Elon:
Guys, I think I’ve got it… What if we built another lane but, you know, under the ground, like a tunnel.
I recently watched a video about autonomous car and the dude argue the tech isn’t here yet, but it will work if we build a lane just for autonomous car and put every autonomous car on that lane.
Everyone in the comment basically calling him out for reinventing the train lol.
Trains are the crabs of transportation.
Can’t improve a crab.
And put that in the basement
He seemed to casually ignore that at the end of the tunnel was still the concept of an offramp with a 25mph street that everyone was funneling to.
Of course he never planned on building it anyway. It was all just to distract from California High Speed Rail, because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.
because that directly gets in his way of selling more cars.
Which is stupid in itself, because the entire goal of the CA HSR project is to link long distance corridors, not putzing around town like most do with a Tesla.
In fact I think there’s a missed opportunity for EVs to partner with long distance public transit.
The main limitations of electric cars is distance, but if people knew they could go across the state or several states comfortably without their car, they might be more willing to take a electric car for city driving.
We have ferries. What if we could combine the efficiency of train and the convenience of ferries? People could just drive their own car on a train car of some kind and be shuttled to a destination and then drive off?
that’s been done in europe since I think the 1930s
I’m sure the idea is suppressed on over in Merica. Glad it’s not an original thought!
I’ve seen those trucks with a bunch of cars packed on top, something like that (minus truck) could totally fit in a train cargo container.
The loading and unloading is a pain.
Without looking deeper it’s probably cost prohibitive. Looking at long train rides cost a thousand dollars and takes 3-4 days, might as well just fly at that point.
Just to be pedantic, the dumb car tunnels (or Loop), are the weird thing elon “invented” to “solve” traffic and reduce competition for his cars for urban transport. This eventually became one tunnel in LA to get between elon’s house and office, and the dumb taxi tunnel in Las Vegas.
The hyperloop, where elon “invented” the vacuum train, is a separate thing that exists to distract from CAHSR, and elon didn’t want to work on himself because “he’s too busy”, and not because it’s effectively just a scam and won’t work, and most of the companies that started up to develop it have since gone bust.
Work 👏 from 👏 home👏 !
The answer to so many manufactured problems.
But what about the office landlords, are no one think about how they are going to feed their yatchs?
After the Covid lockdown, Italian politicians, pundits, and talking heads used sandwich sales as a reason for a return to office.
Removed by mod
Another solution is mass transit. That right of way could support light rail and still have several car lanes in each direction
The light rail also gives work from home people a way to get to shops, shows, and sports without driving
Light rail also can be built to not get stuck in traffic, which makes it faster than driving too
I once heard of an experiment in economics that offers insight into this.
Say you have 100 people. You give each of them one of two choices:
A : you get $40 unconditionally B: you get $70 - n, where n is the number of people who choose B
You end up getting, on average across experiments, n = 30.
If you move the numbers around (i.e, the $40 and the $70), you keep getting, on average, a number of people choosing B so that B pays out the same as A.
I think the interpretation is that people can be categorized by the amount of risk they’re willing to take. If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.
Applied to traffic, opening up a new lane brings in new categories of people who are willing to risk the traffic.
Or something. Sorry I don’t remember it better and am too lazy to look it up. Pretty pretty cool though.
I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn’t help, and the term they use is “induced demand.”
Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you’re just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.
You’ve essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.
When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one
so for these people the new lane will create marginal improvement, right?
That’s the thing: Technically yes. It temporarily improves traffic. But only temporarily. IDK about you but spending billions of dollars to only temporarily improve traffic and then it ending up the same or even worse than before doesn’t sound like a good investment to me.
But only temporarily
but is it?
I thought the temporal improvement would be for everyone who already used the high way (because they will get to their destination a little bit faster). And for the few extra people, who start to use the highway but didn’t use it before, the improvment will stay.
That’s the thing, the number of new cars using that road ends up being at least one additional lane’s worth. So traffic moves at the same speed as it was before the extra lane, just now with one more lane’s worth of cars on that road.
If anything, you might see marginally better traffic on other roads because of the cars that started using the new lane, but you’d be talking about a handful of cars per road. Probably not enough for any discernible change in travel time or congestion, and each new lane you add later will have diminishing returns because it will be a smaller fraction of the total number of lanes coming from any specific direction.
It’s called “Induced Demand”.
As a road widening project is completed, traffic is alleviated for a short amount of time. Then as time passes word spreads, or more people move to the city, or kids get older and get their driver’s licences. More and more people know this widened road is the fastest route, so more people take it, thus undoing the improvement. Then the cycle starts again - either with the same road being widened again, or another one a block over, on and on until the world is covered in asphalt.
The solution is to make alternative transit more appealing than cars. Bikes and public transit already have significant financial benefits, but lack infrastructure to make it more viable in North America. Busses get stuck in traffic, bikes are forced to share lane space with cars or sidewalks with pedestrians.
How is alternative transit the solution? Cities that have public transportation still have traffic jams.
There was an English traffic engineer that predicted that avg speed in central London will always be like 9mph. No matter how many lanes or public transit options you add. If there is no traffic, people will take cars until traffic jams are unbearable to give up. Then the system finds equilibrium.
The key is public transit that doesn’t suck. For the last 100 years the car and oil/gas industries have spent billions of dollars undermining public transit.
Dedicated transit lanes, subways, light rail, protected bike lanes all make cars less appealing to those that want to use them.
Yeah, one of the best examples of this is the Vienna public transit network. About 1000 vehicles (bus, tram, light rail, subway) in service at rush hour, a daily total distance of over 200000km traveled, more year-long ticket owners than car owners in the city, and about 2 million “travels” per day, which is about 30% of all traveling done over the city (including pedestrian and bike traffic)
If that traffic would be routed only by car, the city would be a giant parking space; to compare, one subway train carries about 900 people in rush hour, which replaces 790 cars (avg 1,14 persons per car here). the subway interval in the rush hour is about 4 minutes. i live at one of the subway final destinations, which is on one of the far ends of the city - and i can be at the other side of town in about 25 minutes.
And constructing and running a public transit network is a pretty nice boost to the local economy, creates a whole lot of jobs. sounds like something a lot of us cities could make use of.
Mixed traffic works here, it allows mobility for all social classes (yearlong tickets cost 365€, so about 400$ incl. taxes), nearly all stations are barrier free.
Public transit that share lines with cars are always going to be worst that cars, but if you add exclusive lanes for Public transit they go smooth as hell. This is why metros are usually the best option on cities with good metro infrastructure.
having lived in cities with amazing metro, ok metro, no metro and towns with shitty train access and great train access…
this is 150% true. Having an underground station near your house makes the entire city 30 min away, using buses or horribly interconnected trains makes things 1 to 2 hours away.
Even living outside the city, having a direct rail to the nearest metropolitan center take an hour increased quality of life for me by a fuckload.
The key is that both adding car lanes and adding alternatives like transit are subject to induced demand, but the consequences of it are different for transit than for cars. Not only is the limit of the added capacity much, much higher for a train than it is for a car lane, adding more traffic to the lane up to that limit makes the performance worse and worse (increasing congestion), while adding more transit ridership up to its limit makes the performance better and better (increasing train frequency and therefore reducing wait times).
Similarly, induced demand for walking and biking is a good thing because more people doing those things improves public health, doesn’t pollute like cars do, and takes up much less space.
So it’s not that induced demand is bad, it’s that inducing demand for cars, specifically is bad.
The goal for alternative transit is not to remove traffic jam, it’s to transport people.
9mph is slower than a bike, it fits with my experience. When living in a city (in Europe, it might be different in the US) my feeling was always that bike was the fastest, public transport a bit slower but more comfortable (mainly protected from the elements and car drivers) and lastly car was the slowest and more stressful.
There will always be traffic, but public transportation allows for a higher throughput for the same speed and total surface area of the roads.
Let’s be generous and assume that every car has 2 people in it (the truth is that the vast majority of cars, especially in the US, only have 1 person in them). Now imagine 15 cars vs. 30 bicycles. If we figure that you can comfortably fit 3 bikes in the same space as 1 car, you’re looking at 150% throughput for the bikes compared to the cars at the same speed. Give them their own dedicated, separate infrastructure, and they can probably go faster than traffic while also removing the danger of bikes and cars sharing the road. If you figure buses can fit 20 people in the space of 2 car lengths, you’re looking at 10x the throughput.
And that’s not even getting into transportation that doesn’t use the roads. The Boston T is a perfect example of this. Despite its notoriety for constant failures due to poor maintenance, and only being half the size it was 100 years ago, the T is considered to be the 3rd best public transportation network in the US. Why? Because the average commute time is about half the national average at roughly half an hour, and a full 50% of Boston’s commuters use the T every day. That’s half as many cars in traffic every day than if the T didn’t exist. Could you imagine if Boston, notorious for its bad roads and heavy traffic, suddenly had twice as many cars driving on its streets?
If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.
Can you explain what this part means? What do you mean by category here?
Yes. That wasn’t the best word choice; maybe “group” would have been better. I meant groups of people who are willing to take some level of risk. Imagine the categories are “low risk takers”, “medium risk takers”, and “high risk takers”.
Compared to A paying out $40, if you make B $50-n you’ll only get the high risk takers choosing B. If you make it $70-n you’ll get high and medium risk takers. If you make it $120-n you’ll get almost everybody.
If risk taking is a value between 0 and 1, the categories are groups of people inside certain intervals. For example, low could be [0, 1/3), medium could be [1/3, 2/3), and high could be [2/3, 1].
Just going to leave this one here:
I don’t really like including pedestrians in there. Like sure, you can fit a bunch of people in a small area, but another point you shouldn’t ignore is the throughput over time, and pedestrians are by their nature rather slow. Obviously if you’re looking at shopping in a street lined by shops left and right, then that street becomes tailor-made for pedestrian traffic (and nothing else except perhaps bicycles). But public transport is much better suited for travelling any further distances, and that should be the main focus when deciding to ditch cars.
Sure! Both speed and distance matters a lot for throughput. The advantage of pedestrian traffic is that designing for it reduces the distance people have to travel and that it combines very well in conjunction with public transport, unlike cars. Also, the speed of mixed traffic is inverse correlated to the number of vehicles, hence is a special case in this regard where throughput may decrease as the volume per lane increases. The overall point however is that a single train can substitute a staggering amount of private vehicles (and who doesn’t love leaning back, listening to music and reading the news while commuting?).
The units are passengers per hour. If they didn’t account for speed, pedestrians would theoretically be one of the highest, since you can pack people together fairly tightly and still have them walk.
That reminds me of how shipping hard drives full of data is technically faster than downloading over the internet. Technically true, but almost always a poor choice in practice.
I wonder what the people/hour max is on something like a stadium entrance or hallway? I bet it’s insanely high. Definitely some safety concerns though with crushing or trampling
That’s why pedestrians are in there
If you design your cities well people live near the places which people want to visit, and pedestrian speed is fine
Lots of cities are well designed, though most that were so designed in the US got modified after cars became important
That may be true for smaller cities, but in bigger cities it becomes impossible, because there just isn’t enough space to house all the people near areas of interest. Cars don’t factor in there at all. Give me a subway for the major areas, and perhaps a tram or bus system so you don’t need that many subway stations in the residential areas, and you can have car-free city centers.
deleted by creator
I don’t know what they call it where you are from but here light rail is trams. Similar to San Francisco cable cars.
I guess everything I’ve been calling light rail fits into the suburban rail category. Multiple cities I’ve lived in are adding in “light rail” tracks between major centers
Suburban rail is heavier than trams, the London tube is suburban rail, as are Sydney trains
A step heavier. For the London example, think more like the Overground, the Purple Train or Thameslink. Or the many railways radiating out.
For other examples, think systems like the LIRR in NYC, the RER in Paris or the S-bahn in most major German cities. (though the Berlin one functions more as a metro that’s just legally a train)
Passenger per hour going where? If everyone is going from A to B, ok. But people need to go allover the place.
For me a 10min car ride is a 1.15h bus ride…
Good sign that your city invests too less/wrong in public transport.
Public transport is shit where I live. If I want to go and visit my grandma, it’s a 20 minute drive, 15 on a good traffic day.
If I want to use public transport, its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station, then a 30 minute train journey, then a 40 minute walk to grandma’s.
its a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station,
Yeah, this is a really, really, really big problem with designing society for cars. Tons of people live in suburbia, with no mixed zoning, where they’re a 2 hour walk from their nearest church, a 4 hour walk if they want a coffee; and so like you say, driving becomes their only option. It’s the only thing they can do, realistically. And if they ever lose their car somehow, uh, say hello to poverty. Good luck getting a job at that coffee shop 4 hours away.
In situations where someone who lives very far from a city is visiting someone else very far, cars probably still make some sense. In the OP picture example, though, that is a prime candidate for transit refactoring. The presence of cars there is actually hurting them.
If cars were banned then the bus lines would be a lot better to compensate
But maybe you take a 10 minute train followed by a 5 minute bus in the utopia example
Well, no one is saying cars are worse for all purposes. If you want to take your family and dogs to a cabin in the mountains while also shopping for food along the way, it is probably going to be your best bet. Still, that is not what is pictured in the post. These are commuters that are probably moving from work to home (or vice versa), where cars really are the worst of most options. If the bus takes longer, it is probably an issue of allocation of funds for a shorter route and exclusive lanes for it.
My town does buses better than that, but peak hour buses get stuck in traffic
So times when it’s a 20 minute drive, it’s 30 or 40 minutes by bus, when the same drive is 45 minutes in slow traffic, the bus is not a lot worse, at 1 hr
Anyway the better solution has busses only as a last mile solution, with trunks covered by rail
Study: 83% Of Road Construction Stops Right Before They Would Have Added The Lane That Would Solve Traffic Problems
The remaining 17% just never stop
Think of it like trickle down economics. If it hasn’t worked yet, you just need to make sure that the fat cats on top are fed so forcefully and so fast that something starts trickling down eventually.
Just keep going. We will tell you when to stop.
I mean we really don’t need cities, just make hundred lane roads in their place
omg poland 🇲🇨🇲🇨🇲🇨🇲🇨
One more train* will fix it
Going from where to where?
The midnight train goes anywhere I hear.
Suburban centres to city centres, in places where that’s the traffic flow
just one more lane bro pls one more lane bro i swear just one more lane
Um acttschually, we knew about induced demand as early as 1920, but the government just doesn’t care about science. (It used to be called traffic generation)
Part of it is that the organisations that design and build roads are also the ones who assess whether a road is needed. No big surprise that they “forget” about induced demand
The other point to make here is, obviously you look at this highway trip and say “Well I am obviously not walking or biking it.” But, the expansive gaps between home and destination are often caused by many many roads and parking lots like this one. We have dedicated gigantic land masses specifically to cars, and it actually lengthens travel time to our destinations.
I have been to countries where, even if thin highways exist, they’re not the rule and it’s easy for other modes to get under or around them; and their roads don’t dominate the urban areas. There, the answer is simple: Just walk, you don’t even need a bike.
People will talk about induced demand and all that. But those people really just want to be able to get around. The fact that they just don’t because the traffic is so bad doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add more lanes. It means you should add a lot more. Same with the one lane at a time approach. The fact that it didn’t work does mean you are doing something wrong, but it maybe that you need to add 5 lanes at a time, not one. Now I’m not saying they should actually do that, just that the arguments against are BS.
A comprehensive public transit system, well maintained and well patrolled is what LA really needs. I am talking Paris metro on steroids. And it is going to cost in the trillions. But it isn’t getting any cheaper by waiting.There are other reasons.
Adding, say, a sixth lane doesn’t increase capacity as much as adding a 2nd lane, because traffic jams are generally because of interactions. It’s very rarely the straight road that has a capacity problem. Adding a sixth lane adds capacity, but also creates more interactions.
Also, car lanes have a shit capacity, which goes down massively when it’s busy. Like you said, mass transit is vastly superior, but even a dedicated bus lane would help. In contested traffic, a car lane transports less than a single bus per hour.
Yeah, the interactions suck. But if dealt with earlier, they could have been mitigated. Same way mass transit does. Express trains. Have a highway over a highway that goes to a specific place. If you stack enough of those, people get on the one they need and go straight to where they need to get. Not realistic though unless planned in advance.
That’s the whole thing about induced demand though: People want to get somewhere and believe it or not, not everyone does so by car. But if you decide to add more lanes it temporarily improves traffic leading to those people that didn’t take a car in the past or lived somewhere else because they knew traffic would be horrible if they moved, to actually commute by car now / go forth with their plan to move, increasing the amount of traffic again until it’s as bad if not even worse than before. Cars don’t scale. Cars aren’t for mass transport and shouldnt be used for that. A city with a highway like in the picture really needs a transit system/a better one and fever lanes
See you are missing the point. The demand isn’t induced, it was always there. They wanted to move and use thier car, but traffic was too bad. My complaint is with the BS argument that the extra lane caused demand to materialize out of no where. It was always there, just unserved.
They wanted to move and use thier car
Did they though? To some extent, yes. But most people just want to get places and will take whichever mode makes the most sense for that journey, and what a city invests in will make that mode make more sense for more journeys. There is also a portion of journeys that just won’t happen if they are too difficult.
Distinction without a difference to the point. The demand was always there. It was never induced.
I always feel like these induced demand arguments are suggesting that adding more lanes means the same number of people are just choosing to do more driving. Maybe, as you add more lanes you create the infrastructure for a city to grow, and it adds more people which then fill up the new lanes. People aren’t just going out and buying a new car or rolling an existing car out of the driveway that they were previously not using because a new lane is built. These are net new drivers, who would not be in that city if the infrastructure for them hadn’t been built.
Exactly, thank you. If you build a 6-lane highway in Montana it’s not going to magically fill up with traffic, thus one can conclude that context is missing from the Reddit-tier explanation of induced demand or that the entire idea of induced demand is wrong.
Induced demand actually means that more people drive now because the people that didn’t drive in the past / lived somewhere else because it was less convenient because of the traffic to commute by car or live somewhere else where they would have needed a car now decide to commute by car / actually move (yeah that also something we have observed) because the widening temporarily improved traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse. Induced demand isn’t something the Internet has come up with. It’s actually a real thing that has been studied and researched. We know it exists. It functions on the basic principle of: If you improve something and make it more convenient to use that something, more people will actually use it.
But the demand was always there. They wanted to move, they just didn’t. So the lane didn’t induce it. The choice of that word was intentional. It was to argue against more lanes. It is really unserved demand that they just ignored originally.
Beyond the fact that adding five more lanes would still leave you with a horribly inefficient transport system, you also ignore that externalities that you are exacerbating by doing so. You’re displacing thousands more people, worsening the division of communities, creating a lot of noise and air pollution, increasing car dependency etc
My last paragraph agrees with you.
Your last paragraph is tangential to what I said. It doesn’t disagree because it says something different. It’s also oversimplified in some ways and just wrong in others.
People on here love to shit on Houston’s massive expansion of I-10 as a failure.
It worked great for years, but the population continued to grow. Having 5 fewer lanes on each side would just make things worse or increase sprawl by pushing people further out to thin the traffic. They ain’t gonna mass-adopt bicycles in a city where the heat index is 115° + for months at a time
But that’s the thing about induced demand. Of course widening a road temporarily improves traffic. But only temporary. That temporary improved leads to more people deciding to drive a car when they didn’t in the past or even having different moving options in mind now which they didn’t because if traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse than before. That’s not something the Internet came up with. It’s been studied and researched for years. It works on the simple principle of: If you make something more convenient to use, more people will use it. Cars just don’t scale. They can’t do mass transport and aren’t meant for that. You need to make a city walkable and have a proper public transport system otherwise you will only ever lose even more money on car infrastructure while continuing to worsen traffic, heating up the city because of the sealed surfaces, making the city less desirable to actually exist in and worsening it’s economy. Build the city properly and people will actually choose a different option. No matter the climate in that city. Especially because heat is only worse with massive amounts of car infrastructure because they usually result in less green spaces and trees which provide shade and a cooling effect in the city.
What creates demand on I-10 in Houston is population growth. People haven’t swapped from taking the bus to using a car. Houston leads the country in population growth. You add a couple million people to a me triplex and the infrastructure needs upgrading.
And trying to make people swap to a car by making traffic shitty works in some areas, but major cities that were largely developed after the invention of the car are almost impossible to retrofit for public transit. It’s even worse in hot climates where the city was largely developed after air conditioning. My commute in a different Texas metroplex has gone from 45 minutes to 2 hours because of traffic, but between housing costs in the city and the lack of infrastructure to build transit I still drive every day and can’t consider anything else.
Houston spends bonkers money on its light rail that nobody uses between May and October because last-mile transit is a problem in a city where you’ll sweat through your clothes waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop. The office would smell like a gym if people used it.
I work in municipal development, and it’s a rite of passage for planners to come in from out of state all excited to kill parking standards and shut down roads to make downtown pedestrian-only. Then they spend their first summer here and realize that when you have months of uninterrupted 100°+ days that you can’t just wish away the necessity of door to door transportation.
And the widest parts of I-10 are not the everyday choke points. Other parts of the system are the worst offenders on traffic.
trouble is more lanes are useless if so many people are lane hogs.
Too many times have i been stuck behind someone doing 60 in an overtaking lane with with nothing in the slow lane
People aren’t hitting 60 in LA during rush hour…
The approach worked as intended, more perfectly even.
Look at all those useless expenses on the pic, some people profited on products that weren’t necessary to begin with, and put a lot of moneys in so the system wouldn’t accidentally change for the better.
Any city’s skylines players know what actually would fix this problem?
I mean, that game does not actually properly stimulate transportation. The solution is:
- multi use zoning to reduce commute distances
- Make every mode of travel equally safe, convenient, and pleasant.
I believe another solution would be highways that are strictly for transporting of goods, rather than sharing roads with semitrucks.
Nah, very little of congestion is trucks. You can even see that in this picture. Plus, you’re not trying to make driving easier, that will just cause more people to drive (one more lane bro). You make everything else easier and people choose to walk/bike/bus and the roads clear up because there’s fewer people choosing to drive.
Buses and trains. That, or spaghetti interchange that are bigger than the rest of the city. Also, replace key arterial roads with a pedestrian path, call that path a park, and charge $20 for entry. That will easily fund all the city services and nobody will be too inconvenienced by having to pocket their car as they walk across the “park” to get between neighborhoods. Now excuse me, I have to go murder a little blue bird that won’t shut up about the garbage piling up
Viable alternatives to driving
Delete the save and start again
One long meandering 6 lane road that makes up the entire city. I’m not even kidding, that’s pretty much the optimal solution in the game.
Caesar was like that, too. Citizens couldn’t pathfind if their life depended on it, and it sometimes did.
In a place with essentially nothing but narrow two lane roads, no bike lanes or sidewalks, a little wider might serve some good. Adding a turn lane and a bike lane would free up tons of traffic.
If the highway increases in size, then more off ramps or more lanes in the off ramps are needed, which in turn need more lanes on the main street that connect to the off ramps. It’s basic filtration system dynamics.
I’m not talking about highways, I’m taking about roads connecting suburbs etc. The only way I can get to work. They’re terrible and only accessible to cars.
My town wants to widen a section of road near me. It’s the only part of the road with only one lane each way
I’m torn. I know widening the road won’t help traffic (right now that narrow bit reduces through traffic, making it a nice bit of road to drive) but if they do widen it, they will also add cycle lanes.
