Re:Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Vir...
by sagarm on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:03AM
(#29835167)
Induced demand actually does happen in American healthcare: spending goes up with healthcare availability, but health outcomes do not improve past a fairly low level of usage. This is a waste, not productive economic activity.
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.
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.