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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32928 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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The concept of '15-minute cities' came up a few weeks ago, but since then it appears to have piggybacked off a local dispute in Oxford to become the locus of the latest so-called 'far-right conspiracy theory'. The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian to me on this side of the pond, even as someone who is generally supportive of new urbanist ideas, but I can't speak to how it plays in Europe.

I've often felt that the culture war battle lines on these urban planning issues have not been as clearly drawn as those on gender, immigration, or abortion, mostly due to a lack of attention, but that time appears to be coming to an end. Though seeing as we already can't build anything, I suppose it isn't much of a loss.

I live in a 15 minute hellhole. There are probably a dozen coffee shops within a 15 minute walk, almost as many churches, a bunch of drug stores, some clothing stores, infinite amounts of restaurants

It’s early morning here and I can hear the light rail’s grating, electronic simulation of a bell dinging and angrily bleating at cars as it rumbles past my house. It’s morning, but dark in my house because of the blackout shades I had to install after my city switched to dystopian white LED flood lights to “prevent crime”. All night long people literally drag raced up and down my street reaching speeds of >100mph directly in front of my house.

I used to sit on my front porch every night and chat with neighbors as they walked by, but these days the neighbors mostly sit in their own houses, rightfully fearful of the homeless drug addicted schizophrenics who have laid claim to the sidewalks here.

No I do not love my 15 minute city. Tear out this god awful light rail, it does nothing but bring crime to the neighborhood, tear down ALL of the streetlights, start enforcing the laws against open drug use, and speeding, and maybe then this city would be enjoyable.

But the same people who advocate 15 minute cities seem to think these horrifying hell demons are virtues, not things to be overcome, so no I do not want to give them any power. If they want to build their childish utopia, they can do so out in the desert from scratch. Stop ruining cities.

I’m not really an active advocate for “15 minute hellholes”, but I always find these comments a bit baffling. Surely what “everything should be within 15 minutes” is aspiring to is something like Seoul or Tokyo or Singapore, which are convenient and pleasant enough places to live, even if a bit cramped and not for everyone?

So the bait for "15 minute cities" is small Italian villages and the switch is East Asian anthills, complete with wide boulevards full of cars and motorbikes down the sidewalks (at least in Seoul's case)?

Well, I don’t really see how you’re fitting 5 million people in a small village on the Alps. I always think of Yokohama or Hong Kong when I think of “convenient city to live in”.

"bait", No, I'd say realistically the goal is how the nice parts of Chicago are where you have smaller distinct neighborhoods that have everything you regularly need/want connected by cheap and regular rail but just slightly more so. Put the houses closer together in a brownstone or townhouse configuration, make yards smaller and use much of that sqft saving for nice green parks, which are a much better space for community formation, and the rest for much more local businesses like grocers, bakeries, butchers, restaurants, ect. The areas that are like this make going about the town a pleasure rather than a chore.

Well, the difference is that those cities are in countries that, ah, generally frown upon "immoral" behaviors and crime. I'm not exactly a 15-minute-city opponent, but I can agree that any city that resembles, well, a non-US city needs to enforce laws and norms to a rather strict degree to keep it pleasant.

I will never understand why urbanists will name other countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, and then gloss over the key differences between them and the United States: Cultures, laws, and norms. Singapore even bans chewing gum, for heaven's sake. Meanwhile in the US you'd be surprised if a three-time felon murderer stays in jail for more than a year, in San Francisco they just recalled a prosecutor for not prosecuting crime, and Vancouver is flooded with homeless drug addicts under a misguided "harm reduction" policy.

50.1% of the population may have voted for it. But Anglo democracy scoffs at it, at least most of the time.

Does it? Parliamentary sovereignty is the single most important principle of the Westminster system.

The most is important because I think what annoys people like Smith and others is that the response to coronavirus (whether or not you agree with lockdowns, vaccines, travel restrictions, colossal economic programs) clearly shows that Western governments actually have huge state capacity that they just don’t use because it’s inconvenient or expensive unless they’re very scared about losing power or some other black swan event

Did you live through a different 2020 than me? Our western governments showed their absolutely tiny state capacity. They could make some money fall from the sky, shut down some businesses some of the time, and make edicts they couldn't enforce on 95% of the population.

They effectively shut down a lot of businesses, yes. But that isn't really a demonstration of state capacity. They at the same time couldn't prevent people from spreading the disease via houseparties, etc. Calling the shutdowns "huge state capacity" to me seems like calling smashing your left hand with a hammer "huge carpentry skills".

Sooner or later, the right will (hopefully) come to understand a few hard-hitting things:

  1. NIMBY:ism is not only good but morally necessary to create and sustain worthwhile communities. Not just their character but also their architectural beauty and natural endowments (e.g. parks, tree-lined pathways).

  2. Regulation is an unavoidable fact in order to bring all of this about. The neoliberal rage against regulation will only lead to poorly built cardboard boxes mashed together into historic neighbourhoods, crammed with people of dubious moral character (as this would be "affordable housing" that YIMBYists love to praise).

Getting rid of most cars in inner cities would also be a good start and many European cities are moving in this direction. Some faster (Oslo) and some slower (Paris) but it's slowly coming together.

That all said, if someone truly thinks that car-centric sprawl suburbia is the peak of human existence, then all the more power to you. I just don't think many on the right are actually on board with that once they take time to think. The issue is that many have neoliberal priors that prevents them from going to the logical conclusion. Housing policy is difficult because there isn't a clear-cut left vs right divide and most folks prefer to stay in tribes where thinking independently is discouraged and you can just follow the herd.

Getting rid of most cars in inner cities would also be a good start and many European cities are moving in this direction. Some faster (Oslo) and some slower (Paris) but it's slowly coming together.

Here, as with all regulation, the problem is with execution instead of intention. You can pass the most wonderful laws in the world, but if the people doing the enforcing of the laws lack the capacity, will, or desire to actually put those laws into effect, then you have a serious problem.

For example, take laws against driving a private passenger vehicle in a city center. The law will obviously be enforced on John and Jane Smith, pro-social middle class types. Enforcing the law on the Smiths is easy because:

(1) there are few violations in the first place (the Smiths may grumble that it's suddenly really inconvenient to nip out for a quick date night downtown and get back before racking up a huge babysitter bill, but they will probably obey the law in the first place),

(2) investigation of violations are easy (the Smiths' are always current on their car registration, are invested in a nice home in the inner-ring suburbs, don't obscure their licenseplates, and don't run from the cops if pulled over), and

(3) compliance with imposed penalties is both high and exercises a deterrent effect (the Smiths will likely pay any ticket they get because losing their license or having a bench warrant issued would be devastating to their professional careers and ability to maintain their expected quality of life for themselves and their family. They will also likely view getting ticketed in this way as a mark of shame or at least bad behavior, and so will be vigilant to not violate again.)

But the law doesn't need to deal with just the Smiths. It also needs to deal with the "street takeovers" and community push-back about the ban restricting culturally-specific "cruising" which involve potentially-controversial enforcement efforts on people who it is (a) difficult to catch in the act, (b) difficult to investigate (because poor or itinerant), and (c) difficult to deter or punish short of imprisonment (which may result in worse outcomes through exposure to prison gangs, etc.)

If the law does not deal with those things, you have textbook anarcho-tyranny; a restriction on the privileges of the law-abiding, but little or no effective effort to restrain lawless elements from engaging in significant nuisance activity which further diminishes the law-abiding's quality of life.

And this is all without going into the question of whether the law correctly judges the benefits and costs of the proposed policy; whether the future development of the community will proceed in the manner assumed by policymakers; whether public transit is in a good-enough condition to accommodate the increased demands on ridership; whether the physical geography is suitable for walk/biking with groceries/purchases, etc.

And how many of you tried taking home a new wardrobe on the bus? But that's different, delivery vans are necessary, so you can walk/bike your 15 minutes and the rest of the things you want for a decent standard of living will be produced, stored, and delivered to you by someone else's vehicles.

The idea of "I only need to bring what I can carry in a backpack or my two hands as I walk round the city centre where everything I want is conveniently located" is a nice one, but only works in certain instances. Six million people can't all live in the city centre 15 minutes from where they work, shop, and entertain themselves, that's why cities spread out. Somebody will be on the outer fringe, a lot more than 15 minutes from the fun, happening, hip cultural centre. That's even before getting out to suburbs.

Six million people can't all live in the city centre 15 minutes from where they work, shop, and entertain themselves, that's why cities spread out

I mean, East Asian megalopolises somehow make do, even if they sprawl so much that not literally everywhere is 15 minutes from work and entertainment. Someone in Shinagawa district would be close to Oosaki, Meguro and Gotanda, even if traveling to e.g. Ginza would take a while more; and even living in the commuter cities nearby like Yokohama you get a density of things that isn’t really quite replicated in the anglosphere, especially in the US. Hong Kong has essentially all of the population within a 15 minute’s walk to the closest schools, shops, workplaces, etc., though admittedly that is an extreme and wouldn’t work for people who don’t like apartments. It’s not a matter of “can’t”, I think.

I don't think one has to think car-centric sprawl is the peak of human existence to think it's a pleasant way to live that many people enjoy. People vote with their feet and their wallets and the outlying, sprawlier communities with more square feet and bigger lots do very well and if that means a half hour commute instead of biking 5 minutes to work, young families seem fine with that. I love my little suburb. I have generally everything I need within a 10 minute drive. I have a cute house in a quiet cul-de-sac that backs up to a wooded area. I have just down the street access to 20 mile trail along a beautiful stream. I have just down another street access to 10 acre dog park.

I can perfectly well understand that people can value different things and for some people access to walkable downtown neighborhoods with night life may be appealing. I'll take the weekly trip to the grocery store, the station wagon with heated seats, and the view of the woods from my back porch.

If the regulation was always done by a crusty Oxbridge-educated High Anglican Tory with the politics of the 1950s and the aesthetic tastes of the 1590s (or the equivalent e.g. a sombre unimaginative Norweigian) I would probably favour regulation every time. However, there is no way to guarantee that, and the problems are complex, e.g. avoiding high density development (the classic NIMBY position) comes into conflict with not wanting car-entric sprawl suburbia.

The steelman neoliberal position is normally not that a spontaneous order is optimal, but that it is less likely to produce very suboptimal outcomes than more regulated approaches. Sometimes that is right and sometimes it is wrong, but a neoliberal is not committed to the idea that car-centric sprawl suburbia is optimal - not least because many of them want high density concentrated cities.

Albuquerque is a 20 minute city. That is, by a mix of residential roads, boulevards, Interstates, and state highways, you can drive from almost any spot in Albuquerque to another in twenty minutes or less. It is a sprawling 470 sq km, or 180 square miles, roughly a circle 15 miles wide.

Each square half-mile (four of them in a square mile, for clarity) is bounded by a boulevard zoned for business, and in-filled with residential developments of 1-2 stories. It is a suburb of nowhere, a vast and legible city of car drivers.

The idea of 15 minute cities, seeks to help, not to limit. It aims to provide resources, not dictate where people are allowed to go. In a plan for a 15 minute city public transport networks will be made better and more available; people will be able to move easily. Car movement will be more limited...

This is the mix of po-faced didactic sincerity and Alzheimer's-style incoherence I find often happens when Chat GPT does political analysis. I'm glad to see that AI can already imitate a journalist.

This next bit isn't so stupid, but it's also something that Chat GPT could easily produce and in fact seems to be the sort of tripe[1] that was Chat GPT uses as the basis of its policy analysis style:

But this design choice isn’t just good for Oxford; 15 minute cities and traffic filters have the ability to help people all over the world. Pollution ruins cities. It has been known to cause many health issues, such as asthma. In serious cases, such as certain cities in India, a thick smog hangs permanently above buildings; people have to wear face masks to avoid it. In the USA, vehicles cause 75% of pollution- worldwide, vehicles produce 27% of all greenhouse emissions. 15 minute cities will reduce the amount of pollution and emissions from vehicles drastically. It will also simply make things easier for people. Not everyone has a car and not everyone can access things that are far away easily. By having accessible and close services, it means people, especially groups such as the elderly, disabled, or even just those with busy schedules, will benefit hugely, while also building a sense of community. 15 minute cities may very well be the future; and from the sounds of it, that’s not a bad thing.

[1] I actually like tripe, but you get the point.

I think it would be good to separate out the specific methods used to achieve something like the 15-minute city and the actual goal of very walkable cities. I think the method can be quite bad despite the goal being very good. I've been living in a 15-minute city situation for nearly a decade now and it is truly a great way to live.

I've been living in a 15 minute town for decades now, and it's not so fun on a wet, windy, November morning when you're walking to work and the rain is blowing horizontally in off the harbour. I've several times been drenched arriving to work and ended up trying to dry myself off in the bathroom, then sat all day in damp clothes, because it's not always fine dry weather when you're walking or cycling.

That's why I'm very glad I have someone with a car to give me a lift on the wet mornings, and if anyone in power is idiot enough to think about banning cars from the town centre, I want a parallel law passed that they have to walk to work in the mornings in the pouring rain like the rest of us plebs.

I've walked to work for years, through the infamous Chicago polar vortex, rain and all sorts of poor weather. Do you just not have overcoats and umbrellas? If you're caught at work without the right equipment you have my sympathies but it's not a hard problem to mitigate. And some decent public transit for the bad days is also almost certainly part of the policy suite.

Id rather get wet a few mornings a week than deal with obesity and heart disease from physical inactivity. I charitably attribute Americans' fatness to your car-centricity: if you think it's actually just pure moral torpor, and the cars are an unrelated co-incidence, then fair play to you.

Car-development gives diffuse malus and discrete bonus (ie a dry and comfortable commute), whereas walking is the inverse

if you think it's actually just pure moral torpor

The diet really doesn't help.

The proposal itself is odd. Why allow taxis to pass freely? How are they better than private cars? Also "private hire vehicles" -- is this something like Uber? Why are these better than regular cars? If it's because they don't need parking spaces... charge more for parking?

It starts by talking about specific hours and days, like the way some rush hour lanes work, but then those hours and days are every day of the week 7am - 7pm. It talks about "unnecessary car travel," as though people were just gong for a drive, but would anyone actually do that through a congested main street? It also says vans are exempt? Vans? This is the kind of rule that ended up with areas in America full of extra huge trucks, because they weren't subject to the same rules as smaller trucks. If I were commuting in Oxford, I would buy a van immediately. I suppose vans are much more expensive in England than the US?

All this seems separate from trying to create "15 minute cities" by, say, incentivizing shops in the lower story of apartment or office buildings, or building more public plaza areas. Both those things seem desirable, and I would fully support some kind of incentive for subdivisions to be built more in a village format. I assume they're not because it's cheaper and more convenient for people to drive 20 minutes to the big box store, than buy from a local baker and butcher and so on, so it's hard for those kinds of places to stay in business. If people value quantity over aesthetics, that's valid, though.

Anyway, I haven't noticed any culture war tensions around urban planning in the communities I've been a part of. Everyone assumes that families will have cars, even if they're poor by US standards, and indeed they do have cars, even if they're terrible and junky. This is an equilibrium that isn't aesthetically appealing, but is livable, and seems likely to continue indefinitely. I prefer the Eastern European system of mini-busses, but everyone already has a car.

The proposal itself is odd. Why allow taxis to pass freely? How are they better than private cars? Also "private hire vehicles" -- is this something like Uber? Why are these better than regular cars?

How do you think the council members get around? They're not going to walk, bike (well except that one guy), or drive their own cars like plebs.

The reason for congested rush hour streets is people driving to work (and/or dropping off kids to school). The work from home regime during the pandemic helped alleviate that, then there were complaints from businesses that they weren't getting the same volume of trade from workers buying coffees and lunches and shopping etc. during the day.

So if we want to do away with cars, then yeah - you need a transport system that will collect everyone from home, drop them right at their place of work, and then collect them in the evening and bring them back home. If everyone works in the same block of commercial development in one part of the city, that's easy. But people don't - they work all over, spread out. That's something that I don't see addressed; are you going to develop buses, trains and trams instead of cars, or are you going to make it "well they can come in on the commuter train, then get a taxi or Uber to work"? Because that's still going to have the streets full of cars at peak hours, except it's all Uber this time instead of people driving their own cars.

Again, the idea of cutting down driving by having people travelling in batches for peak hours because of work is not a bad one, but it's something that needs to be deliberately considered and planned for, not some kind of "we'll pedestrianise the inner city streets and then the rest of it will work out magically on its own, as both 65 year old women with arthritic knees and athletic 26 year old men whizz about on their bikes to get from A to B which will ever only be 15 minutes whizzing apart".

The proposal itself is odd. Why allow taxis to pass freely? How are they better than private cars?

Most cars are occupied only by the driver, a taxi has a big incentive to carry more than one person. If the goal is efficient use of road space then taxis are preferable.

Why are these better than regular cars?

Taxis are used a large portion of the day. They continously service customers throughout the day and park out of the city when not in use. Taxis are far more efficient than people driving a car to work, parking it for 9 hours and driving home.

It starts by talking about specific hours and days, like the way some rush hour lanes work, but then those hours and days are every day of the week 7am - 7pm. It talks about "unnecessary car travel," as though people were just gong for a drive,

Driving kids to school is unnecessary driving in a city. There is no reasonable reason for kids having to be driven to a school in an urban environment, kids should be able to walk. Getting a haircut and having to transport oneself 10 km for it is absurd in a city. Having to travel far to go to a gym is a big waste of resources. The unnecessary travel isn't people driving for fun, it is people living in a city and having to travel far for basic services.

I've often felt that the culture war battle lines on these urban planning issues have not been as clearly drawn as those on gender, immigration, or abortion, mostly due to a lack of attention, but that time appears to be coming to an end. Though seeing as we already can't build anything, I suppose it isn't much of a loss.

Regarding the above Noah Smith article https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country

Specifically, what’s frustrating me is America’s seeming inability to build the things it needs to build in order to prosper and flourish in the 21st century. From housing to transit to solar power to transmission lines to semiconductor fabs, the U.S. has little trouble marshalling the financial and physical capital to create what it needs, but ends up stymied by entrenched local interests who exploit a thicket of veto points to preserve the built environment of the 1970s.

'Marshaling resources' implies federal. An aircraft carrier is directed by the fed. government; where a house, subway, or train is built, is outside of the purview of the fed. government. Obviously, the latter is going to have more roadblocks. Zoning laws are local, city level. It's more like "why do cities have zoning?" It's like he's conflating these different things. Where and how its built is local, such as Berkeley student house being blocked by a SF court:

In a tentative ruling issued in December, “the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed the university failed to adequately study certain impacts, including noise. The ruling said that because college kids can be loud when talking, drinking and partying, the university should have studied and sought to reduce the “social noise” from future student residents.”

Furthermore; there is little need for cars in a place like Oxford.

THEN WHY ARE THERE CARS EVERYWHERE?

This is the most Orwellian piece of journalism I’ve read in months. No understanding whatsoever of economics. Traffic isn’t bad because traffic is bad. Traffic is bad because it makes it take longer to get where you want to go. Banning cars to reduce traffic doesn’t solve the problem, it makes the problem worse because now it takes longer to get somewhere than it did when you were stuck in traffic.

Traffic is bad because it makes it take longer to get where you want to go. Banning cars to reduce traffic doesn’t solve the problem, it makes the problem worse because now it takes longer to get somewhere than it did when you were stuck in traffic.

Not if you're one of the people with exemptions.

Stockholm and Copenhagen are two similar cities with completely different transport infrastructure.

Stockholm has six freeways and massive freeway tunnels while Copenhagen has four freeways. Stockholm has 100 subway stations, roughly 120 light rail stations, 54 commuter rail stations.

Copenhagen has 37 subway stations using far smaller subway trains. They have 86 commuter train stations running fewer trains per hour than Stockholm and their commuter trains are smaller and slower.

Copenhagen has lower average commute time, less traffic and fewer traffic jams. The difference is that Copenhagen is a city that doesn't really require transportation. Everything is close and easy. Stockholm has vast urban sprawl. The average commute in Copenhagen is 17 minutes shorter per day than Stockholm's.

Compared to an American city of two million Copenhagens road network would be a complete joke worthy of a bigger town rather than a city. Yet their commute times are lower than almost any city of its size.

It simply isn't true that Houston has fantastic traffic and shorter commute times compared to Barcelona. The idea that cities with massive transport infrastructure have fast commutes doesn't really stack up.

Compared to an American city of two million Copenhagens road network would be a complete joke worthy of a bigger town rather than a city.

Possibly because Copenhagen only has 600,000 people and the metro area only 1.4M. Closest US comparison might be Oklahoma City. Stockholm has about 1M in the city and 2.4M in the metro, more comparable to Austin, Texas, though in both cases the geography is quite different.

A quick look on google maps and Oklahoma city has far bigger freeways and far more of them than Copenhagen.

What about house sizes and rents? Sure you can reduce commute times by cramming everyone into a small area. That's trivial. I would expect rents to be higher in Copenhagen than Stockholm. On first glance that appears to be the case.

I am reminded of Milton Friedman's thermostat. Road infrastructure will look pointless or counterproductive if the only variables you compare are freeway capacity and commute times. In reality, the gains from freeway capacity come from increasing residential square-footage per dollar.

Stockholm har rent control and the longest housing queue in the world. Price to buy appartments was a lot cheaper in Copenhagen. The main reason that they get people into a smaller area is by not having massive parking lots, wide freeways, train yards etc. By having less transport infrastructure they can fit more into their city.

Suburbia is more expensive to build. Sprawl requires way more infrastructure, apartments are cheaper to build than single family housing etc. Cities are more expensive since there is way less high density housing than there is demand for it.

Unless you run into public goods dilemmas. I am not an expert on traffic patterns, but it seems at least theoretically plausible that at a certain level of crowding, adding a marginal car to the existing traffic might decrease total throughput. Ie, if each car within a certain area reduces the speed of all other cars on the road by 1% (multiplicatively), then once you have more than 100 cars in that area, each new car will reduce the total throughput (speed x cars) by more than it adds, and it would be optimal to have only 100 cars at a time.

It sure seems like this is the case in a lot of crowded cities, where cars are stuck in traffic jams and barely moving a lot of the time, such that half as many cars could go way more than twice as fast.

I will note that this does not necessarily justify this approach. It is icky and orwellian and an abuse of power. But if it would work it'll be important to recognize that and oppose it on other grounds.

This is true, but then in that case people would naturally stop driving past a certain point unless they otherwise can't avoid it (e.g. tradesmen). It's not like if you let it go unchecked, cars will keep coming until the road is so jam-packed it's always filled, all the time.

Right, but people maximize their individual utility, not the average of everyone else, so the equilibrium point may not be the globally optimum point. That's how public goods dilemmas work.

Ie, if we take the above instance, where the speed of each car is (0.99)^x, where x is the number of cars, then total throughput is x(0.99)^x, which is maximized at x = 100. If each person's utility when they drive is u = (personal speed) - 0.1 (and 0 if they don't drive), then the equilibrium (when an additional driver would have a utility of 0) happens at about 230 cars. And by definition at this point everyone gets a utility of 0, the wasted time and cost of driving is so bad that it just barely cancels whatever benefit would be gained from driving. Meanwhile the maximum for total utility among all drivers happens at x = 77, which is actually lower than the max throughput of 100 because those 77 drivers have better speed and thus gain more utility.

These are oversimplified dynamics and numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the concept. People frequently reach inefficient equilibria because they're optimizing selfish individual utility functions that don't consider externalities. And it's precisely those cases where the government can serve a legitimately useful purpose by nudging the equilibrium closer to the globally optimal value while still maintaining the feedback loops. Preferably by making people internalize their externalities in some way so that their personal incentives better line up with the global incentives so that they can still optimize but less selfishly. Hard quotas, limits, and bans tend to lead to worse results and/or have unintended consequences because they're not subject to appropriate feedback loops that reflect genuine preferences.

That is what happens in rush hour; though, economists call it induced demand. It's a classic example of a market failure and something that should ideally be regulated away.

  • -10

I don't really think that the theory of induced demand in traffic holds any water. As someone here (I forget who, so unfortunately I can't credit them) put it recently: in any other context, if building more capacity led to that supply being consumed as well, we wouldn't go "oh no, induced demand, let's stop here". We would say "holy cow, that's awesome - let's build even more capacity".

It's not impossible that traffic is a unique and special snowflake where normal human behavior doesn't apply, cats and dogs live together, etc. But I doubt that's the case.

Was it @ZorbaTHut? https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/on89vw/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_19_2021/h63ix39/

Not what I was thinking of, although a good post. Thanks for the link!

One of the common claims for "induced demand" is the Philadelphia-area "Mid-County Expressway" (part of I-476, called "the Blue Route"). It's certainly true that it filled up as soon as it opened. What the induced demand people like to elide is the road opened up 20 years late and a lane short of plan. It didn't induce demand; it's just that by the time it was built there was already more than enough demand to fill the reduced-capacity road.

Yeah, that's the case for any example of "induced demand". Proponents of the induced demand theory seem to think that the new traffic spawns in from nowhere; in reality, the new traffic comes from population growth, and yes, some people who wouldn't have made the trip before who now see the opportunity to do so. This suggests that new traffic isn't some magical force that can't be satiated, but rather has a finite demand that can (and should) be supplied.

The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic. Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard. Car infrastructure takes an absurd amount of space making walking and cycling more difficult. Driving makes every other method of transport far more dangerous. Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk. A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can. Not having a car in a city with a lot of cars really sucks, not having a car in a city with few cars is just convenience.

Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop. Cars make public transit worse.

Cars only benefit the person in them while slowing everyone else down and making the city worse for everyone else. Car based cities are a giant prisoner's dilemma and the best way to handle the situation is therefore a collective reduction in car usage.

This better than this

Is walking an alternative in the second place? Would you let an 8 year old ride a bike to school through the area in the second photo?

The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic.

Uh... how? I am severely confused as to how this could be the case. This would imply that cities could generate however much arbitrary economic value they want simply by building more roads and letting the traffic cause more traffic.

Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk.

Is this really true? I would imagine there are more dominating factors in these parents' decisions, such as the desire to see their kid get to school quickly and on time.

A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can.

Is this really true? Downtown Houston seems pretty walkable to me.

Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop.

See, the reason why not everyone is on public transit (yes, not even in the countries urbanists put on a pedestal like the Netherlands and Japan) is that those people are dispersed over a wide area, so either public transit can't serve everyone or it will get slowed down trying to do so. I know you blame urban sprawl for causing this problem but this is still a problem even in countries without urban sprawl.

Cars make public transit worse.

I don't see how this could be the case, and in general, I'm skeptical of the theory that building one type of infrastructure inherently antagonizes and competes against other types of infrastructure. Such an approach is short-sighted and fails to see the bigger picture.

Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard.

Indeed, the Vine Street Expressway cuts Philadelphia in half, preventing travel across it on the North-South streets.

Oh, wait, no it doesn't, because of a neat application of 3D technology called the "overpass", the streets cross the expressway.

Imagine needing enormous amounts of concrete to allow people to walk 20 meters. Overpasses absolutely help, but more people will walk if their outside looks like this. Those overpasses were stuffed with large cars, would you let an 8-year-old walk home from school alone there?

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You and that person were misinterpreting what induced demand means. It means the only cost to driving on a road is traffic, so in high demand times the cost will equal the benefit of driving and traffic will be at a standstill. It is agnostic over whether greater capacity is a good thing, it just says greater capacity won't fix rush hour problems.

It is agnostic over whether greater capacity is a good thing, it just says greater capacity won't fix rush hour problems.

That's what we're arguing against, and that's plainly wrong. Otherwise, what do you recommend that planners do in Mumbai, where the trains are jam-packed full of people? Build more trains? But then wouldn't that just induce more demand? Or does "induced demand" somehow not apply to trains?

It's more honest to simply concede that "induced demand" isn't actually a thing, and switch to arguing against increasing car infrastructure capacity for other reasons. At least, that's what the urbanists I talk with eventually end up doing.

What you do is charge a higher price to ride the trains or drive on the roads, so that supply equals demand. You might also want to build more roads or trains if it was profitable from a private or social standpoint. That is the idea behind induced demand, driving on a road is free, so during peak times it will always fill up, because the queueing time is the only cost. It’s like bread lines in the Soviet Union’s.

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Wait, what are you arguing?

Theory 1: Induced demand is almost always wrong. Building more capacity will make rush hour less bad, making traffic faster and making your commute take less time.

Theory 2: Induced demand as a reason to not build more capacity is wrong. Sometimes the price elasticity of demand isn't that high, and significant capacity increases can lead to significant decreases in traffic and commute time ("price"). Other times price elasticity of demand is very high, and a small decrease in traffic/commute time ("price decreasing") leads to a large increase in demand, so the price / traffic doesn't decrease much when capacity increases a bit. But even in the latter case, building more capacity is still greatly helpful, as many people want to use the highway to go places, do things, undertake economic activity. So the point of building more isn't 'reducing congestion', it's 'enabling more people to use the highway', which is accomplished anyway.

Because in the latter case, "induced demand isn't actually a thing" isn't true! It is a thing. It's just fine. The former case is just 'the price elasticity is not too high', which is possible, but ... doesn't seem to have been argued anywhere ITT. SubstantialFrivolity's first paragraph claimed 2, but their second paragraph seemed to claim 1 because 'human nature' or something. 1's truth would depend on specific parts of peoples' desire to use highways.

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The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian

Ssome questions (not a gotchas) to try to probe your sense of dystopian:

If they had just removed a central road and made it ped/bike only, would that be comfortable to you?

How do you feel about toll roads generally? What about modern highly automated toll systems?

How do goods get into local stores? Vans and trucks? Then very few vehicular roads can be removed. Particularly not those roads used to reach local shops.

How it works in Europe is that vans and small trucks are allowed in in the early mornings to restock shops and then the road is pedestrianised during business hours.

A van can traverse a cobblestone path if it's wide enough, you don't need a proper road which such a small amount of vehicular traffic.

Either making the central road car-free or a permanent toll road would be preferable in my eyes. The core of it is that I already find the omnipresence of security cameras in the UK to be unsettling and the measure here doesn't go far enough in visually distinguishing the new state from the old (i.e. the way installing a large toll booth would, even with the same automated systems) to remove the nagging fear that fines for driving in other locations could be added in the future without public knowledge.

What's the point of living in a city if I can't go places in it?

Currently, I have (theoretically) easy access to a few thousand businesses and a couple hundred thousand individuals. "Traffic Filters" would cut those numbers drastically, so I might as well leave and go live in the country.

As concrete examples, that implementation of traffic filters would've prevented me from:

  • working in construction, as the jobsites were too scattered for me to live near all of them

  • Comparison shopping for major purchases

  • Visiting specialty stores

  • helping a friend move

It's like they thought "We need better public transit and more attractive local neighborhoods" but set the baseline comparison to better than driving and more attractive than distant ones instead of comparing to the current situation. Under that framing, you can achieve your goals by making everything else worse. (Heck, you can even achieve that goal while making public transit and local neighborhoods worse, so long as you disproportionately affect driving and distant neighborhoods.)

  • working in construction, as the jobsites were too scattered for me to live near all of them

The page says "vans" are in the list of exempt vehicles. Of course, people in construction don't always have work vans. And as far as I can tell, there's no exemption that would cover them. And there's probably other jobs that actually require driving other than construction and the ones they did think of: care workers and taxis.

  • Comparison shopping for major purchases
  • Visiting specialty stores
  • helping a friend move

Do you actually do those more than 100 days a year? Or even more than 25 days a year (i.e. about every other week)? if not, then this law wouldn't affect you for those cases.

But I agree this is a strange policy. Especially with the relatively low fine of £35 which seems more like an expensive toll/congestion charge than an actual attempt to stop people from driving. If they want their buses to flow better and are okay annoying car drivers... have they considered bus lanes? They do say they're waiting on a rail station to be completed before implementing the policy so they have some concept that transit should be better, but that seems like a low bar.

I just checked the camera locations and the permit areas, and it's stupider than I had imagined: You can just reroute your path so you drive ten minutes instead of two, even without a permit. It wouldn't have stopped me from doing anything, it just would've been annoying and caused longer trips.

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