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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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].
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.
I guess everything I've been calling light rail fits into the suburban rail category. Multiple cities I've lived in are adding in "light rail" tracks between major centers
A step heavier. For the London example, think more like the Overground, the Purple Train or Thameslink. Or the many railways radiating out.
For other examples, think systems like the LIRR in NYC, the RER in Paris or the S-bahn in most major German cities. (though the Berlin one functions more as a metro that's just legally a train)
Re: legally a train
Metros and anything lighter are governed by different laws than trains. So German U-bahn is legally a tram, governed by the BOStrab, while S-bahn is legally a train, governed by the EBO
I don't really like including pedestrians in there. Like sure, you can fit a bunch of people in a small area, but another point you shouldn't ignore is the throughput over time, and pedestrians are by their nature rather slow. Obviously if you're looking at shopping in a street lined by shops left and right, then that street becomes tailor-made for pedestrian traffic (and nothing else except perhaps bicycles). But public transport is much better suited for travelling any further distances, and that should be the main focus when deciding to ditch cars.
Sure! Both speed and distance matters a lot for throughput. The advantage of pedestrian traffic is that designing for it reduces the distance people have to travel and that it combines very well in conjunction with public transport, unlike cars. Also, the speed of mixed traffic is inverse correlated to the number of vehicles, hence is a special case in this regard where throughput may decrease as the volume per lane increases. The overall point however is that a single train can substitute a staggering amount of private vehicles (and who doesn't love leaning back, listening to music and reading the news while commuting?).
The units are passengers per hour. If they didn't account for speed, pedestrians would theoretically be one of the highest, since you can pack people together fairly tightly and still have them walk.
That reminds me of how shipping hard drives full of data is technically faster than downloading over the internet. Technically true, but almost always a poor choice in practice.
I wonder what the people/hour max is on something like a stadium entrance or hallway? I bet it's insanely high. Definitely some safety concerns though with crushing or trampling
That may be true for smaller cities, but in bigger cities it becomes impossible, because there just isn't enough space to house all the people near areas of interest. Cars don't factor in there at all. Give me a subway for the major areas, and perhaps a tram or bus system so you don't need that many subway stations in the residential areas, and you can have car-free city centers.
Public transport is shit where I live. If I want to go and visit my grandma, it's a 20 minute drive, 15 on a good traffic day.
If I want to use public transport, its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station, then a 30 minute train journey, then a 40 minute walk to grandma's.
its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station,
Yeah, this is a really, really, really big problem with designing society for cars. Tons of people live in suburbia, with no mixed zoning, where they're a 2 hour walk from their nearest church, a 4 hour walk if they want a coffee; and so like you say, driving becomes their only option. It's the only thing they can do, realistically. And if they ever lose their car somehow, uh, say hello to poverty. Good luck getting a job at that coffee shop 4 hours away.
In situations where someone who lives very far from a city is visiting someone else very far, cars probably still make some sense. In the OP picture example, though, that is a prime candidate for transit refactoring. The presence of cars there is actually hurting them.
Well, no one is saying cars are worse for all purposes. If you want to take your family and dogs to a cabin in the mountains while also shopping for food along the way, it is probably going to be your best bet. Still, that is not what is pictured in the post. These are commuters that are probably moving from work to home (or vice versa), where cars really are the worst of most options. If the bus takes longer, it is probably an issue of allocation of funds for a shorter route and exclusive lanes for it.
My town does buses better than that, but peak hour buses get stuck in traffic
So times when it's a 20 minute drive, it's 30 or 40 minutes by bus, when the same drive is 45 minutes in slow traffic, the bus is not a lot worse, at 1 hr
Anyway the better solution has busses only as a last mile solution, with trunks covered by rail
I don't really understand, how can the bus be so much worse? I assume it's on the same lanes as the cars? Is it that busses are forced to drive significantly slower than cars, or are you including the time to+from the bus station perhaps?
The bus must stop at other stops, wait at an interchange for passengers, then drive in the same lanes as cars (though there are limited lanes on some major roads)
There are no dedicated lanes on the route in my example, though it also is an express bus which doesn't stop at the interchange between where I live and the town centre. Also it is speed limited slower than the rest of traffic on the main road of the route
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
The other point to make here is, obviously you look at this highway trip and say “Well I am obviously not walking or biking it.” But, the expansive gaps between home and destination are often caused by many many roads and parking lots like this one. We have dedicated gigantic land masses specifically to cars, and it actually lengthens travel time to our destinations.
I have been to countries where, even if thin highways exist, they’re not the rule and it’s easy for other modes to get under or around them; and their roads don’t dominate the urban areas. There, the answer is simple: Just walk, you don’t even need a bike.
In a place with essentially nothing but narrow two lane roads, no bike lanes or sidewalks, a little wider might serve some good. Adding a turn lane and a bike lane would free up tons of traffic.
If the highway increases in size, then more off ramps or more lanes in the off ramps are needed, which in turn need more lanes on the main street that connect to the off ramps. It's basic filtration system dynamics.
I'm not talking about highways, I'm taking about roads connecting suburbs etc. The only way I can get to work. They're terrible and only accessible to cars.
My town wants to widen a section of road near me. It's the only part of the road with only one lane each way
I'm torn. I know widening the road won't help traffic (right now that narrow bit reduces through traffic, making it a nice bit of road to drive) but if they do widen it, they will also add cycle lanes.
The approach worked as intended, more perfectly even.
Look at all those useless expenses on the pic, some people profited on products that weren't necessary to begin with, and put a lot of moneys in so the system wouldn't accidentally change for the better.
Nah, very little of congestion is trucks. You can even see that in this picture. Plus, you're not trying to make driving easier, that will just cause more people to drive (one more lane bro). You make everything else easier and people choose to walk/bike/bus and the roads clear up because there's fewer people choosing to drive.
Buses and trains. That, or spaghetti interchange that are bigger than the rest of the city. Also, replace key arterial roads with a pedestrian path, call that path a park, and charge $20 for entry. That will easily fund all the city services and nobody will be too inconvenienced by having to pocket their car as they walk across the "park" to get between neighborhoods. Now excuse me, I have to go murder a little blue bird that won't shut up about the garbage piling up
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
I wonder if a picture like this could be used to fool future archeologists (or paleontologists or historic internetologists, or whichever would be studying it) into thinking we put great effort into segregating people with white lights and scum with red lights from using the same roads.
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
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).
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.
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.
Yeah, the interactions suck. But if dealt with earlier, they could have been mitigated. Same way mass transit does. Express trains. Have a highway over a highway that goes to a specific place. If you stack enough of those, people get on the one they need and go straight to where they need to get. Not realistic though unless planned in advance.
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
Your last paragraph is tangential to what I said. It doesn't disagree because it says something different. It's also oversimplified in some ways and just wrong in others.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not forcing everyone to go to a big centralized city rather than spreading everything out will actually fix it. We started doing that long ago but recently have started listening to greedy real estate developers gentrifying cities and now EVERYONE GO TO CITY TO DO THING and people are now shocked, SHOCKED that traffic into and out of cities is out of control.
And love how other "solutions" are LOL MASS TRANSIT. Yep, going somewhere on a track that doesn't go immediately to a certain place then having to get on a damn bus or in a taxi or a freaking Uber scam to actually get where they need to go which is not only ableist because it's difficult for people with mobility issues to do that, but also problematic if you need to actually transport any decent amout/size of goods on said public transportation. Cars are the best at getting places and no amount of whining and bitching and complaining is going to change it.
Could the problem be that all the money went into building roads and car centric cities, and no money was spent on making mass transit better or rethink on how urban sprawl might cause massive traffic problems?
PieFed
Elon:
Guys, I think I've got it... What if we built another lane but, you know, under the ground, like a tunnel.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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].
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
Work 👏 from 👏 home👏 !
The answer to so many manufactured problems.
Another solution is mass transit. That right of way could support light rail *and* still have several car lanes in each direction
The light rail also gives work from home people a way to get to shops, shows, and sports without driving
Light rail also can be built to not get stuck in traffic, which makes it faster than driving too
But what about the office landlords, are no one think about how they are going to feed their yatchs?
After the Covid lockdown, Italian politicians, pundits, and talking heads used sandwich sales as a reason for a return to office.
Turn them into long pig salami, for the good of the economy
Study: 83% Of Road Construction Stops Right Before They Would Have Added The Lane That Would Solve Traffic Problems
The remaining 17% just never stop
omg poland 🇲🇨🇲🇨🇲🇨🇲🇨
Just going to leave this one here:
What is suburban rail, and how is it different from light rail?
I don't know what they call it where you are from but here light rail is trams. Similar to San Francisco cable cars.
I guess everything I've been calling light rail fits into the suburban rail category. Multiple cities I've lived in are adding in "light rail" tracks between major centers
Suburban rail is heavier than trams, the London tube is suburban rail, as are Sydney trains
A step heavier. For the London example, think more like the Overground, the Purple Train or Thameslink. Or the many railways radiating out.
For other examples, think systems like the LIRR in NYC, the RER in Paris or the S-bahn in most major German cities. (though the Berlin one functions more as a metro that's just legally a train)
Re: legally a train
Metros and anything lighter are governed by different laws than trains. So German U-bahn is legally a tram, governed by the BOStrab, while S-bahn is legally a train, governed by the EBO
I don't really like including pedestrians in there. Like sure, you can fit a bunch of people in a small area, but another point you shouldn't ignore is the throughput over time, and pedestrians are by their nature rather slow. Obviously if you're looking at shopping in a street lined by shops left and right, then that street becomes tailor-made for pedestrian traffic (and nothing else except perhaps bicycles). But public transport is much better suited for travelling any further distances, and that should be the main focus when deciding to ditch cars.
Sure! Both speed and distance matters a lot for throughput. The advantage of pedestrian traffic is that designing for it reduces the distance people have to travel and that it combines very well in conjunction with public transport, unlike cars. Also, the speed of mixed traffic is inverse correlated to the number of vehicles, hence is a special case in this regard where throughput may decrease as the volume per lane increases. The overall point however is that a single train can substitute a staggering amount of private vehicles (and who doesn't love leaning back, listening to music and reading the news while commuting?).
The units are passengers per hour. If they didn't account for speed, pedestrians would theoretically be one of the highest, since you can pack people together fairly tightly and still have them walk.
That reminds me of how shipping hard drives full of data is technically faster than downloading over the internet. Technically true, but almost always a poor choice in practice.
I wonder what the people/hour max is on something like a stadium entrance or hallway? I bet it's insanely high. Definitely some safety concerns though with crushing or trampling
That’s why pedestrians are in there
If you design your cities well people live near the places which people want to visit, and pedestrian speed is fine
Lots of cities are well designed, though most that were so designed in the US got modified after cars became important
That may be true for smaller cities, but in bigger cities it becomes impossible, because there just isn't enough space to house all the people near areas of interest. Cars don't factor in there at all. Give me a subway for the major areas, and perhaps a tram or bus system so you don't need that many subway stations in the residential areas, and you can have car-free city centers.
Passenger per hour going where? If everyone is going from A to B, ok. But people need to go allover the place.
For me a 10min car ride is a 1.15h bus ride....
Good sign that your city invests too less/wrong in public transport.
Public transport is shit where I live. If I want to go and visit my grandma, it's a 20 minute drive, 15 on a good traffic day.
If I want to use public transport, its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station, then a 30 minute train journey, then a 40 minute walk to grandma's.
Yeah, this is a really, really, really big problem with designing society for cars. Tons of people live in suburbia, with no mixed zoning, where they're a 2 hour walk from their nearest church, a 4 hour walk if they want a coffee; and so like you say, driving becomes their only option. It's the only thing they can do, realistically. And if they ever lose their car somehow, uh, say hello to poverty. Good luck getting a job at that coffee shop 4 hours away.
In situations where someone who lives very far from a city is visiting someone else very far, cars probably still make some sense. In the OP picture example, though, that is a prime candidate for transit refactoring. The presence of cars there is actually hurting them.
If cars were banned then the bus lines would be a lot better to compensate
But maybe you take a 10 minute train followed by a 5 minute bus in the utopia example
Well, no one is saying cars are worse for all purposes. If you want to take your family and dogs to a cabin in the mountains while also shopping for food along the way, it is probably going to be your best bet. Still, that is not what is pictured in the post. These are commuters that are probably moving from work to home (or vice versa), where cars really are the worst of most options. If the bus takes longer, it is probably an issue of allocation of funds for a shorter route and exclusive lanes for it.
My town does buses better than that, but peak hour buses get stuck in traffic
So times when it's a 20 minute drive, it's 30 or 40 minutes by bus, when the same drive is 45 minutes in slow traffic, the bus is not a lot worse, at 1 hr
Anyway the better solution has busses only as a last mile solution, with trunks covered by rail
I don't really understand, how can the bus be so much worse? I assume it's on the same lanes as the cars? Is it that busses are forced to drive significantly slower than cars, or are you including the time to+from the bus station perhaps?
The bus must stop at other stops, wait at an interchange for passengers, then drive in the same lanes as cars (though there are limited lanes on some major roads)
There are no dedicated lanes on the route in my example, though it also is an express bus which doesn't stop at the interchange between where I live and the town centre. Also it is speed limited slower than the rest of traffic on the main road of the route
just one more lane bro pls one more lane bro i swear just one more lane
One more train* will fix it
Going from where to where?
The midnight train goes anywhere I hear.
Suburban centres to city centres, in places where that's the traffic flow
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
The other point to make here is, obviously you look at this highway trip and say “Well I am obviously not walking or biking it.” But, the expansive gaps between home and destination are often caused by many many roads and parking lots like this one. We have dedicated gigantic land masses specifically to cars, and it actually lengthens travel time to our destinations.
I have been to countries where, even if thin highways exist, they’re not the rule and it’s easy for other modes to get under or around them; and their roads don’t dominate the urban areas. There, the answer is simple: Just walk, you don’t even need a bike.
In a place with essentially nothing but narrow two lane roads, no bike lanes or sidewalks, a little wider might serve some good. Adding a turn lane and a bike lane would free up tons of traffic.
If the highway increases in size, then more off ramps or more lanes in the off ramps are needed, which in turn need more lanes on the main street that connect to the off ramps. It's basic filtration system dynamics.
I'm not talking about highways, I'm taking about roads connecting suburbs etc. The only way I can get to work. They're terrible and only accessible to cars.
My town wants to widen a section of road near me. It's the only part of the road with only one lane each way
I'm torn. I know widening the road won't help traffic (right now that narrow bit reduces through traffic, making it a nice bit of road to drive) but if they do widen it, they will also add cycle lanes.
The approach worked as intended, more perfectly even.
Look at all those useless expenses on the pic, some people profited on products that weren't necessary to begin with, and put a lot of moneys in so the system wouldn't accidentally change for the better.
No! Don't stop now! We are so close!
Any city's skylines players know what actually would fix this problem?
I mean, that game does not actually properly stimulate transportation. The solution is:
1) multi use zoning to reduce commute distances
2) Make every mode of travel equally safe, convenient, and pleasant.
I believe another solution would be highways that are strictly for transporting of goods, rather than sharing roads with semitrucks.
Nah, very little of congestion is trucks. You can even see that in this picture. Plus, you're not trying to make driving easier, that will just cause more people to drive (one more lane bro). You make everything else easier and people choose to walk/bike/bus and the roads clear up because there's fewer people choosing to drive.
Buses and trains. That, or spaghetti interchange that are bigger than the rest of the city. Also, replace key arterial roads with a pedestrian path, call that path a park, and charge $20 for entry. That will easily fund all the city services and nobody will be too inconvenienced by having to pocket their car as they walk across the "park" to get between neighborhoods. Now excuse me, I have to go murder a little blue bird that won't shut up about the garbage piling up
Delete the save and start again
One long meandering 6 lane road that makes up the entire city. I'm not even kidding, that's pretty much the optimal solution in the game.
Caesar was like that, too. Citizens couldn't pathfind if their life depended on it, and it sometimes did.
I've seen that exact scene in Atlanta trying to get to Alpharetta from 75 S by 675.
Alpharetta represent! Lol
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/49/Aja_album_cover.jpg/220px-Aja_album_cover.jpg
😂
How about 2 more lanes?
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
"One More Lane Bro is the only option, I checked, and it should be subsidised by NYT who make too much money." - Robert Moses
ngl, from the small thumbnail (on desktop) I thought this was a picture of a Venator from SW lol
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I wonder if a picture like this could be used to fool future archeologists (or paleontologists or historic internetologists, or whichever would be studying it) into thinking we put great effort into segregating people with white lights and scum with red lights from using the same roads.
Luke Correia put it best
“What if we put lanes on top of the other lanes?”
There is some in the California SFO bay area.
Bayshore Freeway
For a brief moment, you feel like you are driving\flying in the Jetsons future.
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).
Man I remember those days.. when a 10 mile drive would sometimes be a 1 hour drive.
That's definitely fixed my friend.
trailblazers ad?? 🐐
LA? 5? 405?
They just need to carbet bomb the fucking thing
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.
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.
Yeah, the interactions suck. But if dealt with earlier, they could have been mitigated. Same way mass transit does. Express trains. Have a highway over a highway that goes to a specific place. If you stack enough of those, people get on the one they need and go straight to where they need to get. Not realistic though unless planned in advance.
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.
Your last paragraph is tangential to what I said. It doesn't disagree because it says something different. It's also oversimplified in some ways and just wrong in others.
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.
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.
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
People aren't hitting 60 in LA during rush hour...
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.
Not forcing everyone to go to a big centralized city rather than spreading everything out will actually fix it. We started doing that long ago but recently have started listening to greedy real estate developers gentrifying cities and now EVERYONE GO TO CITY TO DO THING and people are now shocked, SHOCKED that traffic into and out of cities is out of control.
And love how other "solutions" are LOL MASS TRANSIT. Yep, going somewhere on a track that doesn't go immediately to a certain place then having to get on a damn bus or in a taxi or a freaking Uber scam to actually get where they need to go which is not only ableist because it's difficult for people with mobility issues to do that, but also problematic if you need to actually transport any decent amout/size of goods on said public transportation. Cars are the best at getting places and no amount of whining and bitching and complaining is going to change it.
Try living in a place that isn't a shithole and your face will fall so quick. Newsflash, car is the best option in a car centric system.
You think people advocating for mass transit want to remove all roads? Cause that's a nice strawman you have there
Could the problem be that all the money went into building roads and car centric cities, and no money was spent on making mass transit better or rethink on how urban sprawl might cause massive traffic problems?