Um acttschually, we knew about induced demand as early as 1920, but the government just doesn’t care about science. (It used to be called traffic generation)
Part of it is that the organisations that design and build roads are also the ones who assess whether a road is needed. No big surprise that they “forget” about induced demand
That’s definitely fixed my friend.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=0dKrUE_O0VE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Elon:
Guys, I think I’ve got it… What if we built another lane but, you know, under the ground, like a tunnel.
I recently watched a video about autonomous car and the dude argue the tech isn’t here yet, but it will work if we build a lane just for autonomous car and put every autonomous car on that lane.
Everyone in the comment basically calling him out for reinventing the train lol.
Trains are the crabs of transportation.
Can’t improve a crab.
And put that in the basement
He seemed to casually ignore that at the end of the tunnel was still the concept of an offramp with a 25mph street that everyone was funneling to.
Of course he never planned on building it anyway. It was all just to distract from California High Speed Rail, because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.
Just to be pedantic, the dumb car tunnels (or Loop), are the weird thing elon “invented” to “solve” traffic and reduce competition for his cars for urban transport. This eventually became one tunnel in LA to get between elon’s house and office, and the dumb taxi tunnel in Las Vegas.
The hyperloop, where elon “invented” the vacuum train, is a separate thing that exists to distract from CAHSR, and elon didn’t want to work on himself because “he’s too busy”, and not because it’s effectively just a scam and won’t work, and most of the companies that started up to develop it have since gone bust.
because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.
Which is stupid in itself, because the entire goal of the CA HSR project is to link long distance corridors, not putzing around town like most do with a Tesla.
In fact I think there’s a missed opportunity for EVs to partner with long distance public transit.
The main limitations of electric cars is distance, but if people knew they could go across the state or several states comfortably without their car, they might be more willing to take a electric car for city driving.
We have ferries. What if we could combine the efficiency of train and the convenience of ferries? People could just drive their own car on a train car of some kind and be shuttled to a destination and then drive off?
I’ve seen those trucks with a bunch of cars packed on top, something like that (minus truck) could totally fit in a train cargo container.
Without looking deeper it’s probably cost prohibitive. Looking at long train rides cost a thousand dollars and takes 3-4 days, might as well just fly at that point.
The loading and unloading is a pain.
that’s been done in europe since I think the 1930s
Think of it like trickle down economics. If it hasn’t worked yet, you just need to make sure that the fat cats on top are fed so forcefully and so fast that something starts trickling down eventually.
Just keep going. We will tell you when to stop.
I mean we really don’t need cities, just make hundred lane roads in their place
I once heard of an experiment in economics that offers insight into this.
Say you have 100 people. You give each of them one of two choices:
A : you get $40 unconditionally B: you get $70 - n, where n is the number of people who choose B
You end up getting, on average across experiments, n = 30.
If you move the numbers around (i.e, the $40 and the $70), you keep getting, on average, a number of people choosing B so that B pays out the same as A.
I think the interpretation is that people can be categorized by the amount of risk they’re willing to take. If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.
Applied to traffic, opening up a new lane brings in new categories of people who are willing to risk the traffic.
Or something. Sorry I don’t remember it better and am too lazy to look it up. Pretty pretty cool though.
It’s called “Induced Demand”.
As a road widening project is completed, traffic is alleviated for a short amount of time. Then as time passes word spreads, or more people move to the city, or kids get older and get their driver’s licences. More and more people know this widened road is the fastest route, so more people take it, thus undoing the improvement. Then the cycle starts again - either with the same road being widened again, or another one a block over, on and on until the world is covered in asphalt.
The solution is to make alternative transit more appealing than cars. Bikes and public transit already have significant financial benefits, but lack infrastructure to make it more viable in North America. Busses get stuck in traffic, bikes are forced to share lane space with cars or sidewalks with pedestrians.
How is alternative transit the solution? Cities that have public transportation still have traffic jams.
There was an English traffic engineer that predicted that avg speed in central London will always be like 9mph. No matter how many lanes or public transit options you add. If there is no traffic, people will take cars until traffic jams are unbearable to give up. Then the system finds equilibrium.
There will always be traffic, but public transportation allows for a higher throughput for the same speed and total surface area of the roads.
Let’s be generous and assume that every car has 2 people in it (the truth is that the vast majority of cars, especially in the US, only have 1 person in them). Now imagine 15 cars vs. 30 bicycles. If we figure that you can comfortably fit 3 bikes in the same space as 1 car, you’re looking at 150% throughput for the bikes compared to the cars at the same speed. Give them their own dedicated, separate infrastructure, and they can probably go faster than traffic while also removing the danger of bikes and cars sharing the road. If you figure buses can fit 20 people in the space of 2 car lengths, you’re looking at 10x the throughput.
And that’s not even getting into transportation that doesn’t use the roads. The Boston T is a perfect example of this. Despite its notoriety for constant failures due to poor maintenance, and only being half the size it was 100 years ago, the T is considered to be the 3rd best public transportation network in the US. Why? Because the average commute time is about half the national average at roughly half an hour, and a full 50% of Boston’s commuters use the T every day. That’s half as many cars in traffic every day than if the T didn’t exist. Could you imagine if Boston, notorious for its bad roads and heavy traffic, suddenly had twice as many cars driving on its streets?
Public transit that share lines with cars are always going to be worst that cars, but if you add exclusive lanes for Public transit they go smooth as hell. This is why metros are usually the best option on cities with good metro infrastructure.
having lived in cities with amazing metro, ok metro, no metro and towns with shitty train access and great train access…
this is 150% true. Having an underground station near your house makes the entire city 30 min away, using buses or horribly interconnected trains makes things 1 to 2 hours away.
Even living outside the city, having a direct rail to the nearest metropolitan center take an hour increased quality of life for me by a fuckload.
The goal for alternative transit is not to remove traffic jam, it’s to transport people.
9mph is slower than a bike, it fits with my experience. When living in a city (in Europe, it might be different in the US) my feeling was always that bike was the fastest, public transport a bit slower but more comfortable (mainly protected from the elements and car drivers) and lastly car was the slowest and more stressful.
The key is that both adding car lanes and adding alternatives like transit are subject to induced demand, but the consequences of it are different for transit than for cars. Not only is the limit of the added capacity much, much higher for a train than it is for a car lane, adding more traffic to the lane up to that limit makes the performance worse and worse (increasing congestion), while adding more transit ridership up to its limit makes the performance better and better (increasing train frequency and therefore reducing wait times).
Similarly, induced demand for walking and biking is a good thing because more people doing those things improves public health, doesn’t pollute like cars do, and takes up much less space.
So it’s not that induced demand is bad, it’s that inducing demand for cars, specifically is bad.
The key is public transit that doesn’t suck. For the last 100 years the car and oil/gas industries have spent billions of dollars undermining public transit.
Dedicated transit lanes, subways, light rail, protected bike lanes all make cars less appealing to those that want to use them.
Yeah, one of the best examples of this is the Vienna public transit network. About 1000 vehicles (bus, tram, light rail, subway) in service at rush hour, a daily total distance of over 200000km traveled, more year-long ticket owners than car owners in the city, and about 2 million “travels” per day, which is about 30% of all traveling done over the city (including pedestrian and bike traffic)
If that traffic would be routed only by car, the city would be a giant parking space; to compare, one subway train carries about 900 people in rush hour, which replaces 790 cars (avg 1,14 persons per car here). the subway interval in the rush hour is about 4 minutes. i live at one of the subway final destinations, which is on one of the far ends of the city - and i can be at the other side of town in about 25 minutes.
And constructing and running a public transit network is a pretty nice boost to the local economy, creates a whole lot of jobs. sounds like something a lot of us cities could make use of.
Mixed traffic works here, it allows mobility for all social classes (yearlong tickets cost 365€, so about 400$ incl. taxes), nearly all stations are barrier free.
I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn’t help, and the term they use is “induced demand.”
Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you’re just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.
You’ve essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.
If you make driving easier than transit, more people will drive who previously took transit. The reverse is also true. One of these situations is more desirable for myriad reasons.
As well, additional demand can be created by convenience. People will make trips they otherwise never would have if it’s easier to make them.
Communist transportation will never ever ever ever ever ever ever be easier than driving.
Because driving is “get in the car, go directly to destination”
Public transport adds walk to transport rally point, wait, follow a compromise route to accomodate other travellers with many stop, consider all the strangers gazing and judging you, arrive at not your destination, walk 5 to 20 mins to your actual destination. Plus you must carry any object on your person while navigating the terrain (good luck hauling 50lbs of groceries).
I am simply not interested in this nightmare, find a solution that isn’t horrible.
And NOoo I don’t want Musks robot taxis from the “you will own nothing” dystopia.
As much as I personally disagree with you, given that all you’re thinking about is your own benefit, and not any of the myriad of benefits to the city, the world, the people who can’t afford cars, etc, I understand that your outlook is shared by the vast majority of Americans, and can’t be ignored if we ever hope to have an effective public transport system.
We’re going to need to somehow devise a system so convenient that it actually sounds attractive to the huge amount of people who spend 10%+ of their paycheck on car payments not because they have to, but because they want to.
I would love public transport that is actually better than a car. I can’t imagine how that could happen. So what they will probably do is cripple car users until it is intolerable to use. Like make it cost more than your yearly salary just for the license and insurance, plus 10x the price of fuel with taxes.
The joke is on you. There are places where it already is easier than driving. What do such places have in common? There are so many people that having everyone drive is literally impossible to accommodate. You wouldn’t drive in Manhattan, Tokyo, or Seoul. It literally makes absolutely no sense to. In these cities, public transit is faster and way more convenient.
Smaller cities can replicate this effect by just… not outrageously favouring car infrastructure like they do today in North America. That doesn’t mean exclusively making driving worse, it means making public transit better at the same time with the freed up funding. And the freed up money is a lot, car infrastructure is super expensive. More routes with more stops at higher frequencies are made possible because of higher ridership, which increases convenience and makes it more likely you will get almost exactly from your origin to your destination.
But the American brain cannot conceive of this. “Communist transportation” fucking lmao. What if we made cities more liveable for humans, not for cars? Nah we can’t do that that’s communism.
The problem concentrating everyone like a pack of sardines, then you can’t move or live anyway.
There wouldn’t be a problem if the traffic wasn’t all trying to go to the same place.
So you think we should decentralize cities. Make it so you don’t need to go downtown for everything. Everything you need would be within 15 minutes of walking.
… A fifteen minute city perhaps.
By “directly to destination” did you mean the gigantic parking lot necessary to accommodate every car? You are going to walk anyway, the different is that you’re walking in the most horrible hostile car centric space instead of one made for humans.
If there isn’t parking, that mean the place is full. Go somewhere else. Or re-evaluate if you really need to go there, the answer is probably no.
I live in the forest, we have no problem with parking. There is space everywhere. I don’t mind a little mud on my tires and shoes, not everywhere has to be concrete
Given that we’re talking about cities, your experience living in the forest is completely irrelevant.
City anti-car attitude will cause us a lot of pain. They will make car ownership painful to disincentivize it and we will just have to suck it up, if we fail to kill that movement.
Have you considered that within city, parking is a huge problem? Maybe in american suburb the parking space is big enough to fit housing for 100 families, but in the city they don’t have such luxury.
Now just like what you said about the public transport, for driving it’s get in the car, facing 20 min of traffic jam, waiting for traffic light, waiting for traffic light, waiting for another traffic light, reach your destination, find a parking, saw a spot, too bad because big dumb pickup truck double park because the parking spot is too small to fit that ego-sized vehicle, looking for another parking spot, finally found one but have to make 5 min walk to the shop. Now do the return trip.
It already is, finding a parking spot and then walking through a parking lot is a lot less convenient than walking from the tram stop to the store and it’s roughly the same distance. I sold my car after moving to the city because public transit is so much more convenient.
When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one
so for these people the new lane will create marginal improvement, right?
That’s the thing: Technically yes. It temporarily improves traffic. But only temporarily. IDK about you but spending billions of dollars to only temporarily improve traffic and then it ending up the same or even worse than before doesn’t sound like a good investment to me.
But only temporarily
but is it?
I thought the temporal improvement would be for everyone who already used the high way (because they will get to their destination a little bit faster). And for the few extra people, who start to use the highway but didn’t use it before, the improvment will stay.
That’s the thing, the number of new cars using that road ends up being at least one additional lane’s worth. So traffic moves at the same speed as it was before the extra lane, just now with one more lane’s worth of cars on that road.
If anything, you might see marginally better traffic on other roads because of the cars that started using the new lane, but you’d be talking about a handful of cars per road. Probably not enough for any discernible change in travel time or congestion, and each new lane you add later will have diminishing returns because it will be a smaller fraction of the total number of lanes coming from any specific direction.
If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.
Can you explain what this part means? What do you mean by category here?
Yes. That wasn’t the best word choice; maybe “group” would have been better. I meant groups of people who are willing to take some level of risk. Imagine the categories are “low risk takers”, “medium risk takers”, and “high risk takers”.
Compared to A paying out $40, if you make B $50-n you’ll only get the high risk takers choosing B. If you make it $70-n you’ll get high and medium risk takers. If you make it $120-n you’ll get almost everybody.
If risk taking is a value between 0 and 1, the categories are groups of people inside certain intervals. For example, low could be [0, 1/3), medium could be [1/3, 2/3), and high could be [2/3, 1].
No! Don’t stop now! We are so close!
just one more lane bro pls ome more lane bro
Man I remember those days… when a 10 mile drive would sometimes be a 1 hour drive.
Just mandate work from home, that will fix it. Whoa COVID proved it works!
So many people commuting to jobs that could easily be done from home nowadays
I work in the freight industry in a position I can’t do from home but when the whole work from home thing was in full swing I didn’t get stuck in traffic except a few times when the local drawbridge went up
You know what would work just as well, but without isolating people?
Mixed zoning and mass rapid transit
Let people work walking distance to their home, give those who need to go somewhere a way of going there quicker than traffic
It’d also be good to mandate easy availability of work from home for anyone in a job where that is practical
This is the most infuriating part. The best solution to these issues is to remove the need to move in the first place, and WFH for the people that want it and who can do it removes a huge amount of traffic with comparably little cost (company laptop, a screen and maybe a desk and chair, many of which could just be taken from the office).
“What if we put lanes on top of the other lanes?”
omg poland 🇲🇨🇲🇨🇲🇨🇲🇨
People will talk about induced demand and all that. But those people really just want to be able to get around. The fact that they just don’t because the traffic is so bad doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add more lanes. It means you should add a lot more. Same with the one lane at a time approach. The fact that it didn’t work does mean you are doing something wrong, but it maybe that you need to add 5 lanes at a time, not one. Now I’m not saying they should actually do that, just that the arguments against are BS.
A comprehensive public transit system, well maintained and well patrolled is what LA really needs. I am talking Paris metro on steroids. And it is going to cost in the trillions. But it isn’t getting any cheaper by waiting.trouble is more lanes are useless if so many people are lane hogs.
Too many times have i been stuck behind someone doing 60 in an overtaking lane with with nothing in the slow lane
Beyond the fact that adding five more lanes would still leave you with a horribly inefficient transport system, you also ignore that externalities that you are exacerbating by doing so. You’re displacing thousands more people, worsening the division of communities, creating a lot of noise and air pollution, increasing car dependency etc
My last paragraph agrees with you.
That’s the whole thing about induced demand though: People want to get somewhere and believe it or not, not everyone does so by car. But if you decide to add more lanes it temporarily improves traffic leading to those people that didn’t take a car in the past or lived somewhere else because they knew traffic would be horrible if they moved, to actually commute by car now / go forth with their plan to move, increasing the amount of traffic again until it’s as bad if not even worse than before. Cars don’t scale. Cars aren’t for mass transport and shouldnt be used for that. A city with a highway like in the picture really needs a transit system/a better one and fever lanes
See you are missing the point. The demand isn’t induced, it was always there. They wanted to move and use thier car, but traffic was too bad. My complaint is with the BS argument that the extra lane caused demand to materialize out of no where. It was always there, just unserved.
They wanted to move and use thier car
Did they though? To some extent, yes. But most people just want to get places and will take whichever mode makes the most sense for that journey, and what a city invests in will make that mode make more sense for more journeys. There is also a portion of journeys that just won’t happen if they are too difficult.
Distinction without a difference to the point. The demand was always there. It was never induced.
People on here love to shit on Houston’s massive expansion of I-10 as a failure.
It worked great for years, but the population continued to grow. Having 5 fewer lanes on each side would just make things worse or increase sprawl by pushing people further out to thin the traffic. They ain’t gonna mass-adopt bicycles in a city where the heat index is 115° + for months at a time
And the widest parts of I-10 are not the everyday choke points. Other parts of the system are the worst offenders on traffic.
But that’s the thing about induced demand. Of course widening a road temporarily improves traffic. But only temporary. That temporary improved leads to more people deciding to drive a car when they didn’t in the past or even having different moving options in mind now which they didn’t because if traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse than before. That’s not something the Internet came up with. It’s been studied and researched for years. It works on the simple principle of: If you make something more convenient to use, more people will use it. Cars just don’t scale. They can’t do mass transport and aren’t meant for that. You need to make a city walkable and have a proper public transport system otherwise you will only ever lose even more money on car infrastructure while continuing to worsen traffic, heating up the city because of the sealed surfaces, making the city less desirable to actually exist in and worsening it’s economy. Build the city properly and people will actually choose a different option. No matter the climate in that city. Especially because heat is only worse with massive amounts of car infrastructure because they usually result in less green spaces and trees which provide shade and a cooling effect in the city.
What creates demand on I-10 in Houston is population growth. People haven’t swapped from taking the bus to using a car. Houston leads the country in population growth. You add a couple million people to a me triplex and the infrastructure needs upgrading.
And trying to make people swap to a car by making traffic shitty works in some areas, but major cities that were largely developed after the invention of the car are almost impossible to retrofit for public transit. It’s even worse in hot climates where the city was largely developed after air conditioning. My commute in a different Texas metroplex has gone from 45 minutes to 2 hours because of traffic, but between housing costs in the city and the lack of infrastructure to build transit I still drive every day and can’t consider anything else.
Houston spends bonkers money on its light rail that nobody uses between May and October because last-mile transit is a problem in a city where you’ll sweat through your clothes waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop. The office would smell like a gym if people used it.
I work in municipal development, and it’s a rite of passage for planners to come in from out of state all excited to kill parking standards and shut down roads to make downtown pedestrian-only. Then they spend their first summer here and realize that when you have months of uninterrupted 100°+ days that you can’t just wish away the necessity of door to door transportation.
There are other reasons.
Adding, say, a sixth lane doesn’t increase capacity as much as adding a 2nd lane, because traffic jams are generally because of interactions. It’s very rarely the straight road that has a capacity problem. Adding a sixth lane adds capacity, but also creates more interactions.
Also, car lanes have a shit capacity, which goes down massively when it’s busy. Like you said, mass transit is vastly superior, but even a dedicated bus lane would help. In contested traffic, a car lane transports less than a single bus per hour.
I always feel like these induced demand arguments are suggesting that adding more lanes means the same number of people are just choosing to do more driving. Maybe, as you add more lanes you create the infrastructure for a city to grow, and it adds more people which then fill up the new lanes. People aren’t just going out and buying a new car or rolling an existing car out of the driveway that they were previously not using because a new lane is built. These are net new drivers, who would not be in that city if the infrastructure for them hadn’t been built.
Exactly, thank you. If you build a 6-lane highway in Montana it’s not going to magically fill up with traffic, thus one can conclude that context is missing from the Reddit-tier explanation of induced demand or that the entire idea of induced demand is wrong.
Induced demand actually means that more people drive now because the people that didn’t drive in the past / lived somewhere else because it was less convenient because of the traffic to commute by car or live somewhere else where they would have needed a car now decide to commute by car / actually move (yeah that also something we have observed) because the widening temporarily improved traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse. Induced demand isn’t something the Internet has come up with. It’s actually a real thing that has been studied and researched. We know it exists. It functions on the basic principle of: If you improve something and make it more convenient to use that something, more people will actually use it.
But the demand was always there. They wanted to move, they just didn’t. So the lane didn’t induce it. The choice of that word was intentional. It was to argue against more lanes. It is really unserved demand that they just ignored originally.
I keep thinking this during my daily commute along a 3 lane freeway. If a bus/truck overtakes another bus/truck (often), it basically becomes a single lane freeway. And during peak, that little manoeuvre is going to cost you and hundreds of cars behind you, probably for a long time.
My small city’s main suburb to centre link is a 100km/h, two lane each way parkway, until it merges with a similar road from a different centre, grows to 3 lanes each way, and slows down sharply as it gets close to the centre
Between the last traffic lights and the spaghetti junction that merges it with a similar road it’s free flowing and fine. The slow lane goes about 95, the fast lane about 100 to 110, with occasional slight slowdowns when a 95km/h car catches up with a slower one
But on that stretch there’s about 300 metres of slow traffic due to a fixed speed camera. People going 95 who think their speedometer might be wrong the opposite way to which it is slow to 80; people doing 110 slow to well below 100, people following too close brake heavily, the fast lane ends up with a standing wave with a peak (or is it a trough?) of 60km/h
Then as you get past the camera it gets loud with even the slow cars rebelling against the slowdown give much throttle. That camera must cost so much CO2. I doubt it catches anyone except during the lightest traffic times. In even medium traffic you couldn’t speed through that bit of road if you tried
