Please Stop Adding More Lanes to Busy Highways--It Doesn’t Help
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
You often hear people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I bring this up because of an interesting-if infuriating-thread I read this morning about Texas' plan to widen I-35 as it cuts through the heart of Austin.
Unsurprisingly, the state wants to build more lanes, which it thinks will ease congestion. At some points, this could leave I-35 as much as 20 lanes wide; this will require bulldozing dozens of businesses along the way. An alternative that would have buried 12 lanes of the highway in two levels of underground tunnels was apparently considered too costly.
But it would be wrong to single out this 8-mile proposal as an outlier.
[...] The infuriating bit is that the evidence is pretty clear: these are deeply misguided policies. While it seems intuitive that the solution to three lanes of gridlock is to spread the same number of cars over four lanes, it fails because of a phenomenon called induced demand.
Reducing traffic might make sense if the only variable were the number of road lanes. But it isn't-as Ray Kinsella was told in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." Except this time, "they" refers to more cars. When people know a particular route is congested, some of them will choose not to drive. But once you tell everyone that you've added more lanes to that road, that latent demand has an outlet-at which point the traffic jams return, but now with even more cars in them.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.