If people are being diverted from side streets to the highway because the highway is now wider, then that means side streets are cleared up. Not to mention the people who were taking side streets can now enjoy a quicker commute on the highway
In: Engineering
It’s a net gain in being able to transport people through an area. But the problem is that politicians always promise they’re going to fix traffic by expanding highways, requiring bulldozing houses and investing billions of dollars, and not actually fixing traffic.
It really doesn’t make anyone’s commute any faster. What you’ll typically see is less use of public transit as more people can get to work in their car in the same time.
One interesting way of looking at it is thinking about what argument you would make if public transit had induced demand. Double the number of busses and you’ll double the number of busses and you could double the number of people taking the bus. Nobody will complain that by adding more busses you’ve increased ridership. But the goal of a good transit system is high usage of the system. You don’t *want* more people driving on the highway because that is not going to make commute times better.
One other thing to think about is how congested the area where everyone is driving to is. If you have a city that is largely downtown-centric, then all those cars still need to get off the highway in a few exits and then drive down a few specific streets to get to their destination. Those streets didn’t get expanded, but now there’s more cars trying to drive on them. If the total capacity of cars moving through downtown is less than you can handle on the highway, then you’re still going to get backed up at those exits. It can actually be more dangerous as you have queues building up the off-ramps and into live lanes, and suddenly seeing stopped cars in front of you on a highway is never a good thing.
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