"Induced demand" as a reason not to do something is illogical.
The Green Revolution increasing crop yields induced demand for humans. Metro systems existing and building new lines induce demand, in some cases resulting in overcrowding. Building housing and offices induce demand in a location.
There is nothing wrong with improving a thing so that more people are able to do that thing.
I can understand concern about emissions without necessarily agreeing. But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.
>But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.
projects usually have a goal. especially multi-billion-dollar transportation projects. if the goal of the project aligns with the behaviour it is inducing, then induced demand is good. if the goal of the project (according to the people making decisions about funding it) contradicts the behaviour it induces, then induced demand is a bad thing and it's not going to get funded.
for a highway project, the goal isn't usually to allow more people to drive cars. it's to reduce congestion, improve safety, or to improve the flow of commercial vehicles through a corridor. the demand that more lanes induces is contrary to that goal, which is why the induced demand is a reason not to do it.
That depends on who you're talking to. If you're talking to people out in the periphery who want their towns to grow, induced demand is not a problem.
But for someone in an inner ring suburb, induced demand means that if the interstate near my house is widened, I don't get an easier commute. I just get more pollution and more noise and the same traffic misery as before.
Main issue is that traffic ‘misery’ (my term) is the constant. There is a maximum amount of gridlockedness before people naturally stop bothering to think they should begin using a given road (say, by moving farther out into the suburbs, or moving into some far suburb from outside the metro to take a job in the city). You can add 3 more lanes, and right away, more people believe they can make that lifestyle change, and we end up in a couple months right back where we started, with the same gridlock, but an increase in both miles driven and human time wasted, which most people would agree are metrics we don’t want to increase. People should live near where they work, or work near where they live. Let the market fix things — if roads are gridlocked and people can’t afford to live near, the jobs will need to move or to pay more.
this analysi simply ignores the upside. you say that both miles driven and human time wasted are metrics we dont want to increase, but people are clearly willing to trade them off. You say people should live near work, but at what cost?
In practice, they are public funds so it ends up being a public decision. Do people support spending $X so that Y people can obtain Z preference.
I'm off to my 1 hr commute right now, which I chose because it is preferable to my housing options near work. You couln't pay me enough to live in a condo downtown. I wish transportation infrastructure was even better so that I could live further and this is where I would like my taxes directed.
You have a 1 hour commmute because the good house you can afford is about 1 hour away. I would propose that if we (all taxpayers) added 6 more lanes to the road you drive to work, your commute would dip for a short while, more people just like you would move to the new suburbs beyond yours, that are now an (improved for them) 1 hour commute, eventually re-saturating the new wider road. Now your commute is, best case, the same, maybe a little worse, because if it gets better, more people will squeeze into your suburb. You also have the option to move even farther out, but your commute will on average always be roughly as bad as it is today because people in your situation tolerate about that level of 'misery.' (Again that's how i conceptualize the variable, not saying you're literally miserable).
Yes, I suppose stimulating another splash of suburbs out in the countryside does provide Y more people an opportunity to become long-distance commuters, but I'd say:
Surely there's some limit, right? You wouldn't say that California should bulldoze neighborhoods in all the closer suburbs in order to make I-80 30 lanes wide as it gets closer to the Bay, so that people can commute from new suburbs built 150 miles away... right? And if there's some limit to reasonable highway size, why not the current size. And if we want to further increase capacity to bring in humans to a city, build a bullet train and bring them in in a way that's more efficient than individual 6,000 pound SUVs for each commuter. That's where I'd direct incremental transportation dollars. That, or subsidize commercial development nearer population centers so that people who live 2 hours from the city have other options.
To clarify, I'm not dogmatic about Transportation methods, at least for work commuting. I would love if cheap mass transit took some load off of local roads and the highway system so that they could be more effectively used for tasks besides commutes.
I mostly wanted to highlight that there's a trade off of preferences at play. Using your terms, Urban living is also a misery for many people. If you want to talk about Misery, listen to some Millennials and Zoomers that feel priced out of ever owning a home or starting a family.
It seems like most of these induced demand arguments I see start from the conclusion they want (dense Urban living) and reverse engineers a justification.
As you point out, High speed rail also induces Transportation demand.
It's not that increasing highway bandwidth doesn't work (it does). This doesn't preclude the idea that alternatives solutions or a hybrid can't be more efficient.
The fact of the matter is, roads and highways required a lot of space for use and storing vehicles. Space that would otherwise go to homes or supporting mass transit or other more desirable infrastructure and uses, part of the puzzle why owning homes are so expensive but of course, not the only reason why.
You can add lanes, and more people can attain the life that they wish to lead.
You're not back where you started, because more people get to do what they want to do.
It seems as if you have the intrinsic axiom that people should travel less and the fact that they are not doing this is somehow wrong. Your model is wrong.
Allowing people to realize their desires is not necessarily a good thing or the role of government. The majority of people would like to pay 0 taxes and never pay for healthcare.
Sometimes it is. If you desire to be naked on the subway, the government will punish you.
You don't just get to do whatever you want. The government's job is to look after The Public and ensure that most people get what they need—not to ensure that all people get what they want.
That’s kind of a straw man argument because the original argument isn’t “it induces demand therefore it’s bad.” Induced demand is the explanation for why building more lanes (which costs money, especially if you include future replacement costs) doesn’t actually fix traffic, except temporarily. It also increases VMT (vehicle miles travelled) which has its own externalities (pollution, deaths, etc.) but that’s almost a separate matter, but helps explain why encouraging more driving and car based urban design (everything spread far apart, unproductive land use in the form of parking lots) isn’t a great idea either.
I didn't see anyone saying induced demand in and of itself is the thing being avoided, just that induced demand for driving caused by highway construction is being avoided, as this implies that traffic won't be alleviated by increased capacity.
Induced demand can be positive, yeah, but I think induced demand is more complicated. It concerns a positive feedback loop phenomena that leads to the saturation of a system beyond its intended capacity. Like more people taking the metro is good, but more people taking it than it can handle can degrade their impression if it.
Induced demand isn't necessarily complicated. The simple answer is transaction costs.
If people are willing to spend an hour in traffic to go to the beach, you are basically stuck with that travel time. You can only increase the number of people that end up going.
I meant complicated as in not necessarily good/bad. I agree it's not complicated in the general sense that it's an intrinsic part of supply and demand.
That said it's definitely more complicated in how to article is discussing it. The article is clearly talking about a Braess's Paradox-like situation where an individual's optimal decision incentivized by changes in the system is worse for more participants than the previous system, due to anticipatory and dynamic effects. This is inherently more complicated to measure and predict.
The Green Revolution increasing crop yields induced demand for humans. Metro systems existing and building new lines induce demand, in some cases resulting in overcrowding. Building housing and offices induce demand in a location.
There is nothing wrong with improving a thing so that more people are able to do that thing.
I can understand concern about emissions without necessarily agreeing. But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.