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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.