Why Expanding Highways Makes Traffic Worse (gizmodo.com) 267
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Americans drove 40 percent more miles in 2019 than they did in 1994, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. More driving means more congested traffic. So to reduce congestion, it makes sense to build more highway lanes so that more cars can fit. Right? Actually, no. A new report from the policy organization Transportation for America shows that doesn't work at all. Between 1993 and 2017, the researchers found that the largest urban areas in the U.S. added 30,511 new lane-miles of roads -- a 42 percent increase. That's a faster rate of growth than population growth, which rose by 32 percent in those cities over the same time period.
But in that 24 year period, traffic congestion didn't drop at all. In fact, it rose by 144 percent even as states spent more than $500 billion on highway capital investments in urbanized areas, and a sizable portion of which went toward highway expansion. That means governments spent billions, and the end result was Americans wasting more time frustrated on the highway, sitting in cars that spew out climate-warming and neighborhood-polluting emissions. That's because when you build more highways, people start driving more and filling up the lanes in a matter of years. From 1993 to 2017, the average person drove 20 percent more miles. Right after a highway is widened, traffic does speed up, and drivers take advantage of that by "switching from other routes, driving further distances or traveling during the busiest time of the day," the report, which looked at federal and state data on traffic and freeway growth, says. "People who had previously avoided congestion -- whether by riding transit, carpooling, traveling during less congested times of day, or foregoing the trip altogether -- start driving on that route more because it has become more convenient."
But in that 24 year period, traffic congestion didn't drop at all. In fact, it rose by 144 percent even as states spent more than $500 billion on highway capital investments in urbanized areas, and a sizable portion of which went toward highway expansion. That means governments spent billions, and the end result was Americans wasting more time frustrated on the highway, sitting in cars that spew out climate-warming and neighborhood-polluting emissions. That's because when you build more highways, people start driving more and filling up the lanes in a matter of years. From 1993 to 2017, the average person drove 20 percent more miles. Right after a highway is widened, traffic does speed up, and drivers take advantage of that by "switching from other routes, driving further distances or traveling during the busiest time of the day," the report, which looked at federal and state data on traffic and freeway growth, says. "People who had previously avoided congestion -- whether by riding transit, carpooling, traveling during less congested times of day, or foregoing the trip altogether -- start driving on that route more because it has become more convenient."
Treating humans like sewage (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with this analysis is that it treats roads carrying traffic like pipes carrying sewage.
Traffic is PEOPLE. More road capacity means people go where they want to go and live where they want to live.
That people choose to actually use the extra capacity is a GOOD THING.
Re:Treating humans like sewage (Score:5, Insightful)
The controlling factor is commute time versus housing cost. If you make the commute easier people will move out further to get more house for the buck. Mixed used development - residential plus retail plus office is a much better model. Plus cities should stop allowing the construction of massive amounts of office space (cities love the taxes on that since it consumes few services like schools) without corresponding amount of housing. Simply changing urban rules to require office and housing to be built in matching pairs would make a huge difference. You put up an office building for 1,000 workers -- you also have to put up 1,000 units of housing. Building more roads solves nothing, it just causes people to move further out.
Re: Treating humans like sewage (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more. Increased road capacity leads to flatter, more spread out cities 10 years later which in turn increase the demand for road capacity.
If, instead, residential areas are focused around transport hubs, 10% of its citizens may go for public transport or simply end up living closer to work.
For the individual, after all, the cost of commute is measured in minutes traveled , not in miles traveled.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
citizens may go for public transport
Do I choose public transport which is overpriced, always late, doesn't run at night, is filled with homeless, smells like crap, where you're prohibited from eating or drinking, listening to music, and can't even put your feet up?
Or do I choose a personal car which is clean, quiet, has my own music, and I can eat whatever the fuck I want, whenever the fuck I want, and use it whenever I need it regardless of the time?
Not to mention that with Cody-19, I really don't want to be crammed in a train/bus/subway
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Treating humans like sewage (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, clearly, your choice of government is extremely poor because they can not create a train service that is clean, safe, cheap and fast with a restaurant car. The countries manage it without any problem what so ever, clearly your cheap ass government that focuses instead on tax cuts for the rich is quite simply incapable of doing it, just too corrupt.
Shitty public transport system are not shitty by nature but by design, corruptly managed with a focus on minimising taxes and fuck everything else public tr
Re: (Score:3)
I'm 40, no drivers license, never owned a car. Always use public transport, usually very clean and quiet, especially when I care about it when going to work in the morning and back home in the evening. Sure, you might stumble across some drunkards at night, but I never had any serious problem.
Good public transportation is one of those socialist evils we have in soviet Europe. Like universal health care, unemployment benefits, child support, paid vacation and other social security systems.
I hate car culture.
Re: (Score:3)
"Building more roads solves nothing, it just causes people to move further out."
Ummm you just said
"If you make the commute easier people will move out further to get more house for the buck."
That solves something, it enables people to spread out in a more sane and human fashion. Human beings aren't ants, we didn't evolve to live in this cramped fashion packed in like Sardines in mass urban centers. We need space and privacy, trees, PRIVATE SPACE AND TREES not some urban park where you've wasted acres and st
Re:Treating humans like sewage (Score:4, Insightful)
Houses and offices need to be built in pairs to reduce the sprawl. It is a bad model to build 10,000 houses in one place, build a road, and then put 10,000 offices at the other end of it. But that's what our current zoning laws create. Move those offices out to where the houses are.
The transit hub mixed-use model is superior. Build a light rail line, and then at every stop construct a good sized mixed-use (retail, housing, office) development. This doesn't eliminate all long commutes, but it can eliminate a lot of them. You can still have your house with a yard, and them maybe a short commute to the transit hub. You job might be at the transit hub or a short transit ride away.
Re: (Score:3)
Nothing requires you to live in any specific place. These types of developments simply help with the problem, they don't eliminate it. Plus if every 1,000 workers came paired with 1,000 housing units, housing would not be so scarce in urban areas.
It is a supply and demand problem. Build a new 1,000 worker office building without any housing. What is the impact of that? It is going to drive the price of nearby housing up a lot! Nobody likes to commute an hour. People will pay a lot to get out of that commut
Re: (Score:3)
Company towns existed in isolation.
There is no rule that the people working in the offices have to be the ones living in the housing, that is their choice. The rule only says that housing and offices have to be constructed in matching pairs to keep supply and demand balanced. Consider the impact on parking prices if you added a 1,000 worker building without any parking spaces. That's what is happening with housing in urban centers. We add offices at far higher rates than we add housing.
Re:Treating humans like sewage (Score:5, Insightful)
Some urban planners in my city recently proposed reducing a major thoroughfare through the heart of midtown from four lanes to two, under the guise of "fewer lanes means less traffic". This is the same road that multiple new apartment complexes are being built on as part of a housing boom, and where new restaurants are being opened.
Of course, fewer lanes does equal less traffic. In fact, go down to zero lanes, and there's no traffic at all. But every resident and business along the road screamed bloody murder and the idea was dropped like a hot potato.
I often wonder if urban planners every bother trying to live in the utopias that they propose, or if that sort of thing is left to the proletariat.
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen this done successfully. They widen the neighboring streets and shrank the street with the heavy foot traffic while providing additional parking. It made the street much nicer and didn't make through traffic horrible in the long run.
We don't need fewer lanes. (Score:2)
We just need the COVID-19-inspired work-from-home culture to stick. Problem solved.
I realize that this has created some of the worst unemployment in history...so I am not proposing that we stick with non-essential businesses shut down. I am just saying that all jobs that in theory could be done from home, should be done from home, and people can still drive around for their lunch breaks and whatever. Presumably, the high density of traffic during lunch hour would inspire more people to walk, bike, eat at
Re: (Score:3)
Turning four lanes to two can actually help if done right - I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself. The original four lane configuration had bicyclists slowing down the right lane and left turners randomly jamming up the left. The new road configuration of two travel lanes, two bike lanes, and a center turn lane actually flows *better*.
That said it won't work everywhere. If the four lane road already has left turn lanes where needed, and/or no bicycle traffic, such a reduction will only h
Re:Treating humans like sewage (Score:5, Insightful)
Proper urban planning includes designing a self contained vertical city.
What if the taxpayers just prefer horizontal cities?
You just social engineer them into compliance?
I think you will find many people will still put up with longer commutes if the alternative is apartment living.
Re: (Score:3)
What if the taxpayers just prefer horizontal cities?
You just social engineer them into compliance?
I think you will find many people will still put up with longer commutes if the alternative is apartment living.
I used to think like you before I actually moved to Europe. I still own a house in the suburbs back home and man I don't miss it. I think back now and I realise that a house is a hobby. By owning a house you spend time doing your house things. Half a weekend is spent cleaning, mowing the law, maintaining a garden. These days I just go out and enjoy myself.
As for social engineering into compliance, yes. The answer is yes. Urban planning is social engineering one way or the other. Back home I didn't have a ho
Re: (Score:3)
I think you have this backward. Traffic congestion is a problem because it's people. It's wasted times, lives, everything sitting in a traffic jam.
Solution -- well, road building doesn't solve the problem. It caused induced demand. More roads, more traffic. The real solution is this. We design cities for people to live in. There is strong support for people to walk, or to cycle. There is light urban railway. There are playgrounds, shops, parks and beautiful places to be spread through out. Where motorized t
Re: (Score:2)
There is strong support for people to walk, or to cycle.
No there isn't.
For people to walk and bike they need to live close to their destinations.
There is no support for building affordable housing in urban areas because that would depress inflated property values.
If you ask voters if they want more bike paths, they will say "Absolutely!!".
If you then ask them if we should build affordable housing at the other end of the bike path so people actually use it, they will say "Absolutely not."
Re: (Score:2)
Rightly so. Here in DFW we have some of the biggest sprawl in the country yet energy has moved almost 100% renewable and electric vehicles are taking over. There are people who bike and nice paths but really why should we bike? Why should we be forced together even more tightly in further cramped spaces?
Expands networks and services and take advantage of having one of the largest countries in the word. Move out, not up. Live like a human with space and trees where you can spend hours with the sounds of natu
Re: (Score:2)
"Solution -- well, road building doesn't solve the problem. It caused induced demand."
It didn't cause demand, the need and demand was already there they simply didn't expand enough to exceed it. They also failed to account for urban populations growth rate exceeding the general population substantially. We've been choosing policies which force people to urban centers... well those people need roads and facilities.
Stop embracing policies which force people to cluster together to live and enable them to sprea
Re: (Score:3)
Stop embracing policies which force people to cluster together to live and enable them to spread out like humans and you'll reduce congestion not only on roads but also clean water production, and other public services. We are animals, we are not best served by living in giant multi-story concrete boxes packed in like sardines.
Coronavirus and recent civil unrest (with resulting overwhelmed law enforcement) have basically done a two-punch knockout on urban living. Until March of this year I still held a favorable view of city life, but no longer.
LA did not have nearly as bad coronavirus outbreaks because everyone is in cars, which makes for far more effective PPE than a mask. Subways and buses basically spread it like wildfire and make contact tracing rather impossible without some form of intrusive electronic tracking.
Follow th
Re: (Score:2)
The reason why we sit in traffic jams is because of the one place on the road for which we have control; how closely one follows the car in front of them. When another driver pulls into that 'safety zone' not only does the original driver slow down, but the 'invading' driver will often put additional space after taking the spot in the row of cars.
I think of every lane as either 'aggressive' or 'victim' lanes. In fast moving traffic, the left lane (in LHD countries) is generally the aggressive lane, but o
Re: (Score:2)
They also conveniently left out the massive economic expansion that also occurred over those 24 years. Gee, you don't think that more people being employed, and more goods and services using the road network might have something to do with increased amounts of vehicle-miles traveled do you?
Nah, it has to be more capacity = more traffic, because reasons. I mean, I know I enjoy just driving down newly expanded highways with no destination in mind, other than to see the newly expanded highway...
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with this analysis is that it treats roads carrying traffic like pipes carrying sewage.
No, the problem is that roads are designed exactly opposite to pipes carrying sewage. In sewage pipes there is a small end (toilets) and a really big end (the treatment facility). The reality of highways is that all the lanes of cars in the middle of the journey need to get on and off the highway at several points, or two small ends with a wide part in the middle if we're comparing to sewage pipes.
Then of course, there are all the traffic jams caused by crashes
So, until someone figures out..:
1) how to make
Re: (Score:2)
Came here to say this.
Also, the whole concept of reducing congestion to reduce travel times is a political tool to get projects funded. Every planner knows this. Too bad the public does not.
I hate to see projects getting cancelled because of this misguided idea that expanding roads is bad.
Re:Treating humans like sewage (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that assertion is that without a free market, you can't know what people want.
It would be like noticing that everyone in North Korea wears the same clothes and concluding that it's because everybody likes that particular fashion. Ridiculous, huh? It's ridiculous because without a free market, you can't know what people want.
The same goes for transportation. Cities heavily subsidize the roads out of the general fund and force developers and business owners to provide cheap, abundant parking at their own expense, more parking than the market would build if it could choose because otherwise why have such laws?
There's no free market for transportation and so claiming that "more road capacity means people go where they want to go and live where they want to live" is ridiculous because without a free market, you can't know what people want
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
"The city dwellers are people, too."
I recommend they live like it then, it'll improve their mental health. Maybe they won't be so angry and violent all the time.
Re: Welcome to Anti-Human Nihilism (Score:3)
Who enforces such laws of nature. Who says we canâ(TM)t win?
Tinker the tinking tinkerer (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
If this is actually true (Score:3)
We should destroy all the highways and replace them with dirt roads. /s
I mean really, if additional capacity causes more problems with traffic, perhaps they should figure out why they can't fix the problems with their existing planning.
I could drive pretty much anywhere in my "county" in 15-20 minutes in reasonable weather.
I could walk across most of my city in 10-15 minutes with no issues.
Re:If this is actually true (Score:5, Insightful)
perhaps they should figure out why they can't fix the problems with their existing planning.
I live in the SF Bay Area, where 95% of downtown residential building permits are rejected.
Then everyone complains when people live in the exburbs instead and commute into the city.
If voters don't want sprawl, they should support the alternative: Affordable housing in the city.
Re:If this is actually true (Score:4, Interesting)
Well there's another alternative: don't bunch all the jobs up in one place.
It's really ironic that ask these dot com tech companies feel they need to be physically near to each other.
Re: (Score:3)
Well there's another alternative: don't bunch all the jobs up in one place.
It's really ironic that ask these dot com tech companies feel they need to be physically near to each other.
This is a key insight. Here in the Bay Area, there are horrible highway traffic jams during rush hour. However, along most highways, only one direction is jammed and the other flows smoothly. The burstiness of the traffic is a key factor in congestion. The construction of mass transit is simply yet another way to increase the effective size of the transport pipe. However, decreasing burstiness by spreading jobs across metropolitan areas as well as throughout a single metropolitan area is arguably a che
Re: (Score:2)
I have a feeling that the planners usually don't expand roads that don't need it. I also wonder if they examined where the traffic decreased because more carrying capacity on one road will mean less traffic along less efficient routes.
Re: (Score:2)
Who knows if any of this is true, because I saw no signs of a control group in the summary or study. All it proved is that as more highways were built, congestion got worse. But to see if there is at least the potential of a cause / effect relationship, they would need to compare metro areas with similar levels of population growth and similar public transportation options, but different levels of investment in new roads. Then you could see if more roads actually lead to more congestion, or if congestion si
You must be new around here (Score:2)
by expressing a logical thought.
Comparison... (Score:5, Insightful)
So.. Highways are like hard-disks then?
New or full...
Re: (Score:2)
sounds like they're shingled ones with this article
Re: (Score:2)
Now 3 TB USB powered hard disks are piled like compost on a landscaping outlet, without anyone paying attention. BTW I could get 3 yards of compost for 28 $/yard delivered on the drive way back then. Now the compost price has gone above 42 $/yard and the hard disks ...
People drive because it offers benefits (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
This report isn't new. I am surprised it has got onto slashdot, it's so old. We have 20 years worth of data showing that predict (the traffic levels) and provide (the roads) doesn't work; it just induces demand. More people travel more. And not necessarily because they want to, but because there are more roads, your cities get less dense with everything else, so you have to travel to get what you want.
Re: (Score:2)
Precisely.
In the Phoenix, Arizona area about what, 12 years ago, they built the southeast section of the Loop 202, Red Mountain, roughly from East Mesa around Gilbert a and through to Chandler. No other highway down there. It was essentially 100% utilized i a few months.
Not because building it inspired new traffic or extra trips, per se, but the unmet demand for commutes into Phoenix and generally everything North was already there, waiting. In fact, much of the area this stretch of new highway went throug
Re: (Score:2)
The alternative being the Portland Plan - don't build a highway since 1980 and opt for light rail that doesn't go where you want to, causing you to have to use buses and take 2x or more the trip length, and you get an increasing amount of traffic jams and congestion year after year.
The traffic is already there, whether you build the roads or not. It's just in neighborhoods instead of major arterials and highways, reducing quality of life for those neighborhoods.
Nobody is making trips they don't need to, ju
Re:People drive because it offers benefits (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's completely false. I'll give you an analogy [ggwash.org]:
Re: (Score:3)
In my city, the previous mayor (may he burn in Hell) decided his legacy would be to ignore all planning and long-term zoning ideas and approve nearly every large office building development. Vast tracts of land were turned from low-rise dwellings and light industry to massive, tall office buildings, hotels, and convention centers. At one point, the center of my small city had a dozen tall buildings under construction. The construction persists to this day.
And all of this was done without any thought what
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is not that they build highways. The problem is that they don't build enough of them.
Nope. Welcome to the theory of induced demand. Build more highways entices people to live further from the city using the highways more and doesn't resolve the traffic jam at the end.
Proper urban planning is not about building more roads, it's about removing the incentive for people to use them. I heard recently that Americans drive their cars to go shopping. What a strange concept. Don't you have 5 supermarkets within walking distance of your house?
Re: (Score:2)
You are wrong. Several studies have shown that roads do attract traffic. This is old news, really.
Re: (Score:2)
No the problem is that they don't build trains. Trains are magical devices where the more people use them the LESS you wait, because adding more trains increases frequency, and decreases the average cost of the system
Trains are great when they get you from point A to point B, and have a frequent enough schedule that they're convenience-competitive with private transportation for doing so.
Unfortunately, in most of the US, the best you can hope for (if there even is a train option) is getting from a few miles away from A, to a few miles away from B. If you're even lucky enough to have options to solve that "last 2-5 mile problem," its going to have its own schedule/frequency problems. Put this all together, and driving in
Re: (Score:2)
in most of the US, the best you can hope for (if there even is a train option) is getting from a few miles away from A, to a few miles away from B.
In America, most train systems are designed with the assumption that you have a car available at both endpoints.
I used to live near a BART station. The only entrance to the station was from the parking lot.
If you build it they will come (Score:3)
If you build it they will come. This same logic applies to many things, including social programs.
Every attempt to solve a social welfare problem with money produces more demand for the services offered.
For a great book on this read Losing Ground https://www.amazon.com/Losing-... [amazon.com]
this isn't a bad thing (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It appears that people will go to great lengths to not have to live where they work.
Re: (Score:3)
No, you dummkopf,
Let's be polite, please.
When the road is built, suddenly the suburb 30 minutes away goes to a 20 minute commute and more people start moving there...The point being that they've made a semi-permanent change in their lives reliant on the commuting time.
Near as I can tell, that was the interesting observation of the study. But first I did some math. Populations went up by 32% and people drove 20% more miles/person. That's an increase of 58% in total miles traveled, more or less. At the same time we built 43% more roads. Thus it's not surprising congestion got worse. In a rational world, we would have increased miles/driver by only 8% to keep things even.
So why did we do that? We're not stupid, I don't think. Well, because picking yo
Need a highway equivalent of KSP (Score:4, Insightful)
Kerbal Space Program is a great tool to check out hypothetical space flights. It would be great to have some kind of Los Angeles simulator, where you can add a bazillion lanes of extra highway and then see where people would choose to live when the roads aren't full. Then you'd have to do a second round after they'd all moved, and presumably build some more.
There are fourteen lanes of traffic on I-405 going under Mulholland Drive. It would be interesting to see how many lanes you'd need to completely satisfy demand in the long term.
Interesting article on "Carmageddon": http://www.accessmagazine.org/... [accessmagazine.org]
Re: (Score:3)
You can do this a bit in Cities: Skylines - the traffic simulation logic is actually pretty good. You can watch cars back up in inefficient intersections and interchanges, add lanes to increase capacity and watch the problems move to other places as you fix them. It illustrates some of the problems with this kind of thing.
The bit that these city planners seem to forget is that these trips are already happening, and by expanding the highway you are getting those trips off the neighborhood streets and onto
Re: (Score:2)
There are fourteen lanes of traffic on I-405 going under Mulholland Drive. It would be interesting to see how many lanes you'd need to completely satisfy demand in the long term.
You know why the 405 is so wide there? It's a mountain pass, so there aren't many alternate routes. This is a common source of congestion.
The same is true for railroads and waterways. They're natural bottlenecks.
To fix it they recommend economic discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
One of their proposals to address the congestion problem is economic discrimination.
Just price out the poor people. From the report:
4) Remove restrictions on pricing to help manage driving demand
Rather than treating congestion as a foregone conclusion and spending billions of dollars trying to mitigate
it, we should be putting policies in place to help manage driving demand rather than focusing solely on
increasing supply. Pricing roads can reduce congestion by lowering the number of vehicles on the road.
Works for me, I can afford to drive on the nice uncongested road once they filter out all the riffraff.
And even better, their tax dollars helped pay for the roads they can't afford to use. What a deal.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, buy a Tesla and drive the HOV lane. Just don't bother with a Prius... Rules change to favor the emissions...
Or, get friendly with someone to sit next to ya. Like you needed to schedule your travel to someone else's convenience.
Re: (Score:3)
They've done this around Seattle.
They took out HOV lanes and replaced them with toll lanes.
Now you have to pay to drive around the traffic.
Re: (Score:2)
They've been doing this in Houston for some decades now. The ancient straight-through freeways have either no toll or optional toll lanes, but the outer two loops (Beltway 8 and the 99) you either pay the toll or don't ride for the most part. By mileage, it must be nearing 50% of the freeways that have tolls.
The traffic, as expected, completely overfills them within a few years and it's bumper-to-bumper again for most of the day. And you still have the pay the toll. The riff-raff don't stay away for long.
Re: (Score:2)
In reality, tolls don't price out the poor people [archive.org]:
Known for decades (Score:3)
It has even a name "induced demand" and lots of scholarly articles have been published about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Induced Demand (Score:5, Informative)
I thought that this was already a well understood phenomenon. It's called Induced Demand, and it has an opposite effect, Reduced Demand. [wikipedia.org] It applies in myriad contexts, not just driving. I mean, we have all noticed that: With faster computers, we just stack more tasks onto them, and so it can still take a while to load things and such... Or with more bandwidth, ... Or with more energy availability, ...
Does this factor in the stupid toll lanes? (Score:2)
Here in Texas they've added (or doubled) capacity of many highways. But what they did was add them as toll lanes.
What you wind up with is 5 cars on the toll lane with bumper to bumper on the regular lanes. If all the lanes were just open lanes I'd bet money there would be no congestion.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's poor pricing management. They should decrease the toll to induce more people to pay for it and use it. Just don't lower the toll price to where it is as crowded as the free lanes.
Why would they do that? They can charge a $12 dollar toll instead of four $3 tolls and have a lot less wear and tear on the highway.
I hope the study talks about reasonable limits (Score:3)
Re:I hope the study talks about reasonable limits (Score:4, Insightful)
It has been studied to death for 50 years. People ration driving by time rather than distance, so once you add capacity and reduce time, people adjust and drive more. Once people are locked into that commute, they are stuck and it is hard to reduce mileage.
If you want to solve the problem with additional roads you need to grossly over-build, and continuously add capacity. It is much cheaper to try to solve it with urban planning— transit oriented development, mixed-use development, walkable communities, etc., but we seem to be headed the opposite direction now.
Re: (Score:2)
I am actually in favor of the opposite direction. Roads should be multilevel with 10-20 levels. If we increase capacity 20-fold, we will solve congestion issues for quite some time. The problem is that growth is exponential yet we try to address issues with marginal patchwork like adding one extra lane to a six lane highway. Think big, build as big as you can possibly build not as big as you think you need for the next year, and he problems will go away.
Re: (Score:2)
perhaps money would be better spent supporting another form of transit
What about removing the need to travel in the first place? American cities have a dense central business layout with urban sprawl effectively enticing an almost oneway movement of a population in and out of the city every peak hour. It's like what a 2 year old comes up with when playing sim city.
The problem though is breaking down these designs takes decades. Some cities around the world are trying though. I see the idea of distributed business districts gaining traction where suddenly a suburban area that
Interesting (Score:2)
How every country/city chooses to build more and wider roads and very few choose to improve public transport. What's wrong with taking a bus/tram/train to work? Far cheaper to add a few more buses than to add a lane to a motorway.
Re: (Score:3)
>"What's wrong with taking a bus/tram/train to work?"
Because most people don't want to stand in the cold/heat and rain for extended periods, worry about personal safety, deal with other people who can be annoying, figure out how to haul the stuff they need with them, juggle the complexity of connections, double, triple, or quadruple their time in transit, and the mess every time they want to make a few stops at difference places. Even if riding the bus were completely FREE, most people would still not w
Re: (Score:2)
It requires transit-oriented development to mkae it work as a better solution; better transit alone will not improve the problem. Maybe The Boring Company’s strategy will end up working better.
Double Decker Expressways (Score:2)
Why are we even talking about this (Score:2)
Traffic everywhere has been greatly reduced, seems odd to consider expanding any roadways at this time until we see how traffic patterns shake out.
Selfish drivers and Braess's Paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Selfish drivers and Braess's Paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
When you add the shortcut in between allowing people to the good road on both halves of the trip, people stop taking the bad road entirely so they can use the good halves of both roads. Unfortunately, because this means the bad roads are no longer utilized, this results in more cars per occupied-road-mile, leading to longer travel times. So it's not really an example of adding more lanes slowing down traffic. It's an example of adding an alternate route which allows bad roads to be avoided entirely, slowing down traffic.
Unfortunately, the real-world examples given in the Wiki article and in the video seem to promote this as a reason not to improve roads. The paradox isn't caused by improving roads. It's caused by improving the wrong road. It's caused by trying to improve the already good roads by linking them to make a super-conduit of only-good roads, which then promptly gets overloaded (since nobody is using the bad roads anymore) and slows down.
The obvious solution (at least obvious to me) is that you must prioritize road improvements to fix up the worst roads first. Instead of trying to improve roads which are already doing well (by constructing a linking bridge), you should prioritize improving the worst performing roads first. In the example the Wiki article uses, fix up the two sections of road in the example which have the longest travel time. If you improve them so that they match the good roads, then the average travel time drops to 40 minutes for everyone.
You can see the same thing in lots of other areas like computers. Where improving the slowest component (HDD to SSD upgrade) has a much greater impact than improving an already-fast component (CPU). Or fuel consumption, where improving the mileage of tractor trailers results in a lot more fuel saved than improving the mileage of econoboxes which already consume very little fuel.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
And faster internet made me surf more. (Score:2)
Worth it.
weakest link (Score:2)
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/s... [nbcnews.com].
Additionally, lack of affordable housing pushes workers farther and farther from their jobs causing more and more driving... the perfect storm
No, that is not the reason (Score:2)
And I need to own a home because every year my rent goes up 5% and my income goes up 2.5%, plus about every 5 years my rent will shoot up 20% because another major apartment owning company got bought out and there's less competition (seriously, my kid's moving out of state for a job and the crappy college apartme
Re: (Score:2)
Well. And that more than three lanes in one direction just doesn't work.
Funny how the same thing isn't a problem in anywhere near the same universal dregree in the much denser populated Europe ;)
Behind every ban-the-car "think tank" (Score:2, Troll)
Doesn't it say the opposite? (Score:2)
This tells me that overcrowded roads were causing people to not want to travel. By building more lanes congestion is reduced and people thus feel less barriers to travelling more.
Further, my hypothesis would be there are some amount of "lane miles" of road where a population cannot saturate it, and thus congestion would reduce. It may simply be impossible to build that much.
The question is how badly those overcrowded roads were impacting businesses and economic interests and whether further lanes justifies
Why adding lanes doesn't help (Score:2)
No matter how many lanes you add, you still have the same lanes on and off. Highways do not scale well.
No more lanes! (Score:2)
Some years ago, they took two single-occupant lanes from a freeway near me and converted them to HOV lanes. It appears that the cited study finds that this was wrong. To encourage more carpooling and transit use (which makes use of these HOV lanes), they should switch one back to single occupancy use. This will speed up the traffic in the remaining HOV lane and make it worse for the single occupant vehicles. This will in turn create an incentive for more people to switch to transit/carpooling.
Make it so!
That's a bit over-simplified (Score:2)
They tried adding more lanes before and after these sections. It didn't help traffic. They're finally getting around to tackling the hard job of trying to straighten out the sharp turns The uphill grade unfortunately I don't think has a solution, aside from razing the freeway, re-gradin
1994 wants Marchetti's constant back (Score:2)
Seems like we are collectively unable to learn from history. Google Marchetti's constant. For those too lazy, data from the time of early Rome thru the modern era make it pretty clear that people tend to elect a favored commute time (30min where possible) that determines city size. Changes in technology (from walking to riding horses, bicycles, cars, rail, etc.) causes the city size to grow. Then congestion makes the commute worse. Iterate.
Rail (light or otherwise),bus, subways, all follow the same pattern
Wrong Metric (Score:2)
Here in S. Calif, traffic is often the biggest factor in deciding where to live and work. If you expand the highways, people adjust to the changes and the highways then become a bottleneck again.
This doesn't mean they "don't help", it means that traffic is a life-style bottleneck. Highway improvements can improve the lives of many individuals without changing aggregate traffic. Thus, general traffic stats are not a good measure of the "good" of highway improvements.
Improved highways will generally have two
Where nobody lives there is no traffic (Score:2)
This is old propaganda (Score:2)
Sadly, I've seen this reasoning before. "We gave the people a tiny fraction of what they needed, and they reacted by being more productive, using MORE of what they paid for, and they even made more of themselves!" is the distressed cry of the city planner.
The actual test would be to find a city and provide it with actually adequate roads, and then see if that reduces congestion. Alternatively, stop making the metric "how congested in the road" and instead "in cities with more roads, do more people get whe
Highways lead to not highways (Score:2)
I'm in a big megalopolis -- over 10 million people use one "city" every day. Of course traffic congestion is a real thing.
What people forget is that highways are designed to be congested around here. Given that periods of heavy use are going to create congestion, you have only two options. The congestion can be on the highways, or the congestion can be in the not highways -- the city streets.
Highways around here are designed to clog before the city streets -- so that the city streets don't grid-lock six
Re: (Score:3)
I remember reading a tounge-in-cheek article a long time ago where the author proposed doing away with speed limits and switching to kinetic energy limits.
You want to drive that 8000 lb bro-dozer? Fine 50mph limit.
You've got a 1800lb Lotus? 105mph for you!
Re: (Score:2)
Lol what a lunatic you sound like. Yeah every single person on the road is doing their best to slow you down, because you're doing far more important things than they are. I'm happy they're slowing down idiots like yourself. Move to Germany if people driving the speed limit are hindering your "freedom".
Re: (Score:3)
This is moronic. Throughput is barely affected during the times you can greatly exceed the speed limit.
The obvious times throughput is affected is rush hour when no one can possibly go the speed limit.
You're an asshole, that is all.