Bad traffic will expand to fill the road you give it (induced demand). You destroy demand instead.
The conclusion people seem to draw from this is that widening the highway didn't help. This is wrong.
4 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph is still creating twice the value of 2 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph. With the 2-lane highway you were just forcing half the people to divert to other roads or to give up on their plans entirely. With 4 lanes you're serving twice the people.
But if the highway is still full it implies that there is still demand for more travel. By refusing to widen the highway further you are still forcing some number of people into a worse outcome where they aren't able to exercise the travel that they wanted.
I'm all for public transit alternatives (I personally love taking trains when I can), but the goal should be to make the public transit better, not to make the highways worse.
Adding highways creates more traffic by telling developers to put housing in the newly accessible land.
The point of building and expanding highways isn't to reduce traffic, but enable more people to go places. Zero Highways would mean Zero traffic. a $1000 toll would mean zero traffic.
Maybe what you're describing is a positive outcome?
You can't be "we can't build roads because it will cause houses to be built" and "it's a crisis that nobody can afford a house" at the same time.
Highways proscribe a particular way in which to build housing. Low density sprawl. Which results in horrible commutes people hate.
We don't need that. We need high density transit. Which results in high quality of life.
The reason housing isn't built is because cities abuse zoning laws. It's time for states to take back zoning regulations.
If I had no kids I'd love to live in a downtown high rise apartment. Really wish I had done so when I was younger. Among a lot of things I wish I could go tell my younger self to do...
I like privacy, having a workshop, chickens, fruit trees, and a garden. I like having a huge kitchen, a pantry, a meat smoker, and hosting dinner parties. I like having room for an off-road vehicle and camping gear.
It is hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head when someone tells me how much better dense urban living is. I have never met anyone IRL that would happily trade their suburban home for urban life.
Also you can have a workshop while having high density.
Suburban is probably the worst of both world for me: expensive, impractical and not even quiet/isolated enough for when you need that. I'd rather have a flat in a european city + a small rural house in the middle of nowhere than a house in US suburbia.
All this to say that we don't have to agree on what is best for everyone because everyone do not value things the same way.
Im mostly rejecting the idea that this is a "solved problem" and dense flats are the best for everyone.
It probably isnt worth trying to communicate the folks in this thread that think everyone should be forced to live in government owned flats which are assigned based on family size
I'd rather have that than spending half an hour or more driving 2 overweight kids to school twice a day, then having to taxi everywhere they want to be after school.
There is only one reason why the public agrees to highway construction: the idea that their commute will get better. But it won't after a few years.
The highway will always be full! That's induced demand. If you have a highway to a desirable destination people will build out along it until it's full. You can expand that highway as much as you want, it will always be full after a few years.
This isn't a solution. It's just a way to design horrible cities that punish drivers with stressful, unproductive, and long commutes.
You cannot win by adding highways. You can only win by not playing that game.
If people are filling up the new lanes it's because they are getting value out of it. It's making people's lives better, even if the traffic doesn't go faster (though in many cases, it does).
Housing cost does not go down with highway construction.
No. It's making people's lives worse. They could have better lives with transit.
I think you and others have convinced yourselves that this is true because you like the conclusion: that we should stop building highways. But it's a tortured argument that doesn't make basic economic sense.
> They could have better lives with transit.
Then build the transit! I am all for building better public transit! I am all for dense urban development, downtown residential highrises, mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, etc. We can do all of these things -- and also expand highways. With all the options available, people will choose what's actually best for them. If you're right, then people will stop using the highway and it won't be congested anymore. Win win!
I really do not believe in refusing to give people what they want because we think they'd be better off with something else that we're also not building.
Bringing morality into an economic, fluid dynamics, and behavioral argument is not helpful, and the private car entitlement (which is demonstrably unaffordable and unfunded long term) is wild.
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
https://pirg.org/articles/america-cant-handle-more-highways-...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/13/we-could-never-afford...
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/road-funding-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/business/energy-environme...
This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at the very least we shouldn't deliberately make it worse by also artificially juicing demand in one of the main fossil-fuel-burning sectors of the economy (any more than we already are). Every petroleum-powered mile not traveled (and energy is to a certain extent fungible, so in principle this also applies to electric cars burning "free" solar energy) is a win for human civilization.
This isn't hippy-dippy environmentalism, just soulless Chicago economics: mispriced commodities do real damage to a political economy, and in the globalized era, there is effectively only one political economy anymore.
I agree that there could be alternatives to widening highways that will make everyone better off but I rarely see all the tradeoffs being carefully considered.