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.
High density is awesome right up until you have kids and then it's awful. I think a lot of young people who don't have kids have trouble understanding this.
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 love having kids that I don't have to drive because they can go to school or meet their friends by walking.
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.
plenty of non-Americans live in high density areas, have children and are very happy they don't have to drive them anywhere and everywhere all the time.
Yeah, it seems like a huge personality disconnect and critical lack of comprehension that other people simply dont like what they do. Ive spent a lot of time in excellent dense European cities and it still doesnt appeal to me. I dont like going out to bars, crowds, or general city life.
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.
Well meet me. I hated having to spend hours taking care of a garden instead of going for a bike ride.
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 all for options and understand that my preferences are not the same as others.
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 agree, but I think we draw different conclusions. I like both having housing and being treated when I am sick.
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.
People around me go less to the doctor/hospital for "small" things, mostly because of perception of how long and expensive one session can be. Sometimes it makes them neglect preventative things. More hospital would induce this demand and make people consult doctor more often.
If you ask people: would you vote for bonds for a highway expansion that will not make your commute better, but will add a lot more cars to the road, they will overwhelmingly say no.
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.
How about you ask people: Would you vote for bonds for a highway expansion that will not really make your commute better but will provide more accessible housing, bringing down housing prices, and thus allow you to have a bigger, nicer home for less money? (Even if you don't actually use the particular highway!)
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).
You're saying that highway construction encourages building of new housing, enough to use up all the new highway capacity, but that this doesn't bring down housing costs. This is quite an extraordinary claim that goes against basic economics. I don't believe it.
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.
Highway and car infrastructure are the most inefficient way to use land in urban environments. The higher density, the worse cars are. I can't really justify using cars except for interfacing with rural areas.
Physical systems don't care about your feelings. Live somewhere that ignores science and is financially irresponsible with infra dollars if that is your MO. We're not going to spend to build roads forever because people are ignorant and selfish, we can't even pay for the road infra we have today. And some folks are demanding more? Absolutely silly. "I'm not happy they're not building roads we cannot afford and will end up congested again, won't you think about my happiness!"
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.
Fossil energy is artificially cheap (the price its consumers pay does not even begin to pay for the negative externalities of producing and burning it -- and most of it goes into private hands that don't intend to use it for any kind of mitigation anyway).
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.
The induced demand argument is sort of crazy. It is saying you shouldn't build something because if you do, it will be extremely popular and widely used. We shouldn't build libraries - if we do, people will want to check out books. Instead, let's penalize people who read books. That will destroy the demand for books. Problem solved.
Yep, being simply “anti-induced demand” is pro-human suffering.
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.
Bad traffic is bad for industry/business. Boeing threatened to move some manufacturing out of the Seattle because they'd have parts delivery delays due to traffic from Everett to Renton. Eventually I think they moved some to SC, but not a lot because the WSDOT gave in and widened some road infra.
The Amtrak Cascades 518 goes from Everett (Tukwila) to Renton daily. Surely Boeing should do their part, show a good example for the community and take public transportation.
Sometimes people on the left are concerned about nepo babies and the outsized influence of the wealthy and powerful, sometimes people on the left are not concerned.
By the way, she is the daughter of Jack Lew who was President Obama’a Chief of Staff.