Just one more lane

I recently watched a video about autonomous car and the dude argue the tech isn't here yet, but it will work if we build a lane just for autonomous car and put every autonomous car on that lane.

Everyone in the comment basically calling him out for reinventing the train lol.

He seemed to casually ignore that at the end of the tunnel was still the concept of an offramp with a 25mph street that everyone was funneling to.

Of course he never planned on building it anyway. It was all just to distract from California High Speed Rail, because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.

I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn't help, and the term they use is "induced demand."

Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you're just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.

You've essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.

It's called "Induced Demand".

As a road widening project is completed, traffic is alleviated for a short amount of time. Then as time passes word spreads, or more people move to the city, or kids get older and get their driver's licences. More and more people know this widened road is the fastest route, so more people take it, thus undoing the improvement. Then the cycle starts again - either with the same road being widened again, or another one a block over, on and on until the world is covered in asphalt.

The solution is to make alternative transit more appealing than cars. Bikes and public transit already have significant financial benefits, but lack infrastructure to make it more viable in North America. Busses get stuck in traffic, bikes are forced to share lane space with cars or sidewalks with pedestrians.

If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.

Can you explain what this part means? What do you mean by category here?

I don't really like including pedestrians in there. Like sure, you can fit a bunch of people in a small area, but another point you shouldn't ignore is the throughput over time, and pedestrians are by their nature rather slow. Obviously if you're looking at shopping in a street lined by shops left and right, then that street becomes tailor-made for pedestrian traffic (and nothing else except perhaps bicycles). But public transport is much better suited for travelling any further distances, and that should be the main focus when deciding to ditch cars.

What is suburban rail, and how is it different from light rail?

Passenger per hour going where? If everyone is going from A to B, ok. But people need to go allover the place.

For me a 10min car ride is a 1.15h bus ride....

The remaining 17% just never stop

I mean we really don't need cities, just make hundred lane roads in their place

Going from where to where?

Part of it is that the organisations that design and build roads are also the ones who assess whether a road is needed. No big surprise that they "forget" about induced demand

I mean, that game does not actually properly stimulate transportation. The solution is:

1. multi use zoning to reduce commute distances
2. Make every mode of travel equally safe, convenient, and pleasant.

Buses and trains. That, or spaghetti interchange that are bigger than the rest of the city. Also, replace key arterial roads with a pedestrian path, call that path a park, and charge $20 for entry. That will easily fund all the city services and nobody will be too inconvenienced by having to pocket their car as they walk across the "park" to get between neighborhoods. Now excuse me, I have to go murder a little blue bird that won't shut up about the garbage piling up

Viable alternatives to driving

Delete the save and start again

One long meandering 6 lane road that makes up the entire city. I'm not even kidding, that's pretty much the optimal solution in the game.

If the highway increases in size, then more off ramps or more lanes in the off ramps are needed, which in turn need more lanes on the main street that connect to the off ramps. It's basic filtration system dynamics.

My town wants to widen a section of road near me. It's the only part of the road with only one lane each way

I'm torn. I know widening the road won't help traffic (right now that narrow bit reduces through traffic, making it a nice bit of road to drive) but if they do widen it, they will also add cycle lanes.

Alpharetta represent! Lol

My small city's main suburb to centre link is a 100km/h, two lane each way parkway, until it merges with a similar road from a different centre, grows to 3 lanes each way, and slows down sharply as it gets close to the centre

Between the last traffic lights and the spaghetti junction that merges it with a similar road it's free flowing and fine. The slow lane goes about 95, the fast lane about 100 to 110, with occasional slight slowdowns when a 95km/h car catches up with a slower one

But on that stretch there's about 300 metres of slow traffic due to a fixed speed camera. People going 95 who think their speedometer might be wrong the opposite way to which it is slow to 80; people doing 110 slow to well below 100, people following too close brake heavily, the fast lane ends up with a standing wave with a peak (or is it a trough?) of 60km/h

Then as you get past the camera it gets loud with even the slow cars rebelling against the slowdown give much throttle. That camera must cost so much CO2. I doubt it catches anyone except during the lightest traffic times. In even medium traffic you couldn't speed through that bit of road if you tried

😂

I think 3 more will be plenty.

You know what would work just as well, but without isolating people?

Mixed zoning and mass rapid transit

Let people work walking distance to their home, give those who need to go somewhere a way of going there quicker than traffic

It'd also be good to mandate easy availability of work from home for anyone in a job where that is practical

So many people commuting to jobs that could easily be done from home nowadays

I work in the freight industry in a position I can't do from home but when the whole work from home thing was in full swing I didn't get stuck in traffic except a few times when the local drawbridge went up

This is the most infuriating part. The best solution to these issues is to remove the need to move in the first place, and WFH for the people that want it and who can do it removes a huge amount of traffic with comparably little cost (company laptop, a screen and maybe a desk and chair, many of which could just be taken from the office).

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There is some in the California SFO bay area.

Bayshore Freeway

For a brief moment, you feel like you are driving\flying in the Jetsons future.

They just need to carbet bomb the fucking thing

There are other reasons.

Adding, say, a sixth lane doesn't increase capacity as much as adding a 2nd lane, because traffic jams are generally because of interactions. It's very rarely the straight road that has a capacity problem. Adding a sixth lane adds capacity, but also creates more interactions.

Also, car lanes have a shit capacity, which goes down massively when it's busy. Like you said, mass transit is vastly superior, but even a dedicated bus lane would help. In contested traffic, a car lane transports less than a single bus per hour.

That's the whole thing about induced demand though: People want to get somewhere and believe it or not, not everyone does so by car. But if you decide to add more lanes it temporarily improves traffic leading to those people that didn't take a car in the past or lived somewhere else because they knew traffic would be horrible if they moved, to actually commute by car now / go forth with their plan to move, increasing the amount of traffic again until it's as bad if not even worse than before. Cars don't scale. Cars aren't for mass transport and shouldnt be used for that. A city with a highway like in the picture really needs a transit system/a better one and fever lanes

Beyond the fact that adding five more lanes would still leave you with a horribly inefficient transport system, you also ignore that externalities that you are exacerbating by doing so. You're displacing thousands more people, worsening the division of communities, creating a lot of noise and air pollution, increasing car dependency etc

I always feel like these induced demand arguments are suggesting that adding more lanes means the same number of people are just choosing to do more driving. Maybe, as you add more lanes you create the infrastructure for a city to grow, and it adds more people which then fill up the new lanes. People aren't just going out and buying a new car or rolling an existing car out of the driveway that they were previously not using because a new lane is built. These are net new drivers, who would not be in that city if the infrastructure for them hadn't been built.

trouble is more lanes are useless if so many people are lane hogs.

Too many times have i been stuck behind someone doing 60 in an overtaking lane with with nothing in the slow lane

People on here love to shit on Houston's massive expansion of I-10 as a failure.

It worked great for years, but the population continued to grow. Having 5 fewer lanes on each side would just make things worse or increase sprawl by pushing people further out to thin the traffic. They ain't gonna mass-adopt bicycles in a city where the heat index is 115° + for months at a time

You think people advocating for mass transit want to remove all roads? Cause that's a nice strawman you have there

Try living in a place that isn't a shithole and your face will fall so quick. Newsflash, car is the best option in a car centric system.

Could the problem be that all the money went into building roads and car centric cities, and no money was spent on making mass transit better or rethink on how urban sprawl might cause massive traffic problems?