More Lanes are (Still) a Bad Thing

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Script by Nicole Conlan & Jason Slaughter

Thanks to Matthew Krol (Extra Credits), Chuck Marohn (Strong Towns), & Lane Man (Cities by Diana) for quotes

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References & Reading

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON INDUCED TRAFFIC
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00166218

What Is Induced Demand?
https://www.planetizen.com/definition/induced-demand

Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

INDUCED TRAFFIC AND INDUCED DEMAND
https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/induced_traffic_and_induced_demand_lee.pdf

Highway 401 Expansion
https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/what-we-do/projectssearch/highway-401-expansion-project/

Induced Demand: An Urban Metropolitan Perspective
https://escholarship.org/content/qt5pj337gw/qt5pj337gw.pdf

Supply/Demand graph based on SilverStar (CC BY 2.5)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11044484

405 Commutes Now a Minute Worse Than Before Carpool Lane
https://la.curbed.com/2014/10/9/10036932/405-commutes-now-a-minute-worse-than-before-carpool-lane

Houston commute times quickly increasing
https://www.click2houston.com/news/2014/02/04/houston-commute-times-quickly-increasing/

North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP)
https://www.txdot.gov/nhhip.html

With I-45 construction set to begin in 2024, many facets of the project remain uncertain
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transportation/article/i45-meetings-txdot-freeway-rebuild-18507217.php

Rethink35 Austin & Frogger
https://rethink35.org/
https://onelinergames.com/games/i35frogger/webversion/

Lawsuit against TxDOT
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/fundraising/41a2391b-9075-4700-b504-5c4ce1937e3f

Mr. Biden, Tear Down This Highway
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/08/opinion/urban-highways-segregation.html

Braess’s paradox – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

The Spring Paradox
Steve Mould

Congestion Decreases When Cities ‘Delete’ Road Lanes
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2022/05/13/three-reasons-why-congestion-decreases-when-cities-delete-road-lanes

Exploring traffic evaporation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213624X22002085

Traffic Evaporation: What Really Happens When Road Space is Reallocated from Cars?

Traffic Evaporation: What Really Happens When Road Space is Reallocated from Cars?

From Freeways to Waterways: What Los Angeles Can Learn From Seoul
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/departures/from-freeways-to-waterways-what-los-angeles-can-learn-from-seoul

청계고가, 밤 12시부터 전면 통제, 고가도로 철거 오는 10월 말까지 마무리
https://news.sbs.co.kr/news/endPage.do?news_id=N0311442270

Cheonggyecheon Stream Restoration Project
https://www.landscapeperformance.org/case-study-briefs/cheonggyecheon-stream-restoration-project

WSDOT VS. REALITY, Puget Sound traffic forecasts don’t even pass the laugh test.

WSDOT vs. Reality

Every traffic projection is wrong
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/09/09/every-traffic-projection-wrong

Traffic Forecasts Ignoring Induced Demand: a Shaky Fundament for Cost-Benefit Analyses
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268293526_Traffic_Forecasts_Ignoring_Induced_Demand_a_Shaky_Fundament_for_Cost-Benefit_Analyses/fulltext/54bc7a710cf253b50e2d2b8a/Traffic-Forecasts-Ignoring-Induced-Demand-a-Shaky-Fundament-for-Cost-Benefit-Analyses.pdf

Traffic volumes declined by 34 percent on SR 520 after deployment of pricing and electronic tolling.
https://www.itskrs.its.dot.gov/its/benecost.nsf/ID/78a1e4026c2ed620852581a7003b7b87

Carmageddon Leaves Los Angeles in Gridlock With I-405 Closing

Downs–Thomson paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox

Do Your Buses Get Stuck in Traffic?
Not Just Bikes

Effects of upgrading to cycle highways
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692316304008

Bikeability and the induced demand for cycling
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220515120

Build The Lanes (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/@buildthelanes

NACTO Transit Street Design Guide

Designing to Move People

How Arlington Is Avoiding D.C.’s Traffic Nightmare

How Arlington Is Avoiding D.C.’s Traffic Nightmare

ARLINGTON TRAFFIC COUNT DATA
https://www.arlingtonva.us/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/projects/documents/historic-traffic-counts.pdf

How Oslo Achieved Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Fatalities

How Oslo Achieved Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Fatalities, and How Others Can Apply What Worked

More road tolls set to cordon off Oslo

More road tolls set to cordon off Oslo

This video uses footage licensed by Getty Images

We see it all the time another road widening project this time they’ve promised to get us moving this time congestion will be solved but then it isn’t it never is this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone because planners have known since at least the 1930s that more

Lanes do not solve traffic in fact they actually create more traffic so I wondered do I even need to make this video I mean there are already lots of research papers articles and videos about all of this all over the Internet some bu people much more educated on

This topic than me but apparently yes I do because cities are still spending billions on road widening and Highway expansions promising to reduce traffic congestion despite Decades of evidence that it doesn’t work plus a recent increase in online urbanist content lately has induced the demand for more

Videos and if this video helps more people understand the concept then it will be be worth it let’s talk about induced demand when a highway gets filled up with traffic the solution seems obvious make it bigger then there’s more space for all the cars intuitively that makes

Sense I mean if your water pipe is overflowing make it bigger problem solved but and I know this is going to come as a shock to some of you cars are not made of water well except this one I guess more importantly cars are driven by people people who make different

Decisions based on their environment and the options available to them transportation is important people will literally choose where to live where to work where to shop and where to send their kids to school based on how easy it is to get there and conversely the transportation Network itself is heavily

Affected by the behavior of the people using it without understanding this underlying psychological component of traffic it’s impossible to do anything about it which is why fixing Road congestion isn’t a simple Plumbing problem Road widening projects can take years to complete they’re a lot more complicated than just slapping down some

Extra asphalt and the road needs to remain open to traffic as much as possible during construction too when the project is finally done though drivers can enjoy those sweet new Lanes but in a growing city this is only temporary because as more people become aware that the road is wider they’ll take that

Option so adding new Lanes didn’t make more room for the existing cars it made more room for a whole bunch of additional cars wider highways can make it faster cheaper and more convenient to travel on the new road so people change their Lifestyles and housing patterns to match some people who previously lived

Close to their daily destinations will now move to a new house half an hour drive away because now there’s a big new Road connecting that distant neighborhood to where they need to go people will change jobs because the road has opened new opportunities to them these all seem like small personal

Decisions but when enough people make these life changes it causes the road to fill up and become just as congested as it was before this is why urban planners call this induced demand these new trips and new travel patterns have been induced by the increase in Road capacity these are trips that never

Would have been taken before and they effectively nullify the benefits of that increase in Road capacity induced demand can take time to develop but there’s another related Effect called latent demand which can occur immediately as soon as the new road is opened lat and demand are the

People who do not travel today because of the bad traffic but who would like to if they could that guy who leaves for work at 7:00 a.m. to beat traffic or the person who doesn’t take a trip at all because traffic is too painful the demand is there but it’s not being met

By the roadway Supply so people just change or cancel their trips you’ll hear latent demand used by Highway evangelists tarmac junkies and Interstate idolizer to argue that induced demand isn’t real they’ll claim that a wider Road isn’t creating or inducing demand but that the demand is

Always there and we just need to throw a few billion dollars at it but that’s misleading there are certainly people who have a latent demand for Highway trips but induced demand is different the most damaging factors are those land use changes that accompany Highway and Road expansions these highways and wide

Roads inherently spread things out so that everything is farther away than it used to be new neighborhoods big box stores and lifestyle centers will be built because of the new highway or road but these get built in the suburbs or between cities rather than within cities which makes them only accessible by car

And it makes these roads a bottleneck that everybody has to go down increasing the pressure to provide even wider roads in the future this is how more roads have induced their own demand through shifting land use patterns and suburban sprawl of course some of the difference between latent and induced demand is

Academic I have no burning get it desire for a fireman’s pole that connects the top floor of my house to the bottom but if one magically showed up you know I’m going to use her right so would you say that there’s a latent demand for extra fireman pole capacity at my house no

That would be stupid I do kind of want one now though similarly maybe this woman is pretty happy riding the train every day then when they widen the highway she thinks sure I’ll drive if it saves me a couple of minutes I guess you could argue that

She had a latent demand for that highway but if she was happily taking the train before was that demand even real in economic terms there’s a supply of road infrastructure and a flexible demand for driving congested highways are the equilibrium condition that the market will always return to which is why you

Cannot simply solve traffic by increasing capacity for cars the city of Los Angeles spent over $1 billion widening a 10m section of its 405 Highway in 2014 and within a year just one year it was so congested that it actually added a minute of travel time for drivers in 2011 Houston spent 2.8

Billion to widen the katd freeway expanding it in one place to 26 Lanes the KD freeway is insane it’s basically the world’s most challenging Frogger level and the widening didn’t even reduce traffic times just 3 years after the project was finished 85% of commute times had increased incidentally after Nicole

Wrote that Frogger joke into the script I found this game online by an advocacy group protesting the expansion of I35 through Austin I’ll put a link in the description to the game as well as their fundraiser to sue Tex do because their models ignore induced demand and they’re

Going to bulldoze a bunch of houses in the process but people will still say yeah yeah yeah but we got to do something about congestion though but you realize there are costs to doing this right that La project was $100 million per mile that’s a hell of a a lot of money and

For what what other valuable projects could that money have gone to and this year the Texas Department of Transportation will begin their North Houston Highway Improvement project thep which will increase the widths of some of the freeways around downtown to as much as 150 M no no I don’t care I am

Not going to convert it to feet this project will cost about $10 billion and it’s being built as a way to manage congestion and improve Mobility you know it’s not going to do that right but it might work for us but it’s not just the dollar cost literally a

Thousand people are going to be forcibly evicted to widen this this is the neighborhood of Clayton Holmes it’s gone now like it’s been bulldozed all these people were forced to move because apparently this ridiculously wide Highway isn’t wide enough so what I want to know is where does this all end will

There even be a city left when the highways are finally wide enough trick question not just bikes if that even is your real name highways are never wide enough take the maximum number of lanes you think you need now double it oh shut up Lane man beyond induced demand which

Is primarily a behavioral response to Road changes there’s also brac’s Paradox which states that adding roads to a network can slow down traffic fundament mentally so even if the cars were all magically driven by robots someday more roads can still mean less capacity this is actually an effect that can be proven

Mathematically and goes well beyond just Road networks it can even be shown with springs as Steve mold has shown isn’t that crazy Link in the description fundamentally though this shows that more roads do not always mean more throughput for reasons that go well beyond induced demand it really is painfully simplistic to

Think of Road networks as if they’re just water pipes as if problems with traffic flow can be solve by just making everything bigger now you might think to yourself now hold on a minute Mr NJB if adding more roads can slow traffic could removing roads speed up traffic and I’d

Say oh aren’t you clever there is a counterpart to induce demand called traffic evaporation where removing capacity from a road network doesn’t have to result in Carmageddon it can actually reduce the total amount of traffic the most famous example is the removal of the chongi Chong Expressway in Soul where traffic actually improved

After it was removed and this River they replaced it with is a hell of a lot nicer for the city than an elevated Expressway they made the city significantly better and improve traffic by removing a highway with traffic evaporation some car trips move to public transportation but others just Disappear

Completely you might be wondering though if there’s so much historical evidence for induced demand brace’s Paradox and traffic evaporation then why do Traffic Engineers keep building more and wider highways well there’s certainly a kind of momentum right where it’s hard for car dependent cities to change the way

They’ve always done things but I genuinely think a big part of it can be explained by the famous quote it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it to put it bluntly Traffic Engineers are paid to build highways they’re not

Paid to not build highways that sentence makes sense just think about it for a second when a highway is proposed Traffic Engineers will provide models that show that the project is needed to accommodate a future growth in traffic and when those highways induce that growth in traffic then it’s used to

Justify further Highway spending sometimes this is taken to absurd levels in 1996 the Washington State Department of Transportation wanted to widen the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge in Seattle and to justify the project they forecasted that traffic would increase like this but then these were the actual numbers so in 2002 they projected an

Increase in traffic like this and these were the actual numbers so in 2011 they projected an increase in traffic like this this incidentally traffic volumes have decreased even more since then but that’s because tolls were reintroduced to the bridge in 2011 and these absurd traffic projections are not rare as Chuck

Morrone a former traffic engineer himself and the founder of strong towns has said the goal of traffic modeling is not to be right it’s to create a plausible narrative as to why more construction is both needed and helpful so if building more Highway ways and more Lanes won’t fix traffic

Congestion what will well if you only take one thing away from this video I want it to be this there is no solution to car traffic except viable alternatives to driving driving isn’t inherently faster than other options especially within cities if driving is faster it’s because hundreds of billions

Have been spent to make it faster ultimately people drive in order to get to the places they want to go sitting in a car by itself isn’t the goal well except for people who hate both their jobs and their families fundamentally I’ve learned that there are really not

That many car people train people or bicycle people the vast majority of people just want to get wherever they’re going quickly and efficiently in Amsterdam that best choice is often a bicycle in Tokyo it’s often a train but in far too many cities the only quick

And efficient way to get around is by car and so you get too much car traffic like this is really kind of obvious right there’s even a term for it the Downs Thompson Paradox which states that traffic will constantly increase until it’s faster to take the Alternatives but if the Alternatives get

Stuck in the same traffic as the cars there’s nothing to stop the growth in traffic congestion I have a previous video about the down Thompson Paradox so if you’d like to learn more and see buses stuck in traffic see the link in the description in car dependent cities like

Where I’m from people see public transit as inferior nobody will voluntarily take this bus if they can afford to drive but that’s because the alternatives to driving have been made inferior through Decades of expensive infrastructure built almost exclusively for cars and a chronic underfunding of public transit these are political decisions and and

They’re not inevitable if you ride in the first class Carriage of a train in Switzerland you’ll see lots of wealthy people taking public transit I guarantee you that these people can afford to drive but why would they when taking the train is vastly superior it’s important to understand

That induced demand isn’t just for cars it can happen with any transportation infrastructure when you create a transportation system that makes it faster cheaper and more efficient to say cycle or take public transit the majority of people will choose those options when a new train line is built

People will arrange their lives around it people can and do change jobs or move houses because new public transit makes it more convenient so we can choose where we build homes and destinations right we can build them along increasingly wide strads and highways inducing people to drive or we can build

Them within walking distance of Rapid Transit cycling Advocates will very often say if you build it they will come because people who do not cycle today can and will cycle when high quality and safe cycling infrastructure is made available to them researchers in Copenhagen have conducted multiple studies that show

Expanding the bike Network leads to an increase in both the total number of trips made by bike as well as the total distance people were willing to travel by bike the difference between induced demand for cars and induced demand for other modes of travel is that cars are extremely space inefficient you can

Absorb a lot more induced travel Demand on a subway line tram line or bicycle path than you can in a car Lane one thing I’ve noticed about the Netherlands is that within the city most roads only have one lane per direction for cars and this is done on purpose you

Might think that if a single Lane can carry say 1,000 cars per hour then two lanes can carry 2,000 but it’s not true not even close on multi-lane roads drivers will merge in and out which causes backups and this only gets worse The Wider the road gets the only real

Place where multiple lanes are needed is at intersections where turning cars should be out of the way of through traffic so turning lanes are useful strads with their multiple driveways and side streets are uniquely inefficient but what happens when a road is genuinely not big enough to handle the

Traffic required well this is a chart by the national Association of city transportation officials in the US which shows the estimated capacity of a single travel Lane for different types of Transportation this chart is oversimplified huh but it expresses the First Fundamental mindset change that’s needed to actually improve

Transportation efficiency moving as many people as possible rather than as many cars as possible H this is an important distinction if your two-lane road is full and you need to go through the very expens and home destroying process of widening it why would you choose anything at the top of this chart

Instead of something farther down and that’s what you often see here in the Netherlands a road like this with one lane for cars in each Direction and a center lane for public transit this kind of Road configuration is going to move a hell of a lot more people than one that

Is only for cars because the trams and buses get their own dedicated Lane they don’t get stuck in traffic which can make them faster than driving especially at rush hour which inevitably induces demand for Transit and because the cycling infrastructure is extremely safe it encourages people to cycle for some

Trips too though Dutch Transportation planner is designed for many more factors beyond just capacity so if you’d like to learn more about the philosophy of Dutch Road design is worth checking out build the lanes a YouTube channel created by a transportation engineer in the Netherlands Link in the

Description but why walking and cycling isn’t a viable alternative in a place like this which is why you don’t see a lot of people doing it you can’t just slap down a bike lane here and expect most people to use it in order to make walking and cycling convenient and

Viable destinations need to be closer together instead of exclusionary zoning where residential commercial and business districts are completely separated from one another mixed use zoning allows residential and low impact commercial properties to intermix which was literally just the way we designed cities until car dependent Suburbia came along in the

1950s in mixed use neighborhoods it’s often faster and more convenient to walk or cycle to your destination than to take a car which is why so many people do it as opposed to Suburbia where everybody has to funnel down the same arterial roads to go to Every

Destination this is why places that are serious about reducing congestion bring destinations closer together and give people other ways to get to them Arlington Virginia has successfully decreased traffic by focusing on mixed use zoning and Transit which means the people who live and visit there don’t

Need to take their cars for every trip researchers estimated that these improvements took about 45,000 car trips off Arlington’s roads every single weekday if they had widen the roads instead they would have literally gotten the opposite and a city that has made incredible progress reducing traffic is Oslo after electing a left-wing majority

In 2015 the municipality created a plan to reduce car traffic by 1/3 by 2030 they did this by making it easier to walk cycle and take public transit they separated tram and bus lines so that public transit wouldn’t get stuck in traffic they built out their bike

Network and Bike Share which made it easier and safer to cycle and many new people started cycling they widen sidewalks pedestrianized streets and improve safety for people walking by adding things like bump outs and traffic calming they moved and removed street parking to provide more space and to

Make the road safer and they expanded and increased their toll system to discourage driving all of these things made walking cycling and public transit viable alternatives to driving oh and they effectively eliminated traffic fatalities too now I’m not going to pretend that Oslo has fixed traffic as

If that’s even a thing that’s possible to do but I will say that the number of cars in the city center is so much lower than it was the last time I was there in 2017 that cities would be insane not to copy some of what they did but as the

Saying goes when all you have is an SUV every trip looks like a drive viewed through the windshield there’s only one solution make more room for all these cars when the real solution is building places where so many cars aren’t needed in the first place it doesn’t mean

Getting rid of driving it just means making cars only one option out of many and certainly not the only good option for every trip because the only way to solve induced demand for cars is viable alternatives to driving this video is sponsored by incog who provide viable alternatives to

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Up at incog docomo just bikes or with the promo code not just bikes and get 60% off an annual subscription thanks to incog for sponsoring this video I’d also like to thank my supporters on nebula and patreon who pay me a chant there’s no solution to car traffic except viable

Alternatives to driving there is no solution to car traffic except viable alternatives to driving there’s no solution to car traffic except viable alternatives to driving but maybe one more Lane will fix it this time die