Caption: Photo collage of a beach in Alexandria, Egypt, showing a progression in 3 images:
Alexandria "Problem" - empty beach + walking street + 6 lane road with medium traffic + dense mid-rise buildings (likely housing)
Alexandria "Solution" - empty beach (doesn't seem to matter) + narrower walkway or sidewalk + 10 lane brand new and empty road + tiny sidewalk + the same buildings
Alexandria "Results" - crowded beach + crowded beach walkway + traffic jam on the 10 lane road
Playing factorio has given me a deeper appreciation of how much adding lanes doesn't help traffic.
Adding an extra conveyor belt to your factory line won't help you process materials any faster. You have to add more processing elements, widening the belt lines does absolutely nothing!
Why's there no one on the beach in the "problem" pic? Kinda seems like one was taken in the slow season and the other was taken in peak rush hour of the busy season.
There's a few good mini-documentaries on YouTube starting from 1950s America through to now and how the USA is a robust, evidence-rich, long-term case study of why this is bad infrastructure. It's basically a modern no-brainer now. Thanks to the US we know not to do this. US cities are now slowly trying to undo decades of deep-rooted bad infrastructure choices based around reliance on big road networks.
Surprise, surprise, car manufacturers were a big player in influencing the initial decision 🤣
Having lived in metro areas that have worked on alternative transport solutions, I can tell you it's sooo much better and easier to live with. And I love cars—own three. But they're just not the convenient option quite often.
I’d love for my car to be the inconvenient option but we’re just miles and miles away from that. Sure I could take the metro, it’d cost me more and I’d still need the car to drive to the metro station. Add an hour or so to what any given journey would have taken by car, throw in a handful of sweaty, rude and aggressive co-travelers and you have the answer as to why I drive everywhere.
Yeah, but thats exactly the problem. We know stuff like that is bad, but American cities were built so fundamentally flawed, that we cannot fix the car dependency without completely rebuilding them, which is obviously not an option
Yeah, that's the poor infrastructure summarised right there. There are minimal alternatives and they're shit ones. It forces the car to be the only choice, which is fucked if the roads are fucked because there's no other option to go with.
I like to explain this phenomenon as the free cake effect.
Say you set up a food stand with a sign "free cake". It doesn’t matter how many cakes you baked, people will keep showing up until all the cake is gone.
An infinity wide road has no traffic, but the first time you try to connect your magic highway to real exits and local streets, you are stuck again.
By this I'm pointing out that it isn't the road itself causing traffic in isolation, it's the real world bottle necks anywhere this new highway connects to things.
Add in induced demand (people taking new trips) and now you have more people trying to fit down the same offramps, local streets and parking lots than you did in the first place.
An infinitely wide road couldn't be effective unless it was also infinitely long. Cars enter and edit at one edge, and transferring lanes reduces capacity, so adding lanes had diminishing returns.
all you’ve illustrated is that the only place my statement doesn’t apply is in a theoretical (and impossible) fantasy, but you do then go on to explain the means by which what I said is true.
Not if all people that would possibly go on the road can fit on it. And I’m 100% positive that this one extra lane will accomplish that, trust me broo!
I taught someone from Egypt how to drive here in the UK. She would absolutely attest to this 😂 She'd tell me that when she drove in Egypt it was a case of having faith in God getting you to your destination. She also said God must have gotten sick of driving for her so He provided her a good instructor 🥰
Edit: I also just realised where I'm posting! Being an instructor, I guess I'm the devil incarnate in this community 👀
Where are you thinking? I visited London recently and while the underground is cool and efficient, it has quite a depressing atmosphere. I'm wondering how it can be done better
Try Berlin. It's barrier free. All those bloody barriers you gotta stick your ticket through suck and lead to big traffic jams. Everyone basically has to pay for the upkeep of those things too. Seems like it would be expensive and I definitely hate the shuffle you get in when it's busy.
Berlin also has it's problems though. Just different ones.
London is awful. Old trains, super expensive, unreliable service. My subway to the airport was delayed by 25 minutes a month ago with no warning or clear idea when it was going to arrive. Thankfully I had some time before my flight otherwise it would have been a disaster.
Virtually every country does it better other than the US. Paris is amazing. Very cheap, beautifully designed stations, very efficient. Trains are meh but they're fine.
Japan is a bit weird for having multiple private companies operate subways in the same city, but the reliability and quality is pretty amazing.
This is one of those arguments that never made sense to me. People like to say that adding lanes just creates more traffic, but what is the proposed mechanism? Does anyone suppose that people who didn't want to go somewhere suddenly remembered that the highway added more lanes, and then decided to go for a cruise?
It suggests to me that the demand for transit far exceeds capacity, or that this traffic would otherwise have just taken a different route. Probably some of both.
That's not an argument to just build 15 lane highways everywhere, just that the common form of the supply creates demand argument seems implausible.
The idea behind induced demand is the easier and more convenient/cheaper you make a method of transit the more people will use it. So if you make driving easier by building a super highway people will default to that whole if you build put a rail network that gets peole to where they need to go they'll take that. Transit being crowded in some ways is a good thing as it shows the route you've got is good but could prbsky do with a capacity upgrade. Of course roads being crowded is bad due to massive space inefficiencies and environmental issues.
Even if the same number of cars are on the road, it is likely that the bottleneck is somewhere else in the city, so adding 20 lanes won't help the issue anyway.
This like complaining the bathroom is clogged and your solution is to make the showerhead bigger.
If you're looking for a job and you see an opening but it's going to take you more than an hour each way to get to and from work, doesn't that make that job less desirable than jobs that are closer by?
Conversely if you're looking for a new place to live aren't you going to consider places that are closer to work to be more desirable?
Suddenly there's road expansion and a house that used to be 2 hours drive away is now 30 minutes drive from you. So you buy the house.
This would all work out great if you were the only one that thought this. But unfortunately there are many many more people that will also get a house or find a job that's further way, because it's only a 30 minutes drive now. So now more people are using the highway and that 10 lane highway is clogged, and that commute time starts going back up. But now you have a mortgage now and so you're stuck. Everyday in your car for more than an hour each way again.
Cars are simply an inefficient way to move a lot of people. A highway expansion only temporarily solves the problem, but when the highways work well, more people use it and those inefficiencies rear their ugly head again.
They absolutely should, however as with most people in power they use cars and therefore see only the traffic jams. And of course everyone knows the best solution to traffic is just building one more lane.
The whole comparison is stupid without time and date stamps. First looks like it's an early morning before most people are out and about. Third looks like there's an event at the beach. Second is strange, maybe the road was just completed or shut down or the cars were edited out.
All the three looks bad to be fair, side with buildings probably businesses cannot attract that much customer which likely come from the beach since there is no way to go to the other side. Though first one is still bearable.