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.”
#roads #traffic #cars @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #motorways #fuckcars
@ajsadauskas induced demand is a stupid concept. If adding options increases traffic that means your.city is not serving residents. The point of a city is all the places people can get in them, if you have no place to go then move to Montana or someplace else with noplace to go. Note that I didn’t say add more lanes, lanes are not very cost effective’
The reason adding one more lane is wrong is by the time slowdowns occure people are already packing cars in 6 times more dense than is safe and so you need not one more lane but 6 times as many lanes. That is expensive no matter how you look at it. (And probably requires layers of bridges and tunnels)
@fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism @ajsadauskas That is about the right level of freeway for a city (entire MSA) of about a million people. I believe that the picture is for a city population of 7 million.
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@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.
_ /\ _
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.
@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.
_ /\ _
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.
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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While the money sold have been spent on public transport, it’s a bit fucking premature to put this down to induced demand - the tangled mess has been operating for what - like 3 business days? People are getting confused and doing silly bullshit. It’s a problem, but it’s not induced demand.
Induced demand is a thing, and it’ll almost certainly be relevant here - there’s no need to lie about it - give it a minute to settle first. This is the benefit of being correct - there’s no need to be dishonest.
I came here to point this out and love the way you stated it. Confusion, hesitation and unnecessary lane changes are what create traffic. There has never been a major highway development in history that didn’t cause at least some short term issues. We should give city planners a bit more credit than that
No, volume of cars is what creates traffic.
Edit: you’d think that in a fuck cars community, of all places, we’d all be able to agree on this basic principle. We’re apparently infested with six idiot trolls who think cars don’t cause traffic and that induced demand isn’t real.
The volume of cars is a scale factor that determines the impact of traffic causing behaviors and conditions for free flowing highways (no traffic lights, stop signs, etc.). Following too closely and improper lane changing are two specific behaviors that actually create slow downs. There are numerous models that simulate this.
@WaxedWookie @ajsadauskas Are you sure the post is dishonest? Maybe it’s just a simple mistake or a misunderstanding. ‘You’re a liar’ seems a bit much.
Are you sure the post is just a mistake or misunderstanding? Maybe it’s just dishonest. ‘You’re ignorant or stupid’ seems a bit much.
I’d be more willing to accept innocent ignorance in the replies - I assume that if someone is posting a new thread about a situation that includes a judgement on the cause of that situation, they at least have a passing familiarity of the thing they’re publically passing judgement on.
They’re very obviously wrong in a way that discredits the good ideas put forward by the participants in this sub - if they retract their post, I’ll happily retract mine.
@WaxedWookie Is it really “obviously wrong”? I lived a few kilometres from all those roads when they were being built - ANZAC Bridge, City West Link, Cross City Tunnel etc… Induced demand (as I understand it) has been a long-term thing. Previous new road debuts have not been as fraught as the Rozelle Interchange.
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
I think it’s more a case of this whole interchange has been built for western harbour tunnel. ie the more lanes are coming…in 5 years.
@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
Seems more like it, I would expect induced demand to be more prominent on the longer time scales.
In particular, I recall a simple graph example where you’d have two parallel roads with some traffic on them. And then you create a link between them, aiming to improve the situation. However, the link gets jammed and the overall situation gets worse
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@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
Not even that; the additional lanes already exist, they’re just signposted so confusingly that people are avoiding them and instead crowding onto what’s now intended to be a local road
@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
To be clear—
The tunnel sign-posted as “City, Port Botany ✈️ [toll]” goes to Anzac Bridge, toll-free. If you’re used to taking Victoria Road to Anzac Bridge, you should take the tunnel.
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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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