and second, I think "induced demand" launders a normative, _political_ question (what do we want our cities to look like?) into a 'scientific' question (will road widening reduce traffic?) and that laundering makes me uncomfortable, even though I support the outcome it pushes
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Replying to @rsnous
I like transit but have always found the anti-road induced demand argument to be strange. You can apply it to many different kinds of networks, where increasing bandwidth "causes" increased usage. But why should increased throughput be considered bad?
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I think I'm more of a fan of quant-y arguments than you, so I wouldn't mind an argument based on ROI, but that's quite different from what I see: why build bigger roads, they just get filled up! Well, why build fiber instead of ISDN, that extra bandwidth just gets filled up!
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Your experience as one individual driving on the road doesn't improve with widening.
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People want to not be stuck in traffic. They don't want to be stuck in traffic plus have the delightful company of hundreds more cars stuck in traffic with them.
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Yeah, I think the induced demand argument has a hidden second part, that the throughput increase you do get is bad because some combination of: - bad externalities (pollution, land use sprawl) - failure to fulfill even the original political purpose (doesn't reduce traffic)
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+ maybe some ROI thing about how if you spend that amount of $, you can transport more people with a different technology than road
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I think it's easy to argue that buses or trains have much higher goodput (and people do argue this, but I don't really hear this from the induced demand people). I don't buy the "people don't want to be stuck in traffic" line because that's exactly the cause of induced demand.
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Increased b/w allows more people to travel at a level of congestion they find tolerable. That's supposed to be bad? Maybe it's not worth the cost relative to other possible projects or maybe the externalities are bad. But that's not the argument I hear.
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When I lived in a driving city, traffic didn't impact me since I had a job where I could work any hours I wanted, but for a normal person with a 9-5, increasing throughput at peak times (as they did in Austin by adding a lane to the highway) is a huge quality of life improvement.
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I think this is easy to miss if you're very privileged or wealthy and can afford to have a lifestyle where this doesn't affect you (by living closer to work or having flexibility), which is literally everyone I've seen making the induced demand anti-road argument.
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