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Comment by jesstaa | Hacker News Reader

Urban highways solve a political problem. When you have voters that spend a hour or so a day stuck in traffic it's really easy to sell them the idea that a highway will reduce traffic congestion without them having to change anything about their daily routine (ie. take public transport, bicycle, walk)

Since the highway will only reduce traffic congestion for a short time it's something you can sell to the voters again at the next election.

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When you have voters that spend a hour or so a day stuck in traffic it's really easy to sell them the idea that a highway will reduce traffic congestion without them having to change anything about their daily routine

That's disingenuous. I commute by car exactly because public transport takes longer to most of my clients, even when including structural and incidental traffic jams.

It's happened exactly three times in the last five years that my car commute took longer than public transport would have taken. And on one of those occasions (excessive snowfall), most trains were canceled too.

That only speaks to the inadequacy of the public transportation network where you live though, which is exacerbated by the construction of urban highways instead of a better mass transit network.

It's probably more that my situation doesn't match the topic under discussion. I live in an urban area, whereas many clients are in the rural areas surrounding it. Servicing those areas with mass transit would be prohibitively expensive: there is no mass traffic to service.

Good mass transit that got cars off congested roads would speed your kind of journey just as much as building urban motorways, and be more effective overall.

No it wouldn't, it would just allow more people to move even further out! I call this the law of constant misery; people continue to move further and further out as far as a roughly 45 minute commute will allow them. The better a transit system gets, the further the reach of the roads to the city center in 45 minutes, the bigger the city grows.

There's nothing that can be done to stop this without extremely draconian laws or turning public roads into very expensive toll roads, without ripping the roads out as Portland did.

Author here.

The principle you refer to here is Marchetti's constant. It's the idea that people will make decisions about where to live and work to achieve an average commute time of 30 to 45 minutes in general. So the faster transport options are, the farther from their workplace people will live.

And yes, IF you already have a complete network of urban freeways in a metropolitan region, THEN using fast transit options like commuter rail or commuter buses can help take people off of the highways, freeing up space for more people living even farther away. A good example of this "transit as highway capacity extension" approach is the commuter rails in North American cities that only go downtown during peak AM and go to the suburbs in peak PM, and not running the rest of the day. These forms of transit clearly exist to take pressure off of the highways at their most congested time, to free up the space for even more cars and perpetuate highway-oriented development.

Good transit options in the absence of highways have a different impact. And as you mentioned, transforming highways into expensive toll roads also can serve to deter sprawl built along them.

The comment you're responding to is about the political impetus for ever-increasing road construction to combat congestion.

Your "reverse" commute to exburbs/rural areas is likely not impacted much by congestion. You actually have a good reason to use a car.

That unending column of cars you see always headed in the opposite direction on your commutes is the actual subject at hand here.

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