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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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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.

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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?

It's not that much concrete really; like bridges, they are engineered to balance weight, strength, and capacity.

Overpasses absolutely help, but more people will walk if their outside looks like this.

Would Philadelphia look like that if it didn't have a freeway?

It would probably be built like cities were built before cars, which is much more similar to the pic.

It would probably be built like cities were built before cars

Why is this probable?

Philadelphia was built before cars.

Before cars, cities were built to accommodate horses and horse traffic, such as horse-drawn carriages. This resulted in wide roads being built, which is not at all like the picture you linked to.

but more people will walk if their outside looks like this.

What is that, some sort of linear prison? Or maybe it's a cruel gaming arena... clearly wheeled vehicles use it, based on the two concrete tracks, so maybe the idea is they come through and the pedestrians have to jump into the little niches to get out of the way?

A place that actually has a culture and where people aren't obese.

This seems very uncharitable. Are you seriously suggesting that "car-dependent" places don't have a culture and people are obese in them? I've seen obese people in all sorts of places; it doesn't seem particularly correlated to "car-dependency". What does it even mean to not have a culture anyway? Culture is simply the way humans do things; it seems impossible to avoid having a culture, even deliberately.

I would absolutely say suburban sprawl is much more atomized, generic and soulless than walkable cities. Suburban sprawl tends to have generic big box stores and consumers who isolate themselves in their cars. There tends to be a lot less community spirit, interactions between people become limited and people isolate more. In a more walkable city people are out moving more and interacting more with the area they live in.

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If it's like the villages that look just like that I saw in Italy the idea is in the morning vans will drive up those paths to deliver goods to shops before everyone else wakes up. They are not normally driven on besides that.

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.

Arguable, if politically infeasible (but most things discussed here are). But 'build more lanes' is still worth doing under the current system, because they'll let more peop®le get to their destinations at the current (serviceable) congestion level, presumably?

Also, is a price that eliminates congestion necessarily the optimal price, either privately or socially? Plausibly having some fast, high-cost lanes and a bunch of cheap, low-cost lanes would maximize profit.

I agree with all your points and they already have fast high-cost lanes and cheap low-cost lanes in some especially congested parts of the Bay Area. Not to mention, the more ubiquitous carpool lanes elsewhere. Expanding such systems is difficult technologically and politically, however. Increasing the amount of lanes is also difficult due to land clearance issues. Freeways tend to have lots of businesses, farms and houses built up against them and removing those can prove intractable.

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.

Probably 2. In that case though, the definition of "induced demand" has been changed to be something more reasonable. At that point you might as well drop the "induced" part because, well, the demand doesn't come from nowhere. Even a name like "proportionally induced demand" is far better.

Skimming the wiki article, mine is the "right" meaning in the traffic context, i think. it is poorly named

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