Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?
www.nytimes.com
With billions of dollars available to improve transportation infrastructure, states have a chance to try new strategies for addressing congestion. But some habits are hard to break.

For critics of widening projects, the prime example of induced demand is the Katy Freeway in Houston, one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.

Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.

Matt Turner, an economics professor at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 study on congestion, said adding lanes is a fine solution if the goal is to get more cars on the road. But most highway expansion projects, including those in progress in Texas, cite reducing traffic as a primary goal.

“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history,” Dr. Turner said.

  • cheery_coffee@lemmy.caEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    Switch demand for congestion and there are different solutions.

    1. Adjust off ramps that back up onto the highway, these cause congestion and indicate the downstream artery is too small for demand.
    2. Reduce average lanes to off ramps, each lane change adds braking slowing traffic
    3. Enforce and educate people to merge properly, obliterate people who merge too late out of selfishness with a space laser. Zipper or die.
    4. Increase carpooling and transit to the point it’s actually usable. In practice this means making your local council commute by transit only.
    • clutchmatic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      #3 Americans are too selfish to zipper. The proper American solution is to install special traffic lights mounted with cameras that fine whoever does not zipper on the right time

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, traffic congestion is a lot more complex than it seems. If you alleviate one bottleneck, you can create 15 more (because now more traffic flows through the “fixed” area, stressing everything else) where some of those new ones interact with each other in a way that slows traffic more than the original bottleneck did.

      You need to consider the endpoints as well as the middle. If you make it easier for people to get to their destination and off the road, then traffic will improve. Problem is, destinations are all over the place, so even that can end up causing more congestion if it also enables higher throughput that other roads it feeds into can’t handle.

      Mass transit experiences the same thing. Not to say that there’s no point in emphasizing it, just that it won’t get rid of the problem entirely.

      • cheery_coffee@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Playing a rail-base game of Factorio is a great introduction to this.

        How hard can it be, it’s just trains right?