why does adding more traffic lanes doesn’t help to alleviate traffic congestion?
In: 26
1) Induced demand – if you make the road ‘better’ then more people will drive on it, meaning it will quickly reach some sort of capacity constraint again.
Now *maybe* some of these people were already driving but along alternative routes to avoid the congestion. So if you upgrade one road, it’s possible you will actually help alleviate congestion on the alternative routes rather than on the road you actually upgraded.
2) People don’t just randomly drive on a road/freeway, they have a destination in mind, and there may still be constraints at the destination.
e.g. perhaps upgrading a freeway makes a smoother ride from the suburbs to the city, but people eventually need to get off the freeway in the city. Capacity constraints on local city roads can still cause traffic to back up onto the main upgraded route.
3) Traffic jams can still be caused by poor driving, accidents, confusion etc. This is a human issue and will exist no matter how many times you upgrade the road.
4) People still mostly start and end work broadly at the same time. So even if the road can handle a normal traffic volume without congestion, there will always be ‘peak’ traffic volumes when people are commuting that will be beyond this.
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