If you make more space for cars, and thus reduce congestion, the improved traffic conditions will attract more drivers until the congestion reaches some boundary threshold again where the majority of the remaining drivers are no longer willing to spend their time on the route.
The problem is that the demand is virtually indefinite for a nominally free supply.
The only cost involved is time―time that is wasted in congestion―which limits the amount of drivers willing to use the route during congested times.
Dynamic tolls would make the cost explicit.
If the cost of using the road at any given time would be high enough that there's barely no congestion on the road, i.e. practically everyone can cruise at the limit, then people could choose to pay for the privilege, postpone their trip to a later/earlier time slot when there's less congestion and the toll would be lower or zero, or omit the trip all together. Obviously, people wouldn't like this because they've used to getting free access, or "free" if you don't count the billions of tax dollars that go into widening and extending this utopia of endless freeway capacity.
It's more than people being used to free access. Tolls on a major highway like the 405 would effectively be a regressive tax - people need to get to work and in L.A. there often is no alternative. And people seem to generally agree regressive taxation is not a good idea.
Yep. People frequently have a strong aversion to paying directly for things, unfortunately. It's the same way with parking - people feel like they're getting all these huge quantities of available parking for free, but they're still paying for it, just hidden in the prices of goods, the increased distances between places, higher rents, and so on. But it's just so easy to make laws saying "thou shalt provide enough parking for everybody", so that's what you get.
There's another "or" .. or take the regular streets instead and cause even more local congestion. That's a real issue in LA where on some routes freeways can be only marginally faster than taking cut-throughs during rush hour.
We'll never know the value of 3 overpasses being made more earthquake resistant or the other safety improvements (typical NYTimes that they don't even research the issue). I hate these articles because they're so weak in journalism.
I'm pretty sure the dubious value of these improvements is dwarfed by the rise in vehicular violence that comes automatically with the extra traffic and miles driven as demand inevitably grows to fill the extra capacity.
This is of course a perfectly well understood phenomenon. They went ahead anyway.
A light rapid transit system has a capacity in excess of 20000 passengers per hour per direction.
A $1B investment in public transport can buy you a whole lot more than 1.7k vph. Hell, you could reserve that new lane for buses and transport a magnitude more people than those vehicles carry starting tomorrow.
> "Richard Close, 73, who has lived in Sherman Oaks for 43 years, said his daily commute to Santa Monica has become easier, and with the construction crews gone, he has come to appreciate the new 405. He said he leaves his office after 7 at night, to miss the worst of rush hour, and it takes about 75 minutes to go 15 miles, which he said saved him 15 minutes a night on his old commute."
So he went from going an average of 10 miles/hr to 12.5 miles/hr. Never mind the ever-increasing population of the area and this little boost in commute time is just going to evaporate as more people congest the highway. Ideally they'd take away a lane on each side and build a new Metro rail line. It might not alleviate traffic much, but it would give people an alternative to driving.
You can also compute a 15 minute savings a day as 50 hours a year (commuting 200 days a year) which means you get over 2 whole days of your life back. I would appreciate 2 more days of life a year.
I often read that it's pointless to widen/improve the capacity of roads because increased traffic will swallow the wins (in individual transit times).
I think that's the wrong way to look at it: I argue that the increased traffic throughput allows for economic growth in the region:
Individuals are of course likely to only think about latency/transit time (which hasn't improved, because of the increased traffic.). The society and the local economy cares about the throughput though.
You're treating it as if widening roads is the only possible use of the funds, and ignoring things like building out a mass transit network as an alternative.
Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. There's a limit to widening the roads. What happens in 50 years when the population is a couple of million people larger? More cars, more space dedicated to parking, etc.
It would be interesting to see economic data from areas near the Katy Freeway in TX with a total of 26 lanes and see if the economic growth is abnormally high around there.
This is actually how the original simcity handled its traffic algorithms and why as a kid I always failed to fix the problem :) Read about it years later in the SimCity Planning Commission Handbook (which I first found from a discussion here, coincidentally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168016)
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'm not looking forward to the similar articles about self-driving cars: "traffic still basically the same, people now just live spread out even further since total vehicle throughput is higher due to more efficient autonomous driving."
Yeah, that's probably step one. But I think people will reclaim time commuting if they're not actively driving--likely by working remotely (or personal entertainment). I hope that'll lead to changes in work patterns like working remotely most days or allowing people to shift their schedules even more.
I'm also hoping self driving cars will let people choose more appropriately sized vehicles and perhaps untether luggage from human transport (reducing the vehicle size even more).
You're not going to get around congestion, but I think we can break the norms of 9-5 sitting at your desk office hours. White collar jobs have changed dramatically in the past 40 years due to other forces; offices to cubicles to "open floor plans." But we've stuck to 9-5 and people expect me at my desk.
I expect when self driving cars are introduced congestion will be more or less unchanged. It will take 20 years or so for people to switch over, and during that time roads won't be expanded. The net benefit will be we won't spend much money on new roads for for a few decades.
Yep. Autonomous cars are going to remove many of the factors that discourage driving, such as parking costs, and licensing. Resultantly there will be a greater incentive to drive, and we'll could very well see an explosion in car use.
Traffic in Los Angeles is in a sad state. I have moved my house and office to within 2.5 miles of eachother so that I never need to see a freeway. I am fortunate to be able to do so. There is heavy traffic all the time, even when you least suspect it. It's no way to live.
For me it's a deal breaker -- I could never live in LA because of the traffic. I have relatives there, and I am reminded anew every time I visit how horrendous the traffic situation is.
Still, millions of people manage to make it work somehow, so I guess you eventually get used to it and plan accordingly.
It's really sad. There are so many good places, food, events, activities in LA, but the sprawl and traffic ensure that meeting up with friends or exploring the city is a difficult headache. It feels like punishment from a fable or something.
I have not yet lived in a metro area in the United States where traffic is not bad, particularly at rush hours. Try getting from Boston to Cambridge any time outside the early morning hours. Or Seattle to Tukwila.
Of course it wasn't worth it. Road improvements for cars incentivize driving, and so the result is more traffic.
Frustratingly the California DOT has studied this and has acknowledged this fact, so I suppose spending 1.6 billion on road improvements was a political decision and the experts were ignored? http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...
If you want to reduce traffic and get people to their destination faster you need to halt and/or reverse road network expansion and put all your money toward alternatives such as transit and cycling.
Sure. Freeways aren't art installations -- the freeway is built to service drivers. A newly expanded freeway can now service even more drivers before getting congested.
It would be pretty pointless to build a freeway, just for no one to use it.
> If you want to reduce traffic and get people to their destination faster you need to halt and/or reverse road network expansion
Those are two different things, one of which is inherently untrue by definition, for the same reason that "If you want faster internet, you need to halt or reverse fiber deployment" is untrue.
Traffic is transportation. If your goal is to reduce transportation, then sure, tear down roads and it will be much harder for people to move around. But that's going to suck for most of the people living there.
If your goal is to improve transportation, a freeway is one method of doing that. Improvements to public transit and/or bicycling infrastructure is another method of accomplishing that (obviously one you would prefer), but that doesn't make investments in freeways bad too.
It's possible to be pro-public-transit without being anti-personal-transit. LA can need a new freeway and more light rail, those two things are not actually in any conflict.
Transit and cycling would be awesome. I'd also like to see cities build more houses where the jobs are. And conversely, don't allow cities to build office space if there is not enough residential zoning to support those jobs.
It seems the root cause of traffic is a mismatch between jobs and housing, leading to sprawl and traffic.
Do you have any data showing cycling gets people to their destination faster and more efficiently? That sounds like a nightmare to me if implemented in large scale and will always be hampered by the low top speed of a bicycle.
>Of course it wasn't worth it. Road improvements for cars incentivize driving, and so the result is more traffic.
If it takes you 75 minutes to go 15 miles you already have plenty of incentive not to drive.
People keep moving to Southern California whether the traffic network can handle them or not. "Let's stop building roads so our home is a famously crappy place to live and people stop coming" isn't really a sound coping strategy.
The best alternative to cars is a motorcycle lane. For a place like Los Angeles where the lowest temperature is 55 degrees, year round motorcycling is feasible.
An area I wish the NY Times had dug deeper on, as this article seems fairly light compared to the local coverage of "did traffic on the the 405 get better? nope not really," is did seeing how little impact this massive highway project had help convince 70% of LA county voters to pour massively more money into public transit then ever before?
In related LA news, Metro is doing an amazing job massively expanding LA's transit footprint, in rail, bus, and local (e.g. bikes). LA voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M to further fund the plan:
The addition of the HOV lane is worth it IMO. The single-rider commuters of course are still kvetching because they are receiving a nominal change in their commute times. Carpools however are benefitting and carpooling is the needed behavior modification.
With their new focus on California (like their daily "California Today" section), the Times seems to be doing a better job covering California news than either the LATimes or the Chronicle.
[+] [-] yason|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that the demand is virtually indefinite for a nominally free supply.
The only cost involved is time―time that is wasted in congestion―which limits the amount of drivers willing to use the route during congested times.
Dynamic tolls would make the cost explicit.
If the cost of using the road at any given time would be high enough that there's barely no congestion on the road, i.e. practically everyone can cruise at the limit, then people could choose to pay for the privilege, postpone their trip to a later/earlier time slot when there's less congestion and the toll would be lower or zero, or omit the trip all together. Obviously, people wouldn't like this because they've used to getting free access, or "free" if you don't count the billions of tax dollars that go into widening and extending this utopia of endless freeway capacity.
[+] [-] anatari|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snrplfth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|9 years ago|reply
There's another "or" .. or take the regular streets instead and cause even more local congestion. That's a real issue in LA where on some routes freeways can be only marginally faster than taking cut-throughs during rush hour.
[+] [-] AdamN|9 years ago|reply
http://dot.ca.gov/dist12/DEA/405/index.php#Technical
[+] [-] revelation|9 years ago|reply
This is of course a perfectly well understood phenomenon. They went ahead anyway.
[+] [-] cgrubb|9 years ago|reply
So capacity increased maybe 10k a day, or 750M over a 20 year period. Makes the $1B investment seem reasonable.
[+] [-] revelation|9 years ago|reply
A $1B investment in public transport can buy you a whole lot more than 1.7k vph. Hell, you could reserve that new lane for buses and transport a magnitude more people than those vehicles carry starting tomorrow.
[+] [-] DrScump|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffic|9 years ago|reply
That is the very nature of Induced Demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand).
[+] [-] snrplfth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cezary|9 years ago|reply
So he went from going an average of 10 miles/hr to 12.5 miles/hr. Never mind the ever-increasing population of the area and this little boost in commute time is just going to evaporate as more people congest the highway. Ideally they'd take away a lane on each side and build a new Metro rail line. It might not alleviate traffic much, but it would give people an alternative to driving.
[+] [-] ariwilson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johansch|9 years ago|reply
I think that's the wrong way to look at it: I argue that the increased traffic throughput allows for economic growth in the region:
Individuals are of course likely to only think about latency/transit time (which hasn't improved, because of the increased traffic.). The society and the local economy cares about the throughput though.
[+] [-] majormajor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yason|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpedroso|9 years ago|reply
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_T...
[+] [-] mysterydip|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masterleep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majormajor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamjernst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfranz|9 years ago|reply
I'm also hoping self driving cars will let people choose more appropriately sized vehicles and perhaps untether luggage from human transport (reducing the vehicle size even more).
You're not going to get around congestion, but I think we can break the norms of 9-5 sitting at your desk office hours. White collar jobs have changed dramatically in the past 40 years due to other forces; offices to cubicles to "open floor plans." But we've stuck to 9-5 and people expect me at my desk.
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonwilk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duderific|9 years ago|reply
Still, millions of people manage to make it work somehow, so I guess you eventually get used to it and plan accordingly.
[+] [-] blt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmoche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|9 years ago|reply
Frustratingly the California DOT has studied this and has acknowledged this fact, so I suppose spending 1.6 billion on road improvements was a political decision and the experts were ignored? http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...
If you want to reduce traffic and get people to their destination faster you need to halt and/or reverse road network expansion and put all your money toward alternatives such as transit and cycling.
[+] [-] maxsilver|9 years ago|reply
Sure. Freeways aren't art installations -- the freeway is built to service drivers. A newly expanded freeway can now service even more drivers before getting congested.
It would be pretty pointless to build a freeway, just for no one to use it.
> If you want to reduce traffic and get people to their destination faster you need to halt and/or reverse road network expansion
Those are two different things, one of which is inherently untrue by definition, for the same reason that "If you want faster internet, you need to halt or reverse fiber deployment" is untrue.
Traffic is transportation. If your goal is to reduce transportation, then sure, tear down roads and it will be much harder for people to move around. But that's going to suck for most of the people living there.
If your goal is to improve transportation, a freeway is one method of doing that. Improvements to public transit and/or bicycling infrastructure is another method of accomplishing that (obviously one you would prefer), but that doesn't make investments in freeways bad too.
It's possible to be pro-public-transit without being anti-personal-transit. LA can need a new freeway and more light rail, those two things are not actually in any conflict.
[+] [-] ulkram|9 years ago|reply
It seems the root cause of traffic is a mismatch between jobs and housing, leading to sprawl and traffic.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
If it takes you 75 minutes to go 15 miles you already have plenty of incentive not to drive.
People keep moving to Southern California whether the traffic network can handle them or not. "Let's stop building roads so our home is a famously crappy place to live and people stop coming" isn't really a sound coping strategy.
[+] [-] nashashmi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majormajor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ariwilson|9 years ago|reply
http://theplan.metro.net/
[+] [-] CodeWriter23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickv|9 years ago|reply