Whoopsie! Sydney’s road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.

For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney’s Central Business District.

It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it’s turned into a giant car park:

"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.

"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.

“Those travel delays have now blown out.”

So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?

‘Dude! Just one more lane!’

From the article:

"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.

“That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/how-planners-got-rozelle-traffic-modelling-horribly-wrong-20231129-p5ensa.html

#roads #traffic #cars @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #motorways #fuckcars

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7 points

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism There is a specific CATEGORY of threat to humanity’s operations, that needs systematic countering:

The counter-intuitive.

Things like “add more roads, they’ll de-congest” are *natural* assumptions, and *wrong*.

But there are many counter-intuitive things,
and it is *incompetent* to pretend that every manager, authority, whatever, everywhere, is going to somehow, magically, independently discover that they are counter-intuitive & need to be managed *backwards* to one’s unconscious “reasoning”.

It’s like trying to get somebody to understand countersteering…

Until they *understand* that you’re literally riding the bike on the *side* of the tire, it can’t make any sense.

Counter-intuitive functions need to be catalog’d, organized, and systematically defeated by school-kids, or in job-training, or ANYthing.

The costs of *not* doing-so are compounding too much.

-–

Perhaps a Required Lessons for each domain, & each job within that domain…

SOMEthing, though, and we need it yesterday.

_ /\ _

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Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: !sydneytrains@aussie.zone, !urbanism@slrpnk.net

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5 points
*

It’s like trying to get somebody to understand countersteering.

Yep.

Until they understand that you’re literally riding the bike on the side of the tire, it can’t make any sense

Wait, what? Countersteering is about manipulating the contact patch relative to the center of gravity. The side of the tire has relatively no relevance.

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-6 points

@sping From my perspective as a bicyclist, it is the key to understanding counter-steering:

When one is riding the center of the tire, one is in normal steering.

However, when one is riding the *side* of the tire, then counter-steering is happening, and one is *climbing* on the side-ish part of the tire.

That matches the experience.

_ /\ _

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5 points
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Experience is misleading and not only is what you describe not countersteering, it’s also not how bicycles steer. The primary input is the angle of turn of the handlebars. The complication is that on a balanced vehicle like a bicycle you can’t just point the wheel where you want to go or you’d just fall over to the outside of the turn. So, before you steer where you wan to go, you have to point it in the opposite direction to initiate a lean.

Countersteering is used by single-track vehicle operators, such as cyclists and motorcyclists, to initiate a turn toward a given direction by momentarily steering counter to the desired direction (“steer left to turn right”). To negotiate a turn successfully, the combined center of mass of the rider and the single-track vehicle must first be leaned in the direction of the turn, and steering briefly in the opposite direction causes that lean.[1] The rider’s action of countersteering is sometimes referred to as “giving a steering command”.

Many people get quite heated, insisting they do not do this on a bicycle, and believe all sorts of other things. But the fact is this is what everyone does and it’s the only way to steer a bicycle, it’s just that it’s quite possible to ride without realizing this is what you’re doing.

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Fuck Cars

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This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.

This community exists for the following reasons:

  • to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
  • to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.

You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.

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