But let's be fair, "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars.

The real question is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?

Edited to change "problem" to "question" - problems are things like "we need to get people to work, etc" and "how do we reduce pollution" not "I saw too many cars".

For me, who can't drive, a big chunk of it is the crime aspect of public transit.

In the last two months alone, two people have been murdered on my local transit system, including a 13-year-old-kid shooting some dude for no reason [0][1].

This, combined with it taking at least three times as long to get literally anywhere, with many trips resulting in a detour to a central hub station or similar means the Uber is a far better value if you care at all about your time.

If you are trying to visit friends 10 minutes away, this is 20 minutes by car or (if you're lucky and the time windows line up) an hour out of your day by transit.

[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/02/boy-13-arrested-fatal-...

[1]: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/27/man-accused-of-longmon...

Ya, safety is important. Metro and Sound transit here in Seattle want increased funding for more routes, while the routes they have are becoming unusable as anything more than unhoused neighbor day centers. Fix the safety problem first, and then expand.

I still take the D line into Downtown Seattle when we go there, but will always have one or two situations on the bus where I regret the choice. It keeps me from using the bus more often.

I've never been to Denver but I would guess auto fatalities are a higher percentage than public transit fatalities.

There's an element of control when you're in a personal vehicle that's lacking when you're on transit with the general public, and fatalities aren't necessarily the only risk factor to be considered.

e.g. I'm less likely to be mugged or assaulted in a personal vehicle compared to public transit but I'm also more likely to have my vehicle broken into or stolen. Public transit is also _very_ different during typical commute times, compared to off hours.

I think this is a critical aspect: the current statistics on who takes which mode of transportation are hopelessly distorted. The current system is broken every which way. For the San Francisco Bay Area you don't take one or the other because you like it. You take one because the other is even more messed up. You can't even "like" one if it's right under your door. Parking is (deliberately) terrible. Car windows broken entirely expected to happen sooner or later (pretty deliberately also really). Transit shows up or not. And is slow. And might break down right under you. And is a war zone. The potholes are massive enough they affect the busses just fine, etc, etc. Back to the point at hand: looking at how many trips are taken in one or the other tells you nothing about people's preferences. The preference would be NEITHER.

It's one of those things that may work out mathematically, but the true fact of it is if someone dies in a car accident everyone is sad and gets back in their car after the funeral (and to be fair, a decent number auto fatalities involve drugs or alcohol). Crime hits in a completely different way.

Same way that no amount of "more people died in car accidents than on Boeing planes" would ever get people to agree that fixing the MCAS was not needed.

It says a lot that you evaluate traffic deaths as “crime”

> The real problem is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?

Time is the answer. Very rarely, covering typical US population density to the routes and schedules allow people to get from point a to b in a reasonable time. I once tried to hire a person to work for our company who thought she could take the bus. To get three miles, it would take her roughly 3 hours and require her to change busses five times. In the end, spending six hours on a bus or waiting for one just wasn't worth it to work eight hours.

I was going to say "as opposed to a little less than an hour's walk", but in the US there is the question of how many 14-lane highways and Costco parking lots you would need to cross during that hour.

Also even if the right geography exists for walking, does the climate locally support it?

Under 50 outside, most folks just nope out, same with over 80 outside.

Heck, most people cannot walk three miles without breaking some sort of sweat in a temperate climate, so for work, you need to be presentable.

Also a three mile distance "as the bird flies" may be double that as the person walks or drives.

People, including me, are lazy. I could walk almost all the time, I don't.

I could make up excuses, but I'm just kinda lazy.

And no matter how we try to sell it, people will almost always prefer a 15 minute drive to a 30 minute walk, or even a 15 minute walk.

Hell, I could walk my children to school (it's a mile away) in freezing weather through a blizzard, but will I? I could lie and say I would, but damn that heated seat feels nice ...

I dated a woman from Uganda for a while and she said to me that she (and other Ugandan immigrants) Americans were crazy. Why would you want to walk anywhere when you have a car. She explained that back in Uganda, you had to walk everywhere and it was not a good life.

The issue with this particular walk was surviving a four block jaunt though the worst neighborhood in town.

This is almost always the answer. I’ve written up before “how does driving compare to transit for my commute?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197

It’s not hard to understand why I’d choose to drive when there is an alternative (at least technically, if not practically).

I used to have a 3 mile walking commute and was almost always in a great mood, full of ideas and inspiration by the time I arrived at work or home. It took about 35 minutes each way.

probably twice as slow as driving, but 10x more enjoyable

3 hours to commute 3 miles is literally 1 mile an hour. about the speed of a baby's crawl

>Why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives?

In my experience as an American who prefers public transport but lives in the Midwest, where public transport is essentially nonexistent: people have a skewed view of public transport thanks to horror stories about NYC subways and whatnot. So even if public transport were available, many people wouldn't take it because it would mean being around other people.

How skewed is the perception? Riding transit isn't a death sentence, but it does suck: slow, unreliable, expensive, dirty/smelly/germy, and with the potential of being a victim of violent crime.

It really depends on the city. Some places it's just fine, and pretty popular, some places it's a rolling bathroom and pretty popular - the problems are the ones where it is unpopular and a rolling bathroom; that's the hardest to expand - which means it is perpetually stuck in a dead zone where it can't be used because it can't be expanded because it can't be used.

Meanwhile things like the San Diego Trolley has gone from 16 miles and 17 stops in 1981 to 47,000 people a weekday in 1996 and to almost 70 miles and 62 stations today, with ridership peaking at around 38 million a year in 2019 (and slowly recovering back up).

(Some of the original cars are still riding, down in Mendoza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza )

Something to note: that is a very successful light transit line and the total track is about the same as some people's daily commute.

> "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars.

I don’t think anybody claims induced demand happens instantly and doesn’t have limits.

It won’t happen instantly, but over time, a new road to the middle of nowhere will lead to people moving there, increasing traffic.

Also, in the case of widening roads, part of induced demand is of people that used to leave early to avoid the traffic that now will leave home a bit later. That doesn’t increase demand for going from A to B, but does increase demand for going from A to B between 7 AM and 9 AM.

Another effect is that, all other things being equal, using more space for roads decreases population density and thus increases distance traveled, also increasing road usage.

The problem with cars is the geometry. It's just very inefficient for the amount of people you are trying to move. For example, many cars are able to seat four or more passengers. What frequently happens is that only one person is driving it. You need empty space for maneuvering and ability to stop safely, especially at high speed.

If you design for the car, you need to design spaces for cars to park in, which increases distance between places, which worsen alternatives.

Coupled with parking minimum and inefficient urban planning, everything is too far apart. Traffic engineer design for convenience of cars with everything else an afterthought. It's either too dangerous or too inconvenient to walk and bike.

When you need to drive everywhere, that also increases demand for driving.

With cheap land and access to highways, this cause suburban sprawls and of course additional traffic. Given that jobs are found within the city, it's no surprise that we have traffic congestion.

Compare people to car, we just need less space in general to move and you don't have the problem of car seating only the driver majority of the time instead of four or five people.

So yeah, geometry hates car.

It hates busses worse if the busses are regular enough not to be annoying.

If the busses are only every couple of hours, they might get packed, but the number of nearly empty busses driving around would amaze people.

Example: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58861#_idTextAnchor012 where busses beat personal vehicle but only slightly; compared to rail transit it's obscene.

But that's because the average transit bus has 8 passengers and gets 3.4 mpg! https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html

Even if you "fill" the bus to 40 people, it still is matched by a car with 5 people in it.

Easy. Time and incremental cost.

I live in a small city. I work a 8 minute drive, or 20 minute bus ride from my home. In the summer, I frequently walk. During the school year, I have to drive to get my kid to school and other events.

For distance trips, I frequently go to NYC for personal trips. I live in upstate NY and can quickly use Amtrak to get to NYC. The problem is, even though NYC has great transit, I can get to any single point in NYC faster and likely cheaper from upstate than most arbitrary points within NYC. I only take the train for Manhattan or overnight trips.

If you live in suburbia, forget it. Cycling is dangerous, and walking is time consuming with poor infrastructure in most places.

> The real problem is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?

Often people don't appreciate that there are alternatives. People will often claim that alternatives aren't practical such as cycling in cold or wet areas which is despite many European countries that provide counter examples. It's also a matter of habit and people will gradually get used to their commutes becoming longer and more stressful rather than evaluating whether driving is the best option. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel that the vehicle they drive is a key part of their personality or signals their social position.

I was in Scandinavia a couple of years ago. Drove around 4000 kilometers around the Baltic. There was no way I could've done that on public transit. In fact, in the whole time, the only public transit I saw was in Stockholm or Helsinki. In Helsinki, it was far easier to rent a bike and experience more of the city than it was to take the tram. In Talin and Tartu, driving, walking, and biking was orders of magnitude faster than transit because it still didn't go or you needed to go.

In Sweden I saw separate pathways for bicycles complete with roadway lighting. Didn't see many people using them but at least they were there.

> when there are alternatives

Because these alternatives are usually kept subpar. In many areas of the world with good mass transit options, people don’t choose to drive (London, UK for ex.)

Convenience and cost.

I take the train or bus when it's the right combination of faster, easier, and cheaper. I drive when the alternative is slower, harder, or more expensive. Sometimes it's a coinflip.

> But let's be fair, "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars.

No, "induced demand" is a variation on "if you build it, they will come".

e.g. Traffic is heavy to the new suburb, so you add lanes. But now people are willing to expand the new suburb, or to build houses even farther out because of the new highway. So you need to add even more lanes ...

Yeah, I've always found that particular argument unconvincing. If road usage grows, that means more people are benefiting, right?

There are some fundamental problems with cars crowding out alternatives (either due to cost or space). But saying that utilization is evidence that something is bad seems backwards to me.

There are a number of problems with increasing car utilization. They tend to prevent other forms of transport from co-existing as busy roads are not attractive to walk/cycle/scooter along. There's also the sizable amount of pollution from tire and break wear which is not solved by EVs (except electric scooters/bikes - they produce a negligible amount of tire particulates due to their reduced weight).

When you have increased car usage, there's also a demand for car parking and once you start assigning a large amount of space for car parking, you end up pushing facilities further apart. This means that more journeys then become impractical except via cars and the problems increase.

Because there aren't alternatives in most cases. I 100% could not reach my job with any sort of public transport because there is none in that suburb, and bike is out of the question unless I want to spend 3-4 hours a day commuting.

I know a lot of people hate cars, but you should remember that much of the US is rural, and by land area, it’s mostly not suitable for trains. We should remember that cities and the countryside are different and reject simplistic slogans (“geometry hates cars”) that imply that one form of transportation works best everywhere. We should have a mosaic of different systems that work together.

The most successful form of public transit in low-density areas is the school bus. They work well for bringing kids to school. They require roads. We’re not going to switch to rail.

The geometry argument was not as simple as you suggest.

There was a necessary precondition: "there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level".

That's the opposite of implying that one form of transportation works best everywhere.

FWIW, in some low density areas the most successful form of public transit is the ferry, which carries kids to school, people to work, food to the stores, and more.

I'm very pro car and personal travel / liberty, but I will say living briefly in Sydney that the ferry is the ultimate form of public transportation, like a free tour.

However weather does play a large role, and during peak hours the crowds are quite daunting.

There's only very specific places where ferry is useful. You need multiple ports close to each other in calm water with high frequency traffic.

The U.S. solution mostly is just not to have that level of population density. Most larger cities in Europe for example are old, laid out and built before the invention of the car. Before motorized transport, people mostly got places by walking. The point of a city is that you have lots of people that can all reach each other in a reasonable amount of time. If you have to walk, you have to get those people closer together.

If you can drive, you can spread out more and still get reasonable travel times. A lot of big cities in the U.S. were mostly built out after the invention of the car, so they are built with cars in mind. The older ones mostly have semi-decent public transit available.

I know the myth of European cities being more suited for walking but the reality is, it isn't. Even many's old city centers, it's one or two story buildings, tiny apartments, tiny expensive shops and has-beens preserve more for tourists than for living.

I did see one exception. In Helsinki down by the harbor near the Estonian ferry, they are putting in 8-10 story apartment buildings. They are located on transit lines but does nothing but apartment buildings there. You have to take the tram to get to supermarket or medical facilities and the tram doesn't go that fast.

It seems to me that effective public transit would require running a public transit vehicle (buses, trams) so that you never need to wait more than 15 minutes at any stop. Still would be horribly inefficient because you'd be doing lots of vehicle changes but at least you can get everywhere eventually.

> there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level

I think the other issue in the US is the opposite: below a certain density, it's hard for public transit to be effective. Once car-oriented development has sprawled out with suburbs and stroads, the distance between you and a transit-stop is gonna be higher, riders per mile of route will be lower, etc. And when housing prices push people to move further out from city centers (which is important not just for commuting to jobs but access to stores/schools/everything) the problem just gets worse.

This is one of the issues with prioritising cars over all other forms of transport - they tend to crowd out any other form of transport or make them far less desirable due to the distances involved or the danger posed by drivers.

> Unfortunately, the U.S. has gone all-in on car based infrastructure and that's a difficult thing to reverse.

The USA has a fantastic organizational structure that allows changes like this to be experimented with in pockets of the country without a top down approach. If an approach can't be done at the city or State level, then it's not likely to get approved for spending at the Federal level as you add in more people who will never directly benefit from said system.

In the USA, the city of New York is seen as having the most extensive mass transit system, in particular the subway system. Problem is that it has massive budgetary shortfalls and doubles as a de facto homeless shelter. People don't take the NYC subway because they want to, they take it because they have no other choice.

If people want public transport to be a success in the USA, pick a city (any city!) and show that it can be done in a fiscally sustainable way with an end product that people actually want to use. Not just forced to use.

I’m not an anti-car person but I think you have a few misconceptions:

- A lot of well off people who could flag a taxi or Uber still take the NYC subway because it is very convenient and has incredible coverage. All sorts of New Yorkers use it. Also, you can get from the airport to Manhattan just as fast if not faster on the LIRR, and at a fraction of the cost. (In the SF Bay Area on the other hand, the trains are pretty bad for getting to the airport!)

- Public transit is almost never intended to operate at a profit. They intentionally subsidize it, both for people with low income, and to make routes to suburbs where the route might not have the ridership to really justify it, but the planners think it is still important for political reasons (like if a district is paying for some transit service, everyone in the district should get some stations).

> Public transit is almost never intended to operate at a profit.

Fiscally sustainable does not have to mean turning a profit or refusing to take any external tax dollars for funding.

But it also can't be $3 billion over budget (on a $20 billion budget) every year with a fiscal timebomb about to go off when their COVID bailout expires: https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics [1]

[1]: Same link from wayback machine from Dec 2023 in case the MTA changes it: https://web.archive.org/web/20231203043132/https://new.mta.i...

Well, it's an issue of double standards.

Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason.

> Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason.

The NY State Thruway, the tolled highway that crosses the entire state, is entirely self-funded by tolls:

https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2022/03/28/tolls-not-tax...

>Nobody expects highways to make money or break even.

Where I'm from, in New Zealand, roads are paid for from a budget that is funded primarily by fuel taxes and road user charges. So what you've said is not a universal truth.

Sorry, was speaking from a USA context. Yes, you are correct.

"but there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level."

And yet tha vast majority of the US is nowhere near that density. The most dense areas already have public transit. Could those areas use some additional funding? Probably. Are there other issues than just funding? Definitely. Is the title misleading and presenting a false dilemma? Yes, the US is investing in both, not just one or the other.

Induced demand also applies to housing (i.e. as more housing becomes available, more people choose to live in the popular city, and housing prices keep increasing). But we should probably still keep building more housing (but with parking, that means traffic gets worse, so lots of public transit would work better in that case, even if the city is going to become expensive to live in).

Yes, but "housing" can involve any number of different types of house. If everyone demanded spacious detached housing that had approximately four times the number of bedrooms per person, then there would be similar problems. That would be analogous to the typical car journey where there is space for four people and usually just one occupant.

Also, housing requires space for where the house is located, but cars will require space (parking) both at the main residence and also at every possible destination.

> If everyone demanded spacious detached housing that had approximately four times the number of bedrooms per person, then there would be similar problems.

Even if you built that housing, let's say you are in Houston or some texan city with lots of space, it would fill up. Your traffic problems would be even worse of course. Luckily, a lot of cities are hemmed in by water/mountains, so the only way to build is up, but if you do build up (like in HK, which is a good example of a city that is hemmed in by water and mountains), your city doesn't necessarily get cheaper, you just get more people.

Why not increase quality of life by decreasing density? The United States is an unfathomably large land mass, there's plenty of space out there. With modern ways of working there's no need to live in human storage pods in big cities.

We are nowhere NEAR saturating our landmass with people. There are more and less desirable places to live in the country, but there's no shortage of raw space.

Not to mention, this isn't zero sum. Our roads and bridges can be in desperate need of repair (they are) and we can also need better public transportation and rail.

> We are nowhere NEAR saturating our landmass with people.

That is true only if you think wall papering the earth from top to bottom with human settlement is acceptable and that the natural world has no value. In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people. Now, infill.

> In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people

This sure sounds a lot like a pure opinion. Do you have anything to back up this claim?

If the number of threatened animal species and fragmented biomes don't convince you, nothing I can say will. It's a fact that most of the natural world is threatened. That we shouldn't pave over paradise and put up a parking lot is a value statement that I cannot prove to you more than I cant that murder and rape are bad.

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...

I live in the mountains of Colorado, on a dirt road. Living there does not mean paving everything. My home's presence does not "threaten the natural world" as evidenced by the moose, the birds, the bobcat, the ermine, and countless other wildlife that we share the environment with.

I understand you might think everything humanity does is destructive, but it just doesn't comport with my experience.

I would encourage you to find some wilderness, and see for yourself whether the "natural world is threatened". I'm not denying that it doesn't happen, it's just not as widespread or universal as you seem to suggest.

Visit the US west and tell me "most of the natural world is threatened". In many parts it's wilderness as far as the eye can see.

> My home's presence does not "threaten the natural world" as evidenced by the moose, the birds, the bobcat, the ermine, and countless other wildlife that we share the environment with.

If your settlement isn't dense enough to disturb nature, then it's not dense enough to make a dent in the national supply. That said, I cannot find the research right now, but I did read that human presence on a hiking trail in a national park effects wolf behaviour for a month as they are weary of the scent, so I definitely bet you are having a bigger impact than you know.

I own a home on a 100 acre wood. It's the only one, and yeah, it probably doesn't disturb the natural world very much, at least much less than the local ATV trail. But I know what it took to get building 5 miles from the nearest logging road, and I know that it's not feasible to do that for a million immigrants a year looking for a home. Cheap and plentiful homes means easier easy sprawl or dense infill.

PS - Willing the home to a local youth organisation to use for retreats and the rest of land is being stipulated to have no more development on it.

From what I've heard, that specific issue has more to do with farming than with housing. In the US specifically, 4% of land area is urban, 21% is farmland; worldwide it's 33% agricultural and 0.5% urban.

Parking lots are awful, even in their own right, in that we agree.

Repair and widening are different things. When you say we're nowhere near saturating our landmass with people, are you thinking of the landmass of the entire country or the areas within an hour commute or less of a major population center? That's where the vast majority of people live, and that landmass is pretty saturated.

Why is increased density better? Maybe it would be better for things to be more spread out and for people to have EV cars charged from clean nuclear energy?

Dense cities are a different kind of time bomb. Replacing pipes and streets disrupts a lot more people and a lot of businesses for a shockingly long amount of time.

Dense cities also happen to be significantly more expensive in practically every way. The cost of housing in particular. Feels like a corollary to induced demand on roads. Although it’s worth noting in both cases that induced demand means more people are receiving value and benefit!

I dunno. I live in a city. It’s fine. But density doesn’t feel like a defacto good thing to me.

Spreading out is bad. It adds significant fiscal burden supporting essential services infrastructure such as water and sewerage, as you lose the economies of scale that more dense/compact cities have. Worse, spreading out only adds to induced demand when you have greater numbers of people commuting at the same time of day twice a day.

Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc.

Further, if you had better and reliable rapid transport links servicing spread out communities, it would negate the need to drive in many cases when commuting to economic hubs. But this requires a mindset shift.

Overall, it's nuanced, and that complexity is why voters (and NIMBYs) are reticent to embrace how we need to be living for now, and not how we used to live.

> It adds significant fiscal burden supporting essential services infrastructure such as water and sewerage, as you lose the economies of scale that more dense/compact cities have.

I grew up in rural America. It is not at all obvious to me that cities are more economic. If anything it’s the opposite. Doing any kind of infrastructure work is expensive, slow, and disruptive.

> Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc.

Maybe. Cost of housing is arguably our biggest and most important problem – and it’s increasingly wide spread.

But at no point in recent history have dense cities had cheaper housing. Building tall is expensive.

Apologies — what I meant by economic hub was in the sense that a city is a central point for business, trade and finance. Not that cities are necessarily more economical.

Though I would argue that while costs can be higher, the ROI is also realised faster, whereas the costs to service rural areas will take longer to achieve its benefit-cost ratio — and in fact it may never.

And that's not to say rural areas aren't important. They are! But we need to think more cleverly and collectively for how we can service them better for the social and economic benefit of all within a given region. No one needs to lose out at the expense of someone else, I don't believe it's a zero sum game.

And I hear you re cost of housing. The thing is at some stage there can be critical mass in that there's enough housing on the market that it negates huge inflation due to supply outpacing (not outstripping) demand. The thing is, this is one lever, and if we keep the emigration (domestic and foreign) faucet turned on and we don't mitigate it with other measures, housing costs go up. And we've got to ask, who is winning in that situation? It's not the people, but it is the speculators and investors...

> The issue is the space that's required by them and building more lanes doesn't really help due to induced demand

No, you're measuring what you care about, not the actual goal.

More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! If you have 4 lanes, and 20,000 people can commute to work, and with 8 lanes, 40,000 people can commute to work, that's a huge win for the people who wanted to use the highway! Think about this honestly — if you doubled the capacity of a subway, and twice as many people took it so it was just as crowded, you'd be thrilled.

You're going to be perpetually confused by infrastructure decisions if you measure a goal that nobody else is trying to solve for.

It's a zero sum game. More lanes/roads for commuters means less land for other productive uses. And given the geometry and passenger density of cars (how many traffic jams are moving 1 person per X cubic feet/meters?) Adding another lane doesn't give you much for the amount of land it uses compared to alternatives.

It's unfortunate that low-density areas and the highways they depend on are subsidized by more productive uses of land. It's a tragedy that the people benefiting from that subsidy feel entitled to it and prevent society from developing the land in more sustainable ways.

Part of it is a chicken-and-egg problem though... even my city where I live is not immune. Those who live in less developed areas vote against public transportation solutions and stymie progress at every turn while voting for more roads/lanes. It appears rational: they can't get to the public transportation where they are since every amenity is incredibly far (due to cars and road infrastructure, wah wah). So who has to suffer more while we figure out the solution?

From a larger ecological perspective, we need to reduce car infrastructure. It's a significant contributor to climate change, air pollution, and unnecessary deaths every year and there are ways to avoid a good deal of those problems (or at least reduce them).

> More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go!

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but no one wants to get to the 5 or 6 lane highway. They are using the highway to get to smaller 1-2 lane surface roads and parking areas with limited capacity. Eventually you will hit a bottleneck in surface roads or parking that you cannot improve easily or cheaply. The larger highways only serve to get people to the bottlenecks in the system faster.

And they apparently hated you for you spoke the truth. Like sure there's the "adding more lanes to one highway doesn't reduce congestion" thing but that's not a good faith reading of your point.

If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. It's literally providing more value to people and acting as an economic multiplier. If you improve the bus system and more people use it that's also a win because it's providing more value to people.

If your plan doesn't start with here's all the ways the roads provide value and why individuals and businesses overwhelmingly prefer them to current alternatives and how we're taking that as table stakes for our new system, then of course people are gonna push back. Just because you think a trade-off is worth it or some perceived downside is fine for you doesn't mean it will be true for everyone.

> If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win.

This ignores the cost/benefit of constructing more car infrastructure in heavily urbanized areas and the cost of owning a car for transportation. It ceases to be an economic multiplier when you compare it to cheaper alternatives. You are also painting car infrastructure as some sort of panacea, but it costs households a lot of money (almost 1/5th of their total income[1]) to use a car for transportation.

Not only are cars expensive, but their expense is inversely correlated with income (poor people spend more money on cars). In the USA we spend much more on transportation than in EU countries[2]. From the standpoint of the average American family, car infrastructure is much costlier than the alternatives.

1. https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend... 2. https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-uni...

You'll end up with 20k more cars needing parking too.

You'll also end up with 20K happy voters.

This is too often forgotten.

Why is induced demand bad? Induced demand means more people get to do more things!

It's like you have a bunch of people at 1700 calories per day, and you are against growing more food cause there'd be induced demand for food - they'd just eat it all up, and ask for more.