This is the widest freeway in the world in Houston. After the freeway was widened, traffic got even worse
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/katy/news/article/Bragging-rights-or-embarrassment-Katy-Freeway-at-6261429.php
This is the widest freeway in the world in Houston. After the freeway was widened, traffic got even worse
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/katy/news/article/Bragging-rights-or-embarrassment-Katy-Freeway-at-6261429.php
Induced demand go brrr.
Also it doesn't help how wide you make the roads if the choke points are intersections and on/off ramps. Traffic will just pile up anyway until those can handle a larger volume, and there is no way to make an intersection handle 26 fucking lanes of traffic or eliminate every possible choke point on a road system. In short, car bad train good
Exactly. Everyone should spend the time to really understand induced demand.
Not only does it apply to roads and traffic, there are other implications too. This goes into theory territory, but for every technocratic solution to climate change there is, like electric cars, there is induced demand to use them more. There was a study on mice once that put a few breeding pairs in a massive enclosure with abundant food and they observed the population. It maxed out at about 1000. At that point, it was crowded and a lot of the mice stopped reproducing. Could it be the same thing with technology that makes our lives easier? Or technology that reduces carbon emissions? People and companies will just do more until the emissions (the stresses on our society) are the same again.
It's not really induced demand, it's pent up demand, the problem is that only trains are physically compact enough to alleviate the pent up demand. Each passenger takes up, what, 1000-2000 square feet? The wider road helped more people get places, but it's clearly run up against the upper limits of a highway.
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Elon is this you?
More people need to play Road Building Simulator (Cities Skylines)
Induced demand isn't real. That's like saying we shouldn't expand an emergency room that is consistently full because it would just still be busy after the expansion. If your goal is to get people where they want to go, it makes sense to expand transportation infrastructure.
There are a lot of good arguments against car-centric infrastructure, but the induced demand one never made any sense.
your analogy to expanding an emergency room is terrible, for reasons that should be obvious
hope the mods are happy for making me insult you
So obvious that you can't even mention them? The question is if your objective is to get people where they are going (that is, treat more people) or to reduce traffic times (that is, reduce wait times in the er). You could demolish every freeway and it would solve the traffic problem in the same way that putting a strict quota on admittance to the ER would.
It's literally an Elon Musk teir take from them lol
No, it is perfectly analogous. The question is if your objective is to get people where they are going (that is, treat more people) or to reduce traffic times (that is, reduce wait times in the er). You could demolish every freeway and it would solve the traffic problem in the same way that putting a strict quota on admittance to the ER would.