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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32919 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.

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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