So you buy another server. Now you have 2000 users, but once again it is starting to run slowly.

You decide to stop there. Clearly, more servers wont help. You'd just get more and more users.

You buy a second server. Now, your server still is overloaded between 08:00 and 9:00 but fewer people use it between 07:00 and 08:00 and 09:00 and 10:00.

There are plenty of people avoiding the main traffic times for whom the annoyance of congestion is just a tiny bit larger than the annoyance of leaving home an hour earlier. Take away a bit of congestion and they move their schedule.

Your analogy is broken because building more servers doesn't "get more users". You have to service a fixed number of users in the most efficient manner possible. Providing a car lane for each of them is not efficient.

So I open another stall next to it but the lines don't seem to get much shorter even though I'm making twice as much coffee.

Notice that nowhere in there was a requirement that said infrastructure pays for itself. More often than not, and especially in small towns, it doesn't.

But don't believe me, take it from a civil engineer and urban planner who has done a lot of real research into this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn7aJ_Ti-co

You're assuming that having more roads makes it more efficient, but that's not necessarily true. If having less urban roads convinces more people to use mass transit, for example, it might be more efficient.

Article provides very little useful information. Again, it's obvious that if you expand one road in a congested city then it will get full of cars again, because it takes the overflow from all of the other congested roads. And if you reduce congestion in general then people might choose to drive more often.

But this does not persist as a 1:1 relationship. China has proved as much by building a bunch of empty highways and cities, as is also demonstrated by urban highways carrying more traffic than rural highways with the same number of lanes. The "problem" is that if you have a lot of congested highways then you need to add a lot of lanes before you'll hit saturation, but that hardly proves that it can't be done. The observed 1:1 relationship in some locations is easily explained as a result of widespread insufficient infrastructure investment, resulting in roads with insufficient capacity even after the expansion.

He was drawing an analogy to the 'swing-top' bin - how you always try to fit more in and never empty it. "What would be the state of affairs a week from now if I gave you all a brand new swing-top bin to put next to your current one?"

http://i.imgur.com/DKRsGZ4.png

It was on an episode of Top Gear. It's typically empty, and in the above image you have government officials going to work.