For critics of widening projects, the prime example of induced demand is the Katy Freeway in Houston, one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.
Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.
Matt Turner, an economics professor at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 study on congestion, said adding lanes is a fine solution if the goal is to get more cars on the road. But most highway expansion projects, including those in progress in Texas, cite reducing traffic as a primary goal.
“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history,” Dr. Turner said.
Just one more lane bro, I swear it’ll fix traffic. Just one more lane.
Just a little more trickle down bro, I promise once we privatize the next utility it will all work.
snorts asphalt
The intended purpose isn’t to fix traffic. It’s supposed to allow more volume of cars through per day. Entirely different things.
I’m not suggesting that’s a good thing.
The goal shouldn’t be to move more cars through per day. The goal should be to move more people though each day. When they use the wrong metric, they get the wrong answer.
Eventually there’s gotta be diminishing returns too given that every lane makes it a little harder to drive on. Can’t imagine the idiots swerving over 13 lanes of traffic because they didn’t realize they had to get off until the last minute
Yup. Been plenty of studies to show that increasing lanes only alleviates traffic in the short term and long term only makes it worse. Better to spend money on trains and busses that actually work and get people where they need to go with minimal hassle and a reasonable cost than to do this crap.
to me it’s like the military industrial complex - they don’t care what evidence supports, they want their fucking money and they’ll keep building roads until it’s a giant parking lot from sea to fucking sea. we could have an ecosystem, but fuck you, because cars.
I already see the angry republicans on Fox news raging on how their precious tax dollars are being wasted just to benefit poor people
It also costs the taxpayer more because of maintenance
This is because the extra lane allows demand to change. It is not congested so people feel ok building and moving to further out suburbs. This continues until demand has increased to cause delays.
Note that Houston and Paris have about the same population. Paris is 1/3 the size. They are actually removing a lane from their loop highway and planting trees, and turning another lane into busses only. Only considering transportation, I would much rather live in Paris.
But what options do you have in Houston, compared to Paris?
You can’t just not widen roads but instead
— less sprawl - places to live closer to each other and to destinations
– useful transit or short distance commute options
– remove bottlenecks
These are a lot harder to do, and I don’t imagine Houston even considered it
Investing is public transport can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Sure building a full on subterranean high density metro system might be the utopia, but actually developing a high frequency, high quality bus route with dedicated bus lanes can be low cost and hugely increase the volume of people carried Vs the lane you took from cars.
Compliment this with docking cycle rental schemes, and some dedicated cycle infrastructure and you can transform how a big chunk of people get to work …you start to win back the city from one which is built around cars and instead making it a city for people.In Texas, and most of the places I know of, people won’t ride the bus, or the bike. When it’s August and the high temp for the day is 108, with 65% relative humidity, everybody wants to get in their car with the AC blowing directly on them, and be comfortable.
In my experience, every public bus I’ve been on has been miserable.
Paris also has a subway.
This makes sense. With the increased cost of city living, and an ever increasing population; doesnt this support the need for more lanes?
I live in Katy. Driving through this from 4-7 pm is an absolute nightmare. Horrible traffic jams, erratic drivers and multi-car accidents daily. Mornings aren’t fun either.
After Hurricane Katrina I lived in Houston for about six months. I still have nightmares about your highways. I don’t know how y’all do it.
Oh jeeze… it was so bad after Katrina. I’m sorry you had to deal with this and the hurricane.
Toll roads were a great alternative 10-15 years ago. Now they are just as bad as freeways. It’s nearly impossible to find alternatives unless Google Maps finds a neat back way around this hell hole.
Luckily I was a typical self-centered teenager, so I was pretty good at being oblivious and ignoring what was going on around me. It also helped that I had very strong parents who worked tirelessly to make it as seamless/normal for my siblings and me haha.
Well hopefully they will come up with a solution that isn’t just adding more lanes! Don’t have a lot of hope for Texas and public transit these days, but I feel like y’all would be prime candidates for high speed rail between some of your cities.
Sounds like you have amazing parents!
And yeah, a speed train would be great, but I doubt we’ll ever get one. I was very excited for the infrastructure plan, but who knows if and when it’ll happen.
I have to assume someone cutting through 10 lanes of traffic to get off at their exit causes a lot of those jams.
Oh absolutely. A few years ago someone did just that because they were about to miss their exit. I slammed on my breaks and it caused 8 cars to crash. I wasn’t found at fault, but because I was the first car to stop, I had to deal with 8 different insurances from all the people involved… it was such a pain. The whole thing took around 4 months to settle all the claims and get my car fixed.
Why, oh why didn’t they build 27 lanes?!?
99% of urban planners stop just one lane short of permanently solving traffic for good.
For anyone wondering what that looks like-
Absolute insanity.
Where are the bridges? How do you walk from one side to the other?
Oh yeah, right, of course. But how do you even drive from one side to the other?
You don’t really… You exit and follow the service road until you find a way to get across, usually by going under.
I hate driving in Texas because this kind of shit is everywhere. Middle of nowhere and want to get to the rest area ahead? Exit and follow the service road for a mile.
I feel like Texas intentionally did that so that everything seems large af. If the exit road is long af then it must make you feel like the place is large when in reality it is just inefficient spaghetti
It’s not an exit road. The service road is a parallel road to a highway that contains all the turns with occasional on/off ramps into the highway. It’s actually a pretty efficient design, as it reduces the amount of on/off ramps needed. Similar design style is local vs express lanes in some highways.
Tl;dr less ramps = less slowdowns
I have no idea. I’ve never driven on it. I was just searching around and was mortified.
Hey this looks just like my failed Cities Skylines build!
I thought it was common knowledge of the only way to reduce traffic is to reduce demand on roads, eg more expensive gas and tolls etc.
If you add another lane to the highway you’re just gonna attract more people and make it worse.
Ideally we’d reduce demand by providing better and faster alternatives to driving. Increasing the price of gas and adding tolls only prices the poor out of using the roads, which is a less than ideal solution, especially if there aren’t any alternatives. At some point people are going to work just so they can afford to go to work.
When I lived outside of Chicago I would take the Metra train into the city. It took about an hour, but driving in traffic could take 2-3 hours (at 4am with no traffic it would take 20 minutes to drive). Everyone person riding the Metra was one less car on the highways leading into and out of the city, and they were all savings hours of time doing so.
You can reduce traffic with more lanes, but not just willy nilly. They need to be carefully planned and managed while limiting lane changes.
But a lot of the time, they won’t. The issue usually comes from people wanting to change lanes while others are merging on. In high traffic areas, lane changes will slow the traffic down while increasing the risk of an accident. Making alternatives such as different routes, other modes of transportation, or reducing the need for traveling usually work better in cities.
If you’ve got more lanes then you’ve got more lanes for idiots to cross right before the exit they need to take because they weren’t paying attention and they MUST take this particular exit or their life is over or something.
Especially since most exits have very easy U Turn options. Just get off at the next one and then turn around
Exactly this! It’s especially terrifying to drive here Friday and Saturday nights and during heavy rains. You’re also expected to go 15-20 over the speed limit and yeah, idiots will absolutely speed-cross from the furthest lane to their exit without giving a f*ck about anyone else.
This is more than likely the real reason more lanes doesnt help.
Literally play 2 minutes of cities skylines and you will discover how bad of an idea this is lmao
The purpose of widening the highway isn’t to make individuals move faster or to solve congestion. It’s to move more individuals, and therefore more money.
And to allow for more development to house those people etc.
Just one more lane bro. I promise. It’ll fix everything, I swear. Just one more lane bro.
My only time in the Houston area, and visiting friends staying in Katy TX, and I learned how quickly I hated the traffic there. This makes sense
It worked great at the start, but the Houston area population just kept exploding at unprecedented rates.
The Greater Houston area grew by 70% between 2000 and 2020 - largely on the West side. Of course a 30% capacity improvement couldn’t keep up.
Anti-car people use this to try to explain that adding more lanes doesn’t help traffic congestion. Except that every highway system is different and the vast majority of them don’t have anywhere near those number of lanes. Adding 1 lane to a 2 lane road would dramatically help traffic situations.
If you are ‘pro car’ then you should definitely be resistant to adding lanes (and pro using that money for transit alternatives).
Getting cars off the road is the only thing that’s going to make driving less miserable in the kinds of places were adding lanes is suggested.
And maybe a warm take, while this discussion is going on: Whether or not you’re pro car or anti car, you’re gonna want to provide and improve alternatives to driving. If you’re anti car, it’s so that you don’t need to drive to go from A to B. If you’re pro car, it’s so that others don’t need to drive to go from A to B, keeping more room on the roads for you. Build trains, busses and bike space, and everybody wins.
Just like with nearly anything else, if you do a shit job of implementing something and do a 1/2-ass effort then the results will be shit. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
The US population has grown considerably over the decades and yet our highway traffic system has not even come close to keeping pace. I’M ALL FOR MORE TRAINS and MASS TRANSIT, but I am also not some deluded hippy that thinks we can just get rid of cars and all our traffic problems will magically go away like all your problems after a few hits from a bong.
We need more lanes on MANY highways throughout the nation and this terrible example in Houston doesn’t change that fact.
not some deluded hippy that thinks we can just get rid of cars and all our traffic problems will magically go away like all your problems after a few hits from a bong.
Hmm for some reason I don’t believe you’ve actually considered opposing views
By definition, if you got rid of cars, you wouldn’t have traffic. Traffic is made from cars.
As with many things there’s not a clear cut answer. I think you could make a strong case for the Katy Freeway expansion being a failure where those resources would have been better spent on other forms of transportation. I’d agree that adding lanes is not always a bad idea, but blindly adding lanes like the US has done for decades has not been a good thing overall, imo. We’re dependent on cars for everything, they’re heating up the planet and they’re a very inefficient solution to the ultimate problem of getting people from point A to B. I’m not so much anti-car as anti-inefficient travel that has saddled us with tons of negative aspects to city life.
the ultimate problem of getting people from point A to B
I think a lot of people, specifically city leaders and planners, would do well to keep this in mind. The problem is people need to move from their homes to work, retail, and entertainment destinations. A car is only one solution to that problem, there are many others. I think they also need to be more intentional about what they want a city to become. Adding a lane might sound like a good quick fix, but what do they want these cities to look like in 50 years? I think that is rarely considered, and as a result our cities aren’t designed with and intention or larger vision, they just become whatever they become.
They don’t consider it because they want to be re-elected in the next few years. Fixing a problem that’s more than “the next election” away holds no interest for them, or most of their constituents.
