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It sometimes legitimately feels like the state does things for no other reason than to frustrate the city and its residents. In this case I think the relevant state officials really do believe that expanding the highway will reduce congestion in spite of overwhelming empirical evidence, but wouldn't be surprised if they felt the ability to throw their weight around and ignore the city's point of view was a bonus.
Wait, no. That’s the opposite of the point I was making. I-35 through downtown Austin is 3 lanes each direction. It’s awful. That’s the same width as I-35 through rural areas between San Antonio and Waco.
You seem to have fallen for the “induced demand” meme. No, the demand is already there. People want to live in the suburbs and work downtown. If throughput were increased, more people would be able to do that. The welfare of the area would be increased. People wouldn’t have to pay massive rent for shitty apartments near their work. Not to mention the fact that I-35 is, you know, an Interstate. People hate driving through Austin. Other Texas cities with functional freeway systems are objectively easier to get around.
It's not a meme; it's basic economics which is also backed up by fairly overwhelming empirical evidence.
Given Austin's zoning map, a correct statement would be "Austinites are largely prohibited from living anywhere except a suburb or right in the middle of downtown." Also, people may "want"* to live in the suburbs and drive into downtown, but that's not possible. Doubling freeway capacity would not change that, because it is literally impossible to fit the whole population into cars. They simply take up too much space.
*I put "want" in scare quotes because rarely do such people want to pay all of the costs associated with doing so.
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere. It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic, construction, and possibly have their property sized to make room. It would separate downtown from East Austin even more, etc.
There's no reason to have the only interstate go straight through downtown. Lots of cities have interstates that go around the core. San Antonio has 410. Houston has 610 and I think others I don't recall the number of. DFW has 635, 20, and again I think others. Elsewhere, 95 goes totally around Boston, while 90 and 93 go into the city. Austin only has 45, which isn't an interstate and is a toll road, so all the trucks and other thru traffic go through the city even though it's slower.
Let's say we add the new lanes, and congestion stays the same, and travel times stay the same. Is this a failure?
Let's say you have a single supermarket in a town. It's too crowded, the lines are always long. A second supermarket opens in a town. There's enough demand that, now, both supermarkets are too crowded, and the lines are too long. Is this bad? No, it's strictly an improvement - more people are buying food now! And the supermarket makes more money!
The same is true of 'induced demand' - the goal of 'reduce congestion' wasn't accomplished, but a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to' was. The extra people who drive on the new highway are benefitting greatly from the change - they can now get to places they couldn't before!
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
If your goal is to reduce congestion, which is typically a major stated goal of these projects, then yes, it's clearly a failure.
I don't think this statement means anything, but also there is no "market" here. The state government just wants to build more highway, regardless of costs or benefits.
I don't know why every time I end up in a discussion about roads on here, all of the car enthusiasts use the same analogy as if I don't understand that more people driving means that more people are going places. That's not the question. The question is how this particular use of space, money, and time compares to alternatives. It's like offering starving people 1,000-dollar truffle mushrooms as food, and then when someone points out that 98% of them are still starving because you could only afford to feed 2%, you pat yourself on the back because, well, you fed some people, right?
Plus, you can't just completely ignore everyone except for the group who benefits. What about the businesses and homes that would be subsumed by the wider freeway? Are they better off? What about people who live in East Austin and would like to be able to get into downtown without driving? What about people who can't or don't want to drive?
The market in this case is utility enjoyed by people living where they prefer.
...what? I have no idea what you're trying to say. This is just a non sequitur.
People derive enjoyment from certain living arrangements? This seems pretty uncontroversial to me. Some people may like trees, some may like an upper floor on a tall building, some may like having a garage or a big back yard or a pool or a huge basement or space for their mother in law to live with them but in a physically different structure or any of a zillion other things.
The amount of enjoyment is measured by economists as utility. People might or might not trade something they really like like eating less pizza for something else they like like a skinny waist or giving up a short commute to get some housing feature they prefer. These trade decisions are just as much market decisions as trades purely done with currency they just involve trades of utility, too.
Just because no dollars are exchanged it's still a trade which means it's effectively a market, and the same tools we use to study currency based markets work to study utility markets, it's just harder to directly observe prices.
What trades are you talking about? What does any of this have to do with the subject at hand? I'm well aware of what utility is and the fact that people have preferences, but you haven't explained how any of it relates to roads.
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