Drivers already pay for the cost in lost time. It's a 'natural' market.
The main problem with this article is the idea that the goal in traffic policy is to reduce congenstion. No, it should be to maximize utility. Sure, if you reduce roads, add congenstion charges then people will find alternatives to cars. That doesn't imply that utility is increased.
Public transportation is typically worse than using a private car. You can't decide when to leave, you pretty much need to plan your trips around public transportation. They don't take you directly from A to B etc. Public transportation becomes effective only when population density becomes high enough.
Yes, but it's a negative sum market. The lost time the drivers are paying is lost, it is destroyed, hours that could have been spent in productive work, or in enjoyable leisure are being wasted. Setting up the market to work in dollars rather than hours avoids this. The dollars are transferred but no resource is squandered.
This is typically true in North America, but it is not a fundamental law. Particularly, in Europe, but also for some trips in Sydney, Vancouver, et cetera, I have found public transit superior to a private car. The key is to have as wide of a network as possible, frequent service (every 5 minutes so you don't need to think about schedules) and a average speed that is higher than the car (doable with trains, dedicated bus lanes and so on). Anywhere that there is enough traffic to cause congestion ought to be a viable place for public transportation . . . population density is not necessarily the driving factor. In fact, in some situations, a high population density might allow people to move less as they are closer to shops, work, friends, et cetera, rendering transit less important.
No, the problem with public transit in North America isn't some fundamental flaw with public transit, it is because we tend to half-ass it.
In North America part of the reason we don't have as much mass transit as other parts of the world is because we like our urban sprawl and that makes it difficult to make the economics work out.
When PT is done right, it's much more predictable than private cars. Being able to leave when you want does you no good when you're dealing with unpredictable traffic.
And to the GP's point, they most definitely take you from point A to point B. Those two points may not be where you are and where you want to go, though with a solid network it'll usually be within ambulatory distance.
;)
Except it's not: unless you're extraordinarily prescient (or have access to real-time, accurate-to-the-meter traffic data), the driver cannot act as a rational actor because he has imperfect knowledge about the transaction. And that's assuming he'd act like a rational actor anyways -- and anyone who's studied real life instead of theory will tell you that most actors are not rational except, sometimes, in aggregate.
Says who? Instead of spending time stressfully navigating through a slow maze of cars, you can read a book while quickly and predictably getting to your destination. (Public transit is substantially more predictable than traffic.)
I'd take a train over a car every time.
And if you really need A -> B directly, there are taxis.
In the same cities owning a car is also inconvenient, it's not like you can park anywhere.
The fact that public transportation sucks in a lot of cities is not due to intrinsic qualities of these solutions, it's a consequence of shitty urbanisation planning that makes it hard to offer a good public transportation strategy.
I'm not interested in the definition of a 'traffic jam'. I'm not interested to know if I've ever been in a 'traffic jam' or not.
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[1] Adding more roads to a network of roads can make traffic worse (and viceversa, closing roads can make traffic better). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox or watch this friendly explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiauQXIKs3U
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Edits: moved links and parenthesis to footnote, and added "In addition to the correlation found by these researchers" and "other complex network phenomena" to make my point clearer.
Instead, it seems a lot of "traffic" studies are just minor tweaks around the edge, add a lane or remove a lane from a 4-6 lane main corridor and the traffic patterns basically don't change that much because its massively oversubscribed already.
Ultimately the reason why adding more roads to a system produces more traffic is more people take cars vs. public transit.
Adding road capacity makes other types of trips possible. It's not a simple "hey, I'm taking the bus today because they built a lane". It's more like "Hey, I don't need to worry about uprooting my family or spending 6 hours on the bus to get a job in place X vs Y."
Think about it in computer networking terms. Netflix and Office 365 didn't exist in 1995 because it wasn't possible to make those sorts of solutions work then. Today, we need to worry about network congestion because millions of people are streaming movies.
More precisely, more people take cars vs. not take cars. "Not take cars" can be public transit, human powered transport or even not moving at all.
You're talking about the Downs–Thomson paradox. that's a related, but different, problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
However, what does happen is that when you take a road at 70% capacity and double it, so it has a lot more room, some people will move from other 70% utilized roads to your road, and yet more people will decide to drive instead of taking the bus or train, and the utilization of the whole system will remain largely flat at ~70%.
This was seen time and time again in NYC, where even at the peak of construction of roadways in and out of the city under Robert Moses, every new bridge, tunnel, and highway was at >80% utilization within days or weeks of completion. IIRC, the total amount of major roadways in and around NYC was increased by 5-10x from the 1940s to 1950s, and yet traffic congestion and utilization actually increased over this time.
It took a number of years of urban planning research to identify that as you increase the number of roads, more people opt to drive in lieu of mass transit or not making the trip at all.
So, i would argue that in an abstract sense you are correct, but in the context of a major city, a single major road change does not ease congestion, as it simply changes traffic flows and increases demand.
Leave it to "years of urban planning" to determine a proper solution is to make roads so poor that people decide not to use them.
Near my parents' home, there's an intersection of a 18 lanes (!) of highway + access road crossing over a 9-lane surface street. I just don't know how you grow that any further, without the prohibitively expensive option of more vertical stacking.
I've always thought of our current car-based transportation system to be amazingly inefficient when measured in energy consumption per passenger and travel time. But I'm noticing it's also extremely greedy with land use.
I agree. This makes a lot more since.
The authors are taking good data, but making a big leap on their assumption to the cause.
Roads don't "create" traffic. New roads in most major cities are never built until the old ones are already 300-500% over capacity.
If you wait until your 500% over capacity, and then double the lanes, your still way over capacity, so the old and new roads are still "congested". This traffic isn't "new" -- it was always there, you just couldn't see it, because a 200% over capacity road, and a 500% over capacity road, looks like the same gridlock from the sky.
For simplicity, let us have City Core (C), the suburbs reachable with a one hour commute at the worst (S), and the rural area/farmland (F) further out, and ultra-rural deliverance areas beyond that (D).
No one wants to go buy a piece of Farmer Joe's land in zone F and build a house when it takes 3 hours to drive to work. Therefore relatively few people live out there. Because so few live out there, many other people don't want to live out there (not much shopping, no entertainment, few schools, etc).
Now the road is widened. In C, it goes from six lanes to ten. In S, it goes from four to eight. In F, a new closed-access highway with four lanes is built.
What is the result? Why spend $650,000 on a house in S when you can build the same house in F for $300,000? Which is in fact what a ton of people do. Over a period of ~20 years, developers buy up the farmland in zone F, subdivide it, and build houses. People move for the cheaper/larger housing; businesses move in, retail is built, and now we have zone S'. You have four lanes of traffic from zone F connecting to an expanded eight lanes in zone S, which was originally four lanes. Can you spot the problem? Hint: 8 - 4 = 4. Thus the "effective" number of lanes is unchanged for the people living in zone S, even though we presume both S and C have increased density by building taller buildings, renovating to subdivide houses into apartments, etc.
Same for the people in zone C, where the four additional lanes of traffic from S' eat all the excess capacity from the expansion.
What was zone D becomes the new zone F'. Soon as they build some excess road capacity (damn hippies and liberals! what a bunch of Phooey, we should just build more roads) all our problems will be solved!!!
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So yes, in a place like NYC with massive over-demand for transportation, you are correct. But here in Dallas, we've been building tons of new roads all over for the past 50 years and it hasn't changed much, it has merely enabled people to buy up farmland and move further away. Plano in the 1960s was all farms, now it's been 100% build on (literally, the city has no further room to grow). Same for Allen. McKinney is almost completely built now. Any further road expansion will require tearing down skyscrapers, double-decking, or tunneling which magnify the cost of building new roads by an order of magnitude or worse.
Dallas is living proof that building more roads won't help congestion. It might lower home prices or allow your city to continue expanding, but it won't help with commute times or congestion beyond a small temporary bump.
Critically, many of those people are people who might have taken mass transit or carpooled. They are literally new demand in the system driven by new capacity.
Over a longer time period, there's an even deeper effect, where new roads and perceived availability of road transit drives more people to move to previously undesirable parts of metro areas, which increases population which increases demand.
Let's say you change a 3 lane road to a 6 lane road, and double the capacity. While some people from nearby roads will decide to start using the new road, a lot of increased usage over time will come from the new development that's made possible by the improved capacity. Strip malls will open up, new subdivisions or condos will go in, business centers will open, etc. Which is all fine, but it means that ultimately road usage will increase until some pain-of-driving threshold is reached, at which it'll level out.
If the theory of 'induced demand' was accurate, then traffic congestion would not have changed, and that would have been something worth writing about.
This report was highly biased since I'm sure no one built a road where people didn't need one and looked if demand were the same. Instead this is only about building roads where they were deemed to be critical enough to warrant a ton of spending and where the built out supply probably lags demand.
This really sounds like an over engineered explanation and usually the simpler explanations turnS out to be more accurate.
To use the author's own analogy, it's more like a pipe that is being overwhelmed being replaced by a slightly larger pipe that will continue to be overwhelmed.
That said, I hope it encourages people to find creative ways of solving the traffic problem.
Common around where I live is expanding two lane roads to three lanes and going back to two the closer to the city you get.
This sort of idea is discussed a lot in the libertarian community. I don't intend to make the conversation about that; I just want to mention the ideas because they're similar. Basically, a common and oft-parodied criticism of libertarianism is "but who will build the roads," implying that massive road infrastructure is something that can only be produced by government through taxation and eminent domain.
One common retort by libertarians is to come up with a bunch of proposals for how private enterprise could create a very similar road system to what we have today. I think that's the wrong approach. I'm more interested in the ways that government roads, no matter how well-intended they are, can lead to inefficiency and perverse incentives.
I think the biggest and easiest argument to make is an environmental one, which is somewhat ironic, considering that libertarians are generally considered (by themselves and others) as a threat to environmentalism. And yet, I wager that public road infrastructure is one of the most obvious cases where government programs lead to (probably unintended) environmental problems. The interstate highway system is a massive blow to railroads, which have a vastly smaller environmental impact than road freight. The public road funds essentially subsidize the price of fast shipping via truck. Big trucks are probably responsible for a disproportionately large portion of road wear relative to the funding of roads that they provide.
Another interesting effect is that urban sprawl probably wouldn't happen without roads which are primarily produced by government. This is probably another big threat to the environment, since I would imagine that suburbs pollute much more per capita than urban areas because of the necessity to use automobiles.
Here in the DC region, demand-based pricing was used in the widening of interstate 495. It works. My favorite aspect is that buses and vehicles carrying 3 or more people can use the lanes for free, while all the assholes riding by themselves have to pay handsomely for the privilege of creating congestion at rush hour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_HOT_lanes
One of the funny things about the libertarian idea of making everyone pay for road use is that technology has made it much more feasible. We don't have to use toll booths anymore. Instead just stick a transponder on the window. One of the best remedies for situations in which overuse of a public good is causing environmental problems is to make people pay to use said good.
Likewise the Chesapeake bridge-tunnel was built by a government organization funded by municipal bonds. Bond funding does not imply private ownership and is not really a libertarian idea.
The 495 HOT lanes were a public/private partnership, so again not exactly a libertarian ideal. Also, to date they are underperforming financially.
The best example of a libertarian-type road project in the DC area is probably the Dulles Greenway, which was built and is operated by an entirely private company.
It's rational for a private company to insert a road into a system to benefit itself at the disadvantage to others (cf. negative externalities). Indeed it's rational for several to do this making ad-hoc modifications to the network, the net result of this is significant inefficiency.
Collective action problems and (negative) externalities are the main cases where we require a single-point-of-trust / authority to coordinate a system. Libertarians say that private companies can do this, but when you ask "well what do these companies look like?" you invariably get something like a small government.
The moral question then arises: we have these single-points-of-trust, do we have any democratic control over them? The answer, in a libterian system is No (money != vote).
The libertarian solution to these problems then, seems to me, to hand them over to private tyrannies with no public accountability to perform largely the same function as a government. Its at this point the "NOPE!! LEAVE ME ALONE!" tends to come out.
> It's rational for a private company to insert a road into a system to benefit itself at the disadvantage to others (cf. negative externalities). Indeed it's rational for several to do this making ad-hoc modifications to the network, the net result of this is significant inefficiency.
It's also rational for a government to insert a road into a system to benefit "itself" (i.e. politicians, construction companies that are "friendly" with government, etc.) at the disadvantage to others. What is your response to my environmental argument? That's an argument about specific negative externalities that are produced by government that I would not expect to be produced by private infrastructure.
> The moral question then arises: we have these single-points-of-trust, do we have any democratic control over them?
It's just as reasonable to ask that about government roads. Does government's decisions about roads reflect the desires of the population? I haven't seen any data, so I don't really know, but I would suspect the answer to be mostly no. But markets often do have the quality that their products reflect the desires of the population.
The main reason highways exhibit the behaviour is because they are not load-costed, as the 407 is. The cost per peak traveler on the 401 (an alternative-ish public highway of similar size / etc) is around $10k per car per year, due to the immense cost of building new lanes, the slow down that costs, and the additional slowdown of everyone else on the road. And that cost was when I was studying engineering back in 2007, so it's almost surely higher.
Cost per use seems a lot more interesting. It's hard to say exactly how many cars ride it every day, but Wiki has a table of average daily utilization at 11 points along the system. If we simply add those up, then in 2008 they counted an average of 1.1m cars per day on the highway, or 401 million riders per year. This almost certainly significantly understates utilization.
If the Ministry of Transportation spent their entire budget on the 401, that would work out to about $3.70 per ride. In reality they are probably investing less than $0.25 / ride to maintain and extend the highway.
There is very little, perhaps nothing, that can compare to the cost-benefit of building freeways for your nation.
What is the alternative. Can you show a single developed country with a successful private transportation system? You talk about trains. Most countries with functional and effective train system are not libertarian today. In most places they are mandated, standardized, subsidized by governments. Bullet trains, freight, safety rules, etc.
Showing that public roads lead to inefficiency and perverse incentives doesn't point to a solution. It just points to a problem. You still have to find a solution that works.
I think this argument is bit of cop-out, well we can't make argument how libertarianism would work so we can poke at something government subsidized and tell everyone how it is broken.
To me it seems this is not unlike Communism argument. "It is so nice in theory, we'll just share and distribute the wealth blah blah". "Ok, can you show me an example of a successful Communist country?" "Well no, _but_ let me point out some problems and inefficiences with the capitalist system".
Not on a national scale, no, unless you count any passenger rail or air systems as "successful" and "private." But that's not really a sufficient argument. Obviously, it would be nearly impossible to compete with taxation and eminent domain at the scale they are used in modern developed nations.
> Showing that public roads lead to inefficiency and perverse incentives doesn't point to a solution. It just points to a problem. You still have to find a solution that works.
What do you mean I have to find a solution that works? Does that mean I don't get to propose new solutions and argue for why I think they should work?
> I think this argument is bit of cop-out, well we can't make argument how libertarianism would work so we can poke at something government subsidized and tell everyone how it is broken.
I can make an argument for how libertarianism (or rather, a specific societal organization that some might consider to be "libertarian") could work.
> To me it seems this is not unlike Communism argument...
Well, I don't think communism works well in theory or in practice. I am advocating for markets, and there is a great deal of theoretical and practical evidence for why markets perform well.
Maybe. Or, while we're speculating, maybe spreading out the impact (even if it is in total greater) is good. Highly concentrated human activity causes very dramatic damage to the environment. If you spread the same activity, or even more activity, over an area many times as large the impact may not be felt.
"It has been shown that cities of a high density, such as, for example Hong Kong, have a far lower transport energy demand per capita than low density cities such as Houston, by a factor of 18. On average, when comparing 10 major cities in the US with 12 European cities, European cities are five times as dense but the US cities consume 3.6 times as much transport energy per capita. The conclusion often drawn from such data is that dense cities are low energy cities." [1]
You are correct that there is more immediate impact to the environment from dense urban areas, but it's outweighed by the gains in energy savings from sharing resources (energy, transportation) effectively. This is why contemporary urban planning tends to push compact, dense neighbourhoods over suburban sprawl.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778802...
To other libertards, we have to come up with a well-reasoned, thoughtful argument, with support and contingencies.
To authoritarians, we have to use a glib sound bite. Who will build the roads? Without government, who would possibly make the hamburgers and blue jeans?
In reality, a libertarded city might not have any roads at all, like Kowloon Walled City before they tore it down. It wasn't necessarily a nice place to live, but it got on well enough without roads.
Some libertards are kooky enough that they would build a city around ziplines, sleds pulled by teams of housecats, for-hire piggybackers, and go-go-gadget hatcopters. If there were any cars at all, they would be made of hemp, have built in pistol holsters instead of seatbelts, and be powered by Stirling engines burning moonshine. Visit New Hyperbole City today!
But seriously, either someone will build a road at their own expense, or everyone else will adapt to the lack of a road. What you certainly will not see are paved county roads with one mailbox every half-mile or so. A massive system of autobahns will not spontaneously appear, and it certainly would not be free to use. Rail networks, as you mention, would almost certainly more efficient use of private funds. People living where roads are not economical would simply buy off-road-capable vehicles and chainsaws instead of paving their own. Libertarded CONUS would start to look a lot like Alaska, except with more fanboats, ATVs, mudboggers, dune buggies, ultralight fan-gliders, mountain bikes, zeppelins, and such. People who like cars would have to pack in closer on fewer roads, and pay for their use directly.
If you only consider the aspect of freedom, maybe. But there are more aspects of quality life to consider imo. Spending hours in a car, practically standing still, causes stress. More lanes? More stressed people, higher volume of traffic jam - is that still freedom, sitting inside a metal cage while you can't go forward or backward? Increased number of cars driving means increased pollution. More lanes means less space for buildings and nature. Etc. I get your point, but I think there is more to it.
Perhaps not, if you take into account the resource costs of road infrastructure (which are fairly hidden by government) and the health impact of automobile usage (from pollution, commuting hours, and obviously road accidents).
The thing is, massive public subsidies for roads might be the reason that so many people need to travel far from their homes to their work. You're assuming that the causal relationship goes one way, but it could just as easily go the other way.
Promoting alternatives outside big cities and spending the money there to attract companies instead of spending it on roads would make much more sense.
I have 2 kids, and I've made urban living work. Courtesy of Virginia's former governor (now on trial for felony corruption charges) our roads are no longer funded by gasoline taxes, and are instead funded by a sales tax that people like me, who walk to work, have to fucking pay. If I had my way, all of you commuter idiots would have to pay a toll for all roads. Its absurd that I can't ride a subway for free, but you get to use public infrastructure while the rest of us pay to maintain it.
Your "freedom to live and work" is actually a freedom to take from urban people and give to yourself to finance your unsustainable, silly lifestyle.
If you want to live in the country, then fucking work in the country. Grow something other than a useless, decorative plant that requires extensive fertilizer and watering.
The solution:
Tough luck, adjust your life to your dumbass decision to live in the suburbs.
Even if it's personally satisfying, no minds are being won here.
On a smaller scale, I grew up in the middle of two medium-sized towns, the one north of me had factories, and the one south of me had other factories. In towns A and B, there were about as many people working from the other town as there were local. But without the roads, everyone would be more likely to work a couple miles from home, and probably be happier (type of work, pay rate, etc were about the same between the two).
In the UK we tried this under the Thatcher government. Margaret Thatcher was allergic to trains and wanted to encourage private ownership of cars as much as possible. Vast swathes of South East England were turned to roads so that happy motorists could get around a few minutes quicker.
Ultimately the Conservatives had to give up on the road-building schemes. It was too expensive to do and the roads really were only encouraging motorists.
The crux of your argument has been tried and tested in the UK. Despite the vast resources and ideology that went into it, it was a battle that was lost.
So what now for the UK? Cycling and buses. It is now socially acceptable to cycle and the government are encouraging it as much as they can in London. Soon it will be 20 mph everywhere in London's boroughs (average speed for cars is ~ 10mph though). There is congestion charging to keep cars out of the capital. With only so many roads, for the commuter, cycling is actually pretty quick. You can also get a bike tax-free with payments spread out over a year.
Buses have been quite transformed in London. The night bus service means that people in service sector jobs can get in or out of the capital at odd hours. Years ago night buses were a nightmare. Now they are clean, safe and quite comfortable if you have some phone/book/tablet for entertainment. The cost is not bad either. People that used to not consider a bus will nowadays take them without hesitation. You can check the times online so you never have to wait an aeon.
Even though we have Conservatives in power - the sworn enemies of public transport - transport in the London area is better than it was. There have been 1/2 million extra Londoners arrive in the last decade or so, no new trains and no new roads. People do spend far too long on the commute - two hours each way is common, but, what do you do when a city gets to be huge?
Personally I wish that the cycle routes were more like 'motorways for bikes' with it possible to go ten miles or so from the suburbs to the centre without having to stop for any lights. Such routes would make commutes by bike all the way a lot more viable. For instance, according to the maps I have 13 miles by bike. I could do that in an hour if there was no start/stop + danger. As it is I cycle for 20 minutes to the train and then get a 35 minute train journey. Those figures sound good, however, I also spend some money on the journey (time=money) plus I have a 10 minute walk at the other end and I like to get to the station ten minutes before the train departs. Therefore I actually spend 1 hour 25 minutes door to door, with a little longer on the reverse journey. So that is 5 hours a week that I could save if I wanted to. What stops me? Those crazy idiots that set out every day to add to the congestion they know is on the roads. I have a quiet ride through the park and some quality time with my phone on the train, thereby avoiding the nutters that are in the dark ages of driving everywhere, single-occupancy style.
If I drive somewhere, all I need to know is where it is and where I am and I can eventually get there within 50% of the normal time to get there. Let's take this road that points towards where I want to go. That didn't work? Okay, let's take the next road that points to where I want to go. Unless you're driving around the Pentagon, which I'm fairly certain has had its road systems designed into the shape of a PENTAGRAM, then that will get you to where you want to go in the majority of the US.
And grand total is still faster than walking to the metro, waiting in line for the train to show up, and waiting for it to stop at every spot in between.
Most cities have real time bus/train trackers now that help you plan when to leave so you don't have to wait long.
A map?
What else does a starter packet need to contain?
Later, they test you on it. Obviously, testing people on riding the metro would be ridiculous. But there is a huge difference in having a map and signing system in place versus knowing how to read them.
Yet for the metro, if you don't know what you're doing and you don't know anyone who knows what they are doing, you're essentially dumped in the deep end during all-swim. The maps and the keys for understanding the maps are all printed in high-traffic areas (of course, where they will be seen by the most people), and the other passengers are often quite annoyed by "noobs" who stand in those high traffic areas and gawk at the maps.
You might have even seen this phenomenon in real life: Driving on a highway, suddenly you get stuck in traffic. As you pass through the traffic zone, there are no cars pulled over, no accident, no disruption in the quality of road. What most likely happened was that someone accidentally slammed on their brakes which caused an increase in car density. If there are enough cars that are in bound to this traffic zone before the density can disperse, the traffic zone will persist.
Also notice that traffic zones often appear in situation where there's a positive increase in elevation. What happens is that if people aren't using cruise control (or their cruise control, control system isn't tight enough) their speed will decrease as they ascend the hill, causing some congestion and as like if the density of traffic is high enough, the cars behind them will have to slow down. You may think that if the cars behind them are also ascending the hill they'll also slow down in the same way but some cars may use cruise control while others don't (resulting in congestion) or the differences in each car's torque, power-output, efficiency curves differ causing each to slow down at different rates (often leading to the least capable car governing the rate)
Use a worst-case scenario to analyze. Assume you have a network of diverless cars all linked together that maintain equidistant space between each other. If a new cars needs to join their network / pack the minimum amount of delay that the cars (behind the entering car) need to encounter is the (Length of the incoming car + gap tolerance between the other car) / (the sustained speed of the pack) =25/5280/65*3600 ~= .25 seconds per car. Now do a thought experiment that the high way you drive on was completely full (like we said in our original problem statement) do you think if you added one additional car to the highway, would everyone's (who's downstream of the merge) commute time be only increase ~.25 seconds? I'm very confident it's be much more than that.
Traffic management is a task that needs high coordination, cooperation and reaction times above what unassisted humans are capable of.
If everything is networked, dynamic tolls also become easier. I guess a lot of people react badly to the concept, but it creates the ability to simply prevent heavy congestion.
http://www.traffic-simulation.de/
Decreasing the time gap and space gap decreased the amount of traffic
Take 405 in West Los Angeles for example. On one side it has the Sepulvida pass with very steep decent going south and ascent going north. It is crossed by I-10 going to Santa Monica and Downtown, a little further in 90 goes to Marina del Rey, and then exits for LAX.
If you examine this section as an example, you have number of people either trying to get in or pass through this section during commuting hours. From the north, the sepulvida pass makes people slow down as they climb the hill. Not exactly sure why, but many drivers seem to be afraid of it. This recoils through the rest of the traffic, as each incremental car slowing down results in the car behind it slowing down slightly more.
Once you get down the hill, you have people exiting and entering with very short distances to decelerate or accelerate, causing more slow downs.
On the other side, you have a similar dynamic, but people are also trying to merge to or from 90 and I-10. With majority of the traffic heading either to Santa Monica, West LA, Century City or Hollywood/Downtown/something in between.
The city has recently completed a major expansion on the 405 in that area adding a carpool lane, but more importantly changing how you merge to/from several of the exits, including Wilshire blvd and I-10.
In my observation, the carpool lane did relatively little, but the smoothed exiting/entering with enough time to accelerate shifted the bottleneck from before Wilshire blvd, frequently spilling past the 90, to no ending around Wilshire.
The flow restriction now seems to be the dreaded 101 interchange, with a huge amount of traffic stuck in the Sepulvida pass. As the result, I can not get from the 90 to I-10 in about 10 mins, whereas before it was easily 30.
Point being, that if you maintain road size (or marginally improve it) and optimize the flow, you get a lot better returns.
But nevertheless, the study mentioned in the article does show that building more roads does not make traffic better:
> "[the researchers compared] the amount of new roads and highways built in different U.S. cities between 1980 and 2000, and the total number of miles driven in those cities over the same period. “We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” said Turner. If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate."
If you have never experienced 405 in West LA, I suggest you visit :)
[1]entire article
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/3/4/the-stroad.html#...
It's interesting to look for the accidental victims of development, stuff like houses backed up against a road that probably started as a street. In areas where there is lots of room, the sensible thing is probably to just tear them down (or relocate them if that made sense), but people are too busy looking at the immediate impacts and ignore the needlessly low quality housing that will exist for decades (your link points out that the housing also makes the road less effective, which I hadn't considered).
Colloquially, they're referred to as "Lexus Lanes".
As far as a I can tell, they haven't done much to reduce congestion on the non-toll lanes. But, if you can afford $12/day (peak rate, round trip) for a 10 mile stretch of interstate, you get to avoid the dirty, unwashed masses who are stuck in the poor lanes. :)
I drove from Austin to Dallas the other weekend -- what a mess I-35 is. And it's been that way for 30+ years. High speed rail could help, if there's good transit connectivity at both ends, and the trains are frequent enough.
This bizarre fluid does obey certain rules, which are consistent and discoverable. Once you have all the rules, you can model an entire system and run experiments.
That said, I hate roundabouts. They seem to combine the worst elements of multiple solutions to make all drivers equally unhappy and inconvenienced. It is somehow okay that no one wins, because everyone loses.
Not to worry, over the next several decades large cities will build out effective mass transit systems. High-speed rail will eventually come to America after years of debate.
Look to China to lead the way. What's this low-speed maglev that they're building now?
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2014-02/19/content_17291...
Which, as the article points out, won't fix the traffic congestion, because as some people switch from driving to mass transit, other people will take their place by driving when they previously walked or just didn't make the trip at all. So mass transit can increase the total number of trips made, but it won't decrease road usage.
It is the onion, and is flippant, but as a general belief it touches upon a basic truth -- everyone would love if everyone else used public transit, leaving the roads available for our use.
However, if you have a big visual reminder that the road you're driving on will cost you money as soon as you drive on it, then people will be less likely to either take that route or drive altogether.
It will be interesting to see what happens. For the record, I can see the construction from my office window. I've used the express lanes a couple of times now, and traffic has always been clear on it when I did so. Whether this is due to pricing or simply because it is so new I am not sure. Either way, there was no traffic jams for me (during afternoon rush hour, mind) on the occasions I used them.
I think it's very possible to jump ahead of this effect, but the capital outlay would be impressive, and as a society we apparently aren't permitted to accomplish Big Things anymore, so it's likely we stay in this weird bit of the function for a long while.
But I think many of us would agree about accomplishing Big Things. Here's the dirty little secret: the US Government has almost always funded those "Big Things" and taxed the rich heavily to do it. The Interstate highway system was funded by a massive (as a percentage of the price per gallon) gas tax, along with a 90% post-war income tax rate on the rich.
Even the trans-continental railroad was funded thanks to guarantees, loans, etc from the US Federal government (including sending the Army out shoot Native Americans and bandits who attacked the railroads). No private entity was willing to take such a large risk - it could have bankrupted even JP Morgan if it went bad. Without "Big Government" support the line never would have been built.
I'm all for bringing back much higher taxes on the rich - tax anything over $1 million income at 50%, over $10 million at 60%. Same for cap gains. Use that money to fund massive expansions of roads, build subways under every major city, heck start a government-funded bank that gives anyone who wants to start a business a loan (it's what the Chinese government does).
We could do a ton of "Big Things" if we were willing to tax the uber-rich to pay for it.
The recent update to Google Maps seems to do the same thing. It's much more proactive now about suggesting alternate routes. Here in Seattle, I recently bypassed I-5 by taking an astonishingly complex and twisty route that was all prompted by Google Maps, and I got to my destination five minutes sooner than Google was estimating I would had I stayed on I-5 (although that's impossible to verify since traffic congestion changes throughout the duration of a drive).
All that said, while it was fun (also especially when I avoided a Tacoma I-5 snarl that I hadn't previously known how to avoid), I don't think we actually want to redirect highway drivers onto local streets. Local streets aren't designed for highway overflow; they're designed for local traffic.
Isn't the real answer to design more decentralized town areas so people have less reason to drive long distances, for reasons other than recreation?
While I understand there's a really point to this paradox (it really happens), I hate the simplistic conclusion people reach that it is always wrong to make a road bigger. Sometimes you really do need a bigger road. Sometimes you really need more public transport or something else. It's complicated, and we need better models of it. But reducing it to one line slogans doesn't help that.
In those country towns with a population of 30,000 but a super road through the center that could carry 100,000 people a day the road _is_ the same as if that 100 lane highway had been built in a major city.
In the article they state that there are more factors at work but they do need a title for the article that will draw people to read it.
They've been expanding it ever since they've built it and in parts it is 25 lanes wide. It's slammed all the time. Traffic jams at 3am aren't unheard of if they're doing road work and it's slimmed down to half capacity.
It was once merely an 8 lane highway, so the idea that tripling or quadrupling the size of a highway magically makes traffic jams go away is so far from the truth.
There's a parallel highway running north of it that's paid by tolls which isn't as busy, but only because they can adjust pricing according to demand.
If you want to reduce congestion try the obvious. 1) Mixed zoning, allowing more residential and retail to be close together. So people have less distance to travel. 2) Raise speed limits where possible so people can get to their destinations faster. 3) Build for the future. Don't just add a lane or two, add six. 4) And yes trains, do help. The problem in the States is that we hardly have any. Only the major metro areas have any sort of adequate rail system and even they are fairly slow, limited and antiquated. Which brings me to my last point: 5) Consult with Elon Musk.
We've been building roads at a massive clip around the Dallas area, sprawling out over huge suburbs, many of which support mixed development (as does the city of Dallas itself). When I first moved here, the previous two lane highway had just been turned into a six lane toll road and there were no traffic jams, not even during rush hour. It's been 8 years and now we have stop and go traffic every day for about a 30 minute window and that window continues to grow larger.
If you think about the design of roads it should become clear why this happens... You have many on-ramps dumping cars into a fixed set of lanes. If, at any point, there are more cars that want to enter than there is room traffic must slow to accommodate them. In reality it happens before the road is full as people leave space for braking, etc. When that happens at any point, it creates a wave of slowed traffic that begins to ripple backwards from that point, meaning anywhere further backward that is close to capacity begins to jam up, making it even more difficult for new vehicles to enter the roadway, amplifying the wave even more.
Even if demand were 100% evenly spread out (which it never, never will be simply by the fact that brand new areas have empty fields or wooded lots - it takes time to build offices, start businesses, etc), the friction of merging & exiting the highway would eventually require more cars to exit than are entering, the exact opposite of rush hour conditions.
Building more lanes merely delays the inevitable; that's assuming you can, which in Dallas is impossible - most of the current roads (and 100% of the worst congested ones) would require tearing down skyscrapers or 100% tunneling / elevated highways because there is no more space.
>> New roads will create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same
So contrary to popular belief, invention is actually the mother of necessity. The question now is how best to take a systems approach to promoting alternative forms of transportation.
If the principle, holds, obviously: build more.
Using Google Maps as my source, a trip home will take between 1hr, 3min to 1hr, 30min, and still includes driving for the last mile. Granted, this is San Antonio, which is certainly a driving city. The same drive home is 14-17 minutes, depending on route.
In my calculus, drive vs. public trans. is a balance of which sucks least. Right now, I would say that the cost and altruism aspect of public trans. would allow it 200% of the suckiness allotted to driving. All else being equal, I would need a public trans. trip of ~30minutes or less.
Adding more lanes is useless from a urban planing point of view because it doesn't alleviate congestion.
A study finds a correlation between construction of new roads and increase in driver miles. A policy-maker, never one for logic, transmutes correlation to causation. Now, it may be that they assume that increased demand for travel causes road construction, and assign resources to reduce the total cost for each trip. Good for them.
But they may also assume that more roads cause more travel, and decide to prevent trips by destroying roads. Boo. You could as easily prevent water from flowing downstream by building a dam. Then your stream becomes a reservoir, the downstream flow rate reduces while it fills, then the reservoir spills over the dam at the same rate it flowed before.
People want to move around. They want to travel freely between the places they can earn money, the places they can spend it, and the places they enjoy keeping their stuff. Making the travel more difficult makes them unhappy, while making it easier makes them more content. For the most part, the desire to move minus the cost of the trip results in economic activity. If that number is zero or negative, people stay put, and don't add to economic circulation.
Human movement is an economic engine. You can add friction to it and generate more heat, or you can remove friction and extract work instead
Generally speaking, you want people to take more trips, and you want the cost per trip to be as low as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean building more, wider, and longer roads. You may be able to get better results by siting the popular destinations more closely to each other, and ensuring that the routes between them are direct, non-viscous, and non-turbulent.
When you do something stupid like make 3000 people work in one building complex, far away from homes or other businesses, and have everyone sleep in a suburban bedroom community, far away from jobs and shopping, yes, the road that is the best available route between them will be packed every single day. You cannot economically reduce traffic by narrowing that road. The cars you see on it will go down, but that is because people quit their jobs or moved their households over the arduous commute. They went somewhere else, and will be earning and spending there, instead. It would be better to simply put the homes, businesses, and offices closer together, and diffuse the obvious trips onto roads in such a way that they are neither over or underutilized.
Politicians in the city I live in are literally doing this, installing "traffic calming measures" (destroying perfectly good road lanes that were just resurfaced)
I believe phase two involves generating clean energy by harnessing the power of Bastiat spinning in his grave.
There is already enough incentive, the incentive is to avoid seeing your hours waste away on traffic. Most people don't really get to choose their hours, with or without incentive, otherwise they already avoid the most congested hours. So the suggested incentive doesn't really make a difference when it's not a matter of choice, except by taking money away from people without adding any value.
> What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse
> For instance, Paris in recent decades has had a persistent policy to dramatically downsize and reduce roadways. “Driving in Paris was bad before,” said Duranton. “It’s just as bad, but it’s not much worse.”
Bigger roads are worse, and smaller roads are worse?
There's a point here somewhere but they've failed to make it.
It seems to be a much simpler scenario that demand far outstrips capacity, and until you can meet the demand, saturation every lane added will continue to be saturated.
I'm sure amdahl's law applies to lane adding here, on top of the fact that all the highways I've seen merge from one side or the other. I don't think I've seen any that merge in the middle, though I guess they probably exist.
"By comparison, building expensive transit systems aimed at getting people out of their less-expensive cars generates zero economic benefits if it generates no new travel. Only new travel generates economic benefits, so people who argue that new roads induce new travel are actually arguing that new roads create economic benefits.
If congestion is the issue, then–as Mann briefly mentions–the solution is congestion pricing. But Mann doesn’t understand the difference between true congestion pricing and New York City’s proposal for cordon pricing. Cordon pricing is more a way of raising revenue to fund urban boondoggles than a way of relieving congestion.
Even UC Berkeley planning professor Robert Cervero believes that the induced demand argument is “wrong headed.” “Road investments by themselves do not increase volumes,” he writes. “Only by conferring a benefit, like faster speeds, will traffic increase.” Provided that benefit is greater than the cost–something that could be assured, Cervero says, through proper pricing of roads–then it is a good thing."
And all around me, as I look out my windows, all I see are skycranes build condo projects.
On my walk to my local coffee shop, I see a political campaign poster touting the candidate will work to block some proposed parking garage project that I never understood why old people hated.
There is a new metro station going in less than half a mile from my place. Except it won't be done for another 5 years or something. And really, the other nearest station is only a mile away over flat road. I don't understand putting metro stations less than half a mile from each other. That just seems more likely to cause traffic than it is to alleviate it, as it increases the latency of trips.
There aren't any major road projects going on. There are one or two projects to fix up a few ramps that were crumbling. There is something about an express lane all the way to the Dulles airport. But nothing about the 95 expressway seems to be addressed.
Clearly, someone is planning to pack a LOT more people into this area, but has given no thought whatsoever where to put their cars, either while in use or not.
So I've just accepted that this is reality now. There is absolutely no reason to complain about traffic, because nobody is doing anything meaningful about it. I try to work my life to not be involved with it at all. I do most of my shopping online. I am a freelancer who works 100% from home. I live in walking distance of a bar and a coffee shop, and I'm even cutting back how often I go. Unless I can finally convince my wife to move out of this place, I'm not traveling anywhere during daylight hours.
Finally, businesses that rely on roads will swoop into cities
with many of them, bringing trucking and shipments.
I was expecting something more interesting such as the correlation to car driver behaviour and inefficiency with stop-go traffic when not leaving a buffer in front of the next car (something that was written up very well a year or so ago) and how this logic is effected with wider roads. Instead, got some pretty worn out theories.
Humans don't just drive for the sake of doing so. They drive because they have the need to do so. Building roads lowers the perceived time cost of driving, so more people drive, and more people drive at the time that is most desirable to do so. In some cases this results in increased congestion, but if the need of the population is met or exceeded, then the result is smooth traffic flow. Even if the bigger road is more congested, it may still have a greater net traffic flow, and that increased flow results in greater economic and societal good.
For example, because of new highway XYZ, I can now work somewhere that was formerly too far a commute.
The problem isn't solved by building smaller roads, it's solved by building even bigger roads, or building roads in a more optimal fashion (selecting a route for a new road that matches the transportation needs of the population).
Every day I cycle commute up the London A24/A3 (CS7) corridor. On the first day of the first tube strikes early this year, the congestion was insane. I mean the worst traffic I've ever seen in my life. An ambulance was literally stuck in traffic and no one within earshot of the ambulance able to move their vehicle enough for it to get through.
But then the second day of the strike traffic was a bit on the heavy side but mostly back to normal. I think a huge number of people realized that it was actually pointless to even attempt to go to work unless they were walking or biking. This effect even carried over to the second tube strike a month or two later.
"The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource."
I think this is where projects like Andriod Auto & iOS CarPlay come into play. Just jump into your car and say "Take me to Julia's house" and the route will be mapped out for you. I would love to not have to figure out the best way to get to the mall on a busy Saturday afternoon! Even better, an auto-driving car will actually take care of the moving bits as well as planning your route.
That is because I believe how and where you build the road is more important than how much road you build. For example, where I live the main roads in the city proper haven't been upgraded in the last 40 years. Yet, new roads funneling drivers from farther and farther out are being constructed all the time. This simply means that the first 1/2 of many drivers commutes involves sailing along a new road until they hit the old roads, and then puttering around at 5mph (or worse) for the last 5-10 miles of the journey.
What? No? It doesn't work that way? Hmm, what a coincidence, it appears we're already at the sweet spot on the traffic-flow Laffer curve.
Either that, or what the authors of the study are trying to optimize is very different from what the typical driver is trying to optimize.
Perhaps you could reduce rates for each passenger in the vehicle. Maybe a four-passenger vehicle gets to drive free anytime. This encourages car pooling for those who can't afford to pay the tolls.
In fact it may create new jobs.
I personally think that a lot of jobs today don't justify driving around at all. What difference does it make if you code in the crowded building of your employer or at home and use tele-conferences to talk with each other? Maybe you would even be more productive if you got rid of all the stress caused by commuting around a substantial portion of the day.
I guess a good chunk of the office work done today could be replaced by remote work, but employers insist on everyone to get into the car, commute and thereby congest roads and burn up non-renewable petrol.
I am seriously wondering why the working population don't bill the time and expenses of commuting to the employers? Most entrepreneurs do. You pay $50-$100 for the plumber to come to your place (just to come there, work is billed extra). Why not office workers?