“One More Lane Bro is the only option, I checked, and it should be subsidised by NYT who make too much money.” - Robert Moses
That’s definitely fixed my friend.
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!
Elon:
Guys, I think I’ve got it… What if we built another lane but, you know, under the ground, like a tunnel.
He seemed to casually ignore that at the end of the tunnel was still the concept of an offramp with a 25mph street that everyone was funneling to.
Of course he never planned on building it anyway. It was all just to distract from California High Speed Rail, because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.
Just to be pedantic, the dumb car tunnels (or Loop), are the weird thing elon “invented” to “solve” traffic and reduce competition for his cars for urban transport. This eventually became one tunnel in LA to get between elon’s house and office, and the dumb taxi tunnel in Las Vegas.
The hyperloop, where elon “invented” the vacuum train, is a separate thing that exists to distract from CAHSR, and elon didn’t want to work on himself because “he’s too busy”, and not because it’s effectively just a scam and won’t work, and most of the companies that started up to develop it have since gone bust.
because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.
Which is stupid in itself, because the entire goal of the CA HSR project is to link long distance corridors, not putzing around town like most do with a Tesla.
In fact I think there’s a missed opportunity for EVs to partner with long distance public transit.
The main limitations of electric cars is distance, but if people knew they could go across the state or several states comfortably without their car, they might be more willing to take a electric car for city driving.
We have ferries. What if we could combine the efficiency of train and the convenience of ferries? People could just drive their own car on a train car of some kind and be shuttled to a destination and then drive off?
that’s been done in europe since I think the 1930s
I’ve seen those trucks with a bunch of cars packed on top, something like that (minus truck) could totally fit in a train cargo container.
The loading and unloading is a pain.
Without looking deeper it’s probably cost prohibitive. Looking at long train rides cost a thousand dollars and takes 3-4 days, might as well just fly at that point.
I recently watched a video about autonomous car and the dude argue the tech isn’t here yet, but it will work if we build a lane just for autonomous car and put every autonomous car on that lane.
Everyone in the comment basically calling him out for reinventing the train lol.
And put that in the basement
Trains are the crabs of transportation.
Can’t improve a crab.
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?
You think people advocating for mass transit want to remove all roads? Cause that’s a nice strawman you have there
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.
How about 2 more lanes?
I’ve seen that exact scene in Atlanta trying to get to Alpharetta from 75 S by 675.
Alpharetta represent! Lol
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
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
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
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).
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
just one more lane bro pls ome more lane bro
Man I remember those days… when a 10 mile drive would sometimes be a 1 hour drive.
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.
I always feel like these induced demand arguments are suggesting that adding more lanes means the same number of people are just choosing to do more driving. Maybe, as you add more lanes you create the infrastructure for a city to grow, and it adds more people which then fill up the new lanes. People aren’t just going out and buying a new car or rolling an existing car out of the driveway that they were previously not using because a new lane is built. These are net new drivers, who would not be in that city if the infrastructure for them hadn’t been built.
Induced demand actually means that more people drive now because the people that didn’t drive in the past / lived somewhere else because it was less convenient because of the traffic to commute by car or live somewhere else where they would have needed a car now decide to commute by car / actually move (yeah that also something we have observed) because the widening temporarily improved traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse. Induced demand isn’t something the Internet has come up with. It’s actually a real thing that has been studied and researched. We know it exists. It functions on the basic principle of: If you improve something and make it more convenient to use that something, more people will actually use it.
But the demand was always there. They wanted to move, they just didn’t. So the lane didn’t induce it. The choice of that word was intentional. It was to argue against more lanes. It is really unserved demand that they just ignored originally.
Exactly, thank you. If you build a 6-lane highway in Montana it’s not going to magically fill up with traffic, thus one can conclude that context is missing from the Reddit-tier explanation of induced demand or that the entire idea of induced demand is wrong.
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.
And the widest parts of I-10 are not the everyday choke points. Other parts of the system are the worst offenders on traffic.
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.
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
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.
They wanted to move and use thier car
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.
“What if we put lanes on top of the other lanes?”
