For critics of widening projects, the prime example of induced demand is the Katy Freeway in Houston, one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.
Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.
Matt Turner, an economics professor at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 study on congestion, said adding lanes is a fine solution if the goal is to get more cars on the road. But most highway expansion projects, including those in progress in Texas, cite reducing traffic as a primary goal.
“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history,” Dr. Turner said.
Just one more lane bro, I swear it’ll fix traffic. Just one more lane.
Just a little more trickle down bro, I promise once we privatize the next utility it will all work.
Lol. One thing I just thought of. Ignoring the extremely obvious fact that trickle down economics is something you tell stupid people to be okay with getting the shaft… can we name one time in history (golden shower jokes aside) where something trickling onto you is a good thing? The word carries questionable connotations. I don’t want anything trickling onto me…
The intended purpose isn’t to fix traffic. It’s supposed to allow more volume of cars through per day. Entirely different things.
I’m not suggesting that’s a good thing.
T R A I N S
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But think of the alternative. In Japan the trains arrive every 10 minutes are publicity subsidized so cost is minimal and because of this there exists an entire generation of train nerds that just want to go out and photograph trains. Are you gonna let the nerds win?
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide,
65 tons of American Pride!
Canyonero! Canyonero!
Those train nerds are super cool. James may talked to a couple of them that had memorized every station’s unique arrival jingle and message and the one guy could whistle them. They said they weren’t popular with the ladies but i don’t understand how with cool skills/knowledge like that
I’m all for trains and against cars, but is Japan really the best example? Don’t they have people stuffing passengers into cars with special passenger packing sticks?
In Tokyo there are 20 million people
The yamanote line at peak hour has a lot of folks, it’s true
But if these 20 million people were in cars? My friend the entire city would be a gigantic 100 lane highway and things would be significantly shittier I guarantee
Trains are the solution and america is insane for ripping up lines to force people to buy cars
100 lanes sounds like a massive exaggeration but is actually undercutting it lol. It’s insane how space and energy inefficient it is to transport that many people in individual cars.
The yamenote line transports 5 million people a day
The Katy Freeway transports 219 000 cars. Let’s say that’s 400 000 people. (pretty generous I think, most cars are just one guy driving to work)
You would need 5 million / 400 000 = 12.5 Katy freeways.
That would be 12.5*26 lanes =325 lanes!
I was there as a tourist this summer and it was fine overall. Middle of the day there were often lots of seats open but early morning or around 6 you had to stand but it wasnt bad at all. No pushing or anything.
The Tokyo metro system is amazing, I rode like 50 trains all over the city the entire day, and it was really pleasant the entire time
And housing is still affordable because they control zoning at the federal level and build houses to meet demand.
Whut? Everything I’ve read about housing in Japan (which admittedly is little) tell me housing is super expensive.
If I had to guess (and this is definitely a guess), it’s that Japan is cheap … for the population density compared to other major cities across the world. So, cheap compared to places that still look like a ripoff to anyone living rural.
Or comparing square footage. Japanese people are far more space efficient than dumbass McMansions.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-home-prices-stay-flat-11554210002
https://thinkrealstate.com/why-are-houses-in-japan-so-cheap/
https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning-more-liberal-than-us-zoning/
They are cheap compared to other major cities. It is because of vastly different zoning laws that limit sprawl (they do not have a lot of excess land) and stops NIMBY issue. They keep building to match demand.
Yup. Been plenty of studies to show that increasing lanes only alleviates traffic in the short term and long term only makes it worse. Better to spend money on trains and busses that actually work and get people where they need to go with minimal hassle and a reasonable cost than to do this crap.
I already see the angry republicans on Fox news raging on how their precious tax dollars are being wasted just to benefit poor people
I don’t necessarily disagree that it costs more, I have no idea but it seems logical to me that it would. However, even if it is cheaper, public transit solutions also have maintenance.
Far less maintenance, and it’s generally directly supported by rider fares instead of petitioning for government tax money.
Also the density of passengers on transit justifies the costs. 90%+ of all cars have a single person, whereas transit is on average magnitudes more. On that basis alone transit is far far cheaper.
trains and busses that actually work and get people where they need to go with minimal hassle and a reasonable cost
Trains predate cars and busses have always been with us since the car. People have voted – with their cars.
The Interstate Highway System started in the 1950s. Population has more than doubled since then. Of course, we have more traffic, we have more people!
Remember the Alamo? It’s like that but the stuff that happened after, up until now. I don’t know if there was anything before.
Source: I paid attention during my Texas History classes. (It’s an actual required class in Texas, at least when I went)
This is because the extra lane allows demand to change. It is not congested so people feel ok building and moving to further out suburbs. This continues until demand has increased to cause delays.
Note that Houston and Paris have about the same population. Paris is 1/3 the size. They are actually removing a lane from their loop highway and planting trees, and turning another lane into busses only. Only considering transportation, I would much rather live in Paris.
If you also consider the weather and politics, I would still much rather live in Paris.
But what options do you have in Houston, compared to Paris?
You can’t just not widen roads but instead
— less sprawl - places to live closer to each other and to destinations
– useful transit or short distance commute options
– remove bottlenecks
These are a lot harder to do, and I don’t imagine Houston even considered it
Investing is public transport can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Sure building a full on subterranean high density metro system might be the utopia, but actually developing a high frequency, high quality bus route with dedicated bus lanes can be low cost and hugely increase the volume of people carried Vs the lane you took from cars.
Compliment this with docking cycle rental schemes, and some dedicated cycle infrastructure and you can transform how a big chunk of people get to work …you start to win back the city from one which is built around cars and instead making it a city for people.
In Texas, and most of the places I know of, people won’t ride the bus, or the bike. When it’s August and the high temp for the day is 108, with 65% relative humidity, everybody wants to get in their car with the AC blowing directly on them, and be comfortable.
In my experience, every public bus I’ve been on has been miserable.
