The proposed solution was the same one transportation officials across the country have used since the 1960s: Widen the highway. But while adding lanes can ease congestion initially, it can also encourage people to drive more. A few years after a highway is widened, research shows, traffic — and the greenhouse gas emissions that come along with it — often returns.
California’s Department of Transportation was, like many state transportation departments, established to build highways. Every year, states spend billions of dollars expanding highways while other solutions to congestion, like public transit and pedestrian projects, are usually handled by city transit authorities and receive less funding.
Some communities and government officials are pushing back on widening plans. In Los Angeles, this opposition had an impact. After $60 million was spent on design and planning over two decades, the Route 710 expansion was canceled last May. “We don’t see widening as a strategy for L.A.,” said James de la Loza, chief planning officer for Los Angeles County’s transportation agency.
When a congested road is widened, travel times go down — at first. But then people change their behaviors. After hearing a highway is less busy, commuters might switch from transit to driving or change the route they take to work. Some may even choose to move farther away.
For critics of widening projects, the prime example of induced demand is the Katy Freeway in Houston, one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.
Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.
Matt Turner, an economics professor at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 study on congestion, said adding lanes is a fine solution if the goal is to get more cars on the road. But most highway expansion projects, including those in progress in Texas, cite reducing traffic as a primary goal.
“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history,” Dr. Turner said.
What is the consequence of not inducing demand? If people are choosing to join congested highways, which they eventually become and people continue to use them up to a point, isn't that some...
What is the consequence of not inducing demand? If people are choosing to join congested highways, which they eventually become and people continue to use them up to a point, isn't that some indication that the barriers or costs outside this highway infrastructure make that a more appealing option?
I don't disagree with experts or history in order to think that widening the highways is the best solution to reducing traffic, but everything I see something about such a strategy of widening roads "induces demand", there's no consideration for what the demand is or what it means. The way it's phrased is almost always in a negative light. Why is demand to get from point A to B bad? Of course I know that's not what they're intending to say, but it comes across that way.
I guess to me, what I want to understand is the goal and the alternatives and understanding the consequences of the choices behind them to better be able to understand the scope of the problem. The simplest explanation seems to be that widening highways fits the budgets set aside, it doesn't require new infrastructure, just making existing infrastructure bigger. It's the same with traffic within a city, why build more and more roads rather than rails and subways etc.? The answer to that always seems to be cost, existing infrastructure is in the way etc. but the answer isn't simply to do nothing either, so more roads get built instead. Isn't that the same thing with highway expansions?
With it being such a broad problem nationally, is it also an issue that cities themselves are generally driven to grow (and thus driven to cater to demand) but there's little room for cooperation for bigger and costlier alternatives that require coordination between Points A through Z? Is it that we're giving money to cities and states to find solutions, but that the solution needs to be on a national level? If you give resources to middle management and tell them to find a solution to X problem, isn't middle management solutions limited by the authority they have? Criticizing their solutions as inadequate isn't the same as criticizing the fact that they were given the task to begin with.
I've long been a bit skeptical of the idea that there is an unlimited amount of latent demand and that, therefore, widening highways is always a useless endeavor. Presumably there is some maximum...
I've long been a bit skeptical of the idea that there is an unlimited amount of latent demand and that, therefore, widening highways is always a useless endeavor. Presumably there is some maximum amount of latent demand that, with an infinitely wide freeway, you would eventually satisfy. I think your point is apt: what were those people doing before? Is it bad that they now feel like they can drive on those freeways that, before, they thought that they could not?
Having said that, I am sympathetic to the idea that past experience does show that, if the only goal of highway widening is to reduce congestion, it hasn't worked. So I don't know what the real solution to traffic congestion would be.
Alternate modes of transportation aren't likely to be a real solution in most of the United States. If you built a light rail line that got someone in one part of the suburbs to another part of the suburbs, they're still stuck in the suburbs and will need a car to navigate at their destination. To use my own metro area as an example, if I'm in southeast Tigard, Oregon and I take a light rail line to northwest Beaverton, Oregon, instead of driving up highway 217, I'm pretty fucked when I get off that train.
I actually had (and still do) have similar skepticism. The real problem isn’t actually “inducing too much demand”, it’s that when you expand capacity of major arterial road it can accommodate a...
I actually had (and still do) have similar skepticism. The real problem isn’t actually “inducing too much demand”, it’s that when you expand capacity of major arterial road it can accommodate a lot more people, but because the outflow capacity hasn’t increased a similar amount, eventually all that traffic just winds up backing up onto the road you just widened. I don’t feel like people explain that part enough though.
As an example of insufficient outflow capacity relative to lane width, allow me to present my own exhibit A: the exits from the toll plaza from the Rio-Niterói Bridge in Rio de Janeiro. The bridge...
As an example of insufficient outflow capacity relative to lane width, allow me to present my own exhibit A: the exits from the toll plaza from the Rio-Niterói Bridge in Rio de Janeiro. The bridge itself is an 4-lane highway in each direction (8 in total). Upon arriving at the toll plaza it spreads out into over 20 cabins, which then splits out across 4 separate exit ramps. 3 of the 4 run into traffic lights almost immediately, while the last one goes off to another 2-lane highway (Rio-Manilha), which has its own traffic issues and is nearly always backed up.
Getting off the bridge should be a 30-second ordeal, but it usually becomes a 15-minute odyssey just to get into your correct lane and get through to your exit. This always results in a multi-kilometer backup into the bridge itself.
Yeah, that's a good way to illustrate what I meant when I asked is this a problem that we're criticizing cities or states for creating solutions within their control that adequately match the...
To use my own metro area as an example, if I'm in southeast Tigard, Oregon and I take a light rail line to northwest Beaverton, Oregon, instead of driving up highway 217, I'm pretty fucked when I get off that train.
Yeah, that's a good way to illustrate what I meant when I asked is this a problem that we're criticizing cities or states for creating solutions within their control that adequately match the existing national infrastructure and its not the same to criticize them for their solutions as it is to criticize that they're being asked to come up with the solution to begin with. Meaning it's not necessarily going to produce the same effects to criticize their solution as it would be to criticize putting the responsibility on them to begin with.
I haven't seen the conversations around widening roads and highways expand much to this point of discussing more about the demand, but I'd definitely be curious to see more perspectives on it.
I’m not sure if I’m reading your post correctly, but I think you’re asking some fundamental questions about induced demand (eg why do we want to induce it, why are people being induced, why is it...
I’m not sure if I’m reading your post correctly, but I think you’re asking some fundamental questions about induced demand (eg why do we want to induce it, why are people being induced, why is it bad)? If so, here’s the best of my understanding as gleaned from insufferable YouTube urbanists:
Densification is inherently desirable. Economically, it costs less to move people and resources less distance. Sociologically, it seems like people enjoy amenities more when they can walk a couple minutes to them vs driving and finding parking.
Induced demand isn’t bad; highways and city streets just require a lot of space per person that they move (ie you need to drive with a safe stopping distance, navigate through congested cities, then find parking). Other alternatives (walking, cycling, mass transit) offer a better sqft investment per person ratio.
Taken together, these sorts of articles come to the conclusion that civilizations should push for denser populations, and that requires reducing expenditure on car-infrastructure.
Yeah that is along the lines of what I'm asking. Mostly trying to approach it from a different angle to push the thought about the problem in a different way, where it's not about trashing US...
I’m not sure if I’m reading your post correctly, but I think you’re asking some fundamental questions about induced demand (eg why do we want to induce it, why are people being induced, why is it bad)? If so, here’s the best of my understanding as gleaned from insufferable YouTube urbanists:
Yeah that is along the lines of what I'm asking. Mostly trying to approach it from a different angle to push the thought about the problem in a different way, where it's not about trashing US infrastructure or the people who are deciding to widen lanes etc. but more so questioning why we're at the point we are at and why we do what we do. Part of what we do is factoring in the consequences of not doing what we do. Sometimes we look at problems and see it as: do nothing, do something now that is quick and easy, or do something later that is hard and expensive but better. In many cases we choose the do nothing solution, in many other cases we choose the do something quick and easy solution, and less frequently it seems we choose the do something hard and expensive but better solution.
It seems like an essential part of the conversation, rather than just giving the impression "induced demand bad" as some of these articles seem to boil it down to.
The nature of roadway maintenance means that the "do nothing" solution has high inherent costs. It is not actually cheaper to maintain an extensive network of car-centric infrastructure than it is...
The nature of roadway maintenance means that the "do nothing" solution has high inherent costs. It is not actually cheaper to maintain an extensive network of car-centric infrastructure than it is to maintain an equivalent amount of public transportation infrastructure with reasonable accommodations for automobiles.
Because automobiles are slow and heavy relative to the number of passengers they transport, their per capita maintenance cost is higher than modes like trains, which transport more people in less time, less space, and while doing less damage to infrastructure. Asphalt as a building material is particularly susceptible to weight stress as heavy vehicles dislodge its microscopic particles. When a freeze-thaw weather cycle allows water to change states within the roadway surface, those particles become further dislodged and form potholes, visibly degrading the structure. This process fundamentally originates with and is accelerated by vehicle traffic. Other modes, such as bicycling, do not stress roadways in the same way.
Induced demand as a concept applies to any mode: automobiles, trains, airplanes, ferries, bicycles, walking, etc. It is not a good or bad thing per se, but simply an observation that "if you build it, they will come." In general, it is unwise to induce demand for highways because they are an inefficient, expensive, and environmentally unsustainable form of transportation (yes, even if the cars are electric). Most city planners operate with the goal of inducing transit demand. They are stymied by municipal budgets, whose authors make the unwise decision to induce the most expensive and most inefficient kind of demand (cars). There is some political pressure to maintain car dominance, but politicians mostly just don't know any better than to go with the flow. They often live in car-dependent suburbs anyway, but are wealthy enough to own multiple personal vehicles, so they may not even recognize the problem.
It is not possible to design a city that is optimized for automobile traffic throughput and conventional human-oriented livability metrics. Cars simply take up too much space relative to how many people they transport. The wider the roads get, the more dangerous and unpleasant it is for pedestrians, and the worse it is to live. The more effort is made to increase automobile transit speed, the more difficult it is for any other mode to operate. This turn toward automotive inefficiency has the effect of stressing public budgets, as roadways are more expensive per capita than other modes; encouraging urban sprawl, as car parking, strip malls, and other car-oriented development is wasteful; contributing to ground impermeability and inducing flooding, as highway exits and interchanges are inefficient large-scale land uses, and roadways in general cannot typically be permeable in the way a tram track can; exacerbating economic inequality, as not everyone can afford a personal vehicle; negatively affecting public health, as people drive more and walk less; reducing mobility, as disabled and elderly citizens who physically and/or legally cannot drive are effectively barred from accessing public spaces; contributing to groundwater pollution through tire microplastics; contributing to noise pollution; and so on.
City planners have to make the decision to design our spaces for vehicles or to design them for human beings. The most cost-effective way to address the problems described tends to be to reduce collective reliance on automobiles as a mode in favor of walkability and public transportation.
This seems somewhat related to a recent Tildes thread: The United States can't build infrastructure. The reason: it refuses to learn from other countries The common thread being the perception...
The common thread being the perception that infrastructure projects seldom learn from the past or from abroad, which can balloon up costs and prevent new projects from actually accomplishing their goals.
I feel that it's deeper than that. America has an opportunity for streamlining a bullet train that could get you from New York to Austin in a matter of hours, for example, but that won't happen...
I feel that it's deeper than that. America has an opportunity for streamlining a bullet train that could get you from New York to Austin in a matter of hours, for example, but that won't happen for another 70 years because big oil and the airplane industry would lobby against it. They'd also do a hell of a job convincing people that they need a car, or if they want to travel that they need to fly.
The trains they have in Dubai and other countries are rather efficient. People thrive with those. But there's so much money to be made from selling cars, gas, and the romanticism of independence and autonomy that we can't see the forest for the trees.
I'm going to be a skeptic and say that I do believe that flying is the optimal way for long distance travel in the US. To your example about a bullet train from NY to TX, that is still a distance...
I'm going to be a skeptic and say that I do believe that flying is the optimal way for long distance travel in the US. To your example about a bullet train from NY to TX, that is still a distance of 1700+ mi. Interestingly, that is equivalent to the entire track length of the Japanese bullet train system (of which I've rode every single mile recently). Even with the max speed of 200mph for the entire 1700 mi. (highly unrealistic), that's still a 8.5 - 9hr train ride. Conversely, a flight is about 4 hours long. The US doesn't do long distance travel the same way as Asian/European countries, because our long distance is too vast even for high speed rail.
The airline industry suck, but I think it's a symptom of the companies and not due to nature of the transportation method. If we aren't still dealing with post 9/11 security theater, where planes leave every 30 mins (missed your flight, just take the next one), and everyone isn't crammed in seats, flying makes a lot of sense in the US.
Of course a four hour flight is actually closer to 6-7 hours because of all the overheads with check-in, controls, boarding, delays, luggage collection, not to mention getting to and from the...
Of course a four hour flight is actually closer to 6-7 hours because of all the overheads with check-in, controls, boarding, delays, luggage collection, not to mention getting to and from the (typically not very centrally located) airports. Trains have far less overhead, so there's a pretty big range of distances where they're faster than flights. And the least comfortable train I've been on was still nicer than the most comfortable plane.
It might not be sensible to take a train from one side of the US to the other, but there's plenty of lines you could build that connect like 4-5 large cities each and would be preferrable over driving or flying if well-implemented.
There's no reason for hardcore TSA on trains. TSA isn't there to protect the passengers, it's there to protect company assets and government relations. Planes were routinely hijacked and people...
There's no reason for hardcore TSA on trains. TSA isn't there to protect the passengers, it's there to protect company assets and government relations. Planes were routinely hijacked and people taken hostage for money. Planes can go as far as their fuel will take them though.
Trains don't have that option. They follow the rail and that's it. A stolen train isn't going to run away. Worst it could do is ram another train, but these trains could (and should) have remote operation that removes the ability for hijackers to steal them. So all you're really left with is holding up the train, but that's really not common even now with other transport like buses or light rail already with no checks.
The one thing that I think is similar between trains and planes is that trains are full of people who are captive to a small container. Sure, you can't turn them into a weapon as easily or at all...
The one thing that I think is similar between trains and planes is that trains are full of people who are captive to a small container. Sure, you can't turn them into a weapon as easily or at all in some cases as you can a plane, but they mostly nullified this issue with planes by simply locking the cockpit, yet you still have all the security theater. All it required was locking the cockpit to eliminate the plane being turned into a weapon.
Once you realize that, the major similarity of trains and planes is lots of people stuck in a metal container that they can't get out of whenever they want. At that point, it becomes a lot easier to see how trains could get the same TSA treatment. For something to have more popularity in usage would result in high demand of that to cater to everyone who might use it to feel safe using it. That's all the security theater is there for, to cater to the base of people who would stop using it if they felt like they were easy hostages for crazy people.
Amtrak gets ~30 million passengers per year, while planes get ~900 million passengers per yer in the US. Were trains to become the major travel option, the only thing that might keep them from the security theater is that planes are an alternative for people who really need the security theater, so they aren't forced to take trains if they don't want to, but planes don't really have an alternative right now so those people who need that security mostly have no good options other than planes.
That's simply not correct though. Planes are definitely stuck handling the situation they are given but a train can stop at any time. Yeah it's bad for scheduling and there's certainly places they...
That's simply not correct though. Planes are definitely stuck handling the situation they are given but a train can stop at any time. Yeah it's bad for scheduling and there's certainly places they would have few services, but they can stop and get out of the box whenever.
Planes can emergency land whenever too. The costs to do so are just astronomical in terms of how it impacts other air travel and the passengers on the plane. Passenger trains can stop much more...
Planes can emergency land whenever too. The costs to do so are just astronomical in terms of how it impacts other air travel and the passengers on the plane.
Passenger trains can stop much more quickly than freight trains, but they still can't stop instantly.
I can't find too many sources with hard data, but this page says
An 8-car passenger train moving at 80 miles an hour needs about a mile to stop.
That's probably 30 seconds at that speed (trying to account for there being a time where the speed is low enough to not result in major injuries should people jump off), plus the time it takes to notify the engineer that there's something to stop for, and the time for everyone to filter out through narrow aisles and doorways while in a panic. Could potentially be a minute or longer being stuck in a train car with a madman shooting up people, and it only takes one incident to strike that lasting fear into people. There's also the possibility of people getting trampled in the resulting panic.
Yes but the difference is a plane will take at minimum 15 minutes and that's assuming they are close to a valid landing site. And a shooter isn't going to be shooting while a train is emergency...
Yes but the difference is a plane will take at minimum 15 minutes and that's assuming they are close to a valid landing site. And a shooter isn't going to be shooting while a train is emergency stopping at they'll be tossed on their ass from the braking forces. So in the absolute worst of the worst cases deboarding a train is a very fast and safe event.
The worst isn’t ramming another train; it’s detonating a bomb. Packed train itself is a target. The train can be a delivery system for a bomb to stations and interchanges, as well as any...
The worst isn’t ramming another train; it’s detonating a bomb. Packed train itself is a target. The train can be a delivery system for a bomb to stations and interchanges, as well as any (critical) infrastructure or population centers near enough to the rail. Significantly increasing rail coverage, frequency, and ridership increases the number of potential targets and opportunities as well as the crowd in which an attacker could blend in. I would be surprised if security wasn’t stepped up to air travel levels.
I'm with you on regional high speed rail, where you can take a train and hit 3-4 major cities on a 3-5 hour ride. It's just that I feel anything beyond 5 hrs on a train loses out to the efficiency...
I'm with you on regional high speed rail, where you can take a train and hit 3-4 major cities on a 3-5 hour ride. It's just that I feel anything beyond 5 hrs on a train loses out to the efficiency of flying.
As I alluded to, what if the overhead of flying is comparable to traveling on a train. No TSA lines, you can just show up at the airport 10 mins before the gate closes and still make your flight. The standard seat width is comparable to premium economy or business class. 30 min departures between flights.
I might even go as far to say that boarding can be simplified a lot if we don't allow any carry-on beyond a backpack or purse. Anything larger is free checked luggage. People just walk in, take their seats, and not block people in the aisle.
But that's a huge "what if" though and comes up against some plain facts about planes like their complexity and absolute necessity to be as safe as possible (because there's no "just stop" option)...
But that's a huge "what if" though and comes up against some plain facts about planes like their complexity and absolute necessity to be as safe as possible (because there's no "just stop" option) or the fact that they cost A LOT of money to operate..
It's a huge what if from stuff that was mostly the csse at one point (minus plane departure times. Not sure of commercial airlines will ever optimize it down to 30 minute intervals). I imagine the...
It's a huge what if from stuff that was mostly the csse at one point (minus plane departure times. Not sure of commercial airlines will ever optimize it down to 30 minute intervals).
or the fact that they cost A LOT of money to operate..
I imagine the gap between a train and a plane is smaller than the gap between a car and a train.
Not sure what you mean, I'm not a native English speaker so that's probably on me. Are you saying that in the past there was less hassle in taking a plane due to reduced security theatre and...
Not sure what you mean, I'm not a native English speaker so that's probably on me. Are you saying that in the past there was less hassle in taking a plane due to reduced security theatre and safety regulation?
I imagine the gap between a train and a plane is smaller than the gap between a car and a train.
Well. Yeah, because a car can carry 5 people and a train 500. The useful metric here would be per passenger per year.
Correct. Before September 2001 it was almost as simple to get into a plane as it was a train. But after the terrorist attacks, security stomped down extremely hard on airports. Today, you can get...
Are you saying that in the past there was less hassle in taking a plane due to reduced security theatre and safety regulation?
Correct. Before September 2001 it was almost as simple to get into a plane as it was a train. But after the terrorist attacks, security stomped down extremely hard on airports. Today, you can get to an airport an hour early and you'd be cutting it close for your flight if you get caught in a particularly busy security check. You want at least 2 hours to get through the massive line of security checks these days.
Tbf, I'm sure at least 80% of that overhead is political. And it's not streamlined to respect time to begin with. Airport terminals can't even decide if they want you to take out your electronics...
Tbf, I'm sure at least 80% of that overhead is political. And it's not streamlined to respect time to begin with. Airport terminals can't even decide if they want you to take out your electronics or not, there's s lot of roomcfor optimization.
You may be correct on transit time efficiency, but trains win along another vector: energy efficiency. Passenger mile per gallon on a plane is about the same as a car, whereas on a train it is a...
You may be correct on transit time efficiency, but trains win along another vector: energy efficiency. Passenger mile per gallon on a plane is about the same as a car, whereas on a train it is a lot higher.
You make a lot of good points. Assuming that there isn't a political party egging people to commit domestic terrorism on the trains or rails of a suggested future interstate bullet train system,...
You make a lot of good points. Assuming that there isn't a political party egging people to commit domestic terrorism on the trains or rails of a suggested future interstate bullet train system, flying would still have a valuable place in travel because flying is a no-nonsense option, but I do see bullet trains becoming a wave of the future so to speak.
There are trains that travel faster than 200 mph, though barely approaching 280 mph/hr at this time, but I feel like I'm cherry picking your argument if I focus on that. The vastness of America would surely benefit uninterrupted, straight-on travel of highly efficient interstate bullet trains if the tech is there, we are largely at peace, and we can accept the merits of what that kind of travel has to offer.
The cutting-edge Japanese "Chūō Shinkansen" superconducting maglev train reaches a max speed of 505 km/h (314 mph). Infrastructure for this train is under construction now and passenger service...
Exemplary
The cutting-edge Japanese "Chūō Shinkansen" superconducting maglev train reaches a max speed of 505 km/h (314 mph). Infrastructure for this train is under construction now and passenger service will operate by 2027, with plans for expansion through at least 2037. SCMaglev technology has demonstrated a top test speed of at least 603 km/h (375 mph) with a seven-car trainset. Theoretically, it could go higher.
For reference, a train magically operating at 375 mph for the entire Northeast Corridor would be able to travel between Washington, DC and Boston (457 miles) in 1 hour 13 minutes. Of course, high-speed trains don't operate at max speeds through an entire route. The Acela trains in the Northeast Corridor have a max speed of 150 mph (soon 160 mph) but an average of about 86 mph. If we assume a similar ratio with an SCMaglev system (let's say avg = 0.5 * max), that would still be an impressively fast transit time of 2 hours 26 minutes. The fastest plane you can take between BWI and BOS is 1 hour 20 minutes, or 3+ hours in practice. Even with some padding time at either end, such a train would be time-competitive with air while also being dramatically more energy-efficient (environmentally sustainable) and comfortable.
While some preliminary feasibility studies have been conducted, this technology won't meaningfully come to the United States in the next 50 years without:
Professional rejection of American exceptionalism and generally pointless nationalistic sentiment among planners; that is, acceptance of obviously superior foreign technology and systems.
A second Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocating consistent federal funding for HSR, as with automobile highways. This law has been revolutionary. We need more like it.
Federal and state legislation making it easier to construct HSR, like a streamlined environmental review process and near-immunity from expensive land acquisition litigation from NIMBYs.
Still, there is no technical reason why this technology could not be deployed around the world in the next 25 years. That includes the United States. US construction costs are not inherently high; rather, we choose to keep them high for many of the reasons described in the thread linked above (and more).
And the more opportunities there are for people to not use cars, the more roads will be freed up for those who truly need or want to use them. Everyone wins.
And the more opportunities there are for people to not use cars, the more roads will be freed up for those who truly need or want to use them. Everyone wins.
New York to Austin? That's 1500 miles. That would be 7.5 hours on a nonstop, 200 mph train. No way in hell that's a reasonable route to choose. It would probably go through about 10 other states....
New York to Austin? That's 1500 miles. That would be 7.5 hours on a nonstop, 200 mph train. No way in hell that's a reasonable route to choose. It would probably go through about 10 other states. I know an important part of Tildes is not just immediately shooting things down but I think the fact that you picked that as a route demonstrates perfectly how poorly the country is set up for that kind of cross country high-speed rail. I'm all for bringing it to the country and would love to use it that would just be an unreasonable trip. A direct route would spend quite a while in the Appalachians and an indirect route would probably add 500 miles.
This particular route doesn't advocate for itself in a city pair gravity model, as Austin has a small population relative to its distance from New York. Crossing state boundaries on rail is not a...
This particular route doesn't advocate for itself in a city pair gravity model, as Austin has a small population relative to its distance from New York. Crossing state boundaries on rail is not a meaningful obstacle in and of itself though. Amtrak already operates several such lines. While infrastructure in any particular state requires some input from state governments, the issue is not coordination between states (an operational detail which should not, by itself, stymie a project) but rather funding for construction.
The United States is not "poorly set up" for inter-regional high-speed rail per se. It is not a chain of islands nor entirely mountainous (like Japan, which has the best HSR system in the world). Much of the geography is relatively flat, empty farmland. Many population centers exist in linear regional chains. The US is uniquely suited for high-speed passenger rail.
The High Speed Rail Alliance has some approachable materials about potential regional and cross-regional HSR corridors. The Northeast Corridor can and should be extended southward along the coast to major population centers in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere. Such a route would be time-competitive with long-distance flights if there were more federal investment into high-speed rail. It is likewise reasonable to conceive of a Southern Corridor linking population centers in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, etc.; and a Southwest Corridor linking Californian cities with nearby population centers like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Midwestern and Northwestern cities likewise have plenty of potential.
In the spirit of this example, a NY to Austin flight takes 4 hours plus 1–2 hours for airport nonsense. From a pure time-competitiveness standpoint, a high-speed train from New York to Austin could only compete with air travel if it operated at an average of ~300+ mph for a ~1700 mile route (~5.5 hours). That technology is sort of possible (modern Shinkansen maglevs have reached 375 mph). Realistically, a train with a theoretical max speed of 375 mph would not operate at that for an entire trip, or even 300 mph, but it technically could. Regardless, travel time is not the only metric passengers use to choose a mode. Simply for comfort, I would consider taking an 8- or even 10-hour train from NY to Texas over a 4-hour flight + airport dwell time. For example: it's not a regular trip, but I've taken the train from New York to Charleston, SC (a 13.5-hour journey) over a 2-hour flight because I do not qualitatively enjoy the experience of flying.
Within my lifetime, I would not be surprised to see maglev trains operating real routes with passengers at over 350 mph max somewhere in the world. 400 mph max does not seem out of the question. Accordingly, average speeds may increase considerably. While I'm sure planes could get faster in that time too, aircraft are inherently energy-inefficient vehicles and the economic operation of Concord-esque planes over land routes seems questionable.
Another obstacle I would add to your list is the federal, state, and local coordination that would have to happen to pull off some kind of interstate HSR. The US is so fractured when it comes to...
that won't happen for another 70 years because big oil and the airplane industry would lobby against it. They'd also do a hell of a job convincing people that they need a car, or if they want to travel that they need to fly.
Another obstacle I would add to your list is the federal, state, and local coordination that would have to happen to pull off some kind of interstate HSR. The US is so fractured when it comes to jurisdictional authority, and many initiatives are quickly politicized (often by the monied interests you mentioned). Even just building a subway system in a single metro area, you might have to cater to dozens of counties that don't really get along well. For example, Atlanta metro area is at least a dozen counties plus City of Atlanta, and the Braves stadium built several years ago was intentionally cut off from the MARTA system by Cobb County. That county has the deepest of roots in white flight from the city center during the 60s and 70s.
I always imagined this to be a math problem. I'll try to explain, please forgive me if I do a poor job. Instead of traffic and freeway lanes, imagine water flowing through a pipe. The cross...
I always imagined this to be a math problem. I'll try to explain, please forgive me if I do a poor job.
Instead of traffic and freeway lanes, imagine water flowing through a pipe. The cross section of a pipe is a circle. A circle is an an area. As your flow rate requirements increase, you reach a point where your current pipe diameter becomes insufficient, so you increase the pipe diameter. When you increase the diameter of the pipe, the area increases in two dimensions, and therefore, at a squared rate.
Now imagine the traffic analog of this. The solution would be to not only widen the freeway but also build up. But instead we only build out. Our flow requirements need a two dimensional solution, but instead we only address one.
Clearly we can't build up. But this is why, I imagine, building out does not solve the traffic problem. Population increase requires an exponential solution. Adding lanes is a geometric one.
Also, exits and onramps are still only one, or perhaps two lanes wide at most. This doesn't change.
The real problem is that wider highway encourage people to drive. Growing upwards would make people more inclined to drive as well. To use your comparison, widening the pipes would also increase...
The real problem is that wider highway encourage people to drive. Growing upwards would make people more inclined to drive as well.
To use your comparison, widening the pipes would also increase the amount of water in them.
Here's a metaphor that's perhaps slightly more accurate. Imagine you have a very large reservoir of water. This is the maximum possible demand for transportation; if everyone went everywhere they...
Here's a metaphor that's perhaps slightly more accurate.
Imagine you have a very large reservoir of water. This is the maximum possible demand for transportation; if everyone went everywhere they had the slightest desire to go to, the entire reservoir would be emptied. Pipes leading out of the reservoir correspond to actual mechanisms for travel, with the diameter of the pipe roughly corresponding to how cheap/convenient it is to take that mechanism.
Then, it should be obvious that if you enlarge a pipe, more water will flow into it. The reservoir of possible travel is enormous; no even marginally reasonable road system could drain it all, and so enlarging pipes will enable more water to flow into them (though, if you don't enlarge all the downstream pipes to actual travel destinations, obviously more water cannot flow out, and so you'll get congestion) but won't effectively provide overhead capacity.
So: road expansions do increase travel, though they don't improve congestion once they reach steady state (unless you massively overbuild).
The real problem with roads, though, is that the externalities are absolutely mind-boggling. Cars are polluting, loud, dangerous, inefficient (along multiple axes: energy, space, etc.), expensive, socially isolating, and on and on and on. Effective train service induces demand, too, but trains are so much better along every one of those axes that it's barely even a discussion if the increase in travel justifies the externalities; it always does.
(We don't have effective train service in the US because of car and oil industry propaganda and lobbying, not anything resembling rational social/economic decisionmaking.)
Regardless of people's thoughts on cars, that is indeed the goal of these initiatives from the perspective of the government. Very few are anti-car, nor trying to strive for a walkable city. In...
Regardless of people's thoughts on cars, that is indeed the goal of these initiatives from the perspective of the government. Very few are anti-car, nor trying to strive for a walkable city. In fact, they are giving subsidies to encourage more cars to be made, simply with an alternative fuel source to fossil fuels.
Not really. Driving a 6-lane highway is not fun. People need to get to where they are going. We shouldn't be in the encouraging/discouraging business anyway. If the demand is there, and we're...
The real problem is that wider highway encourage people to drive. Growing upwards would make people more inclined to drive as well.
Not really. Driving a 6-lane highway is not fun. People need to get to where they are going.
We shouldn't be in the encouraging/discouraging business anyway. If the demand is there, and we're failing to fill it, that's it. Fill it. If you want more people on the trains and buses, then make them better -- I'd love a clean ride to where I am going, next to well-behaved passengers respecting one another. But buses and trains are neglected and allowed to become the ghetto option requiring acceptance of loud music, vape smoke, trash on the floor and seats -- or I get to sit in a traffic jam in my car.
The article: “widening roads was so successful that more people decided to use them, making them congested again. Therefore we deem it unsuccessful because traffic sucks” The article misses the...
The article: “widening roads was so successful that more people decided to use them, making them congested again. Therefore we deem it unsuccessful because traffic sucks”
The article misses the point of widening roads. You don’t increase the diameter of a water pipe to speed up the flow, you increase diameter to allow more water through. In this, the roads are successfully allowing more traffic through at the same rate as they used to work with less traffic. That is a success even though the author seems to think increasing the rate was the goal
I do believe that increasing the rate is the goal. Why would you assume that is not the case? Being able to move around quickly and comfortably is a chief concern of most taxpayers, and I doubt...
I do believe that increasing the rate is the goal. Why would you assume that is not the case? Being able to move around quickly and comfortably is a chief concern of most taxpayers, and I doubt very much that is not the goal of these infrastructures. We are talking about privately owned automobiles, not water or freight trains. Ignoring that in favor of a purely mechanical calculation is incredibly out of touch.
Commute is 30mins for 20 people, but there’s 50 people so commute is now 45mins. Increase lanes and commute is now 30mins for up to 70 people. You haven’t increased the rate, you successfully...
Commute is 30mins for 20 people, but there’s 50 people so commute is now 45mins. Increase lanes and commute is now 30mins for up to 70 people. You haven’t increased the rate, you successfully allowed more people to use the road correctly. Raising the rate would be increasing the speed limit of the roads so people could get there faster in 20mins, but that won’t help if your exceeding capacity of the road and its stop&go traffic. Now the problem here is that they keep exceeding capacity of the road even when they keep expanding the road. The population is growing faster than the infrastructure, so the solution is either to use infrastructure differently or expand infrastructure faster. Their argument is “if you build it they will come, so building it doesn’t work” and that’s incorrect.
I read it yesterday. I understand it completely. It misses the point that the road was congested for a reason, and that reason was that there was then increasing demand to be at the other end of...
I read it yesterday. I understand it completely.
It misses the point that the road was congested for a reason, and that reason was that there was then increasing demand to be at the other end of that road. So, they expanded the road, meanwhile the increasing demand to be on the other side of that road also continued to increase.
When the Interstates became a thing, we were 150 Million people and growing. We're 330+ Million people now, and still growing.
This is not to say that other things shouldn't ALSO be done, but that not expanding overwhelmed roads as a means to frustrate motorists is not fixing a thing but neglecting a thing.
The money used to widen a road, resulting eventually in exactly the same slow journey for everyone who was already using it, could just as well have been put into improving public transport that...
The money used to widen a road, resulting eventually in exactly the same slow journey for everyone who was already using it, could just as well have been put into improving public transport that already exists or building new public transport, both of which would end in some real positive changes to people's journeys. So why widen the road?
Why improve public transport, instead? It already exists, like the road. People have chosen the road, and it is fully utilized, and the trend is toward more utilization, not less, so don't neglect...
Why improve public transport, instead? It already exists, like the road. People have chosen the road, and it is fully utilized, and the trend is toward more utilization, not less, so don't neglect it. Neglecting it will make it worse, not better.
Taking the idea of not improving the road to the extreme, let's delete a lane. Let's make it even worse. We'll fix the road by deleting the road entirely or restricting it to buses and emergency vehicles. Force everyone onto transit. Now everyone is -- happy? No, I don't think so. Instead, I think the next election will force these people out of power.
At the same time, make public transport a more attractive option -- not by making the roads worse, but by making transit better. Police the passenger cars, have more trips per hour, make it easy to park and buy a fare, make it an easy choice for the occasional commuter with assistance available. That can only help the road, too, but if the road is congested, something must be done involving the road.
I'm actually living this in two dimensions. Our bridges are old and 50 years out of date and spec and there is no mass transit that crosses them. But if I can make it to the other side, I can get on mass transit and ride into the major city nearby but parking is hard because it needs and app that I don't have, buying tickets is a mystery because I only do it once or twice a year, I need transfers and only this kind but not that kind of transfer is acceptable, and the ride is miserable because the behavior is poor and the litter is everywhere. But I often will suffer this because suffering the traffic into town is just as bad.
The real reason why it doesn't help is because cars aren't fluid and destinations aren't different. People drive like shit and putting them on more lanes only leads to more disruptive lane...
The real reason why it doesn't help is because cars aren't fluid and destinations aren't different.
People drive like shit and putting them on more lanes only leads to more disruptive lane jockeying, causing more slowdowns.
The people that are headed downtown are still just headed there, but it's not like downtown was also expanded. So all you've done is improved the time it takes to slam into the standstill traffic block trying to squeeze into the now undersized destinations.
In operational research flow of people/traffic is often modeled as a fluid. It's generally a good approximation. The general rule of thumb is that while increasing flow in a confined space will...
In operational research flow of people/traffic is often modeled as a fluid. It's generally a good approximation. The general rule of thumb is that while increasing flow in a confined space will decrease pressure but increase turbulence. Traffic as we know and hate it is essentially turbulence (lane jockeys, people following too close hitting their brakes and causing a backwards shockwave in the flow). Your point is well made that the destinations often introduce bottlenecks. We need to add more parallel options in order to move more people efficiently.
Yeah, that's part of why I look forward to a switch to mostly fully autonomous transport in maybe 30+ years. When cars can communicate to one another in complex ways, reaction times aren't bound...
Yeah, that's part of why I look forward to a switch to mostly fully autonomous transport in maybe 30+ years. When cars can communicate to one another in complex ways, reaction times aren't bound to human senses, and you don't have reckless people changing lanes every 20 seconds, you can really streamline roads in a significant way without any change to the roads themselves.
If population increase is exponential and the main reason demand for roads increases (I'd question both of these premises) then quadratic expansion is also not good enough
If population increase is exponential and the main reason demand for roads increases (I'd question both of these premises) then quadratic expansion is also not good enough
I hope you will forgive a bit of pedantry on my part here. When you increase the diameter of a pipe and get a quadratic change in area, that is called geometric. When you add another lane and get...
I hope you will forgive a bit of pedantry on my part here. When you increase the diameter of a pipe and get a quadratic change in area, that is called geometric. When you add another lane and get a proportional increase in capacity that is called linear. Neither is these is called exponential.
Perhaps we can still use your analogy. Traffic comes in big waves at rush hours, so perhaps the situation is more aligned with flooding and drout mitigation. Instead of building bigger pipes (highways) we should look for ways to decrease water consumption (make it easier for people to meet their needs without driving) and introduce flood control channels (public transportation which is fast and reliable enough to get commuters off the roads at peak hours).
I think there's a sense of American exceptionalism, always has been. There is some truth to saying we don't learn from others and we want to do things our way, but a less cynical take would be to...
I think there's a sense of American exceptionalism, always has been. There is some truth to saying we don't learn from others and we want to do things our way, but a less cynical take would be to say the issue, as always, is a tad bit more complex than that.
Other American industries do take notes from Europe or the East when it comes to architecture, fashion, trains even, believe it or not. Business is after innovation and development to get the edge over competition and it's not above looking across the ocean for new tips and tricks.
Private business can do this easily enough. They can afford to fly a European consultant for an extended stay to gain some insight into how Europe does it, but we're not talking about private industry here, we're talking about the Department of Transportation, a department that is controlled by congress and they in turn by voters.
Like any American government agency that isn't the Department of Defense, they're choked for funding which is one of the reasons why our bridges are in dire need of repair the nation over, our highways in the northeast peaked when cars went as fast as 45mph, and train tracks have become privately owned with strong lobbying power to prevent new tracks from being layed down (gross over simplification of another complex issue).
So funding is a major problem especially when states have a lot of say on how their roads are taken care of. Sometimes, in the case of Pennsylvania, money does make its way to the state. The capital approves the project and then money is then dispersed to whoever won the government contract. There's issues noted with these contractors playing a dishonest game where they stall the project, re evaluate and say they need more due to x y and Z complication, or say the project needs an extension due to x y and z reasons. That's not all of them, but it does happen due to the laws of the state, the power of the unions, and the structure of commonwealth versus a state with more power being in the hands of municipalities than concentrated in the capital.
New Jersey, by contrast, functions differently with funding coming in from higher state taxes and strict and clear laws saying where that money goes to (the roads) and what happens if workers attempt to pull what happens in Pennsylvania.
So funding, state laws versus federal laws, and as I mentioned, it's a government institution controlled by congress which means there's an element of politics involved. Politics bought by major car manufacturers that favor highway extensions over public transportation.
Even if we take that cynical take out, just playing politics, selling the idea of trains to the masses is a big ask considering how embedded the automobile lifestyle is in certain areas of this country. Several cities will have drivers endanger bicyclists before even thinking of using mass transit. Americans are in love with cars and we've been conditioned to be.
Is it too late? Nah, it's an active battleground. Some cities are doing great work on pushing alternate means of travel and regulating cars. New York recently announced a strategy to reduce car share services. Philadelphia is making headway with bicycle lanes and bringing back the old trollies in a new and improved way. And for as much shit as Amtrak gets, they're trying to expand their fleet and modernize their trains as best they can. They're the ones talking with Europeans on how to improve and design their trains.
But yes, ultimately there's pride. With blue collar jobs shrinking or being seen as undesirable, the few big contractors that win these bids know how to do roads one way and that way works. They have no interest in bringing in outside counsel because they also know the way that works for them needs to be repaired and they win that too. Regardless if it's asphalt or concrete, that's what their machinery is built for, that's what their workers know, the supply chains are built for it, and the money flows best when you keep it traditional. To take notes from other countries would mean destabilizing an already shrinking field and just like coal miners are still around, so too will these workers. Until they're forced to change, but that would require DoT funding which would require political reform which would require Americans to want it and right now they don't. They love their SUVs.
As a European, while the American scale of building might be larger due to more available space, this tendency is of building bigger to make it better is prevalent everywhere. It goes against our...
I think there's a sense of American exceptionalism
As a European, while the American scale of building might be larger due to more available space, this tendency is of building bigger to make it better is prevalent everywhere.
It goes against our knee-jerk reactions to scale down something to make it work better. Even if traffic throughput will actually go up from reducing speed limits for example. I've seen the public respond to such changes with an angry outcry many times in my own country, and I remember it being a topic in Top Gear at some point as well.
Some major road or another in England had its speed limit lowered to increase throughput and people were outraged at the idiocy. As far as I can remember the show didn't actually criticise it. I think they had someone come on that explained how it actually works like intended.
By lowering the amount of space needed between each vehicle due to the lower driving speed, you can get more vehicles through the same area, even as each individual driver might take a bit longer to get from A to B. Then again, how much longer does it take when traffic shifts from high speed, to lower speed in junctions and cause backups?
The gut reaction is "I need to spend even more time to get home? How is that helping anyone?"
And so we tend to get a lot of support behind suggestions of expansion. Even when it would be objectively better for the whole to do things on a smaller, slower scale despite it being at a slight inconvenience to the individual. Sometimes even just a percieved inconvenience, as fewer backups would mean it actually would take less time to get where you're going. It just feels better to go faster.
I think you really have it, Americans are in a suicide pact with cars. Jakarta, Indonesia recently built a mass transit system from scratch with Japanese-style carefully designed infrastructure....
I think you really have it, Americans are in a suicide pact with cars.
Jakarta, Indonesia recently built a mass transit system from scratch with Japanese-style carefully designed infrastructure. It has been running smoothly and tickets cost like $0.50. Indonesia has a GDP per capita of $4,000. What do they have that we don't? I think incentive is probably the biggest factor -- driving sucks in Indonesia and is very slow compared to motorbike. Cities in America have dug a hole that it's very hard to climb out of.
I wonder how much of this is encouraging people to drive instead of taking public transportation (assuming it exists in the regions they are studying), as opposed to population increases. I would...
I wonder how much of this is encouraging people to drive instead of taking public transportation (assuming it exists in the regions they are studying), as opposed to population increases. I would imagine that the studies that go into determining road infrastructure projects do include projections of traffic increases based on projected population growth.
For example, our section of the major highway (I40) was widened by 2 lanes, but the population also increased by 25% in the past 10 years.
So I'm curious how density and baseline traffic volume affects this. The State of Missouri has plans to expand I-70 to three lanes each way all the way from Kansas City to St. Louis. Right now,...
So I'm curious how density and baseline traffic volume affects this. The State of Missouri has plans to expand I-70 to three lanes each way all the way from Kansas City to St. Louis. Right now, it's two lanes outside of both metros, even through the largest settlement in-between, which is Columbia (home of the University of Missouri). Admittedly, it can be a pain driving across the state, particularly when there are accidents or construction.
The CW, as stated in this article, is that adding lanes will eventually lead to more congestion. But it always seems to be related to urban areas. I've seen the effects here in Kansas City when some of our metro highways were expanded. But does the same happen in more rural areas, in the places between some metros, where traffic volume is typically lower to begin with? Is there any reason to believe that the CW isn't the CW in these places?
Link to the archived version
What is the consequence of not inducing demand? If people are choosing to join congested highways, which they eventually become and people continue to use them up to a point, isn't that some indication that the barriers or costs outside this highway infrastructure make that a more appealing option?
I don't disagree with experts or history in order to think that widening the highways is the best solution to reducing traffic, but everything I see something about such a strategy of widening roads "induces demand", there's no consideration for what the demand is or what it means. The way it's phrased is almost always in a negative light. Why is demand to get from point A to B bad? Of course I know that's not what they're intending to say, but it comes across that way.
I guess to me, what I want to understand is the goal and the alternatives and understanding the consequences of the choices behind them to better be able to understand the scope of the problem. The simplest explanation seems to be that widening highways fits the budgets set aside, it doesn't require new infrastructure, just making existing infrastructure bigger. It's the same with traffic within a city, why build more and more roads rather than rails and subways etc.? The answer to that always seems to be cost, existing infrastructure is in the way etc. but the answer isn't simply to do nothing either, so more roads get built instead. Isn't that the same thing with highway expansions?
With it being such a broad problem nationally, is it also an issue that cities themselves are generally driven to grow (and thus driven to cater to demand) but there's little room for cooperation for bigger and costlier alternatives that require coordination between Points A through Z? Is it that we're giving money to cities and states to find solutions, but that the solution needs to be on a national level? If you give resources to middle management and tell them to find a solution to X problem, isn't middle management solutions limited by the authority they have? Criticizing their solutions as inadequate isn't the same as criticizing the fact that they were given the task to begin with.
I've long been a bit skeptical of the idea that there is an unlimited amount of latent demand and that, therefore, widening highways is always a useless endeavor. Presumably there is some maximum amount of latent demand that, with an infinitely wide freeway, you would eventually satisfy. I think your point is apt: what were those people doing before? Is it bad that they now feel like they can drive on those freeways that, before, they thought that they could not?
Having said that, I am sympathetic to the idea that past experience does show that, if the only goal of highway widening is to reduce congestion, it hasn't worked. So I don't know what the real solution to traffic congestion would be.
Alternate modes of transportation aren't likely to be a real solution in most of the United States. If you built a light rail line that got someone in one part of the suburbs to another part of the suburbs, they're still stuck in the suburbs and will need a car to navigate at their destination. To use my own metro area as an example, if I'm in southeast Tigard, Oregon and I take a light rail line to northwest Beaverton, Oregon, instead of driving up highway 217, I'm pretty fucked when I get off that train.
I actually had (and still do) have similar skepticism. The real problem isn’t actually “inducing too much demand”, it’s that when you expand capacity of major arterial road it can accommodate a lot more people, but because the outflow capacity hasn’t increased a similar amount, eventually all that traffic just winds up backing up onto the road you just widened. I don’t feel like people explain that part enough though.
As an example of insufficient outflow capacity relative to lane width, allow me to present my own exhibit A: the exits from the toll plaza from the Rio-Niterói Bridge in Rio de Janeiro. The bridge itself is an 4-lane highway in each direction (8 in total). Upon arriving at the toll plaza it spreads out into over 20 cabins, which then splits out across 4 separate exit ramps. 3 of the 4 run into traffic lights almost immediately, while the last one goes off to another 2-lane highway (Rio-Manilha), which has its own traffic issues and is nearly always backed up.
Getting off the bridge should be a 30-second ordeal, but it usually becomes a 15-minute odyssey just to get into your correct lane and get through to your exit. This always results in a multi-kilometer backup into the bridge itself.
Yeah, that's a good way to illustrate what I meant when I asked is this a problem that we're criticizing cities or states for creating solutions within their control that adequately match the existing national infrastructure and its not the same to criticize them for their solutions as it is to criticize that they're being asked to come up with the solution to begin with. Meaning it's not necessarily going to produce the same effects to criticize their solution as it would be to criticize putting the responsibility on them to begin with.
I haven't seen the conversations around widening roads and highways expand much to this point of discussing more about the demand, but I'd definitely be curious to see more perspectives on it.
I’m not sure if I’m reading your post correctly, but I think you’re asking some fundamental questions about induced demand (eg why do we want to induce it, why are people being induced, why is it bad)? If so, here’s the best of my understanding as gleaned from insufferable YouTube urbanists:
Yeah that is along the lines of what I'm asking. Mostly trying to approach it from a different angle to push the thought about the problem in a different way, where it's not about trashing US infrastructure or the people who are deciding to widen lanes etc. but more so questioning why we're at the point we are at and why we do what we do. Part of what we do is factoring in the consequences of not doing what we do. Sometimes we look at problems and see it as: do nothing, do something now that is quick and easy, or do something later that is hard and expensive but better. In many cases we choose the do nothing solution, in many other cases we choose the do something quick and easy solution, and less frequently it seems we choose the do something hard and expensive but better solution.
It seems like an essential part of the conversation, rather than just giving the impression "induced demand bad" as some of these articles seem to boil it down to.
The nature of roadway maintenance means that the "do nothing" solution has high inherent costs. It is not actually cheaper to maintain an extensive network of car-centric infrastructure than it is to maintain an equivalent amount of public transportation infrastructure with reasonable accommodations for automobiles.
Because automobiles are slow and heavy relative to the number of passengers they transport, their per capita maintenance cost is higher than modes like trains, which transport more people in less time, less space, and while doing less damage to infrastructure. Asphalt as a building material is particularly susceptible to weight stress as heavy vehicles dislodge its microscopic particles. When a freeze-thaw weather cycle allows water to change states within the roadway surface, those particles become further dislodged and form potholes, visibly degrading the structure. This process fundamentally originates with and is accelerated by vehicle traffic. Other modes, such as bicycling, do not stress roadways in the same way.
Induced demand as a concept applies to any mode: automobiles, trains, airplanes, ferries, bicycles, walking, etc. It is not a good or bad thing per se, but simply an observation that "if you build it, they will come." In general, it is unwise to induce demand for highways because they are an inefficient, expensive, and environmentally unsustainable form of transportation (yes, even if the cars are electric). Most city planners operate with the goal of inducing transit demand. They are stymied by municipal budgets, whose authors make the unwise decision to induce the most expensive and most inefficient kind of demand (cars). There is some political pressure to maintain car dominance, but politicians mostly just don't know any better than to go with the flow. They often live in car-dependent suburbs anyway, but are wealthy enough to own multiple personal vehicles, so they may not even recognize the problem.
It is not possible to design a city that is optimized for automobile traffic throughput and conventional human-oriented livability metrics. Cars simply take up too much space relative to how many people they transport. The wider the roads get, the more dangerous and unpleasant it is for pedestrians, and the worse it is to live. The more effort is made to increase automobile transit speed, the more difficult it is for any other mode to operate. This turn toward automotive inefficiency has the effect of stressing public budgets, as roadways are more expensive per capita than other modes; encouraging urban sprawl, as car parking, strip malls, and other car-oriented development is wasteful; contributing to ground impermeability and inducing flooding, as highway exits and interchanges are inefficient large-scale land uses, and roadways in general cannot typically be permeable in the way a tram track can; exacerbating economic inequality, as not everyone can afford a personal vehicle; negatively affecting public health, as people drive more and walk less; reducing mobility, as disabled and elderly citizens who physically and/or legally cannot drive are effectively barred from accessing public spaces; contributing to groundwater pollution through tire microplastics; contributing to noise pollution; and so on.
City planners have to make the decision to design our spaces for vehicles or to design them for human beings. The most cost-effective way to address the problems described tends to be to reduce collective reliance on automobiles as a mode in favor of walkability and public transportation.
This seems somewhat related to a recent Tildes thread: The United States can't build infrastructure. The reason: it refuses to learn from other countries
The common thread being the perception that infrastructure projects seldom learn from the past or from abroad, which can balloon up costs and prevent new projects from actually accomplishing their goals.
I feel that it's deeper than that. America has an opportunity for streamlining a bullet train that could get you from New York to Austin in a matter of hours, for example, but that won't happen for another 70 years because big oil and the airplane industry would lobby against it. They'd also do a hell of a job convincing people that they need a car, or if they want to travel that they need to fly.
The trains they have in Dubai and other countries are rather efficient. People thrive with those. But there's so much money to be made from selling cars, gas, and the romanticism of independence and autonomy that we can't see the forest for the trees.
I'm going to be a skeptic and say that I do believe that flying is the optimal way for long distance travel in the US. To your example about a bullet train from NY to TX, that is still a distance of 1700+ mi. Interestingly, that is equivalent to the entire track length of the Japanese bullet train system (of which I've rode every single mile recently). Even with the max speed of 200mph for the entire 1700 mi. (highly unrealistic), that's still a 8.5 - 9hr train ride. Conversely, a flight is about 4 hours long. The US doesn't do long distance travel the same way as Asian/European countries, because our long distance is too vast even for high speed rail.
The airline industry suck, but I think it's a symptom of the companies and not due to nature of the transportation method. If we aren't still dealing with post 9/11 security theater, where planes leave every 30 mins (missed your flight, just take the next one), and everyone isn't crammed in seats, flying makes a lot of sense in the US.
Of course a four hour flight is actually closer to 6-7 hours because of all the overheads with check-in, controls, boarding, delays, luggage collection, not to mention getting to and from the (typically not very centrally located) airports. Trains have far less overhead, so there's a pretty big range of distances where they're faster than flights. And the least comfortable train I've been on was still nicer than the most comfortable plane.
It might not be sensible to take a train from one side of the US to the other, but there's plenty of lines you could build that connect like 4-5 large cities each and would be preferrable over driving or flying if well-implemented.
There's no reason for hardcore TSA on trains. TSA isn't there to protect the passengers, it's there to protect company assets and government relations. Planes were routinely hijacked and people taken hostage for money. Planes can go as far as their fuel will take them though.
Trains don't have that option. They follow the rail and that's it. A stolen train isn't going to run away. Worst it could do is ram another train, but these trains could (and should) have remote operation that removes the ability for hijackers to steal them. So all you're really left with is holding up the train, but that's really not common even now with other transport like buses or light rail already with no checks.
The one thing that I think is similar between trains and planes is that trains are full of people who are captive to a small container. Sure, you can't turn them into a weapon as easily or at all in some cases as you can a plane, but they mostly nullified this issue with planes by simply locking the cockpit, yet you still have all the security theater. All it required was locking the cockpit to eliminate the plane being turned into a weapon.
Once you realize that, the major similarity of trains and planes is lots of people stuck in a metal container that they can't get out of whenever they want. At that point, it becomes a lot easier to see how trains could get the same TSA treatment. For something to have more popularity in usage would result in high demand of that to cater to everyone who might use it to feel safe using it. That's all the security theater is there for, to cater to the base of people who would stop using it if they felt like they were easy hostages for crazy people.
Amtrak gets ~30 million passengers per year, while planes get ~900 million passengers per yer in the US. Were trains to become the major travel option, the only thing that might keep them from the security theater is that planes are an alternative for people who really need the security theater, so they aren't forced to take trains if they don't want to, but planes don't really have an alternative right now so those people who need that security mostly have no good options other than planes.
That's simply not correct though. Planes are definitely stuck handling the situation they are given but a train can stop at any time. Yeah it's bad for scheduling and there's certainly places they would have few services, but they can stop and get out of the box whenever.
Planes can emergency land whenever too. The costs to do so are just astronomical in terms of how it impacts other air travel and the passengers on the plane.
Passenger trains can stop much more quickly than freight trains, but they still can't stop instantly.
https://www.minnesotasafetycouncil.org/facts/factsheet.cfm?qs=858251BECECF1976F908D7D68B570E85
I can't find too many sources with hard data, but this page says
That's probably 30 seconds at that speed (trying to account for there being a time where the speed is low enough to not result in major injuries should people jump off), plus the time it takes to notify the engineer that there's something to stop for, and the time for everyone to filter out through narrow aisles and doorways while in a panic. Could potentially be a minute or longer being stuck in a train car with a madman shooting up people, and it only takes one incident to strike that lasting fear into people. There's also the possibility of people getting trampled in the resulting panic.
Yes but the difference is a plane will take at minimum 15 minutes and that's assuming they are close to a valid landing site. And a shooter isn't going to be shooting while a train is emergency stopping at they'll be tossed on their ass from the braking forces. So in the absolute worst of the worst cases deboarding a train is a very fast and safe event.
The worst isn’t ramming another train; it’s detonating a bomb. Packed train itself is a target. The train can be a delivery system for a bomb to stations and interchanges, as well as any (critical) infrastructure or population centers near enough to the rail. Significantly increasing rail coverage, frequency, and ridership increases the number of potential targets and opportunities as well as the crowd in which an attacker could blend in. I would be surprised if security wasn’t stepped up to air travel levels.
That's already something freight has to deal with, so I imagine we'd continue xraying and sniffing containers for explosives.
I'm with you on regional high speed rail, where you can take a train and hit 3-4 major cities on a 3-5 hour ride. It's just that I feel anything beyond 5 hrs on a train loses out to the efficiency of flying.
As I alluded to, what if the overhead of flying is comparable to traveling on a train. No TSA lines, you can just show up at the airport 10 mins before the gate closes and still make your flight. The standard seat width is comparable to premium economy or business class. 30 min departures between flights.
I might even go as far to say that boarding can be simplified a lot if we don't allow any carry-on beyond a backpack or purse. Anything larger is free checked luggage. People just walk in, take their seats, and not block people in the aisle.
But that's a huge "what if" though and comes up against some plain facts about planes like their complexity and absolute necessity to be as safe as possible (because there's no "just stop" option) or the fact that they cost A LOT of money to operate..
It's a huge what if from stuff that was mostly the csse at one point (minus plane departure times. Not sure of commercial airlines will ever optimize it down to 30 minute intervals).
I imagine the gap between a train and a plane is smaller than the gap between a car and a train.
Not sure what you mean, I'm not a native English speaker so that's probably on me. Are you saying that in the past there was less hassle in taking a plane due to reduced security theatre and safety regulation?
Well. Yeah, because a car can carry 5 people and a train 500. The useful metric here would be per passenger per year.
Correct. Before September 2001 it was almost as simple to get into a plane as it was a train. But after the terrorist attacks, security stomped down extremely hard on airports. Today, you can get to an airport an hour early and you'd be cutting it close for your flight if you get caught in a particularly busy security check. You want at least 2 hours to get through the massive line of security checks these days.
Tbf, I'm sure at least 80% of that overhead is political. And it's not streamlined to respect time to begin with. Airport terminals can't even decide if they want you to take out your electronics or not, there's s lot of roomcfor optimization.
You may be correct on transit time efficiency, but trains win along another vector: energy efficiency. Passenger mile per gallon on a plane is about the same as a car, whereas on a train it is a lot higher.
You make a lot of good points. Assuming that there isn't a political party egging people to commit domestic terrorism on the trains or rails of a suggested future interstate bullet train system, flying would still have a valuable place in travel because flying is a no-nonsense option, but I do see bullet trains becoming a wave of the future so to speak.
There are trains that travel faster than 200 mph, though barely approaching 280 mph/hr at this time, but I feel like I'm cherry picking your argument if I focus on that. The vastness of America would surely benefit uninterrupted, straight-on travel of highly efficient interstate bullet trains if the tech is there, we are largely at peace, and we can accept the merits of what that kind of travel has to offer.
The cutting-edge Japanese "Chūō Shinkansen" superconducting maglev train reaches a max speed of 505 km/h (314 mph). Infrastructure for this train is under construction now and passenger service will operate by 2027, with plans for expansion through at least 2037. SCMaglev technology has demonstrated a top test speed of at least 603 km/h (375 mph) with a seven-car trainset. Theoretically, it could go higher.
For reference, a train magically operating at 375 mph for the entire Northeast Corridor would be able to travel between Washington, DC and Boston (457 miles) in 1 hour 13 minutes. Of course, high-speed trains don't operate at max speeds through an entire route. The Acela trains in the Northeast Corridor have a max speed of 150 mph (soon 160 mph) but an average of about 86 mph. If we assume a similar ratio with an SCMaglev system (let's say
avg = 0.5 * max), that would still be an impressively fast transit time of 2 hours 26 minutes. The fastest plane you can take between BWI and BOS is 1 hour 20 minutes, or 3+ hours in practice. Even with some padding time at either end, such a train would be time-competitive with air while also being dramatically more energy-efficient (environmentally sustainable) and comfortable.While some preliminary feasibility studies have been conducted, this technology won't meaningfully come to the United States in the next 50 years without:
Still, there is no technical reason why this technology could not be deployed around the world in the next 25 years. That includes the United States. US construction costs are not inherently high; rather, we choose to keep them high for many of the reasons described in the thread linked above (and more).
I'm all for not needing to own a car in the US, although I love having one because of the travel freedom and privacy it provides.
And the more opportunities there are for people to not use cars, the more roads will be freed up for those who truly need or want to use them. Everyone wins.
New York to Austin? That's 1500 miles. That would be 7.5 hours on a nonstop, 200 mph train. No way in hell that's a reasonable route to choose. It would probably go through about 10 other states. I know an important part of Tildes is not just immediately shooting things down but I think the fact that you picked that as a route demonstrates perfectly how poorly the country is set up for that kind of cross country high-speed rail. I'm all for bringing it to the country and would love to use it that would just be an unreasonable trip. A direct route would spend quite a while in the Appalachians and an indirect route would probably add 500 miles.
This particular route doesn't advocate for itself in a city pair gravity model, as Austin has a small population relative to its distance from New York. Crossing state boundaries on rail is not a meaningful obstacle in and of itself though. Amtrak already operates several such lines. While infrastructure in any particular state requires some input from state governments, the issue is not coordination between states (an operational detail which should not, by itself, stymie a project) but rather funding for construction.
The United States is not "poorly set up" for inter-regional high-speed rail per se. It is not a chain of islands nor entirely mountainous (like Japan, which has the best HSR system in the world). Much of the geography is relatively flat, empty farmland. Many population centers exist in linear regional chains. The US is uniquely suited for high-speed passenger rail.
The High Speed Rail Alliance has some approachable materials about potential regional and cross-regional HSR corridors. The Northeast Corridor can and should be extended southward along the coast to major population centers in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere. Such a route would be time-competitive with long-distance flights if there were more federal investment into high-speed rail. It is likewise reasonable to conceive of a Southern Corridor linking population centers in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, etc.; and a Southwest Corridor linking Californian cities with nearby population centers like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Midwestern and Northwestern cities likewise have plenty of potential.
In the spirit of this example, a NY to Austin flight takes 4 hours plus 1–2 hours for airport nonsense. From a pure time-competitiveness standpoint, a high-speed train from New York to Austin could only compete with air travel if it operated at an average of ~300+ mph for a ~1700 mile route (~5.5 hours). That technology is sort of possible (modern Shinkansen maglevs have reached 375 mph). Realistically, a train with a theoretical max speed of 375 mph would not operate at that for an entire trip, or even 300 mph, but it technically could. Regardless, travel time is not the only metric passengers use to choose a mode. Simply for comfort, I would consider taking an 8- or even 10-hour train from NY to Texas over a 4-hour flight + airport dwell time. For example: it's not a regular trip, but I've taken the train from New York to Charleston, SC (a 13.5-hour journey) over a 2-hour flight because I do not qualitatively enjoy the experience of flying.
Within my lifetime, I would not be surprised to see maglev trains operating real routes with passengers at over 350 mph max somewhere in the world. 400 mph max does not seem out of the question. Accordingly, average speeds may increase considerably. While I'm sure planes could get faster in that time too, aircraft are inherently energy-inefficient vehicles and the economic operation of Concord-esque planes over land routes seems questionable.
Another obstacle I would add to your list is the federal, state, and local coordination that would have to happen to pull off some kind of interstate HSR. The US is so fractured when it comes to jurisdictional authority, and many initiatives are quickly politicized (often by the monied interests you mentioned). Even just building a subway system in a single metro area, you might have to cater to dozens of counties that don't really get along well. For example, Atlanta metro area is at least a dozen counties plus City of Atlanta, and the Braves stadium built several years ago was intentionally cut off from the MARTA system by Cobb County. That county has the deepest of roots in white flight from the city center during the 60s and 70s.
I always imagined this to be a math problem. I'll try to explain, please forgive me if I do a poor job.
Instead of traffic and freeway lanes, imagine water flowing through a pipe. The cross section of a pipe is a circle. A circle is an an area. As your flow rate requirements increase, you reach a point where your current pipe diameter becomes insufficient, so you increase the pipe diameter. When you increase the diameter of the pipe, the area increases in two dimensions, and therefore, at a squared rate.
Now imagine the traffic analog of this. The solution would be to not only widen the freeway but also build up. But instead we only build out. Our flow requirements need a two dimensional solution, but instead we only address one.
Clearly we can't build up. But this is why, I imagine, building out does not solve the traffic problem. Population increase requires an exponential solution. Adding lanes is a geometric one.
Also, exits and onramps are still only one, or perhaps two lanes wide at most. This doesn't change.
The real problem is that wider highway encourage people to drive. Growing upwards would make people more inclined to drive as well.
To use your comparison, widening the pipes would also increase the amount of water in them.
Here's a metaphor that's perhaps slightly more accurate.
Imagine you have a very large reservoir of water. This is the maximum possible demand for transportation; if everyone went everywhere they had the slightest desire to go to, the entire reservoir would be emptied. Pipes leading out of the reservoir correspond to actual mechanisms for travel, with the diameter of the pipe roughly corresponding to how cheap/convenient it is to take that mechanism.
Then, it should be obvious that if you enlarge a pipe, more water will flow into it. The reservoir of possible travel is enormous; no even marginally reasonable road system could drain it all, and so enlarging pipes will enable more water to flow into them (though, if you don't enlarge all the downstream pipes to actual travel destinations, obviously more water cannot flow out, and so you'll get congestion) but won't effectively provide overhead capacity.
So: road expansions do increase travel, though they don't improve congestion once they reach steady state (unless you massively overbuild).
The real problem with roads, though, is that the externalities are absolutely mind-boggling. Cars are polluting, loud, dangerous, inefficient (along multiple axes: energy, space, etc.), expensive, socially isolating, and on and on and on. Effective train service induces demand, too, but trains are so much better along every one of those axes that it's barely even a discussion if the increase in travel justifies the externalities; it always does.
(We don't have effective train service in the US because of car and oil industry propaganda and lobbying, not anything resembling rational social/economic decisionmaking.)
Regardless of people's thoughts on cars, that is indeed the goal of these initiatives from the perspective of the government. Very few are anti-car, nor trying to strive for a walkable city. In fact, they are giving subsidies to encourage more cars to be made, simply with an alternative fuel source to fossil fuels.
Not really. Driving a 6-lane highway is not fun. People need to get to where they are going.
We shouldn't be in the encouraging/discouraging business anyway. If the demand is there, and we're failing to fill it, that's it. Fill it. If you want more people on the trains and buses, then make them better -- I'd love a clean ride to where I am going, next to well-behaved passengers respecting one another. But buses and trains are neglected and allowed to become the ghetto option requiring acceptance of loud music, vape smoke, trash on the floor and seats -- or I get to sit in a traffic jam in my car.
I choose my car.
You might find the article an interesting read.
The article: “widening roads was so successful that more people decided to use them, making them congested again. Therefore we deem it unsuccessful because traffic sucks”
The article misses the point of widening roads. You don’t increase the diameter of a water pipe to speed up the flow, you increase diameter to allow more water through. In this, the roads are successfully allowing more traffic through at the same rate as they used to work with less traffic. That is a success even though the author seems to think increasing the rate was the goal
I do believe that increasing the rate is the goal. Why would you assume that is not the case? Being able to move around quickly and comfortably is a chief concern of most taxpayers, and I doubt very much that is not the goal of these infrastructures. We are talking about privately owned automobiles, not water or freight trains. Ignoring that in favor of a purely mechanical calculation is incredibly out of touch.
Commute is 30mins for 20 people, but there’s 50 people so commute is now 45mins. Increase lanes and commute is now 30mins for up to 70 people. You haven’t increased the rate, you successfully allowed more people to use the road correctly. Raising the rate would be increasing the speed limit of the roads so people could get there faster in 20mins, but that won’t help if your exceeding capacity of the road and its stop&go traffic. Now the problem here is that they keep exceeding capacity of the road even when they keep expanding the road. The population is growing faster than the infrastructure, so the solution is either to use infrastructure differently or expand infrastructure faster. Their argument is “if you build it they will come, so building it doesn’t work” and that’s incorrect.
I read it yesterday. I understand it completely.
It misses the point that the road was congested for a reason, and that reason was that there was then increasing demand to be at the other end of that road. So, they expanded the road, meanwhile the increasing demand to be on the other side of that road also continued to increase.
When the Interstates became a thing, we were 150 Million people and growing. We're 330+ Million people now, and still growing.
This is not to say that other things shouldn't ALSO be done, but that not expanding overwhelmed roads as a means to frustrate motorists is not fixing a thing but neglecting a thing.
The money used to widen a road, resulting eventually in exactly the same slow journey for everyone who was already using it, could just as well have been put into improving public transport that already exists or building new public transport, both of which would end in some real positive changes to people's journeys. So why widen the road?
Why improve public transport, instead? It already exists, like the road. People have chosen the road, and it is fully utilized, and the trend is toward more utilization, not less, so don't neglect it. Neglecting it will make it worse, not better.
Taking the idea of not improving the road to the extreme, let's delete a lane. Let's make it even worse. We'll fix the road by deleting the road entirely or restricting it to buses and emergency vehicles. Force everyone onto transit. Now everyone is -- happy? No, I don't think so. Instead, I think the next election will force these people out of power.
At the same time, make public transport a more attractive option -- not by making the roads worse, but by making transit better. Police the passenger cars, have more trips per hour, make it easy to park and buy a fare, make it an easy choice for the occasional commuter with assistance available. That can only help the road, too, but if the road is congested, something must be done involving the road.
I'm actually living this in two dimensions. Our bridges are old and 50 years out of date and spec and there is no mass transit that crosses them. But if I can make it to the other side, I can get on mass transit and ride into the major city nearby but parking is hard because it needs and app that I don't have, buying tickets is a mystery because I only do it once or twice a year, I need transfers and only this kind but not that kind of transfer is acceptable, and the ride is miserable because the behavior is poor and the litter is everywhere. But I often will suffer this because suffering the traffic into town is just as bad.
The real reason why it doesn't help is because cars aren't fluid and destinations aren't different.
People drive like shit and putting them on more lanes only leads to more disruptive lane jockeying, causing more slowdowns.
The people that are headed downtown are still just headed there, but it's not like downtown was also expanded. So all you've done is improved the time it takes to slam into the standstill traffic block trying to squeeze into the now undersized destinations.
In operational research flow of people/traffic is often modeled as a fluid. It's generally a good approximation. The general rule of thumb is that while increasing flow in a confined space will decrease pressure but increase turbulence. Traffic as we know and hate it is essentially turbulence (lane jockeys, people following too close hitting their brakes and causing a backwards shockwave in the flow). Your point is well made that the destinations often introduce bottlenecks. We need to add more parallel options in order to move more people efficiently.
Yeah, that's part of why I look forward to a switch to mostly fully autonomous transport in maybe 30+ years. When cars can communicate to one another in complex ways, reaction times aren't bound to human senses, and you don't have reckless people changing lanes every 20 seconds, you can really streamline roads in a significant way without any change to the roads themselves.
If population increase is exponential and the main reason demand for roads increases (I'd question both of these premises) then quadratic expansion is also not good enough
I hope you will forgive a bit of pedantry on my part here. When you increase the diameter of a pipe and get a quadratic change in area, that is called geometric. When you add another lane and get a proportional increase in capacity that is called linear. Neither is these is called exponential.
Perhaps we can still use your analogy. Traffic comes in big waves at rush hours, so perhaps the situation is more aligned with flooding and drout mitigation. Instead of building bigger pipes (highways) we should look for ways to decrease water consumption (make it easier for people to meet their needs without driving) and introduce flood control channels (public transportation which is fast and reliable enough to get commuters off the roads at peak hours).
You claim that but Omaha says otherwise
Did you mean to post a different link? I don't see any high-rise construction in that photo.
I think they were referring to GP comment of building the highway up (as in, elevating it), not high-rise construction.
I think there's a sense of American exceptionalism, always has been. There is some truth to saying we don't learn from others and we want to do things our way, but a less cynical take would be to say the issue, as always, is a tad bit more complex than that.
Other American industries do take notes from Europe or the East when it comes to architecture, fashion, trains even, believe it or not. Business is after innovation and development to get the edge over competition and it's not above looking across the ocean for new tips and tricks.
Private business can do this easily enough. They can afford to fly a European consultant for an extended stay to gain some insight into how Europe does it, but we're not talking about private industry here, we're talking about the Department of Transportation, a department that is controlled by congress and they in turn by voters.
Like any American government agency that isn't the Department of Defense, they're choked for funding which is one of the reasons why our bridges are in dire need of repair the nation over, our highways in the northeast peaked when cars went as fast as 45mph, and train tracks have become privately owned with strong lobbying power to prevent new tracks from being layed down (gross over simplification of another complex issue).
So funding is a major problem especially when states have a lot of say on how their roads are taken care of. Sometimes, in the case of Pennsylvania, money does make its way to the state. The capital approves the project and then money is then dispersed to whoever won the government contract. There's issues noted with these contractors playing a dishonest game where they stall the project, re evaluate and say they need more due to x y and Z complication, or say the project needs an extension due to x y and z reasons. That's not all of them, but it does happen due to the laws of the state, the power of the unions, and the structure of commonwealth versus a state with more power being in the hands of municipalities than concentrated in the capital.
New Jersey, by contrast, functions differently with funding coming in from higher state taxes and strict and clear laws saying where that money goes to (the roads) and what happens if workers attempt to pull what happens in Pennsylvania.
So funding, state laws versus federal laws, and as I mentioned, it's a government institution controlled by congress which means there's an element of politics involved. Politics bought by major car manufacturers that favor highway extensions over public transportation.
Even if we take that cynical take out, just playing politics, selling the idea of trains to the masses is a big ask considering how embedded the automobile lifestyle is in certain areas of this country. Several cities will have drivers endanger bicyclists before even thinking of using mass transit. Americans are in love with cars and we've been conditioned to be.
Is it too late? Nah, it's an active battleground. Some cities are doing great work on pushing alternate means of travel and regulating cars. New York recently announced a strategy to reduce car share services. Philadelphia is making headway with bicycle lanes and bringing back the old trollies in a new and improved way. And for as much shit as Amtrak gets, they're trying to expand their fleet and modernize their trains as best they can. They're the ones talking with Europeans on how to improve and design their trains.
But yes, ultimately there's pride. With blue collar jobs shrinking or being seen as undesirable, the few big contractors that win these bids know how to do roads one way and that way works. They have no interest in bringing in outside counsel because they also know the way that works for them needs to be repaired and they win that too. Regardless if it's asphalt or concrete, that's what their machinery is built for, that's what their workers know, the supply chains are built for it, and the money flows best when you keep it traditional. To take notes from other countries would mean destabilizing an already shrinking field and just like coal miners are still around, so too will these workers. Until they're forced to change, but that would require DoT funding which would require political reform which would require Americans to want it and right now they don't. They love their SUVs.
As a European, while the American scale of building might be larger due to more available space, this tendency is of building bigger to make it better is prevalent everywhere.
It goes against our knee-jerk reactions to scale down something to make it work better. Even if traffic throughput will actually go up from reducing speed limits for example. I've seen the public respond to such changes with an angry outcry many times in my own country, and I remember it being a topic in Top Gear at some point as well.
Some major road or another in England had its speed limit lowered to increase throughput and people were outraged at the idiocy. As far as I can remember the show didn't actually criticise it. I think they had someone come on that explained how it actually works like intended.
By lowering the amount of space needed between each vehicle due to the lower driving speed, you can get more vehicles through the same area, even as each individual driver might take a bit longer to get from A to B. Then again, how much longer does it take when traffic shifts from high speed, to lower speed in junctions and cause backups?
The gut reaction is "I need to spend even more time to get home? How is that helping anyone?"
And so we tend to get a lot of support behind suggestions of expansion. Even when it would be objectively better for the whole to do things on a smaller, slower scale despite it being at a slight inconvenience to the individual. Sometimes even just a percieved inconvenience, as fewer backups would mean it actually would take less time to get where you're going. It just feels better to go faster.
I think you really have it, Americans are in a suicide pact with cars.
Jakarta, Indonesia recently built a mass transit system from scratch with Japanese-style carefully designed infrastructure. It has been running smoothly and tickets cost like $0.50. Indonesia has a GDP per capita of $4,000. What do they have that we don't? I think incentive is probably the biggest factor -- driving sucks in Indonesia and is very slow compared to motorbike. Cities in America have dug a hole that it's very hard to climb out of.
I wonder how much of this is encouraging people to drive instead of taking public transportation (assuming it exists in the regions they are studying), as opposed to population increases. I would imagine that the studies that go into determining road infrastructure projects do include projections of traffic increases based on projected population growth.
For example, our section of the major highway (I40) was widened by 2 lanes, but the population also increased by 25% in the past 10 years.
So I'm curious how density and baseline traffic volume affects this. The State of Missouri has plans to expand I-70 to three lanes each way all the way from Kansas City to St. Louis. Right now, it's two lanes outside of both metros, even through the largest settlement in-between, which is Columbia (home of the University of Missouri). Admittedly, it can be a pain driving across the state, particularly when there are accidents or construction.
The CW, as stated in this article, is that adding lanes will eventually lead to more congestion. But it always seems to be related to urban areas. I've seen the effects here in Kansas City when some of our metro highways were expanded. But does the same happen in more rural areas, in the places between some metros, where traffic volume is typically lower to begin with? Is there any reason to believe that the CW isn't the CW in these places?