edu/eas150/files/2017/11/Zakaria_LeeKuanYe.... America is a decentralized, low cohesion society built around having plenty of space for a bunch of different groups to leave each other alone. America is continually replenished by the people who are antisocial enough to leave their kin and homelands to start new lives thousands of miles away.[1] We aren’t Germans or Swedes or Japanese and shouldn’t beat our selves up trying to be them. Our future is electric cars and freeways, not trains.
[1] Asians are the biggest immigrant group in the US, but when polled, under 10% of people in Asia said they would immigrate to another country if they had the chance. Guess what kind of people end up making the journey?
I think this is the main point of disagreement in this thread; if we have to spend $500M/mile for light rail in the US, it's fairly obvious that rail is not an option. If there is a large learning-factor for building rail that would bring costs down significantly with more miles built, then rail is certainly an option for the northeast US.
I used to be a rail fan. Then I rode Amtrak to work for a couple of years. I saw the DC Metro, which is well funded, so badly maintained that automated train control, a core feature when the system was built 1970s, had to be turned off. (That was a decade ago and there is no sign of it ever being reenabled.) I came to the conclusion that Americans running transit projects like the Europeans or Japanese is just wishful thinking. A camel cannot be a bird no matter how much it wants.
So prove it with more than your ridiculous anecdotes and metaphors. You do a lot of claiming and literally no sourcing. Try again, this time with data.
>You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs.
Can I point out the irony that you're posting this in a thread about a natural disaster exacerbated by suburban development patterns, and your example of Dallas suffered a similar disaster less than a year ago, made worse by the thermal inefficiency of the same development patterns? Is that the future we should want?
I say this as a member of a two car family who routinely ferries children to places and hates every minute of it that could be spent paying attention to something other than the road.
I lived literally next to Dulles International Airport - ~8 miles. Yet, to get to Dulles (or Reston/Herndon) by Public transit, would've taken me 2 hours perhaps, or more.
Home to IAD by car: 5 miles, 9 minutes
Home to IAD by transit: 40+ minutes across 2 bus lines
Home to IAD by foot: 10.9 miles, 3+ hours
Home to WAS by car: 24 miles, 29 minutes
Home to WAS by transit: 90+ minutes across 1 bus line, 2 Metro lines, and a few walking segments to link them.
It's sad that walking to the airport is twice as far than driving. It's also sad that I can drive to a airport further away than I can access my closest airport by transit.
1: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9768706,-77.4451826,3a,75y,2...
I have considered cycling to the airport in my area before, and basically run into the same issue you raise.
I read your comments downthread, which I think are pretty insightful; it may be the case that the ship has sailed and we're not going back (and it may even be the case that there's something in our national DNA that prevents us from competently building and operating transit). But it should at least be acknowledged that the status quo isn't the result of personal choice or revealed preference; it was quite literally a big-government social engineering project.
It's sad, but without a car in the DC area, your options are very minimal and you pretty much have to live in the city.
I lived in the DC area for nearly 30 years and moved out right as Covid hit, and have tried to use public transit at various points in my adult life. Unless you live super close to a metro stop and/or need to go to a metro stop the system will barely work for you, and even then you'll be hamstrung with where you can go and how long it will take you to get there.
Dallas should probably get some better research universities if this is going to be a thing.
> the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport.
NotJustBikes has a good introduction to it [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
Making everyone ride busses and bicycles in a country with the geography of America is a fantasy, even if you buy the premise that this is otherwise desirable.
I don't even buy the premise, because things that are valuable to me include:
1. Expediency
2. Comfort
3. Not being subject to timetables decided by other people
4. Not having to deal with homeless or crazy people while transiting
5. Sanitation. Public transit and pandemic mitigation measures are mutually incompatible
While driving, I only have to deal with one network topology (the road system) instead of two (the bus network on top of the road network), leading to vastly shorter travel times in practice. My vehicles are customized to my comfort. I don't have to get permission or wait on someone else to use them. I don't have to share them with anyone. I can keep them as clean as I please.
One reason many people are more concerned about inducing driving demand is that private vehicle travel generally emits more carbon, uses more valuable land (e.g. parking, highways), and results in more fatalities per person per mile than comparable forms of transportation.
Another problem with inducing driving demand is the degree to which those costs are subsidized by taxpayers (roads, highways), other shoppers (required/subsidized parking), or left as externalities (carbon, noise). Tolls, gas taxes, per-mile fees, and parking fees would have to be quite a bit higher in most places to cover those costs.
If induced demand is high enough even that, too, may not be enough - but then building a new rail line is at least no harder than adding a new highway lane (in most cases), and can support substantially more throughput with equal or lower travel times.
By the way, even BART could increase throughput today without adding more lines. Not all trains are 10-car trains, because they don't have enough cars in the fleet. Adding more cars to their trains is a significantly cheaper prospect than adding a new lane to the Bay Bridge (which was also basically fully maxed out on throughput during peak traffic times, pre-COVID). And BART carries substantially more people across the Bay than the Bay Bridge does.
So, certainly the BART needs more capacity, both now and in the future - but so do the highways.
Note that I didn't make my point to say that we should build another bridge, just the pedantic detail that BART traffic isn't that much larger than Bay Bridge + San Mateo Bridge, which is a more apt comparison. I think actually you'd want to add in the Golden Gate Bridge, another 110K. So basically, there are more people commuting into SF driving over bridges than taking BART in.
To increase the capacity of the red line would take a lot of work that would not be cheap. For instance, the length of the trains could be increased, but to do that you have to construct new stations, since the train is already the length of the entire platform, at least the ones used for rush hour. LA has actually lengthened platforms that are on the surface before to accomodate longer light rail trains, but underground this is so much more difficult.
You could lower headways from the 10 minutes they are currently at, but this becomes a physics problem fast. One issue is a lack of turnback stations at the ends of the line so the train has to come to a stop then 'reverse' at the end. Another issue is a subway with a train works like a pneumatic tube, there is a volume of air moving that needs sufficient ventilation, which is why you see these big ventilation grates on sidewalks where subways run below, and to run more frequent trains would require significant upgrades to the ventilation systems along the entire line.
Of course, you need to invest in the infrastructure to make it work, but it's very possible.
A quick Google suggests that in Tokyo they even hit 50 trains per hour, so one every 1m20s, which is insanely impressive.
Mostly DC metro rail and a bit of LA buses, FWIW.
Lots of places talk about the importance of walkability and mass transit but if you actually look at most transportation budgets the vast majority goes to automobile infrastructure. Even what passes for "pedestrian infrastructure" in many places is there for the benefit of drivers[1]. I mean, it makes sense because everyone in the US drives everywhere, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/29/pedestrian-inf...
Of course, there are also other potential advantages of public transit unrelated to induced demand, like pollution, safety, cost, impact on the design of living spaces, etc.
It’s just inducing demand on an already overused system like private cars doesn’t fix the system being overused unless you can get beyond the desired capacity.
Note that I said most trips there. If you don't have a system useful enough that most people use it most of the time then people still need cars to get around and that changes the calculation. it can be very hard to get there.
This continues to be wrong every time someone brings it up.
If you have insufficient road capacity, you have congestion, and congestion suppresses demand. If you increase capacity, some of the congestion goes away, and then some of the demand comes back.
What this looks like is that you currently have enough cars to require three lanes but have two lanes, so you build a third lane. The reduction in congestion causes you to have enough cars to require four lanes, leading to the fool's conclusion that adding enough lanes is impossible. But that's not it. It's that you needed four from the beginning to handle the amount of traffic that occurs there in the absence of congestion, but you only had three, or two.
Sometimes building a four (or five or six) lane highway isn't the best solution. Sometimes it's better to build more housing near the jobs so people have shorter commutes, or build mass transit etc.
Sometimes you just need a wider road. Pretending that's never the case is preposterous. If that was true then why do we keep multi-lane highways open instead of closing all but one of the lanes? Wouldn't that improve traffic, under this theory?
You're setting up this strawman where the argument is "improve roads" vs. "do nothing". That's obviously not the case. The argument is "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit". Demonstrably, improving roads is worse than improving public transit. You refer to this as a "fool's conclusion" yet this has been a well-known fact in the field for almost a century. The wikipedia article I linked has some good information on this if you'd like to learn more.
Your claim is this:
> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand
That claim is false and is not a straw man because you actually claim it.
Improving mass transit might work as an alternate solution, sometimes, in specific contexts.
That doesn't prove that adding more lanes wouldn't also work, and it's also not universally true.
A large fraction of the traffic on I-95 is trucks. How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?
Many highways are congested at a specific choke point. You could make a completely free thousand mile an hour bullet train to transport people from one side of the choke point to the other and solve nothing because people would get to the other side without a car and be unable to get the last ten miles to their destination. But once you get past the choke point, the traffic diverges in every direction and there is no longer enough density to justify a mass transit route.
Sometimes you just need a wider road.
> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand [1]. You really need large-scale investments in public transportation for this.
Clearly "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit"...
> How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?
You're again arguing against something no one ever said. No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses. Again, we're discussing where to allocate incremental improvements to existing systems. No one is suggesting doing nothing or, worse, shutting down existing systems.
Using your specific example of semi-trucks, moving more traffic (such as daily commute) to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it. And additionally, freight trains already make up a fairly large percentage of our freight network (~30%) so rail is actually a great alternative to semi-trucks in many cases.
You: Cars are never a solution because they can't go faster than 15 MPH. You really need horses for this.
Me: Cars can go faster than 15 MPH in many cases. Horses can't be used to transport industrial boilers and such.
You: Clearly you missed the part about the horses.
> No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses.
You have a two lane road that needs to be a four lane road to handle the amount of traffic it would have without congestion.
If more than half of the traffic that would occur without congestion is trucks, you physically cannot relieve the congestion with mass transit, because relieving the congestion would require removing more than 100% of the non-truck traffic.
> Moving more traffic to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it.
This the other stupidity with induced demand. It's not induced, it's suppressed by congestion, which means that any alternative means of relieving the congestion will also restore the demand.
Suppose you actually built mass transit and removed the equivalent of one lane worth of traffic from the road. Now you still need to add the other lane because the reduction in traffic congestion restored demand for the road and offset what was removed by the improved mass transit.
Some regions have concluded that adding a lane per decade is sustainable and already have highways more than a dozen lanes wide. I'm curious to see where the upper bound is.
(Personally I think dynamic pricing to maintain optimal highway capacity is a more sustainable approach.)
Property values increasing there actually offsets the problem by making it less desirable to live there.
The real trouble is that people build more houses there. But the reason people build more houses there, and suffer a 30 minute commute (which more congestion might have turned into a 60 minute commute), is that they can't afford to live in the place with a 15 minute commute. Typically because zoning prohibits building more housing there.
Now let's see what our choices are here.
We can do nothing at all. Well, now people are screwed. They still need somewhere to live, the place that now has a 60 minute commute is the only place housing can be built, so the housing still gets built there, but now the commute is longer. That's just horrible and helps no one.
Second, we could widen the road and that's it. The new housing still gets built in the suburbs but at least now people waste less time in their cars.
Third, we could loosen the zoning so higher density housing can be built closer to the city, but not widen the road. This is pretty good, because now the people who live in the new housing get the 15 minute commute. But the people who already live in the suburbs are still stuck with the 60 minute commute.
Fourth, we could loosen the zoning and widen the road. Then new housing gets built in the city instead of the suburbs, because people prefer a 15 minute commute to a 30 minute commute, but the people who already live in the suburbs still get a 30 minute commute instead of a 60 minute commute because of the wider road. And it stays that way because the new housing is getting built in the city instead of the suburbs. This is pretty obviously the one that we want.
That is true for several years after the highway widening. Which is good for politicians who operate one election cycle at a time.
But the population doesn't just sit back and enjoy shorter commutes after a highway widening project. The towns that used to be two hours outside the city are now only an hour drive away and commuters looking for a deal start to move there. The towns that used to be an hour away are now only a half-hour drive to the city and are now hotter as well. Some of that is due to a game of musical chairs in which people expand out of the city to the suburbs, some of that is new residents choosing to live further out than they would have if they arrived before the highway widening. All of this increases the number of vehicle miles traveled. Eventually (over the span of decades) this results in a new equilibrium in which the highway is nearly as congested as it was before the widening and everyone is once again living at about the time-limit of how far they are willing to commute.
It's not all bad of course because the new highway helps grow the metro area and it increases property values, especially in the suburbs that were on the periphery of the commuting zones. But to permanently eliminate congestion you'd either have to keep widening the road every decade or two to handle the growth (Houston, Dallas), allow the congestion itself to act as a natural limit (NJ), or institute tolls/congestion pricing (Singapore, London).
Notice that this is true of anything that relieves the highway congestion in any way whatsoever. As soon as the road is clear, no matter why, the commute is shorter and it becomes more attractive to live further away in distance.
> Eventually (over the span of decades) this results in a new equilibrium in which the highway is nearly as congested as it was before the widening and everyone is once again living at about the time-limit of how far they are willing to commute.
The way out of this is to make some alternative to increasing sprawl more attractive than increasing sprawl. Relaxing zoning rules to allow higher density is an obvious one, because people would rather have a 15 minute commute than a 30 minute commute, so they'll prefer to build housing where it's a 15 minute commute unless that's prohibited by law. When it is, they have to build further away and you get more sprawl.
But also notice that you're assuming population growth.
If the population was stable, and you built a road which is sufficient now, it'll probably stay sufficient as long as the population remains stable, because who is building enough new housing to move the needle on traffic in a city that isn't growing?
If the city's population is growing, continued population growth will require you to expand highways and such over time in proportion to the population. What else would you expect? The only alternative is intentional scarcity.
Is that true if we charge an appropriate price for road use? Isn't that what we do to manage availability of every other scarce resource to ensure it is being used optimally?
If you increase the price of using the road at the busiest times then eventually you will arrive at a price that maintains the optimum flow rate. You may need to adjust the price occasionally to track shifts in inflation and population, it has equity issues, and (like most sustainable solutions) it is politically difficult. But I don't understand what would cause it to stop working. In the places it has been implemented (e.g. Singapore, London, Stockholm) it is generally unpopular at first and then extremely popular after a year or so. And administering it should become cheaper as technology improves which may make it feasible for smaller cities as well.
> If the population was stable, and you built a road which is sufficient now, it'll probably stay sufficient as long as the population remains stable, because who is building enough new housing to move the needle on traffic in a city that isn't growing?
Even in metro areas that have stable populations, heavily subsidizing transportation infrastructure (whether transit or highways) between the city and the suburbs often has the effect of slowly shifting the current metro population outward to those suburbs. By subsidizing suburban commuters you are making living in the suburbs more attractive than it would be otherwise. As you make it more attractive, more people who currently live in the city will rationally choose to move to the suburbs.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea to build more lanes, just that on it's own it is not a sustainable approach. As long as rent/land prices are largely set by the market and roadways are free or heavily subsidized then it's not surprising that people take advantage of that and you end up with a shortage of road space.
(I agree with your comments on zoning.)
It's not a blind spot. It's a characteristic of services with a high fixed cost and trivial variable cost.
To ask if we should price roads is to ask if the price needed to deter usage enough to relieve congestion without expanding the road would generate less revenue than it would take to expand the road. But this is basically never the case because most of the expansion cost is one-time (e.g. buying the land) whereas the congestion charge would have to be collected forever to continue deterring usage.
The strongest case for not expanding the road is if there is a more efficient way to relieve congestion, e.g. by relaxing zoning restrictions to allow higher density housing and reduce travel distances.
But if people value using the road at more than the cost of expanding it, and there are no higher efficiency alternatives, that implies the road should be expanded. And once it has been and there is no congestion even at zero unit price, there is no benefit in charging a unit price to deter congestion that isn't there anyway, and a detriment in deterring use of a public resource for which the same fixed cost has to be paid whether you use it or not.
Charging road tolls is also especially inefficient because the collections process has a high administrative overhead and a high privacy cost. Every dollar spent collecting tolls -- toll tags, gantries, billing, maintenance, customer service -- is a deadweight economic loss not incurred by any alternative that doesn't require them. The privacy cost is the same.
First of all, that just doesn't follow. You can take out a loan to pay for the up-front cost and pay it back using the revenue you collect from tolls. Second, roads cost a lot of money to maintain. There are the usual ongoing costs to fix potholes and so on, and then they have to be totally replaced after 25-30 years. This is far more than what local taxation can bear in many cases. Replacement costs are chronically underestimated.
(e.g. Winnipeg would have to raise taxes 95% to properly fund their existing road liabilities: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/3/death-of-a-car-... )
>But if people value using the road at more than the cost of expanding it, and there are no higher efficiency alternatives, that implies the road should be expanded.
This is wrong, they are not valuing it properly because it is paid for by taxation and debt. A motorist pays exactly the same amount directly as a non-motorist: zero. The true costs are diffuse, invisible, and incomplete.
>And once it has been and there is no congestion even at zero unit price, there is no benefit in charging a unit price to deter congestion that isn't there anyway, and a detriment in deterring use of a public resource for which the same fixed cost has to be paid whether you use it or not.
This situation hardly ever happens. There is almost always more congestion after expansions than predicted by planners. If you wanted to overpower induced demand and get rid of all congestion the roads would have to be utterly gargantuan.
>Charging road tolls is also especially inefficient because the collections process has a high administrative overhead and a high privacy cost. Every dollar spent collecting tolls -- toll tags, gantries, billing, maintenance, customer service -- is a deadweight economic loss not incurred by any alternative that doesn't require them. The privacy cost is the same.
Time spent stuck in traffic is also deadweight loss, and it creates pollution.
The fact that you can do this is the point. It means the value of expanding the road is more than the cost of expanding the road, which implies it should be done absent some better non-toll alternative like increasing housing density.
But once you have enough capacity that there is no congestion without congestion charges, it's inefficient to deter use of the sunk cost road.
> There are the usual ongoing costs to fix potholes and so on, and then they have to be totally replaced after 25-30 years.
These costs aren't linear in the number of lanes. Resurfacing a four lane highway doesn't cost four times more than resurfacing a one lane highway (or your contractors are ripping you off).
Moreover, the initial cost is typically the highest, because you have to acquire land and possibly rebuild bridges and overpasses the first time.
> This is far more than what local taxation can bear in many cases. Replacement costs are chronically underestimated.
This applies to roads to nowhere that are under-utilized but still have to be maintained. Anything with traffic congestion is seeing more use than its cost.
You also have problems with corruption in government contracting inflating the cost of everything, but that's a separate problem and applies equally to mass transit etc.
> This is wrong, they are not valuing it properly because it is paid for by taxation and debt. A motorist pays exactly the same amount directly as a non-motorist: zero.
It's not a question of what they're actually paying, it's a question of what they would be willing to pay, i.e. the value they assign to the road. If you put a toll somewhere there is congestion, would the toll pay enough to expand the road? The answer is almost always yes, which implies that that the road should be expanded when congestion exists, unless there is some more efficient alternative to relieve the congestion.
It shows that expanding the road is more valuable than deterring usage with tolls. The possibility remains that some non-toll method of relieving congestion is still better than expanding the road, but it shows that expanding the road is better than deterring usage with tolls.
And whether to expand the road is a separate question from whether to actually fund the expansion from the tolls, because toll collection is inefficient and privacy invasive the deterrence function is undesired when the congestion can be relieved without it. The toll being able to fund the road proves that people value the road at more than its cost, but it's not the most efficient way to fund it.
> If you wanted to overpower induced demand and get rid of all congestion the roads would have to be utterly gargantuan.
This is only the case if you for some reason insist on using road expansion as the only solution to relieve congestion.
Mass transit can relieve congestion in higher density areas. Zoning that allows higher density housing to be built near jobs relieves congestion by both reducing the distances people have to travel and making mass transit more efficient.
Expanding roads works where those don't, or in combination with them. For example, if you have a growing city with restrictive zoning and a congested road between a large suburb and the city center, what you want to do is cause new housing to be built closer to the city instead of further expanding the suburbs, but the road to the suburbs still needs to be expanded because it is already too small for the existing traffic from housing which is already there and is not about to be removed.
This is politics. The most effective solution involves allowing higher density housing near urban areas, but this is not the solution desired by existing land owners, so they push inefficient alternatives like tolls. Because that increases rather than decreases property values closer to the city center by making it more expensive to live further away without increasing the supply of housing that isn't further away, so existing land owners collect higher rents to the detriment of residents.
> Time spent stuck in traffic is also deadweight loss, and it creates pollution.
Which is why we should relieve congestion by using the alternatives with fewer deadweight losses, like building higher density housing where that works and expanding roads where that works.
The practical limits are all trade offs. How much does it cost to add two lanes? How much does it cost to maintain low ridership bus service to low density suburbs? There are circumstances in which adding more lanes is the best available alternative.
What about the induced demand of going from 0 lanes to 1 lane?
I understand that induced demand is a thing in sprawling metropolis where transport is the bottleneck preventing growth in certain areas, but this feels like a different situation.
That's false. The mistake universally made by people repeating that claim is a failure to account for the fact that vehicles and population are finite. In the US there isn't much population growth, except for in a select few urban areas. It's baffling that it gets repeated so often as though it's always true, when it's not. You can swamp the amount of induced demand with additional roads, it all depends on the number of vehicles you're dealing with. Which is to say, it depends on context and it's incorrect to suggest matter-of-fact that induced demand defeats additional roads.
You'd need to run a study on the traffic potential and local + regional population growth to know one way or another what additional roads might do as it pertains to inducing demand over time and whether you can overcome the expected increased demand. The demand doesn't just keep rising forever as you build more roads.
Do you realize just how extravagantly expensive that would be?
Do you mean the millions of people who do this every day don't exist? You might personally prefer that and it's certainly an opinion which has been lavishly subsidized in the U.S. but this is a lifestyle choice, not a truth.
> people with various health issues.
How many of the people who cannot take transit are capable of safely driving cars? Public transportation — whether bus/rail mass transit or on-demand access services — is key for a large number of people who cannot drive themselves and a large number of people who could but are not affluent enough to afford the $10K/year or more that personal car ownership (considerably more if you need a vehicle customized with assistive technologies).
Again, you obviously have an opinion on this issue but that doesn't make such blanket statements less incorrect.
>How many of the people who cannot take transit are capable of safely driving cars?
It doesn't matter how many (though a lot of people for example develop back issues by mid age and beyond so prolonged walking/standing is much harder than sitting in the car especially after a workday). The point is you just dismiss them. And this is why those tone-deaf public transportation proponents like you aren't going anywhere - you dismiss all those supposedly small groups and thus as a result left with pretty much no support.
And just a bit of meta to illustrate the point - notice that i'm telling you about the issues with your approach and instead of addressing them, you're dismissing them outright as supposedly just "my preferences".
This is pure projection: I was pointing out that millions of people's daily life contradicted the absolute statement you made. If you'd said “doesn't work for many people” I would have agreed: it's no secret that the U.S. has heavily subsidized car-centric design for the last century and there are many people living in neighborhoods which don't even have sidewalks, much less transit or bike paths.
This has also encouraged many people to think that they must drive even if it's not a great choice: in the city I live in, it's not uncommon for people to cling to the habits they acquired growing up and trying to drive everywhere even though it means they're paying considerably more to sit in traffic while their friends who biked or took the train wonder why they're late.
There isn't a single answer here but the important thing is remembering that these are choices. Giving private car owners exclusive use of public land might be a popular choice but it's not a law of nature, and when it doesn't work well it's reasonable to question whether it's the right design for the context. There's no reason to think that the same answers will be true in rural areas, suburbs, and dense urban cores.
US Route 1 basically parallels I-95 in most of VA. I was once detoured on it after a military HAZMAT incident. It’s slow going, but it works.
I-95 works really well as long as its clear. But as soon as an emergency happens, the spillover traffic is too massive for Route 1 to ever hope to handle. An interstate-highway can't rely upon a traffic-light laden local road to handle the traffic from a 4-lane interstate.
EDIT: In the case of the 2017 eclipse, the traffic was so heavy that truckers started to pile up on the side of the roads (allegedly due to the laws stating that they could only drive for X hours at a time). Losing a few lanes slowed down traffic dramatically, causing even more truckers to just pull over due to legal requirements. I don't think the GPS / Waze ever recommended for us to leave I-95 during this time, so Rt. 1 was never a consideration.
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A 2-lane highway without traffic lights that runs parallel would help a lot. I don't know the lay of the land in Virginia (ideally such a road would be coordinated with local suburbs / local cities to lessen day-to-day traffic as well).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/wilson/...
And I don't imagine it would be much use in a sudden-onset winter storm, since it's right next to I-95; it's going to get blanketed about as fast as I-95 will, and most of it lacks enough shoulder for plows to get along it if it gets jammed with traffic.
Well... not really. Taking the 95 corridor in the Northeast as an example, the only places with alternative highways are 95/295 between DC and Baltimore, 295/NJT in lower New Jersey, and Merritt Parkway/95 in Connecticut to New Haven. In all of the other segments, 95 doesn't have a close-ish parallel highway to take off traffic.
And when you dig deeper into traffic statistics, the traffic tends to be heavy on both segments at the same time. That is, there are two highways there because the traffic needs require there to be two highways; the second highway isn't just "merely" a there-for-when-the-first-one-is-full kind of highway. And induced demand basically says that it's impossible to have that kind of highway setup.
Back in I think 1995, somebody rolled a tanker full of sulphuric acid on I-95 southbound about Fredericksburg. It took a long time to get to the Acquia exit from just past the previous one, and Route 1 didn't move that well once we were there.
They do this because they get to turn the extras into toll/HOV lanes and rake in dough without making tons of people's lives worse and getting pressure put on them to not be jerks like that.
Follow the incentives.
Other locations have "Backup" highways to lighten the load or otherwise take up the slack if the main road closes. Not so here.
I've been told that Virginia once had plans to build additional highways / alternative roads in cases of these emergencies, where the main road gets closed off for some reason. To do this, Virginia was planning to sell some coast-space to oil rigs and fund the new infrastructure.
Alas: the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010 killed that funding plan, and with it, the plans for new highways.
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Instead, the state of Virginia focused on building additional lanes to the already existing highways. Which... doesn't help in these times of emergency, and still doesn't help in terms of day-to-day traffic either (most day-to-day traffic is bottlenecked at the offramps, where highways turn into traffic-light controlled, slower local roads).
You need additional highways (aka: additional offramps) to truly scale day-to-day traffic. And you also need "backup highways" to handle emergency situations, such as a jack-knifed semi-truck blocking all lanes due to some snow-accident.