Widening Highways Doesn't Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?
Houston, Katy Expressway and LA, Interstate 710, recent expansions are examples, per article. The takeaway - ... although adding lanes can ease congestion initially, it can also encourage people to drive more. A few years after a highway is widened, research shows, traffic — and the greenhouse gas emissions that come along with it — often returns.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/widening-...194039848.html A 26-lane expressway (Katy) seems frightening... |
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The Katy Freeway in Houston certainly flows a lot better than it did 10-15 years ago before they widened it. It's also built to accommodate commuter rail in the future (two center most lanes) when the politics warms up to it. People in Katy are not keen on the unwashed masses commuting back and forth by mass transit.
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I notice the concept of "induced demand" is never applied to public transit.
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Everyone in urban planning circles knows about induced demand, and the common trope about adding lanes not lessening congestion. But if you add capacity to a roadway, and it remains as congested as it was before, aren't you still moving more cars/people? And doesn't that represent an improvement in regional mobility? Genuine question.
For example, let's say there's a small two lane freeway that's almost always congested during rush hours. The whole freeway gets expanded to 3 lanes, but within a year of opening the expansion, it's just as congested as before during rush hours. Is that a failure, even though that freeway is carrying 33% more traffic? The traffic is presumably shifting from other places, thus removing congestion from other surface streets. Isn't that a win, too? I'm far from a freeway advocate, but I think the soundbite about additional freeway capacity not reducing congestion is a little disingenuous. Freeways absolutely get needlessly expanded all the time. But sometimes, I believe it is necessary. You have to have right-sized infrastructure or your city/region will not function. Los Angeles has huge freeways, but until recently had very little rail transit. NYC has relatively small freeways, but a vast rail network. Replace LA's freeways with surface streets, or replace NY's rail with bus lines, and both cities would obviously grind to a halt. |
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And of course is that the elephant in the room is that large highways create more pollution (both air and noise), cause far more energy usage, have large impermeable surfaces, usage vastly more valuable land, etc. So even if the issue of demand latency applied equally to both (which it doesn't), it's not a bad thing to attract users to something that isn't harmful. |
Because the headline isn’t true. That’s why.
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In DFW there are some widening projects, but the majority of the emphasis on our highways is bringing outdated designs and neglected infrastructure up to today's safety standards, and I fully support that effort.
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In short if a market is created demanding PT, you'll need to provide. I imagine this is why the extra lanes get built in the end, as tunnelling out a local metro network would take decades and cost billions, at the current rate of local corruption. A quick fix though would be to provide bus routes, though of course your army of new buses would equally get jammed, and few would opt for it. You could of course build the new lane and make it bus/ truck/ taxi only, like some motorways in the UK have. In short as a marker of strength of governance, it's interesting whether one caters to the market, or make the market cater to it. |
What fixes traffic?
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And needless to say that’s a good thing. Less cars on the streets and people getting faster to their jobs. |
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Often the "no improvement" travel time statistic is also only for peak rush hour, when a roadway operates at it's absolute worst. Road widening projects often cannot accommodate peak-hour demand as it is simply so high, especially on roads which are severely congested and see significant amounts of trip-avoidance in peak periods. A widening on that kind or road will still result in substantial reductions in congestion in off-peak periods. At the very least, it allows people to make their trips at more preferred times as they don't have to wait out rush hour any longer. I know around the GTA, all highways which have been widened in the last 2 decades operate substantially better than they did before, even if they perhaps still bunch up at rush hour. Where the discussion needs to be held is what kinds of trips we want to induce - do we really want to induce new vehicle trips into a downtown core, for example? It's better to build transit for that sort of condition. It's a lot more nuanced than just "road widening = bad". |
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So really, it's a 16 lane highway. Still big, but not even the largest on the continent, which remains the 401 in Toronto south of the airport which has 18 through-lanes. And the highway in Toronto operates well to this day through most of the day, despite being widened last in the 1980's and being dead-centre in the middle of the largest city in the country. |
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Here was the scene last week - President Joe Biden flanked by KY Governor Andy Beshear, OH Governor Mike Dewine, OH Senator Rob Portman, OH Senator Sherrod Brown, and KY Senator Mitch McConnell: https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds Look at this totally unnecessary second Ohio River bridge that is going to happen because of the Infrastructure Bill: https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds A totally unnecessary widening of I-75: https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds |
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The U.S. keeps building freeways because a bunch of states created agencies with the primary task of building freeways. That's really it.
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