Colombia has 111 cars per 1000 people and Bogotá has some of the worst traffic in the world and traffic is terrible in a lot of the country’s cities. But the United States has 806 vehicles per 1000 people, and yeah there’s traffic, but it isn’t eight times worse than Colombia. Where does traffic come from in low vehicle ownership countries?
[Source](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Vehicles-Per-1000-People_02162024.jpeg)
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The USA has spent a mind blowingly large amount of money building out the best car based transportation network on the planet. As of 2020, there was around 4.17 million miles of highway in the USA. And that’s just the highways. That’s not counting city roads.
Columbia hasn’t. Fewer cars per person sure, but packed onto far less infrastructure that hasn’t been maintained as well.
cars per capida is a useless metric for traffic. what matters much more is the ratio of active cars to road capacity. more better roads decrease traffic.
The less developed a country is, the more people drive like shit. The less developed a country is, the fewer cars people can afford. They’re not related. They’re coincidental.
the raw number of cars by itself is irrelevant. you have to compare it to the road infrastructure. a country could have only a thousand cars, but if the road network has the capacity of a McDonald’s drive thru, traffic is going to suck
Because traffic is induced. If you want to reduce traffic, you have to build other ways for people to get around or – better yet – build your civilisation in such a way that getting around is entirely optional.
as many people have already posted – it’s about the quality AND quantity of road infrastructure.
when there aren’t many car owners, there is less incentive to build either high quality roads or a LOT of roads.
What passes for “local roads” in many countries with low automobile ownership per capita are what some people in “1st world” nations would consider dirt paths…not “roads” at all…..and they have to share the “road” with the local animal–pulled carts. Sometimes there is not even enough space for 2-way traffic. (pull over so i can get by…no YOU pull over!)
taxes to fix/build/expand such infrastructure are unpopular when the lion share of the population doesn’t own a car. Tolls won’t bring in much money, because there aren’t that many drivers.
It’s the Chicken and the Egg.
Really, cars per person has very little to do with traffic. One major part of it is how many cars there are per distance of road. And the other part of it is how well the roads are designed.
For example, LA is awful. Even though the roads are fairly well designed, there’s just too many cars in too small of area. For the LA metropolis, there are roughly 13m people, and public transport is nowhere near enough. Add in hills and other natural obstacles, and it’s an impossible problem.
Meanwhile, Nashville is somehow almost as bad despite having a fraction of the population. But in their case, it’s all poor road design. They don’t time their surface street lights, so surface streets will literally back up a mile onto the freeway, and they funnel all the freeways into the city center. They take roads that should be made into freeways…and add shopping malls that choke traffic even more. They even have freight trains going through the middle of downtown without bridges, preventing a quarter of the city from accessing freeways. And there’s no real excuse. They just never plan ahead.
Meanwhile, San Diego’s about halfway between the two in population density. But it’s fine, as the military presence there has made sure that road transportation remains as streamlined as possible well into the future. Like, there are a good number of streets that have enough sidewalk area to be widened and even some future bridge sites reserved for when the city needs to improve transportation even more.
So even without resorting to public transport, you can have shit traffic. Add to that worse roads, worse cars, worse driving standards, and harsher terrain, and it’s easy to have worse traffic with fewer cars.
It depends on how concentrated the traffic is. If 90% of the cars are in the capital city, it will have bad traffic.
Mostly because of urbanization and poorly constructed roads/infrastructure. Here in Vietnam economy cars cost 10-30% more and luxury cars cost 100-300% more than in the US, so the car ownership rate is around 0.5% if I remember it right. Yet traffic is horrible in big cities, and mildly horrible in other regions
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