(That’s not to say that public transit doesn’t do good, it also allows more people to move around. It’s the same effect as adding a new lane to the highway: congestion remains constant.
#Traffic to work drivers
Add a new subway line and some drivers will switch to transit. But the data showed that even in cities that expanded public transit, road congestion stayed exactly the same. Many railway and bus projects are sold on this basis, with politicians promising that traffic will decrease once ridership grows. You might think that increasing investment in public transit could ease this mess. As long as driving on the roads remains easy and cheap, people have an almost unlimited desire to use them. The problem is that all these things together erode any extra capacity you’ve built into your street network, meaning traffic levels stay pretty much constant. Finally, businesses that rely on roads will swoop into cities with many of them, bringing trucking and shipments. Making driving easier also means that people take more trips in the car than they otherwise would. And if you expand people’s ability to travel, they will do it more, living farther away from where they work and therefore being forced to drive into town. As it turns out, we humans love moving around. The answer has to do with what roads allow people to do: move around. I mean, are they just popping out of the asphalt as engineers lay down new roads?
The first thing you wonder here is where all these extra drivers are coming from. Instead, it's like the larger pipe is drawing more water into itself. Intuitively, I would expect the opposite: that expanding a road network works like replacing a small pipe with a bigger one, allowing the water (or cars) to flow better. These findings imply that the ways we traditionally go about trying to mitigate jams are essentially fruitless, and that we’d all be spending a lot less time in traffic if we could just be a little more rational. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads. The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic. Because if there’s anything that traffic engineers have discovered in the last few decades it’s that you can’t build your way out of congestion. Except, as it turns out, that wouldn’t work. Maybe transform them all into double-decker highways with cars zooming on the upper and lower levels. Yes, commute hours are the worst, but I’ve run into dead-stop bumper-to-bumper cars on the 405 at 2 a.m.Īs a kid, I used to ask my parents why they couldn’t just build more lanes on the freeway. And if there’s one thing I’ve known ever since I could sit up in my car seat, it’s that you should expect to run into traffic at any point of the day. I grew up in Los Angeles, the city by the freeway by the sea.
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