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.
The highway has greater capacity, and that’s a good thing. The congestion would be far worse if it hasn’t been widened, and the increased capacity helps the local economy.
This is an article also about Houston’s freeways and traffic; induced demand is the reason congestion is not lessened in these situations:
The infuriating bit is that the evidence is pretty clear: these are deeply misguided policies. While it seems intuitive that the solution to three lanes of gridlock is to spread the same number of cars over four lanes, it fails because of a phenomenon called induced demand.
Please stop adding more lanes to busy highways—it doesn’t help
This is explored extensively in the book ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)’ by Tom Vanderbilt. I highly recommend it; it’s excellent and very informative about this widely misunderstood topic.
Getting more cars off the road using things like better public transportation is the answer here, something that is sadly lacking in Houston…yet they keep widening roads. It never helps, and it never will.
By definition, if the road has more capacity, it is helping. It just isn’t helping enough to eliminate traffic. Unless you’re claiming that the larger freeways have the same capacity as the smaller ones, which doesn’t really make sense.
I think you’re intentionally missing the point, so I’m gonna go about my day now. But feel free to check out either of the sources I linked if you want to learn why bigger roads don’t reduce congestion. :)
I think adding lanes helps up to a point but after that just creates more problems. Here are a couple problems with adding lanes:
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It assumes that everyone drives efficiently. For example, that everyone knows exactly where they’re going and if they’re in the left lane to go fast that they start migrating over to the right lane well in advance of their exit. But this is not true and instead causes people to panic swerve across 10 lanes while slowing down in order to get to their exit. Anyone who has been driving for a few years has seen this happen. Multiply this problem by the number of idiots on the road, and again by the number of exits. And having more lanes makes this a bigger problem because it has a higher capacity for more of these idiots to exist, and more “obstacle” lanes between them and their goal (not to mention more victims in those right lanes).
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If you don’t expand the lanes across all the exits from this super highway, traffic will still back up because the traffic cannot smoothly flow out to the rest of the city where people are trying to go. This backs up traffic on the highway itself. It’s like having a clogged artery. And expanding those roads is not always an option if it’s already in a heavily developed part of a city. If there’s no room due to buildings, you simply cannot add lanes.
In addition to the zoning and walkability suggestion someone else made, I would propose that more alternate routes (even if not as direct a route) can help offload traffic especially at peak times, and is a much more feasible solution in the short term for our country that is built around private vehicle transportation. This is also an effective solution if you add tolls to one of those routes and increase the speed limit. It has the side benefit of funding other city projects, and acts as a sort of tax for people who want to go fast. The lazy implementation of this that I’ve seen in some places (including in Texas) is to add toll express lanes on the same highway. I see this as mostly a money grab but does not help much, if at all, with congestion. It’s more like a streaming service raising their subscription costs just because they can.
Just think about this for a minute dude.
Who are people going to belive, civil engineers and planning strategists that research this topic for a living and have done for decades, or some random on lemmy?
Driving is the most expensive and dangerous way to get around, ironically championed by the party of “fiscal responsibility”.
Train tracks would have been cheaper to build (and maintain), take up far less space and be far better for the local economy. Hell, just investing the money on buses would have been far more efficient.
but most people can
and, ironically, the commute would be better for drivers too, if most people were to take public transport, since roads would be less crowded (and only with people who enjoy driving, instead of people who are forced to drive)
So they can use the thinner roads, which will be way less crowded when everyone else that can is using public transportation.
Did you really think this was a coherent response? It’s not like all roads are being removed.
That’s what makes sense intuitively, but adding lanes doesn’t solve congestion. Investing in more mass transit and improving walkability through more thoughtful zoning would be a better place to start.
No, I’m sorry, but the reason congestion persists is induced demand. That with a wide open highway, more people use the highway until congestion returns. This means that more people are able to use the highway at the end of the day. Invest in mass transit and walkability, absolutely, but without appropriate transportation infrastructure problems will appear.
Yeah I mean you’re kind of just re-framing point. Yes the mega highway has the ability to move more cars, but still the end result after 5 years is it’s actually taking longer to move cars than before (at peak travel time). So what if it’s due to induced demand, we just want to solve the problem of getting people from point A to B, and adding more lanes is a very inefficient transportation method. It’s a massive waste of resources when moving around in a car is so costly compared to public transit.
