Re:Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety
by AnthonyMouse on Friday October 10, 2014 @08:04PM
(#8440695)
> There was an article about people's tendency to soak up additional road space posted on HN fairly recently
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.
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.