How do you propose doing that, though? Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already and if we're talking buses then there's a significant driver shortage. In the US the distances and routes required outside of dense urban centers also pretty much necessitate a huge increase in transit time compared to driving, making the whole thing a bad value for people who can afford a car.

Personally I feel it's fine for them to operate at a loss, it's a public service, akin to the fire department or library. The amount of good it does society to get cars off the road is staggering.

The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.

Crucially, the road network also operates at a loss

In the first level analysis.

Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and business that is enabled by roads you see that they pay for themselves several times over.

Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and business that is enabled by a decent metro system you see that they pay for itself several times over.

That's even easier to measure because these gains are localized.

Right. So let's have both! You can't replace the capabilities of roads with metro and you can't replace the convenience of a metro with roads.

Specifically, though, viewing roads or metro as a "loss leader" is probably an inappropriate analysis.

Actually, it has been shown that removing cars increase commerce.

This is a universal outcome with research to back it up?

yes but I am about to go to bed so the link mihht come only tomorrow.

Also some studies have calculated the impact on health in the society and calculated a cost to the society per km of driving a car and the money saved when doing the same km walking or with a bicycle.

The difference is that the gas tax or similar user fees could easily (if politically feasible) be scaled up to cover both capital and operating expenses for the entire road and highway network.

If you tried to do that for merely the operating costs of many transit systems, they’d enter a death spiral.

From what I'd read, the majority of road wear comes from tractor trailers, who don't nearly cover their costs.

It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and lowering infra spend.

Ideally you would have to change how zoning and planning works to create denser more integrated neighborhoods that can be efficiently used with public transit.

If that's too difficult the next best compromise is a park-and-ride scheme. Put a couple stations with huge parking lots in strategic locations between suburbs, and offer good rail or subway connections to work places and shopping destinations. That doesn't enable anyone to get rid of their car, but it gives people a faster alternative to the most congested roads

In TFA, they're literally taking roads and turning them into housing near transit hubs? This policy goes hand in hand with densifying housing.

Ask the locals, try some sort of ideas?

I'm not sure if you're saying that it can't be improved or what.

It doesn't change my point, this policy easily could swing the other way if it is perceived by voters as just a stick swung at them.

> Ask the locals, try some sort of ideas?

That's what the article is about...

> Mr. Tafoya was working for the City Council when he heard about the plan to expand the highway just blocks from where his mother still lived. “I-70 radicalized me,” he said. He quit his job and helped organize a statewide coalition of activists and community members who tried to stop the Interstate 70 expansion with lawsuits and protests. In the end, Interstate 70 was expanded. But the fight served as a warning to leaders like Ms. Lew that future highway construction would face spirited opposition.

> How do you propose doing that, though?

Thankfully, Massachusetts has shown how to do that.

The governor has to make a public statement that he will not allow any more eminent domain takings for highways on his watch (and issue executive orders to that effect.)

After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.

>After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.

They always have the option to leave the state due to a perceived reduction in QOL.

>Massachusetts is hemorrhaging people. In fact, it’s seeing the highest outmigration numbers in the last 30 years, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. A net 110,000 people moved out of the Bay State over roughly the first two years of the pandemic within the United States, most of them between the ages of 26 and 35.

>The question is: why? Rent is certainly a factor. Boston has the second-highest median rent in the country after New York City. Traffic congestion and the many woes of the MBTA have also dominated headlines.

>https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-05-30/massachusetts-res...

Yes, people have the option of leaving. That option is so unattractive that even gainfully employed and employable people will sleep rough rather than leave.

Our biggest challenge in MA is building enough housing capacity so people can park their heads somewhere safe every night. Since geometry brooks no compromise, it's nice that none, absolutely none of our existing building stock can be torn down for highways.

It's also nice that our inner ring cities have abolished parking requirements, which makes it easier to build more housing.

Plenty of choices actually. More attractive than taking a bus are leaving the state or voting out the un-American idiot going against the desires of the people to appease online communists.

You're making the assumption that roads pay for themselves, but that isn't true at all either. Across the US cities are going bankrupt because they can't maintain roads and other infrastructure. California has a gas tax that pays 80% of road maintenance, the rest of which is often paid from local city taxes that drivers and non-drivers alike pay. Many cities are falling behind in road maintenance though, the true impact of which won't be felt for ~20 years. A hidden cost of car infrastructure is also that the low density increases the costs of other infrastructure maintenance, such as sewage, gas, and power. Good mass transit is ultimately cheaper for everyone.

> Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already

All infrastructure runs at a loss? Do roads generate revenue

Hang on, this isn't taking anything away from drivers at all - the roads aren't suddenly going away or falling into ruin, they're just not getting enlarged. It's not much of a stick and nor is it a punishment, any more than building a road without bike lanes is a punishment for cyclists.

It is punishment if you are intentionally engineering the roads to cost people more time using them.

Stop punishing people by widening roads! It hasn't been shown to decrease transit times, but it has been shown to harm local standards of living.

The point of widening roads is to let more people use them, not to decrease transit time.

Roads are widened all the time with the goal to increase average speeds.

I can think of counter-example where it's more clear that travel time is not an independent variable to road width:

- lanes on highways are extra wide so you drive faster. (The wider the lane, the faster people will drive, the margin of error is greatly reduced allowing a faster travel speed). If what you were saying is true, then there would be first a lot of projects to narrow lanes to the minimum in order to increase the number of travel lanes. IIRC, US highways have as a standard a 13 foot width (I might have that somewhat wrong), IIRC as well, the absolute minimum width is more like 9 feet. There could be almost 50% more lanes by narrowing, but that would reduce traffic speeds.

People are already complaining about traffic! Drivers taking I70 between Denver and Loveland on weekends aren't doing so because of their love of the road. Why would we want to increase the number of people experiencing traffic? To assume my prior hyperbolic tone: Widening roads is punishing people for driving!

I'd argue the true goal of the exercise is to increase the capacity of the transit system, and that includes the proposal to not widen the roads. This isn't being done to punish drivers, regardless of how someguydave wants to frame it. The money (to the tune of a cool billion dollars) is being reinvested elsewhere in the network with the intent of increasing the number of people the city can move. The naive proposal of widening roads does work! It increases capacity, but it also makes everybody's experience worse via traffic and pollution. Let's see if there's something better!

People complain about everything. Certainly the bus is a common complaint here in Chicago even though it’s difficult for me to imagine it getting much better. Even if they add BRT people will complain about that. Of course the goal is increasing capacity of the transit system the question is how to do it.

I think the US has a big problem where SFHs are the epitome of what it means to be successful for a huge number of people. These people will always vote for policies that enable living in a single family home, even if they don’t live in on themselves and will never be able to afford to because the freedom to do so is so deeply ingrained. Highway expansion is a policy that enables single family home living as it enables people to live farther and farther from the city center so I suspect it will always see a large amount of political support.

But induced demand shows that traffic will only increase… more lanes means you're waiting more.

That’s because people are waiting too long on other roads! There is a point where traffic will not increase as all the demand has been sated.

That's not what induced demand is.

Imagine if there was a portal on your front lawn that allowed you instant access to downtown London. How much more frequently would you travel to London if it took you literally no time at all? All of those trips are induced demand--that is, it is extra demand that is induced by the ease of the trip. Shifting demand from one route to another is, by definition, not induced demand, since it already existed!

If this were absolutely true, the wide highways would be completely packed at 2am

Induced demand does not turn people nocturnal

Neither does it magically summon infinite traffic under all conditions

Every time you decide to delay a trip during rush-hour, because of rush-hour - that is an example of what you are describing.

As an example, in Bellevue, Washington - the evening rush hour starts (and is really bad) at 3pm - there are that many people leaving work progressively earlier that there is still a rush hour of people leaving work early to avoid the big rush-hour.

No. There is not.

You've totally misunderstood induced demand. You can build unlimited roads and they will all be used up and commutes will increase for everyone.

People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it.

This is why initially highway projects look like successes. Wow. My commute is so much better. And then. In a decade. They're even worse than they were originally.

>People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it.

well yes, that is the objective of building transit[0]: to get people where they would like to go. That people 'induce demand' by moving to a place where they can go where they would like to go with (initially) less friction is the system reequilibrating - from places where demand was not adequately sated[0].

Consider the opposite situation: we remove one lane from all highways, and drop the speed limits on all surface streets by 25 percent, and reduce the departures of all trains and planes by 25%. If adding capacity is bad, then reducing it must be good [for the economy and people's quality of life].

[0]If demand was adequately sated, where was it induced from? Adequately sated here might also be read as 'optimally sated' or even just 'less well sated'. Obviously there is a point where cost exceeds the marginal benefit, e.g. adding 10 new bay bridges would surely reduce mean transit times across the bay, but at a patently unreasonable cost-benefit ratio.

[1]Unless you like to argue that we are at the local or global optimum for transit capacity?

It's not that adding capacity is bad, that it can be ineffective.

Given that personal transport is such a large percentage of the nations' carbon footprint, adding more cars detracts from that goal. From that perpsective, or a localized pollution perspective, or people wasting time in traffic jams (because NO alternative exists) - those are bad things.

I've generally lived in places in the US where driving is the ONLY viable option. By adding lanes, an ineffective tactic, instead of investing in more scalable (ie: effective) solutions - therein lies a problem.

> well yes, that is the objective of building transit

The US traffic engineer currently tries to optimize for throughput as defined by vehicles per minute, rather than passengers per minute. Therein lies the rub. Take a 2 lane road, dedicate one for buses, and it turns out the passenger throughput per minute goes way up, a single bus can be equivalent to 50+ cars.

Which is all to say, build more lanes of road for single occupancy cars has a limiting factor for when that is no longer an effective solution to the transit problem. Yet, adding more lanes is often still the only solution applied in many jurisdictions.

in some cities where traffic was reduced in specific areas (usually the center), business went up, because, as more people were forced to walk, they also were more spontaneously entering shops and buying more.

You clearly misunderstand the concept of induced demand

This would only be true if additional lanes were built on top of each other instead of next to each other. As lanes are widened though they just keep pushing things apart and making other types of transit less pleasant, which will then create demand that wasn't there before (because people now need to be on roads longer to get where they want to go). There is a maximum density that cars can support that is LOWER than most cities are built up at.

But it will increase. People move farther away ("this commute used to be bad but now there's another lane so I can live in a bigger house further out!"), businesses build "enough" parking so things are spread farther apart, and all of this increases the miles driven, thereby increasing traffic.

No, there is no such point, because there is simply not enough room to transport every person in an office building or high-rise apartment building in a personal car to and from work.

More lanes only helps the car manufacturers. A nice train system up and down the front range would be great. Would also help people get their 10,000 steps in every day walking to the train.

> the roads aren't suddenly going away or falling into ruin, they're just not getting enlarged.

This is also great for owners of current housing since the road network will not be enlarged to accomodate large new housing developments. Win-win.

People are driven by the cattle prod. If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use, i.e. sin taxes. It's worked on cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc. to varying degrees. The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

I ultimately agree with the approach they're taking. It isn't going to be accomplished by building additional lanes and subsequently asking people to pretty-please take transit.

It does need to be weighed against the practicality of transportation to/from where your transit riders need to go. Given the vast majority of Western states are sparsely populated, transit dollars can only go so far.

Hurting people to teach them your morality certainly has some interesting historical analogies

This is not an argument worth having as it can be extended to any law written, up to and including laws against murder.

There is an difference between the government punishing murderers and government bureaucrats employed by elected representatives to build roads deciding to punish the general population by not building roads (and still being paid tax dollars)

everyone's morality is different, one would hope the government optimizes for something else, like you paying more to slowly kill yourself because it costs the government money when you stop paying taxes early and use your social security net instead of working

And people can make the government change policy.

I don't think the prod that is in the people's hands is a good idea here.

> If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use. . .

> given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

I have a notion the former is related to the latter and might even be a downhill spiral.

People may use sin taxes or similar as an outward excuse, but I doubt rational individuals want to overthrow the government because they are paying an extra 25 cents for soda or haven't had their wetlands paved over for additional parking spaces.

Goalpost movement noted.

Is being "driven by the cattle prod" a valid excuse to hold views described as "distrusts or dislikes the government?"

No goal posts were moved, but nice try. You also seem to be under the false assumption that the cattle prod is a real device in this scenario.

Moving from a maximally coercive metaphorical “cattle prod” to a minimal “sin tax” is classic. Go on

https://medium.com/bigger-picture/what-is-a-motte-bailey-aad...

> The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

It seems weird that the response to "a democratic government, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, has lost the confidence of large swaths of the electorate" is to give that institution more direct social control.

That seems like the opposite of what a sane system would do.

> I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way

Where do you think the money is going?

> Within a year of the rule’s adoption in 2021, Colorado’s Department of Transportation, or CDOT, had canceled two major highway expansions, including Interstate 25, and shifted $100 million to transit projects. In 2022, a regional planning body in Denver reallocated $900 million from highway expansions to so-called multimodal projects, including faster buses and better bike lanes.

>I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like.

Impossible. Mass transit, walking, and non motorized bicycling do not go mesh with individual motorized traffic. It’s just physics.

The classic individualist vs collectivist dilemma that nature presents. You have to sacrifice one for the other.

As proof, simply look at all the best places for mass transit. Individual car usage is painful in all of them. The more painful using a car is, the better the public transit can be.

Yeah, cars are a tragedy of the commons. They're great if you're the only person on the road: you can get to anywhere you want on your own schedule. But then everyone rationally chooses to drive, which makes it a pretty crummy way to get around. Not to mention all the externalities and inefficiencies involved.

In order to make mass transit more attractive we will have to do something about the other riders. A lot of people that I know in the SF Bay Area simply don't feel safe on buses and light rail (although Caltrain seems to be fine). Our failures in housing and mental health public policy have turned mass transit into ersatz homeless shelters. Plus there are plenty of regular antisocial assholes playing loud music, yelling, littering, sometimes begging. Rules are not enforced.

Punishing drivers isn't a solution. We need comprehensive solutions that make regular people feel welcome on public transit. Otherwise those people won't support public transit funding.

The Colorado example is about no longer giving out carrots rather than using any type of stick. Tolls and higher taxes would be examples of sticks.

> clogging the roads

The roads already be clogged and adding more lanes is not likely to unclog them. Single occupancy vehicles at the end of the day are not a solution for moving hundreds of thousands of people around - there's an intrinsic scaling problem that can't be solved by building infinite roads.

It's kinda like trying to get high speed internet by adding more & more 56k modems.