I think there was at least one case where the city went broke maintaining roads and everyone left. That was a success.
That was my every childhood game of SimCity.
My back was to put in rail everywhere with zero roads. People constantly complained about wanting roads, but there was never any congestion. And the desire for roads never seemed to affect anything.
Having been on a small town board, the truth is roads are funded at the state level (may vary by state) with funds distributed to the county governments, who maintain the county highways. The towns and cities get some amount from the county and more from the state to be used for anything highway related.
If this were not the case, and all else being equal many rural towns would go under. Private transportation is currently being subsidized at rates sometimes much higher than the property tax income the towns bring in. It’s unsustainable and barely working like everything else, it’s like long term vision is irrelevant and only short term gains are even considered…
Examples of the opposite. The Braess-Pardox Enjoy!
CityNerd did a video explaining why this happens. It’s because city planners and traffic engineers assume that the same proportion of people will drive in the future, just that there will be more of them. So if you assume everyone’s still going to drive you have to build more lanes because everyone will drive.
North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.
90% of city planners quit one lane before fixing traffic forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeFw0I-igI
Building roads does decrease congestion. Just don’t place them randomly. Use simulations and modern traffic engineering. Do you think that inaction build the Netherlands?
Removing roads decreases congestion: Braess’ paradox
Roads for private cars are generally overbuilt and run directly into Braess’ paradox. E.g. Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse.
You notice it particularily when one road segment is built out, but the fewer lanes on other segments still keep the effective traffic flow rate constant (or lower due to all the merging and yielding that’s now required). Min-cut max-flow theorem, my beloved.
This is ehy im overall neutral on adding lanes.
This post is about the lack of scientific evidence for your theory. Care to supply some?
Case studies are not scientific evidence, they’re well-documented anecdotes that suggest the need for scientific study.
Case studies are scientific evidence. They are just not strong scientific evidence.
Assume the same conditions as of the famously quoted Braess’ paradox (you do know the sources of what you are claiming, don’t you?).
Consider then a subgraph consisting of three path-connected points A, B and C that is also a subtree of a larger more complicated graph representing the entire connected road network. Assume also for simplicity that the three points are equidistant and that A and C are connected through B only and that B is their only connection to the larger network.
Adding a road from A to C would now reduce congestion on the subtree, and cannot increase it on the larger graph due to the tree structure. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader, i.e. you.
TL;DR Wasted my time replying to a sea lion.
Maybe, but now people will go “oh driving is easier so I’ll drive” and now there are more cars in the system, and thus more traffic. If you instead also make rail easy, some of them will go “oh I’ll just take the subway” and not drive.
Cars suck for many more reasons other than Braess’ paradox, even as it indeed adds to the sucking where applied. Being anti-car should be about more than just misrepresenting facts though, especially when science is in our favor.
We cannot argue that the car brains deny facts and then do the same in return. That undermines the whole argument.
Ever heard of induced demand?
Sure, you argued against the claim that roads can decrease congestion, the negation of which is the claim that it always increases congestion. Since I only need a single example to prove you wrong I can claim it to be irrelevant to the counter example provided.
Sometimes removing roads actually helps congestion
That’s equivalent to only well placed roads removing congestion.
Sure an extra lane can relieve congestion, for a bit then 10 years later you’re back to where you started or worse.
This is mostly due to the fact that American cities grow sprawl and not density. So basically unless there’s a population collapse adding another lane is a temporary solution.
That’s why they are basically always adding new lanes, they can’t keep up with the demand. So instead of continually trying to keep up with demand it’s time to work on reducing demand
Building roads is not an extra lane and an extra bus bike or tram lane has surely relieved congestion. Same for an extra lane for queueing in niche cases. Added a random feature at a random spot will not yield desired results.
Seems a bit pedantic, but sure.
New roads are unlikely to fix issues in many places. Small to medium sized town building a new connector would be helpful. Not so helpful for anything large or metro sprawl. Those places mostly limit themselves to adding additional lanes with little result
Fixing one bottleneck to find another bottleneck 3 years later is not an argument that bottlenecks should not be fixed
Though bottlenecks are complex and sometimes shouldn’t be fixed, at least not without building up capacity to the roads they feed into, or else you might end up with new bottlenecks that back traffic back up to the original ones anyways. Without 3 years needing to pass.
Exactly this post is just extremely uninformed - but since we’re in “fuck cars” I’m assuming things don’t have to actually be true to fly here. Just anti-cars.
If you disagree with the echo chamber, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Robert Moses needs to be more (in)famous as the pioneer of this kind of bullshit. The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a must-read book for anybody that wants to know how the US got so fucked up.
It works exactly as intended, to drive sales of cars.
Doubles as the shelf where she keeps her fucks.
Yup. They’re just going to add tolls to some of the lanes and make you pay more to use what you already paid for anyway.
Congestion pricing, on the other hand: observably a good policy.
I call them bribery lanes.
Some of that, probably, but also poor road planning combined with Braess’ paradox.
Just one more study bro
I think Veritadism just put out a video explaining some paradox about this topic.
Well, they’re adding one more lane right now here for busses only…
