More roads simply means congestion in more places.
3:45 pm on a sunny Thursday. What’s usually a 30-minute tootle home from a weekly lecturing gig dissolves into 75 minutes of record-setting swearing. If my arteries were a tenth as clogged as this poorly named “expressway”, my name would appear in this publication’s obituaries before this story.
Problem 1: Build it and they will come, then clog it and double-park there The concept’s called induced demand. Speck says it’s what happens when you increase the number of lanes and/or roads to lessen the “time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reduction in congestion.”1 Induced demand is hardly some new theory. Speck harped on it in an earlier book from 2000, which itself only reiterated others’ seminal studies from 1993.
If not driving’s not a solution, then pay more to drive on toll roads. At least they begin to acknowledge that public roads aren’t ‘free’. Here in the GTA, Highway 407 charges $4.20 per trip for light vehicles and $50.00 for heavy multiple unit vehicles. But the ride is almost always easy and fast. Remember, induced demand takes just a few years to swallow any new road when drivers assume roads should be free. Here in the GTA, Highway 407 opened in 1997.
Being one of those drivers driven off the road by congestion, I left at 6 am and avoided traffic. But at 5 pm, when the 400 was slower than a depressed civil servant, my friend Phil entered the destination to Waze, which, using real-time traffic data, calculated that leaving the highway would save him 45 minutes. Great!
Speaking of faulty assumptions, engineers often equate more cars flowing through per hour with efficiency. To move more cars faster they engineer streets to behave like highways. That means more lanes and wider lanes. Next, also in the name of efficiency, engineers remove obstacles that prevent drivers seeing potential hazards. Things like trees, inclinations, dips and curves. Stuff that makes life in the city more enjoyable.
Second, roads in cities exist not just for cars, but bikes and the ambulatory, be they drivers who’ve just parked, nannies with strollers, dog walkers, joggers. You know: PEOPLE.
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