968
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
968 points (98.0% liked)
Today I Learned
17696 readers
1085 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The highway has greater capacity, and that's a good thing. The congestion would be far worse if it hasn't been widened, and the increased capacity helps the local economy.
That's what makes sense intuitively, but adding lanes doesn't solve congestion. Investing in more mass transit and improving walkability through more thoughtful zoning would be a better place to start.
No, I'm sorry, but the reason congestion persists is induced demand. That with a wide open highway, more people use the highway until congestion returns. This means that more people are able to use the highway at the end of the day. Invest in mass transit and walkability, absolutely, but without appropriate transportation infrastructure problems will appear.
Weirdly aggressive way to agree with everything I was trying to say, thanks.
Yeah I mean you're kind of just re-framing point. Yes the mega highway has the ability to move more cars, but still the end result after 5 years is it's actually taking longer to move cars than before (at peak travel time). So what if it's due to induced demand, we just want to solve the problem of getting people from point A to B, and adding more lanes is a very inefficient transportation method. It's a massive waste of resources when moving around in a car is so costly compared to public transit.
Which is why you do both. There's lots of reasons people sometimes don't use public transit. Refusing to modernize highway infrastructure will kill local industry and punish people whose commutes are inevitably not adequately covered by public transit because they fall outside the planning of the planners.
I see better where we disagree now.
I would contend that allowing sprawl to get bad enough that you can even contemplate 26 lanes is the real "refusing to modernize".
I would contend that while promoting densification is wise, allowing people to live where they want us also wise.
As long as we're talking about allowing and not "privileging". When we allow auto industry political interests to sway spending, that's what usually happens. Moving away from that and toward density is usually fairer than it feels (as equality often does feel unfair to the privileged).
We have a lot to untangle politically and economically. A lot of infrastructure is too utilized for direct profit rather than societal good. Some US states even have privatized DMVs.
I totally agree, and we should be spending on public transit. But going to people and telling them that it is going to be a matter of public policy that they shouldn't be driving?
Should we instead run society based on "but what will the reactionaries think?"
So now people who don't want to ride a bus are "reactionaries?"
Would it kill you to say something that isn't just deeply annoying?
I know, I know, it's annoying to think in complexities
They said, instead of admitting they're an asshole.
🤣 you called me aggressive because I didn't blindly agree with you
That’s not what they’re saying. No one’s going to stop you from living in a suburb 50 miles from your job. But the argument is that maybe a city should stop encouraging people to do so by investing their limited resources in mass transit and denser housing, thus giving some people the option of NOT having to live 50 miles away.
And if road infrastructure is neglected, then anything larger than a person can't easily move in or out of the city. So, you need to invest in both. Buses, freeways, and in a very urban area, rail.
What does modernizing highway infrastructure even mean? I don't think you could call adding more lanes "modernizing" if you're being serious. That's been the blind answer for years but adding more lanes does not solve congestion/demand/whatever you want to call it. It's not an efficient way to solve the transportation problem. You spend a ton of resources (punishing people bulldozing neighborhoods or with noise pollution, destroying nature, etc) and you still have the same ultimate problem you did before you started, people traveling slowly in a pollution emitting vehicle. So doing both is not even the point when one side of the equation (adding lanes) is a very poor solution. Focus on better solutions like public transportation reaching more people.
Driving is the most expensive and dangerous way to get around, ironically championed by the party of "fiscal responsibility".
Train tracks would have been cheaper to build (and maintain), take up far less space and be far better for the local economy. Hell, just investing the money on buses would have been far more efficient.
Not everyone can take public transit.
So they can use the thinner roads, which will be way less crowded when everyone else that can is using public transportation.
Did you really think this was a coherent response? It’s not like all roads are being removed.
That just leads to incredibly long commutes for the working class as they are forced to struggle through progressively worse traffic on neglected, overstrained highways. You need to invest in both mass transit and general transportation infrastructure.
Not sure how you came up with this fantasy tbh.
Do you think the working class isn’t going to use public transportation and will all drive? Do you think investing in public transportation means purposefully letting roads degrade? Neither assumption is based on anything I’ve said or in reality in general.
What do you even think my argument is?
The point is that diverting resources to public transportation will reduce traffic by providing an efficient alternative. Then you don’t have to expand roads to accommodate drivers because the bulk of commuters only really need good public transportation to get around.
All? No. Public transit is very useful. But there's a lot of people who can't afford rent in the city and must live outside the reach of a good public transit network. Or who keep working hours which don't allow them to use the network. Or who needs to travel between two locations which would be an extreme journey for public transit.
That's why you do both. Because not all people are going to be served well by any one solution.
I'm sorry but you don't seem to understand how public transport works. Public transport usually does extend quite far outside the inner city, with efficient links into the city. That's an incredibly common pattern for public transport.
Look at a city like London. Absurd rental prices. The working class lives well outside the city. Few people have cars.
The only situations where having a car tends to be preferable is if you live outside the city AND also work outside the city. And even then, bus routes usually alleviate the problem of getting between suburbs. And those routes usually aren't as congested anyway.
My wife worked a job in a city 20 minutes by car from her location in another city, in a major metro area. Transit would have taken two hours because the focus was on bringing people to different locations, not between where she was going and where she needed to go. No matter how well planned the network, you can't massively cover every route and every time of day. You cover the primary commutes of most people.
So invest in public transport to add more routes.
It's like you are saying that we shouldn't improve anything, because things are bad now. Circular and just nonsensical.
Yes. And in doing so you remove the vast majority of the cars from the road. So you have fewer, narrower roads. Which makes the living conditions of everyone more pleasant. And it enables more transportation options like bicycles, which covers many of the short-to-medium distance commutes which public transport might not be practical for, which even further reduces the demand for cars. It also incentivises, for the people who do actually need cars, the purchase of smaller vehicles, which even further increases pedestrian and bicycle safety. Which even further incentivises biking and walking...
And so on and so on...
The more we invest in car-centric infrastructure, the more people need cars to navigate the world, and the worse the world gets overall.
Again, how did you read everything I’ve written and act like the conversation is about one or the other? Did you even read what I wrote?
Not to mention you very clearly don’t understand how public transportation works based on where you think it goes between.
Alright, you've been a jackass from comment one, and I'm ending this. GFY and have a nice day.
You finally responded to something I actually said! Congrats on clutching your pearls instead of admitting you were misrepresenting what I was saying.
Also funny that I’ve never engaged in ad hominem but I’ve offended you so much that I’m a “jackass” and should “go fuck [myself]”.
Self awareness really isn’t your strong suit.
Who can’t?
Not with idiots fighting it every step of the way to make sure it's as unreliable or nonexistent as possible.
but most people can
and, ironically, the commute would be better for drivers too, if most people were to take public transport, since roads would be less crowded (and only with people who enjoy driving, instead of people who are forced to drive)
Which is why the smart decision is to invest in both.
Besides, if you add an HOV lane to a public highway, you can double it as a bus lane, improving public transit. Roads are like rails for buses, after all.
You’re wrong though.
I'm really not
Just think about this for a minute dude.
Who are people going to belive, civil engineers and planning strategists that research this topic for a living and have done for decades, or some random on lemmy?
Why does induced demand lead to congestion on a highway? Because more people use the road. Because more people are able to use the road.
Therefore, wider highways allow greater movement. It's not very complicated.
This is an article also about Houston’s freeways and traffic; induced demand is the reason congestion is not lessened in these situations:
Please stop adding more lanes to busy highways—it doesn’t help
This is explored extensively in the book ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)’ by Tom Vanderbilt. I highly recommend it; it’s excellent and very informative about this widely misunderstood topic.
Getting more cars off the road using things like better public transportation is the answer here, something that is sadly lacking in Houston…yet they keep widening roads. It never helps, and it never will.
By definition, if the road has more capacity, it is helping. It just isn't helping enough to eliminate traffic. Unless you're claiming that the larger freeways have the same capacity as the smaller ones, which doesn't really make sense.
I think you’re intentionally missing the point, so I’m gonna go about my day now. But feel free to check out either of the sources I linked if you want to learn why bigger roads don’t reduce congestion. :)
Yeah, you didn't read what I wrote, you just chose to be an arrogant ass. Fucking hell, you people are dickheads.
It’s insane how little self awareness you have. They politely correct you and provide information to confirm it and you get pissy and call them a dickhead.
Look in the mirror you dense loser.
I think adding lanes helps up to a point but after that just creates more problems. Here are a couple problems with adding lanes:
It assumes that everyone drives efficiently. For example, that everyone knows exactly where they're going and if they're in the left lane to go fast that they start migrating over to the right lane well in advance of their exit. But this is not true and instead causes people to panic swerve across 10 lanes while slowing down in order to get to their exit. Anyone who has been driving for a few years has seen this happen. Multiply this problem by the number of idiots on the road, and again by the number of exits. And having more lanes makes this a bigger problem because it has a higher capacity for more of these idiots to exist, and more "obstacle" lanes between them and their goal (not to mention more victims in those right lanes).
If you don't expand the lanes across all the exits from this super highway, traffic will still back up because the traffic cannot smoothly flow out to the rest of the city where people are trying to go. This backs up traffic on the highway itself. It's like having a clogged artery. And expanding those roads is not always an option if it's already in a heavily developed part of a city. If there's no room due to buildings, you simply cannot add lanes.
In addition to the zoning and walkability suggestion someone else made, I would propose that more alternate routes (even if not as direct a route) can help offload traffic especially at peak times, and is a much more feasible solution in the short term for our country that is built around private vehicle transportation. This is also an effective solution if you add tolls to one of those routes and increase the speed limit. It has the side benefit of funding other city projects, and acts as a sort of tax for people who want to go fast. The lazy implementation of this that I've seen in some places (including in Texas) is to add toll express lanes on the same highway. I see this as mostly a money grab but does not help much, if at all, with congestion. It's more like a streaming service raising their subscription costs just because they can.