why does adding more traffic lanes doesn’t help to alleviate traffic congestion?
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If you had two towns with a population of 500 people each connected by a 2 lane road, and you expanded that road to a 12 lane superhighway? Then yeah, you got rid of traffic congestion. But it was crazy expensive and ultra wasteful. You would never expand it by that much, because you can’t afford it.
Let’s say I’m living in some city. I currently have a half hour commute, and I’m looking to move somewhere else in the same city. Like it would be nice to move into one of those new neighborhoods on the outskirts of town. Now if moving there means my commute goes from 30 minutes to 90 minutes… well then I’m probably not going to move. But if they widen the road from that neighborhood, and now the commute is only 45 minutes? Yeah I’ll move. So will a lot of other people though. So 5 years down the road, that wider road is handling a lot more traffic, so my commute is back to the 90 minutes it was originally.
The gist of it is, whenever people get in their car, or think about getting in their car, they take traffic into account. The other day I was going to go get a chocolate shake from a local fast food place, but I knew it was rush hour traffic and a drive of less than a mile was gonna take like 30 minutes, so I decided to wait. When you think about traffic, there’s a certain point where you say to yourself “no, that takes too long” and you do something else instead. We do that when we think about going to a restaurant, or when we think about buying a house in a new spot, really any time we think about driving. And that amount of time where you say “that takes too long” *doesn’t really change*. The thing is, it’s not just you. It’s all the other drivers as well. So if they add an extra lane, yeah you can get there 10 minutes faster. But then you and 300 *other* a-holes all decide that you’re okay with sitting in traffic for that shorter period. They don’t stop until it takes too long again.
The only way to decrease the traffic is for people to decide to stay home and not get on the road. Or to build so many lanes than you go broke. But eventually if enough new people move to the area, you managed to fill it up.
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