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Thursday, June 19, 2014

Adding lanes to roads increases traffic

Wired reports on a phenomenon well-known to traffic engineers: adding new lanes to a road increases traffic on them. A few cities, around the world, have taken lanes away, and found that traffic doesn't really get worse -- people take fewer trips, or use public transport.

Interesting.

2 comments:

FancyHorse said...

Interesting reading. I've often thought that more and wider roads lead to more suburbs, more shopping centers, and therefore more traffic.
In regard to making it costlier to drive during rush hour, why not offer incentives to motivate businesses and other employers to stagger their working hours or encourage working from home via computer and flexible hours?
I'm not sure how many people drive just for the fun of it. Occasionally we do, but mostly we drive because we have somewhere we have to be at a certain time and it's too far to walk. I've never lived in a city with really good public transportation except New Orleans one year when I was a student.

Martin LaBar said...

Thanks, FancyHorse.

There are very few places in the US that have good public transportation. Chicago seems to be one of them. I suppose New York, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia also are, but have no experience with them. I think lots of Europe and Japan have good public transport.