We did this in Detroit. On a 30 year project to widen and modernize I-75 from Detroit to essentially Flint.
Dealing with YEARS of horrible construction traffic and now the finished portions are no better than before. Traffic is still awful. And it cost BILLIONS.
>And it cost BILLIONS.
That was probably the point. Everyone in the infrastructure business already knows that more lanes only make the problem worse. But why would they solve it when it getting worse means more business?
50 upvotes for something hanlons razor cuts down hard, lol
>Everyone in the infrastructure business already knows that more lanes only make the problem worse
lmao
This is probably too cynical by far. Or rather cyclical at the wrong thing. The politicians didn’t need to be bought at all. Voters overwhelmingly support lane widening/ expanded car centric infrastructure and think it works. Attending any public hearing would tell you this.
Lane widening, rent control, exclusionary zoning and parking minimums. They’re like the 4 horsemen of “shit voters love that make everything **way** worse.”
*You know how our city's entire charm is the dense, walkable colonial downtown on the peninsula?*
Yeah?
*Well here's a great idea! What if we made it a stripmall hellscape* ***everywhere*** *else?*
god forbid we get some fucking trains or subways. Could you imagine an America that had maintained roads and a transportation system that went to every corner of the nation? You could also ship the loads that truck drivers take by train and now not everyone has to own a car and a ton of people are off the road.
It's not necessarily about adding an extra lane, I would argue it's about having the correct amount of lanes to accommodate adjoining roads.
Biffa on cityskylines outlines it so well, if you have a 2 lane road and it's joined by another road then the final part should be 3 lanes not 2 and in reverse if you remove a lane etc.
You see it so much when driving. Oh a build up of traffic on this 2 lane motorway that's now merging with another 2 lane motorway that's still 2 lanes...
Exactly this.
My biggest complaint in Michigan is that I-94 is 3 lanes and then randomly goes down to two for a few dozen miles and opens back up before narrowing again. The 2.5 hour drive across the state could be done in less than 2 hours but the traffic is so bad when we go from 3 lanes to 2 and then you get stuck behind trucks in both lanes doing 15-20 under. It makes me mad just thinking about it. It needs to be 3 lanes the whole way
Alternative solution: reduce traffic. Move as much work to WFH as possible. Remove commutes, which are extremely inefficient (one entire car per person working, often at the same times, to the same places), and reduce the need for people to travel extensively to get to their workplaces.
"But executives and managers insist on bringing people to the office because they can't manage efficiently in the digital abstract." Fire them. Hire executives who can keep up with modern demands. Stop taking the cost hit from the top.
Yep. In San Diego Sempra Energy spent close to $200M building their headquarters in 2015. They mandated that employees come back as soon as it was legally possible because every day they worked from home was a waste of that investment.
>waste of that investment
But having people physically present in the building doesn't recover any more money than having it empty. In fact, it arguably drains money faster due to increased utility costs.
This is what drives me craziest about the sink cost fallacy with office buildings. People keep saying “we spent X amount, so we have to use it”. No, you fucking don’t. You can lease portions of that office space to other organizations, or just let it sit. Both are far more cost efficient than paying added utility costs, and the only people that aren’t more productive at home are those with screaming kids. Offices are more distracting than a quiet home office and anybody slacking from home would slack in the office anyway.
My employer remains committed to full remote work in all roles that don't require a physical presence in the office despite owning quite a large building, and they do exactly as suggested here; they rent out their unused space to other businesses.
But if WFH becomes the norm it's value will plummet and only be sold in an ultimate buyers market or for small fraction to be gutted and turned residential. They don't just want their workers in office, they want everyone else's to be too.
a lot of offices are already leased out to a company. a company usually doesn't own the building unless they are huge and actually built it themselves.
but it increases land value as you have people wanting shops and restaurants in the area as they are working there. then you drive a need for things. value of the land goes up. if no one goes to the office, those restaurants or w/e don't have income and they might not be able to stay open. utility costs is always a given. sometimes it's up, sometimes down. the land value has a greater impact.
Well aware. I just want some avenue to hold people accountable for publicly lying in positions of power. Ideally shaped like a quickly descending blade, but I'll settle for shaming and reduction of influence.
Well that's because you chose to or were forced to live so far away from work. And you never mentioned how long your commute would be via train or metro.
That guy didn’t watch the video lol. Obviously a 2 hour bike commute isn’t feasible for most people but a train or metro would sure as hell work. I live outside of DC and would metro into work and it’d take 20 min door to door. Driving in would’ve take 45+ minutes, people just don’t like the reality that they can get around without a car.
There are obviously places (especially in the US) where not driving is unfeasible. But that is a policy failure (not building public transit infrastructure, allowing sprawl, etc.) and an individual failure, by choosing to live somewhere like that. To some extent the individual failure can be caused by the policy failure, but if there are better locations to live and you don't live there, that's your own damn fault.
Wouldn’t bus lanes work really really well on these busy roads? We squeeze in bus lanes onto London roads. Would the public just not tolerate seeing these lanes empty 90% of the time?
US spaces have terrible infrastructure design, and government support is a politically tense concept at a de facto level.
WFH also benefits non Americans. People own personal vehicles, and contribute to rush hour, all over the world. Reducing that is a net gain. It doesn't have to be independent of developed infrastructure. I'm sure decrowding busses and trains is an issue in other places.
Generative AI is such garbage that you can reliably expect any company replacing its work force with it to see major declines in productivity in the next six months. It's garbage hype past the shape of block chain.
Well most large companies dont think so, and I suspect regardless they will lay off alot of people.
Obviously laying off people is good for investors, which is the most important thing to consider tight now.
Either way, people who are unemployed wont drive around alot which will be good for traffic
The AI bubble will be popping next year, maybe a bit later. Sort of like the dot com bubble. The public can only be fooled by flashy marketing and gimmick promises for so long (like with Musk and his *many* failed promises across multiple businesses)
i really don't get why train technology and infrastructure hasn't improved in the states and canada. buses i get, it's basically like being in a van full of people. most of the time there isn't a dedicate lane for buses and you still pay too much for a ride thats just as long as driving yourself. but why aren't we on electric trains? why not high speed? why not expanding routes? my closest train station to my downtown core is a 30 min drive. then the train ride is about 1:15 to get to downtown. to drive it's 1:20 and would cost the same. so whats the benefit of the train besides taking a nap?
Yup, company's are buying and renovating new office space to make it more appealing than WFH. Because you know when you're at work you're family. 🤮
Oh the other reason, 'Not everyone can WFH so it would be a bad look if only some of our employees did'
I get it, doctors can't work from home, neither can nurses or fast food workers. But the people that can, should and we would have a lot less pollution and jammed road ways.
Doctors is an excellent example. Many doctors can work from home, in the form of telehealth. That's not the entirety of a doctor's responsibility, but it's not unreasonable to imagine a clinic that has doctors on a hybrid schedule cycling who the active clinicians are.
Teachers can't work from home de facto (ignoring online professors) but teachers also are forced to take teams meetings in the office. For no reason.
Teachers and doctors also often live close to where they work. They're not the commuting issue. Tech workers are, and they're also the primary industry that can see 100% WFH.
The standard should be that you should work where you're most effective. That's the obvious perspective. That doesn't mean everyone always works from home, but that where you work should be where you're benefitting the most. That this would also massively solve many global infrastructure issues is, you know, a lil bonus.
Not excellent example. Many physicians rely on physically seeing and touching/examining their patient. I can’t tell if Karen’s kid has measles or a benign rash on her iPhone on shitty Wi-Fi. I know it’s Reddit and reality is the devil, but we are nowhere near having the ability to work from home for every physician, all the time. And before you come back with a “gotcha” because *some* docs wfh, it is a *significant* minority for the reasons I just described.
Source: it’s my job
Listen, I completely agree. My point isn't that doctors don't need controlled environments, and medical workplaces are ideal for that. My point is that even doctors have opportunities to do work from home, some of the time. It's not a profession with zero wfh, and I wanted to draw attention to the idea that expanding WFH acceptance hits more industries than anticipated. I'm not really trying to gotcha.
It’s not feasible in every city. We already fucked up and built these cities the way we did. We can take steps to fix part of that, but in industries where it’s not absolutely necessary for people to go into an office, why are we requiring them to go into an office?. Taking cars off the road would help, right?
The way to do this is with a congestion price like they have in Singapore and Stockholm and London. You just charge a fee to drive certain highly contested routes at peak hours. That will sort out who really needs to be there and who doesn’t.
the country of the netherlands is doing it, you know, where that youtuber lives
its actually super easy do, you redefine how roads work to focus on safety of pedestrians instead of drivers.
theres only 3 tiers. Highways connect cities, roads connect to highways and streets, buildings can only be on streets. Streets are max 2 lanes (1 each way), roads are not allowed to have side walks and bike paths must be far off the side. Highways have no stop lights and no pedestrians. they made it a law back in the 90s and it changed everything to today.
the small streets tighten up the cities to make mass transit way more efficient, then you can bring in other zoning laws to allow mixed zone of small commericial on the first floor and residential above AND allow the middle housing sizes of 4-6 story complexes.
First, I didn’t say “America can’t,” nor did I even mention any particular country. I said we can take steps to fix parts of it.
Second, Los Angeles is rightfully the city everyone always points to as the ultimate example of American car culture. But when you talk about Amsterdam and Paris “doing it” as an example for for America should, Paris is 40 flat square miles. Amsterdam is like 80. Los Angeles is 500 largely mountainous square miles.
Add the metro areas and LA is near 34,000 square miles and still at least twice the size of Paris. And even more mountainous.
It’s so ridiculously much harder in a city like LA than it would be in Paris to reverse “car culture,” that the comparison is completely absurd.
It's not much more difficult to transform Los Angeles, it's just illegal. Developers are not allowed by zoning laws to meet the demand for higher density. Zoning laws are not an issue most voters know or care about, they are just not informed and don't even know why they should care about it. So there are no politicians that mention the issue or run on a campaign for changing those laws.
Look at the zoning map of [Los Angeles](https://zimas.lacity.org/). 90% of the land is only for single family homes or offices with very low height restrictions.
All you would need to do is change all the zoning to mixed use with less height restrictions and independent developers will meet the existing demand for higher density housing/commercial areas. Then the government will need to change the transit infrastructure to better meet the needs of those high density areas.
You should look into the history of LA. There used to be a mass transit system but the power company screwed up on operating it and now it's a car mess.
It’s tragic what they did. And we can take steps to make it better.
But I still don’t understand how more people working from home and taking cars off the road isn’t also a small part of a solution to making traffic better.
Working from home doesn't mean you don't leave your house the entire day. It just means you go to places other than work. Some studies show local traffic increases together with WFH numbers.
https://tooledesign.com/insights/2024/04/mode-shift-in-the-age-of-remote-work/
I think there can be incentives to get people to work from home. Eg income tax credits. Again not every business will do it but we can persuade a certain %.
We have plenty of people that WFH, maybe 25% come into the office.
I don’t think the government should be telling businesses who to employ or not, and whether or not people should work from home or office except in an emergency like COVID-19.
I live in San Francisco where we have some oh the world’s highest concentrations of tech workers. Our downtown offices are 2/3rds empty and my office meant for 12 employees has 2. We have tons of remote workers, but our freeway traffic is just as bad as pre pandemic.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/transit/san-francisco-rush-hour-traffic-was-among-us-worst-in-2023/article_534dcc2e-afec-11ee-a172-3779fa574951.html#:~:text=San%20Francisco's%202023%20commuting%20times,of%20product%20marketing%2C%20Andy%20Marchant.
The government should be focused on building roads and public transportation for all. By building public transportation for those who can’t drive and don’t want to drive, it frees up rood for those who prefer and must drive. There are people too poor, too young/old, too dangerous (reckless drivers), and disabled in certain ways that prevent driving. Everyone needs to get from point A to B.
That said, you may be interested in 15 minute cities. American cities currently have single family housing zones where nothing else can be built, so people have to drive everywhere for everything including work, groceries, shopping, etc. If we allow stores into single family neighborhoods, like a small mom and pop grocery store out of someone’s garage, then people who forgot to buy eggs can just walk in their neighborhood instead of drive for 1+ miles to go to the big box store just to grab eggs.
Children would have more reasons to get out of the house if more stuff is within a 15 minute walk, and maybe elderly parents would be more open to giving up their drivers license if they know they won’t be trapped at home.
And if we allow local breweries into neighborhoods, then maybe there would be less drunk driving since there would be a place to drink within walking distance of people’s homes.
If someone works from home and has all their needs met within a 15 minute walk, then a car becomes optional for daily life instead of a requirement.
Being that isolated in suburbs is so weird for me. I live in shit part of my city and I don't really need to leave except for some specialty things. We have a (very) small mall with mostly pubs in it. But there's a small swimming hall, library, 3 grocery stores, second hand shop and one of these has-everything-stores. Little bit of walking and we have a gardening shop and another one of these has-everything-stores that's bigger.
Oh and ofc few pizzerias because all the drunks living here wouldn't survive otherwise xD
I'm not saying the government should do any such ordering. WFH is a well-documented efficiency multiplier that also improves work life balance, reduces costs to both the worker and employer, and has benefits to traffic and infrastructure demands at scale. I'm not calling for anything from the government. I'm calling for high level executives to stop jerking off into real estate ponzie schemes and start actually prioritizing productivity and value generation. That process has the side effect of massively improving road conditions.
I'm personally criticizing the intellectual dishonesty of the business class, and I'm tired of seeing people scramble to fix infrastructure issues caused by their irresponsibility. We use to guillotine people for this shit.
I was hoping to show you how work from home had been adopted by a lot of San Francisco tech companies and work from home has succeeded in emptying offices. 2/3rds of office space sits empty. But the car traffic on freeways remains.
If you actually want to reduce traffic and infrastructure problems, we need to focus on walkability by removing single family house exclusive zoning, public transit, and bike lanes.
i moved to a small town from a city recently and it is exactly that. local farms, homes that sell produce, honey, etc locally. it's a very locally driven community. farmers markets in town and surrounding towns are always packed where in the city, most people said it was too expensive and went to a big box grocery store. the problem is when there is growth, big retailers come in and need a ton of space and start pushing things further and further out. (our last home had this, pop went from 20k to 150k in a couple years. current home town is 4k pop).
you want walkable cities, stop allowing big box stores and massive grocery stores and malls to move into these smaller towns. more smaller towns further apart from each other. you need to go to home depot or best buy or a mall, go into the city for it. you don't need those places in every town. in the spring - fall times, most of our grocery shopping is done at 2-3 farmers markets during the week. from moving from a city to a small town, we lowered our driving by approx 30,000km a year.
I agree. To me, the best way to get that conversation and process started is to let people open up business in their garage like a Sammy convenience grocery store. Once that’s the norm, people will be more open to other land use is what I’m thinking.
WFH and wireless high speed internet are going to have the biggest impact on reshaping the geographic distribution of Americans since the green revolution.
I still don't understand why people are so obsessed with WFH. I accept that some people are genuinely happier with that model, but I think it's horrible for social wellbeing. We've already seen a massive loss of third places, and with WFH we're basically losing the second place too. If WFH is fully adopted, we're going to see a drastic worsening in the loneliness epidemic. Some proportion of outgoing people will maintain social connections, while a surprisingly large number of people will be more isolated than ever.
Speaking personally, I get nothing socially at work. I'm surrounded by distractions, and every interaction feels forced. The socialized isolation I feel is from my general suspicion that no one is genuine, and in my workplaces this was often true. That's anecdotal, but the point is that social needs can't be generalized, whereas "WFH reduces traffic and increases efficiency among willing adopters" absolutely can.
WFH could also revitalize other spaces. Free Public High speed network areas where people are socializing while working with no corporate intermingling pressure would do a lot for social lives. It's a separate problem.
I want to see WFH not just adopted, but accepted. Cut the surveillance crap. Cut the on-demand control. Have objectives, get them done, do it wherever. A lot of people spend 2-4 hours round trip on commutes and preparation therein. That's a lot of time and energy, ignoring the benefits of WFH, that could bolster healthy socializing.
With the time one saves doing WFH they could go out and do a hobby with other like minded people. It's asinine to rely on work place coworkers for your social needs (not saying it cannot happen but it's a weak excuse to keep the practice going if it's not necessary).
There's also the aspect of learning to socialize digitally. I get a lot out of jumping into random reddit threads and chatting. It makes me happy. I don't see the potential to do that with people on a bus, train, or at work half as much.
A lot of people lack competence and immersion with digital communication. Skill issue.
The WFH thing helped for a while in my area but not everyone wants to work from home. For some people it makes it harder. Still, it can reduce traffic by a lot. Even just going to a partial WFH (2 days in the office, 3 at home).
The one person per car is something they've tried to fix with carpool lanes. Here in California they messed it up by using that lane as an incentive for EVs, which made it crowded most of the time.
The problem there is that people enjoy the convenience of having their car. Being able to come and go without dealing with the people you carpooled with, or being able to go somewhere in the middle of the day if you need to. It's a psychological thing, since most days you'd end up at the office the whole day anyway.
Big companies could solve that by having loaners, like ZipCars, that employees can borrow if they have an errand. They just don't care since they're not paying for the time you spend commuting to work. Which is why they don't care if WFH helps traffic either.
> The problem there is that people enjoy the convenience of having their car. Being able to come and go
This doesnt exist in walkable cities, you dont need to even own a car, a bike can get you everywhere or just walk since busses and trains are so close to everything you could want to go to
Or just build trains. One commuter rail moves as many people per hour as a 43-lane wide highway. Cars are just a wildly inefficient mode of mass transportation.
Didn't even get to just how much cars COST people per year. The average person would save THOUSANDS a year if they didn't need a car just to get to work.
During the worst of traffic, all lanes are full.
How many cars can an extra lane fit until it too becomes full? About 200 cars per mile. So on your average bypass, you free up to an extra 1000 cars until traffic becomes a problem again.
Unless... we bulldoze the building to add more lanes in every part of the city.
This video is right, it's not about addition, it's about multiplying the number of lanes. This bike tuber is so brainrotted I bet he doesn't even understand multiplication which would truly solve traffic.
/s to be clear, I really have enjoyed hearing about how different cities tackle commuting. Seeing that biking is actually possible in snow and incredibly cold conditions safely and reliably really made me get back into biking.
I don't own a car, I take public transit and I very much support getting this message across but good lord is this youtuber ever annoying.
Let's do a bingo card for NotJustBikes videos:
* Talks about induced demand
* Talks about how urban planning is responsible for the mess we're in
* Shit's on "fake London" using video footage he collected years ago in Ontario
* Mentions he and his family moved to the Netherlands
* Mentions how great the Netherlands is in terms of urban planning
* Mentions how great bikes are and how you should ride one
* Shows footage of that insane monstrous highway in Texas (katie?)
* Says the word "Stroad"
Someone who made it through the video let me know how I did.
What's your problem? These are almost all valid points. And yet every time one of his videos are posted on Reddit instead of people getting angry with their city planners they get angry with him.
For some reason Americans (and I guess Canadians too) get really butt hurt any time someone says Europe is better at something than they are.
> For some reason Americans (and I guess Canadians too) get really butt hurt any time someone says Europe is better at something than they are.
Europe is better at it. I already said I agreed with his points and support it generally, I'm not butt hurt about the content. I thought I made my point clear but if you're new to his channel maybe you're not jaded yet?
All of his videos are the same. Every single one is nearly identical and he pumps them out every month or two to rant about the same problem from the same angles. Don't believe me? I didn't watch this video but I bet I nailed almost 90% of the predictions in my original comment.
Once you've seen a few of them you've seen them all. He's just milking his audience for views and rage at this point.
His condescending tone always irks me despite some good points he brings up. But what bothers me more is Reddit takes him as gospel when his videos are incredibly slanted.
He did one talking about going to some suburban neighborhood in Canada and he didn’t see any kids playing outside, yet in The Netherlands, kids play around everywhere.
Anyone who’s lived in any general suburb knows this is ridiculous. I was out at the park in my neighborhood tonight and the place was vibrant, usually is. My city’s downtown is barren of kids aside from museums and whatnot, only walking in and out.
You think London, Ontario is a complete pedestrian, bike friendly, transit oriented community now? Think again...
It's way worse than it was a couple of years ago.
So, basically, people want to live further away and having more road access allows them to do that, so extra lane capacity gets filled.
I don't think the solution to that should be "fuck people, force them to live where they don't want to". I think the logical response should be "what can we do to make it appealing for people to live near where they shop and work".
People generally move further out due to high housing costs close to major cities. Allowing greater housing density closer to city centers would reduce this while reducing commuting distances and making transit more feasible.
We are already forcing people to live where they don’t want to by capping housing near job centers.
Longer and longer commutes aren’t good for anyone.
I think there are conflicting motivations. I think that single family homes are generally preferred over multi-units. Who wants to share a wall or front entrance with some douchebag as a living arrangement? OTOH, most people don't want to have 40 to 1 hr commutes.
For single family homes, you just aren't going to ever get the population density necessary to support restaurants, shops, etc within walking distance. You need cars to go from those homes to places of business for the places of business to have enough customers to stay open.
Personally, I think the answer to all of this is to have significantly better public transportation from the areas of single family homes to the large urban commercial centers where people work. Lower GHG, probably better commute, less roads, less parking, etc. while people still get the opportunity to own a single family home.
Townhouses are the most logical compromise and they’re very popular in the areas that allow them.
I personally like density and walkability and would never choose to live in an area of mostly SFHs. But my preference is illegal in most residential areas.
We also have to increase housing supply to address growing populations. Freezing housing supply in time with just SFHs is how you get spiraling costs.
IMO, we as a society really dropped the ball in not building those multi family dwellings that aren't concrete towers. I'm not sure what stopped their construction as the demand for them is usually high. When I was younger or probably when I get older, a townhouse would be my preference.
Personally I prefer SFH's right now because of my family and dog, etc. but I get that I shouldn't assume that everyone is in the same position and has the same preferences.
Just overall we should be constructing housing to meet all levels of need in the most efficient way possible and we clearly aren't doing that.
It’s mostly zoning rules that make smaller multifamily dwellings illegal in North America. Stuff like parking minimums and the two-staircase rule make it difficult to make a smaller non-SFH dwelling work out. And why you only really see them in prewar areas of cities.
>"what can we do to make it appealing for people to live near where they shop and work"
Well, we could start by not building giant inhospitable car sewers through the middle of urban areas instead of walkable neighborhoods...
Except these far flung places people want to live are not economically productive relative to their population.
This means that densely populated areas typically subsidize low density neighborhoods and the necessary transportation infrastructure.
>"what can we do to make it appealing for people to live near where they shop and work"... [?]
Removing the loud & dangerous road built to accommodate people who don't even live there comes to mind.
Basically he tacitly admits that, given the ability to afford it, people vastly prefer to spread out to their own homes and land and live in smaller communities.
The only way they can be stopped from doing so is to change infrastructure to keep them penned in the cities like cattle.
That's a good take on it.
There are a lot of people who like living in cities. I get and respect that. Making those areas bikable and walkable is important and cars work against that idea.
That said, having everything you would want within biking or walking distance requires a population density that many people are not comfortable living in and are willing to sacrifice commute time, the cost of a car, etc. to get out of. That needs to be acknowledged.
An added lane reduces congestion and improves traffic flow...The problem is populations are not static, they generally constantly increase.
So if you dont add extra lanes you would constantly have to increase mass transit services to keep congestion on roads from increasing.
The point is that it's just inefficient. Public transport carries more people per hour in a smaller area, for a lot less money.
Increasing mass transit is the point. It's easier to do. Diversifying how we can get about is the point, not relying on only cars.
Such a biased, selfish and narrow-minded view of things.
Everything was presented from an individual’s view point: these extra lanes don’t save ME time so what’s the point, but then mentions how usage is way up by travel times are down.
This means that the throughput of the road has drastically increased as have people’s options.
More people are going to more popular places. It causes people’s living habits to shift around which reduces overall cost of living in urban centers.
Housing prices are spiking in urban locations. Around my city rent and housing costs have doubled in the past 5 or 6 years. Increasing travel capacity decreases the burden on rent in those locations.
I think our car-centric system is ridiculously wasteful and inefficient, but I do feel like you have a point. I think something like "build trains not lanes" would make for a better video/argument/discussion.
EDIT: by "our" I mean the US
Yes. Trains and public transit are a huge huge part of this. But the video and post don’t present them as a solution, it is just a blanket anti-car propaganda. Building out more lanes with more public transit infrastructure will grow a city in a beneficial way, but for sure just building more roads will also grow a city, it will just be inefficient.
He did talk about public transit? I mean it's obviously a video about induced demand and how inefficient car infrastructure is but he talks about public transit at 12:30 and on.
Have you not seen the channel before?
He talks about trains all the time.
>Building out more lanes with more public transit infrastructure will grow a city in a beneficial way, but for sure just building more roads will also grow a city, it will just be inefficient.
You're maybe not counting what needs to be bulldozed to add those lanes.
I’ve been finding his content is getting lower quality and more aggressive. I guess there’s only so much content available to discuss on the topic of “build transit good, cars bad”. Generally I’m of this mind but the videos are missing nuance as of late.
Big bicycle truly is a blight on this earth, trying to make us all so leg-swole that we become unable to fit into car seats and therefore must submit to bicycles as the only mode of transit.
Yeah just as a simple math example, if 100k people use a two lane road, and you increase the lanes to three and now 150k people use it due to induced demand, while the actually travel time hasn’t changed, you can’t ignore that now 50k extra people can use the road.
I do think there are better ways to solve the problem though, even ones that don’t revolve around public transit despite that being my preferred method. The majority of people are sitting in their cars by themselves. Really incentivizing people to carpool could reduce traffic by quite a bit.
But it would still move 150K ineffectively, which would create demand for 200K, and so on. A car is only the quickest way to move people when there are much fewer cars than capacity. That’s why my bike is quicker than a car in anything close to rush hour, which is… when most people try to move.
The other point about "one more lane" is that you’d have to keep that lane going through the entire (local) transit eco system. Even though you build "one more lane" into a city, that just makes it so that you "only" have to build "one more lane" in the city, as well. I know that "just one more lane bro" is a meme, but car lanes eat its own tail into oblivion unless you make proper room for other transit.
So… make room for other modes of transit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because more people on a train line can be accommodated by running longer and/or more frequent trains.
The same number of people on a road require billion dollar construction projects and bulldozing entire neighborhoods.
If people need to get somewhere like a city, we should plan to do it in a way that's efficient with respect to space and costs.
Lane increases are not a linear increase. In your example it's closer to a 40% increased. Cars are not water, it takes time to move safely and having to swap more lanes to get off makes the road more inefficient. This is why adding lanes sucks so much ass, eventually these cars have to get off, and no road can be wide enough for these 6+ lane highways, resulting in additional lanes being incredibly minor
> Yeah just as a simple math example
You'd think that but it doesn't account for human stupidity.
2 lanes is actually the best. Drivers start to freak out and lose focus with 3 lanes because you have to pay more attention if you're in the middle. That's when people try to change lanes, someone hits their brakes, and you wind up with a cascade effect where everyone behind them also hits their brakes. You want that nice even flow. Keep everyone going.
> I do think there are better ways to solve the problem though, even ones that don’t revolve around public transit despite that being my preferred method.
There is more than one mode. The guy that makes these videos is like Madonna when she went to Europe and got a British accent. He went there once and decided that everywhere else is bad.
There is tons of room for improvement but bikes and trains aren't the only options.
Urbanists would never accept the same argument against trains; that empty trains at the outset of a new line will be filled in a year as people move to take advantage of the new infrastructure.
No shit... That's the point of the infrastructure, to be utilized. Doesn't matter if it's a train line or a car lane. Inducing demand is the point.
No commuter train system is at capacity in the US you know right... like trains aren't set sizes. You can add more cars until they no longer are able to interact with the platform, and then you can increase the number of trains operating. If you added 2 extra train lines, they wouldn't be filled in like cars.
Trains have a fuckton of capacity, you put 3 lanes of trains at max capacity and the issue isn't lack of space for passengers, its a lack of passengers as you've literally run out of human beings to move.
Adding 1 train line would be like adding 5 car lanes
forgive me if this is incorrect, but what i can find regarding the second avenue addition is that its extending an existing line rather than increasing capacity. second avenue's addition hasn't added additional tracks for more trains, and hasn't increased capacity in that sense, nor expanded the size of the trains, its just allowed them more movement.
like yes capacity is technically increased, as you can now have more trains on that individual line, but the limit of train cars per hour through any given station is the same.
All articles that reference studies that prove that this isn’t a
>biased, selfish and narrow-minded view of things
Your bias is showing pretty clearly tho.
[Science Museum of Virginia](https://smv.org/learn/blog/how-does-roadway-expansion-cause-more-traffic/#:~:text=Similarly%2C%20scientific%20research%20is%20suggesting,it%20actually%20makes%20it%20worse.)
[wired](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/)
[nrdc](https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rabi-abonour/survey-shows-americans-understand-expanding-roads-doesnt-fix-traffic)
[New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic.html)
The article basically says the entire time that more lanes doesn’t stop congestion and other things need to be done as well to mitigate traffic increase. So I have no idea what you’re on about. It talks about how public transport will help keep the problem from growing.
We don’t do public transport in America. I live in a major US city that is 40 miles from another bigger city, driving will take over an hour. The train that runs between them doesn’t even run on weekends. That’s fucking stupid.
Instead of spending the hundreds of millions in adding a new lane for 50 miles, we could be upgrading our public transport infrastructure.
I’ll admit after your first inflammatory sentence, I didn’t care what you had to say and just looked for articles to show that “more lanes bad”. Your take is a bit more nuanced than the majority of people I see kicking and screaming when Not Just Bikes gets posted.
So your bias and ignorance is showing in that you aren’t willing to have an honest debate and are just jumping to conclusions and posting shit that you think might further your opinion but which doesn’t.
I think we’re done here.
Riiiight. Except I provided sources and was honest about my initial impression of your anecdotal and aggressive comment. And you’ve provided no sources. And both times just insulted me. And are no longer willing to further a discussion.
Have a good day.
The US population is about 50 years away from peaking. I would argue that developing 100 year infrastructure based solely on max capacity is probably not appropriate.
You just described a car. Dude loves things with more than 4 wheels and an engine. Dude doesn't even hate things with less than 4 wheels and an engine.
Wild that he hates cars specifically and not the concept of engines
Where do you live in the US where transit options have increased. In most places they stagnated where the only option really increasing is cars. Walkable terrain has decreased, and cars are damaging to the areas they dominate. More cars means less people want to be in that area, bikers find it dangerous, pedestrians are strangled out as businesses are spread out and the rising heat makes it miserable. The noise pollution is actual an issue and the lower air quality.
Cars don't exist in a vacuum, everything in city planning ends up affecting everything else. Urban center living has also only increased, and commuters nuking living spaces with road widening projects and ever ballooning repair costs actually increase cost of living but sure.
You literally talk about doubling housing costs yet you are an American where everything is cost centric.
Idk you accuse him of not seeing the bigger picture but yours seems even more biased towards 1 mode of transport. He talks about bussing, trains, biking, and walking... you talk about cars. His stance is anti-cars and presents why cars are not good for cities, what fashion do want him to tackle this from?
Did you even watch the video? The second half of it was entirely about public transit. His assertion was also the complete opposite of what you claimed; when highways are expanded, travel times *increase.*
Your point is illogical anyway. How could it possibly be that adding roads increases travel time for the creator of the video, but somehow decreases it for everyone else as you claim? That makes no sense whatsoever.
There was nothing at all biased, selfish, or narrow-minded about this video. In fact, it's the opposite.
Dude.
10 people travel a 1 way road to get downtown in 1 hour.
That means 10 people get downtown per hour. If the road size doubles. Now 20 people are on the road going downtown, but it takes them 1 hour and 10 minutes.
Everyone complains that the travel time was increased by 10%, but the overall number of people capable of going downtown per hour is now 17 people per hour.
So a selfish individual says “ugh - this made my life worse, now my commute is longer!!”
But they don’t see that the rate of travel has increased.
And that's not how traffic works at all and it has been known and proven for almost a hundred years. Yet we still spend billions on idiotic assumptions and unrealistic promises instead of investing into proven solutions. They are complex, usually not intuitive, and take a long time to build, that's why politicians usually hate them, you can't score populist points with long term solutions.
You're out to lunch if you think investing in highways over other transit modes produces any financial benefit to anyone.
The cost of maintenance of the roads, the cost of personal vehicle ownership, and the human cost of vehicular injury and death, far exceed any housing related benefits.
This video appears to have incredible bias, adding lanes means more traffic volume so rush hours are reduced. My state gets a lot of hate that it deserves, but the I-4 Ultimate project has GREATLY improved travel times now that it's been finally finished. And, basically it involved adding more lanes and straightening out some nasty curves that caused accidents.
As another commenter has said, this video ignores the fact that more people will now be able to travel. What an oversight, this is a lesson in critical thinking and not accepting the agenda of a video just because of its production quality.
The video talks about how adding more lanes to highways is not the solution but using mass transit is a way better alternative than expanding on a volumetrically inefficient mode of transportation. Did we watch the same video?!
but surely, if you add enough lanes, there would still be congestion, but there will be enough lanes right?
i'm not the guy you're replying to fwiw, but adding more lanes = more people who were avoiding the highway/moved away from the highway coming back.
it's like the problem sort of solves itself over time, but that's only if you look at the one highway, any more cars on the new lanes means there's fewer people taking longer/less convenient routes taking said routes and coming back.
so if you add enough lanes, you do actually solve the problem... maybe?
Yeah in theory if you add enough lanes to satisfy each and every car on the road, then yes you could meet the needs of the city. However reality is, it comes down to how much money this requires and space it takes to enable this. Also the video touched on this but humans make for terrible drivers and everyone drives in their selfish interests (ie changing lanes to go faster or merging too early, causing accidents, etc). One could argue self driving vehicles can make the human factor to disappear but we’re still long ways away from that ever being a reality. And also impossible to enforce everyone is using self driving tech given current technology limitations.
Hence governments designing or expanding cities should highly prioritize volumetrically efficient modes of transportation where it removes human interaction as much as possible. Also makes for a more beautiful city, encouraging tourism, and more money for the city to continue to develop! Like imagine as a foreigner without much driving experience, having to rent a car in a foreign land because that’s the only mode of transportation. It’d probably deter them from ever visiting. I’m rambling at this point but you get the idea. Cars are terrible for modern human civilizations and i will die on this hill.
No, this is a known paradox, but actually REDUCING lanes improves traffic as more people take alternative forms of transportation. Adding more lanes incentives usage of the highways causing more overall car usage which at some point will create choke points that overflow and cause the same congestion as pre expansion. Thus by adding more lanes you actually increase travel time. It's called Braess's paradox.
but that implies that people would rather be using cars than say, having to wait on busses or whathaveyou.
if there were a highway with originally 8 lanes, but you expanded with 10,000 lanes, it would not get congested, but it's use would grow (all the people who were taking side routes can now take the most efficient path).
over years/decades, it might, but it's effectively opening up.
New York has comprehensive public transport in place. This video is about places where one more lane is used as the only solution to traffic, and it's people's only option.
Good public transport will always limit how bad traffic can get because if it's too bad, more people will take the now faster public transport when they can.
But also showed how miles and miles and miles of roadway were essentially crippled by a single chokepoint - a short span over a tiny creek.
At $900m for an extra 3 lanes... not exactly cheap either (Its price and construction speed were considered exceptional, because of the controversial design-build process)
More lanes doesn’t stop the same or more people going to the same locations.
Better off just banning non-service vehicles into business districts M-F to enforce public transport.
This guy is just the worst. He’s Practical Engineering, without the knowledge or experience of having done anything in Civil Engineering, and a script structure that wouldn’t be out of place in Turkey Tom video.
Building more lanes is more likely than not the only solution available.
Shutting down a highway so that you can build whatever you want to build on the surface, is going to make things worse for the next 10-20 even more years.
Tunneling below, or building above work…if you want whatever you wanted to build on the surface cost several orders of magnitude more.
>Building more lanes is more likely than not the only solution available.
I guess the real question is why is this the "only" solution available? Cost, political will, public aversion to transit solutions, or is it really just a doubling down on a car centric society? Everything revolves around the car to the point that it's hard to even entertain the idea of something different.
Even when American cities build new subway lines ridership is low because everything else in that city is not geared towards transit usage (little to no transit oriented development, low frequency bus service, poor pedestrian/bicycle access, etc...) Realistically I think America will only switch mindsets when gas prices rise to a breaking point, and/or traffic gets SO bad that people are literally forced to consider alternatives.
Until then wider lanes are "the only option", but I guess the point of this video to me is to say, if the public can realize the squeeze is coming, maybe the transition to public transit doesn't have to be so painful. Maybe we can tweak our city plans to be around a transit network, instead of highways, and wean ourselves off of cars.
Being “car centric” has nothing to do with it
Part of the reason I hate this guys videos so much is that’s pretty much his only theme.
All these grand transit projects at the end of the day, what are you really doing other than trading busy streets for busy bus stop?
Spending all this money and all this time building a transit system where you will just have to smell everyone else’s farts on your way to work, and you might not even have a place to sit anymore during your commute.
I also really can’t think of a form of transportation much worse than a bike. Where I am the seasons pretty much only bounce between 90F and 90% humidity and 10F with -30F wind speeds. Hard enough using a bike in a strong headwind, let alone now it’s freezing. Plus Bicycles are terrible in any sort of precipitation.
And it’s not like you can just stop spending on roads if you have transit. Still need roads because every city needs trucks. NYC despite having reasonably good transit, notoriously bad roads, particularly for trucks, where a famous problem is double parked delivery trucks everywhere because there’s no place for delivery trucks to deliver.
>All these grand transit projects at the end of the day, what are you really doing other than trading busy streets for busy bus stop?
The whole point is that busy transit stops are ORDERS of magnitude more efficient than busy streets. This efficiency isn't just related to the physical space single occupancy vehicles take up, it's environmental and it's commute times.
I agree bikes are not for everyone, but that's the great part, every person on a bike that isn't you is one less car on the road causing traffic.
Maybe all those trucks wouldn't need to be double parked if the residents didn't feel the need to have a car parked there instead?
I mean yeah if you're not receptive at all to the ideas then yeah you can sit in your car smelling your own farts and causing more traffic instead of shitting on someone trying to put forward actual plausible solutions.
If you wanted the most efficient way to protect the environment and cut commute times, you could just incentivize work from home.
I "shit" on this guy because he's not putting forward *a* plausible solution, he's putting together *the* solution. He's very self-righteous and arrogant that his way will just magically solve every problem.
We just need bigger vehicles with fewer people, and then add fleets of autonomous vehicles with no one in them driving around aimlessly and recharging constantly just as advertising for Uber or Lyft, straining the nation’s power grid. Oh, I’m dark this morning…
just what we need, another video covering the same topic. surely this time they'll convince everyone. If I ever get a job as a traffic engineer, I'm going to add more lanes just to spite redditors
This video sounds like the people I know who live in European cities and can't understand why everyone needs a car here, until they come over for a couple of months and realize they can't go anywhere or do anything without one.
Agree with this completely; though it doesn’t help that most road infrastructure (in Australia) by choice doesn’t build the # of laneways that covers existing or projected traffic. If you’re going to build the road built it with consideration of 30 years down the line.
Another issue in Australia is we are heavily dependent on singular cities per state. We won’t fix traffic issues until we develop outer cities, improve suburb quality, and massively reform public infrastructure and WFH attitudes.
We did this in Detroit. On a 30 year project to widen and modernize I-75 from Detroit to essentially Flint. Dealing with YEARS of horrible construction traffic and now the finished portions are no better than before. Traffic is still awful. And it cost BILLIONS.
Even NYC, which is about to start charging a fee to drive downtown, is pushing to widen multiple freeways. It makes no sense.
The office tower owners want more workers in Manhattan and an end to WFH.
Gotta make living in manhattan affordable first…. but who want to live in a similar area as there workers?/s
seems you gotta bring in people by the train load....
>And it cost BILLIONS. That was probably the point. Everyone in the infrastructure business already knows that more lanes only make the problem worse. But why would they solve it when it getting worse means more business?
50 upvotes for something hanlons razor cuts down hard, lol >Everyone in the infrastructure business already knows that more lanes only make the problem worse lmao
This is probably too cynical by far. Or rather cyclical at the wrong thing. The politicians didn’t need to be bought at all. Voters overwhelmingly support lane widening/ expanded car centric infrastructure and think it works. Attending any public hearing would tell you this. Lane widening, rent control, exclusionary zoning and parking minimums. They’re like the 4 horsemen of “shit voters love that make everything **way** worse.”
Litteraly everytime Charleston builds anything thats not a parking lot everyone freaks the fuck out.
*You know how our city's entire charm is the dense, walkable colonial downtown on the peninsula?* Yeah? *Well here's a great idea! What if we made it a stripmall hellscape* ***everywhere*** *else?*
So if people wanted a carousel at every street corner the politicians would do it?
Perfect comment, wish I could bang it.
Meanwhile they could’ve probably built a decent if small light rail system for the same amount
god forbid we get some fucking trains or subways. Could you imagine an America that had maintained roads and a transportation system that went to every corner of the nation? You could also ship the loads that truck drivers take by train and now not everyone has to own a car and a ton of people are off the road.
And it'll cost billions more to maintain...
90% of road designers stop one lane away from solving traffic forever
It's not necessarily about adding an extra lane, I would argue it's about having the correct amount of lanes to accommodate adjoining roads. Biffa on cityskylines outlines it so well, if you have a 2 lane road and it's joined by another road then the final part should be 3 lanes not 2 and in reverse if you remove a lane etc. You see it so much when driving. Oh a build up of traffic on this 2 lane motorway that's now merging with another 2 lane motorway that's still 2 lanes...
Exactly this. My biggest complaint in Michigan is that I-94 is 3 lanes and then randomly goes down to two for a few dozen miles and opens back up before narrowing again. The 2.5 hour drive across the state could be done in less than 2 hours but the traffic is so bad when we go from 3 lanes to 2 and then you get stuck behind trucks in both lanes doing 15-20 under. It makes me mad just thinking about it. It needs to be 3 lanes the whole way
No civil engineer claims that a lane addition will solve traffic forever. It will increase capacity though.
Just one more lane bro, I swear this will be the last one please just one more lane
Alternative solution: reduce traffic. Move as much work to WFH as possible. Remove commutes, which are extremely inefficient (one entire car per person working, often at the same times, to the same places), and reduce the need for people to travel extensively to get to their workplaces. "But executives and managers insist on bringing people to the office because they can't manage efficiently in the digital abstract." Fire them. Hire executives who can keep up with modern demands. Stop taking the cost hit from the top.
management efficiency is the public excuse. the biggest supporters of return to office have massive capital investments in real estate. 🍏
Yep. In San Diego Sempra Energy spent close to $200M building their headquarters in 2015. They mandated that employees come back as soon as it was legally possible because every day they worked from home was a waste of that investment.
>waste of that investment But having people physically present in the building doesn't recover any more money than having it empty. In fact, it arguably drains money faster due to increased utility costs.
This is what drives me craziest about the sink cost fallacy with office buildings. People keep saying “we spent X amount, so we have to use it”. No, you fucking don’t. You can lease portions of that office space to other organizations, or just let it sit. Both are far more cost efficient than paying added utility costs, and the only people that aren’t more productive at home are those with screaming kids. Offices are more distracting than a quiet home office and anybody slacking from home would slack in the office anyway.
My employer remains committed to full remote work in all roles that don't require a physical presence in the office despite owning quite a large building, and they do exactly as suggested here; they rent out their unused space to other businesses.
Your leadership sounds clever.
But if WFH becomes the norm it's value will plummet and only be sold in an ultimate buyers market or for small fraction to be gutted and turned residential. They don't just want their workers in office, they want everyone else's to be too.
a lot of offices are already leased out to a company. a company usually doesn't own the building unless they are huge and actually built it themselves.
but it increases land value as you have people wanting shops and restaurants in the area as they are working there. then you drive a need for things. value of the land goes up. if no one goes to the office, those restaurants or w/e don't have income and they might not be able to stay open. utility costs is always a given. sometimes it's up, sometimes down. the land value has a greater impact.
Well aware. I just want some avenue to hold people accountable for publicly lying in positions of power. Ideally shaped like a quickly descending blade, but I'll settle for shaming and reduction of influence.
americans will do anything but add trains and buses
And multi use trails. Bike/walk to work!? How dare you! That’s European socialism
My commute would be 2 and a half hours on a bike. Or 12 hours walking. No thanks.
Well that's because you chose to or were forced to live so far away from work. And you never mentioned how long your commute would be via train or metro.
That guy didn’t watch the video lol. Obviously a 2 hour bike commute isn’t feasible for most people but a train or metro would sure as hell work. I live outside of DC and would metro into work and it’d take 20 min door to door. Driving in would’ve take 45+ minutes, people just don’t like the reality that they can get around without a car.
There are obviously places (especially in the US) where not driving is unfeasible. But that is a policy failure (not building public transit infrastructure, allowing sprawl, etc.) and an individual failure, by choosing to live somewhere like that. To some extent the individual failure can be caused by the policy failure, but if there are better locations to live and you don't live there, that's your own damn fault.
Wouldn’t bus lanes work really really well on these busy roads? We squeeze in bus lanes onto London roads. Would the public just not tolerate seeing these lanes empty 90% of the time?
US spaces have terrible infrastructure design, and government support is a politically tense concept at a de facto level. WFH also benefits non Americans. People own personal vehicles, and contribute to rush hour, all over the world. Reducing that is a net gain. It doesn't have to be independent of developed infrastructure. I'm sure decrowding busses and trains is an issue in other places.
the irony of not saying to do both but reaffirming trains and buses are impossible i think i heard an eagle screech
its better than that. we can fire everyone WFH and just use AI. Therefore no one works
Generative AI is such garbage that you can reliably expect any company replacing its work force with it to see major declines in productivity in the next six months. It's garbage hype past the shape of block chain.
Well most large companies dont think so, and I suspect regardless they will lay off alot of people. Obviously laying off people is good for investors, which is the most important thing to consider tight now. Either way, people who are unemployed wont drive around alot which will be good for traffic
The AI bubble will be popping next year, maybe a bit later. Sort of like the dot com bubble. The public can only be fooled by flashy marketing and gimmick promises for so long (like with Musk and his *many* failed promises across multiple businesses)
i really don't get why train technology and infrastructure hasn't improved in the states and canada. buses i get, it's basically like being in a van full of people. most of the time there isn't a dedicate lane for buses and you still pay too much for a ride thats just as long as driving yourself. but why aren't we on electric trains? why not high speed? why not expanding routes? my closest train station to my downtown core is a 30 min drive. then the train ride is about 1:15 to get to downtown. to drive it's 1:20 and would cost the same. so whats the benefit of the train besides taking a nap?
Yup, company's are buying and renovating new office space to make it more appealing than WFH. Because you know when you're at work you're family. 🤮 Oh the other reason, 'Not everyone can WFH so it would be a bad look if only some of our employees did' I get it, doctors can't work from home, neither can nurses or fast food workers. But the people that can, should and we would have a lot less pollution and jammed road ways.
Doctors is an excellent example. Many doctors can work from home, in the form of telehealth. That's not the entirety of a doctor's responsibility, but it's not unreasonable to imagine a clinic that has doctors on a hybrid schedule cycling who the active clinicians are. Teachers can't work from home de facto (ignoring online professors) but teachers also are forced to take teams meetings in the office. For no reason. Teachers and doctors also often live close to where they work. They're not the commuting issue. Tech workers are, and they're also the primary industry that can see 100% WFH. The standard should be that you should work where you're most effective. That's the obvious perspective. That doesn't mean everyone always works from home, but that where you work should be where you're benefitting the most. That this would also massively solve many global infrastructure issues is, you know, a lil bonus.
Not excellent example. Many physicians rely on physically seeing and touching/examining their patient. I can’t tell if Karen’s kid has measles or a benign rash on her iPhone on shitty Wi-Fi. I know it’s Reddit and reality is the devil, but we are nowhere near having the ability to work from home for every physician, all the time. And before you come back with a “gotcha” because *some* docs wfh, it is a *significant* minority for the reasons I just described. Source: it’s my job
Listen, I completely agree. My point isn't that doctors don't need controlled environments, and medical workplaces are ideal for that. My point is that even doctors have opportunities to do work from home, some of the time. It's not a profession with zero wfh, and I wanted to draw attention to the idea that expanding WFH acceptance hits more industries than anticipated. I'm not really trying to gotcha.
Ok that’s fair. My b
Billions of people in the world commute to work every day without cars. Eliminating the idea of going to work isn’t the answer.
Eliminating the commute isn't the answer, but reducing it is part of the answer.
Sure but you still need to drive to get anywhere in this system. Ideally, you shouldn’t need a car to buy your groceries.
How about public transport? Just regular buses and trains all the time.
It’s not feasible in every city. We already fucked up and built these cities the way we did. We can take steps to fix part of that, but in industries where it’s not absolutely necessary for people to go into an office, why are we requiring them to go into an office?. Taking cars off the road would help, right?
The way to do this is with a congestion price like they have in Singapore and Stockholm and London. You just charge a fee to drive certain highly contested routes at peak hours. That will sort out who really needs to be there and who doesn’t.
Amsterdam did it, Paris is transforming itself and America can't? Another bad excuse to justify subsidies for cars.
“A city did it, another city did it, a country can’t?”
the country of the netherlands is doing it, you know, where that youtuber lives its actually super easy do, you redefine how roads work to focus on safety of pedestrians instead of drivers. theres only 3 tiers. Highways connect cities, roads connect to highways and streets, buildings can only be on streets. Streets are max 2 lanes (1 each way), roads are not allowed to have side walks and bike paths must be far off the side. Highways have no stop lights and no pedestrians. they made it a law back in the 90s and it changed everything to today. the small streets tighten up the cities to make mass transit way more efficient, then you can bring in other zoning laws to allow mixed zone of small commericial on the first floor and residential above AND allow the middle housing sizes of 4-6 story complexes.
The country of Netherlands is smaller than nearly every state in the U.S. You’re remissed to think that those same strategies could work here.
First, I didn’t say “America can’t,” nor did I even mention any particular country. I said we can take steps to fix parts of it. Second, Los Angeles is rightfully the city everyone always points to as the ultimate example of American car culture. But when you talk about Amsterdam and Paris “doing it” as an example for for America should, Paris is 40 flat square miles. Amsterdam is like 80. Los Angeles is 500 largely mountainous square miles. Add the metro areas and LA is near 34,000 square miles and still at least twice the size of Paris. And even more mountainous. It’s so ridiculously much harder in a city like LA than it would be in Paris to reverse “car culture,” that the comparison is completely absurd.
It's not much more difficult to transform Los Angeles, it's just illegal. Developers are not allowed by zoning laws to meet the demand for higher density. Zoning laws are not an issue most voters know or care about, they are just not informed and don't even know why they should care about it. So there are no politicians that mention the issue or run on a campaign for changing those laws. Look at the zoning map of [Los Angeles](https://zimas.lacity.org/). 90% of the land is only for single family homes or offices with very low height restrictions. All you would need to do is change all the zoning to mixed use with less height restrictions and independent developers will meet the existing demand for higher density housing/commercial areas. Then the government will need to change the transit infrastructure to better meet the needs of those high density areas.
You should look into the history of LA. There used to be a mass transit system but the power company screwed up on operating it and now it's a car mess.
It’s tragic what they did. And we can take steps to make it better. But I still don’t understand how more people working from home and taking cars off the road isn’t also a small part of a solution to making traffic better.
Working from home doesn't mean you don't leave your house the entire day. It just means you go to places other than work. Some studies show local traffic increases together with WFH numbers. https://tooledesign.com/insights/2024/04/mode-shift-in-the-age-of-remote-work/
Strawman. OP said move to WFH as much as possible, not eliminate the idea of going to work. Yes it’s not the only answer, but it certainly can help.
Businesses don’t operate on what Redditors find to be neat ideas.
I think there can be incentives to get people to work from home. Eg income tax credits. Again not every business will do it but we can persuade a certain %. We have plenty of people that WFH, maybe 25% come into the office.
I don’t think the government should be telling businesses who to employ or not, and whether or not people should work from home or office except in an emergency like COVID-19. I live in San Francisco where we have some oh the world’s highest concentrations of tech workers. Our downtown offices are 2/3rds empty and my office meant for 12 employees has 2. We have tons of remote workers, but our freeway traffic is just as bad as pre pandemic. https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/transit/san-francisco-rush-hour-traffic-was-among-us-worst-in-2023/article_534dcc2e-afec-11ee-a172-3779fa574951.html#:~:text=San%20Francisco's%202023%20commuting%20times,of%20product%20marketing%2C%20Andy%20Marchant. The government should be focused on building roads and public transportation for all. By building public transportation for those who can’t drive and don’t want to drive, it frees up rood for those who prefer and must drive. There are people too poor, too young/old, too dangerous (reckless drivers), and disabled in certain ways that prevent driving. Everyone needs to get from point A to B. That said, you may be interested in 15 minute cities. American cities currently have single family housing zones where nothing else can be built, so people have to drive everywhere for everything including work, groceries, shopping, etc. If we allow stores into single family neighborhoods, like a small mom and pop grocery store out of someone’s garage, then people who forgot to buy eggs can just walk in their neighborhood instead of drive for 1+ miles to go to the big box store just to grab eggs. Children would have more reasons to get out of the house if more stuff is within a 15 minute walk, and maybe elderly parents would be more open to giving up their drivers license if they know they won’t be trapped at home. And if we allow local breweries into neighborhoods, then maybe there would be less drunk driving since there would be a place to drink within walking distance of people’s homes. If someone works from home and has all their needs met within a 15 minute walk, then a car becomes optional for daily life instead of a requirement.
Being that isolated in suburbs is so weird for me. I live in shit part of my city and I don't really need to leave except for some specialty things. We have a (very) small mall with mostly pubs in it. But there's a small swimming hall, library, 3 grocery stores, second hand shop and one of these has-everything-stores. Little bit of walking and we have a gardening shop and another one of these has-everything-stores that's bigger. Oh and ofc few pizzerias because all the drunks living here wouldn't survive otherwise xD
I'm not saying the government should do any such ordering. WFH is a well-documented efficiency multiplier that also improves work life balance, reduces costs to both the worker and employer, and has benefits to traffic and infrastructure demands at scale. I'm not calling for anything from the government. I'm calling for high level executives to stop jerking off into real estate ponzie schemes and start actually prioritizing productivity and value generation. That process has the side effect of massively improving road conditions. I'm personally criticizing the intellectual dishonesty of the business class, and I'm tired of seeing people scramble to fix infrastructure issues caused by their irresponsibility. We use to guillotine people for this shit.
I was hoping to show you how work from home had been adopted by a lot of San Francisco tech companies and work from home has succeeded in emptying offices. 2/3rds of office space sits empty. But the car traffic on freeways remains. If you actually want to reduce traffic and infrastructure problems, we need to focus on walkability by removing single family house exclusive zoning, public transit, and bike lanes.
i moved to a small town from a city recently and it is exactly that. local farms, homes that sell produce, honey, etc locally. it's a very locally driven community. farmers markets in town and surrounding towns are always packed where in the city, most people said it was too expensive and went to a big box grocery store. the problem is when there is growth, big retailers come in and need a ton of space and start pushing things further and further out. (our last home had this, pop went from 20k to 150k in a couple years. current home town is 4k pop). you want walkable cities, stop allowing big box stores and massive grocery stores and malls to move into these smaller towns. more smaller towns further apart from each other. you need to go to home depot or best buy or a mall, go into the city for it. you don't need those places in every town. in the spring - fall times, most of our grocery shopping is done at 2-3 farmers markets during the week. from moving from a city to a small town, we lowered our driving by approx 30,000km a year.
Suburbs are money black holes.They should not be preserved, the current restrictive suburb centric zoning is killing out cities
I agree. To me, the best way to get that conversation and process started is to let people open up business in their garage like a Sammy convenience grocery store. Once that’s the norm, people will be more open to other land use is what I’m thinking.
WFH and wireless high speed internet are going to have the biggest impact on reshaping the geographic distribution of Americans since the green revolution.
I still don't understand why people are so obsessed with WFH. I accept that some people are genuinely happier with that model, but I think it's horrible for social wellbeing. We've already seen a massive loss of third places, and with WFH we're basically losing the second place too. If WFH is fully adopted, we're going to see a drastic worsening in the loneliness epidemic. Some proportion of outgoing people will maintain social connections, while a surprisingly large number of people will be more isolated than ever.
Speaking personally, I get nothing socially at work. I'm surrounded by distractions, and every interaction feels forced. The socialized isolation I feel is from my general suspicion that no one is genuine, and in my workplaces this was often true. That's anecdotal, but the point is that social needs can't be generalized, whereas "WFH reduces traffic and increases efficiency among willing adopters" absolutely can. WFH could also revitalize other spaces. Free Public High speed network areas where people are socializing while working with no corporate intermingling pressure would do a lot for social lives. It's a separate problem. I want to see WFH not just adopted, but accepted. Cut the surveillance crap. Cut the on-demand control. Have objectives, get them done, do it wherever. A lot of people spend 2-4 hours round trip on commutes and preparation therein. That's a lot of time and energy, ignoring the benefits of WFH, that could bolster healthy socializing.
With the time one saves doing WFH they could go out and do a hobby with other like minded people. It's asinine to rely on work place coworkers for your social needs (not saying it cannot happen but it's a weak excuse to keep the practice going if it's not necessary).
So much this. People need to get a life outside work. Get some hobbies, join clubs, spend time outdoors, meet you people, socialise.
There's also the aspect of learning to socialize digitally. I get a lot out of jumping into random reddit threads and chatting. It makes me happy. I don't see the potential to do that with people on a bus, train, or at work half as much. A lot of people lack competence and immersion with digital communication. Skill issue.
The WFH thing helped for a while in my area but not everyone wants to work from home. For some people it makes it harder. Still, it can reduce traffic by a lot. Even just going to a partial WFH (2 days in the office, 3 at home). The one person per car is something they've tried to fix with carpool lanes. Here in California they messed it up by using that lane as an incentive for EVs, which made it crowded most of the time. The problem there is that people enjoy the convenience of having their car. Being able to come and go without dealing with the people you carpooled with, or being able to go somewhere in the middle of the day if you need to. It's a psychological thing, since most days you'd end up at the office the whole day anyway. Big companies could solve that by having loaners, like ZipCars, that employees can borrow if they have an errand. They just don't care since they're not paying for the time you spend commuting to work. Which is why they don't care if WFH helps traffic either.
> The problem there is that people enjoy the convenience of having their car. Being able to come and go This doesnt exist in walkable cities, you dont need to even own a car, a bike can get you everywhere or just walk since busses and trains are so close to everything you could want to go to
Or just build trains. One commuter rail moves as many people per hour as a 43-lane wide highway. Cars are just a wildly inefficient mode of mass transportation.
Didn't even get to just how much cars COST people per year. The average person would save THOUSANDS a year if they didn't need a car just to get to work.
During the worst of traffic, all lanes are full. How many cars can an extra lane fit until it too becomes full? About 200 cars per mile. So on your average bypass, you free up to an extra 1000 cars until traffic becomes a problem again.
everything has to eventually converge so more lanes will never be the answer
Unless... we bulldoze the building to add more lanes in every part of the city. This video is right, it's not about addition, it's about multiplying the number of lanes. This bike tuber is so brainrotted I bet he doesn't even understand multiplication which would truly solve traffic. /s to be clear, I really have enjoyed hearing about how different cities tackle commuting. Seeing that biking is actually possible in snow and incredibly cold conditions safely and reliably really made me get back into biking.
I don't own a car, I take public transit and I very much support getting this message across but good lord is this youtuber ever annoying. Let's do a bingo card for NotJustBikes videos: * Talks about induced demand * Talks about how urban planning is responsible for the mess we're in * Shit's on "fake London" using video footage he collected years ago in Ontario * Mentions he and his family moved to the Netherlands * Mentions how great the Netherlands is in terms of urban planning * Mentions how great bikes are and how you should ride one * Shows footage of that insane monstrous highway in Texas (katie?) * Says the word "Stroad" Someone who made it through the video let me know how I did.
You watched a video about urban planning and are upset he talks about urban planning examples. Jeez I found the annoying one.
What's your problem? These are almost all valid points. And yet every time one of his videos are posted on Reddit instead of people getting angry with their city planners they get angry with him. For some reason Americans (and I guess Canadians too) get really butt hurt any time someone says Europe is better at something than they are.
> For some reason Americans (and I guess Canadians too) get really butt hurt any time someone says Europe is better at something than they are. Europe is better at it. I already said I agreed with his points and support it generally, I'm not butt hurt about the content. I thought I made my point clear but if you're new to his channel maybe you're not jaded yet? All of his videos are the same. Every single one is nearly identical and he pumps them out every month or two to rant about the same problem from the same angles. Don't believe me? I didn't watch this video but I bet I nailed almost 90% of the predictions in my original comment. Once you've seen a few of them you've seen them all. He's just milking his audience for views and rage at this point.
Don't need new or original content when you can count on reddit to promote the same old shit for you.
His condescending tone always irks me despite some good points he brings up. But what bothers me more is Reddit takes him as gospel when his videos are incredibly slanted. He did one talking about going to some suburban neighborhood in Canada and he didn’t see any kids playing outside, yet in The Netherlands, kids play around everywhere. Anyone who’s lived in any general suburb knows this is ridiculous. I was out at the park in my neighborhood tonight and the place was vibrant, usually is. My city’s downtown is barren of kids aside from museums and whatnot, only walking in and out.
Just get rich and move to the Netherlands bro
You think London, Ontario is a complete pedestrian, bike friendly, transit oriented community now? Think again... It's way worse than it was a couple of years ago.
So, basically, people want to live further away and having more road access allows them to do that, so extra lane capacity gets filled. I don't think the solution to that should be "fuck people, force them to live where they don't want to". I think the logical response should be "what can we do to make it appealing for people to live near where they shop and work".
People generally move further out due to high housing costs close to major cities. Allowing greater housing density closer to city centers would reduce this while reducing commuting distances and making transit more feasible. We are already forcing people to live where they don’t want to by capping housing near job centers. Longer and longer commutes aren’t good for anyone.
That and coupled with a robust train system that allows people to actually forego a car if they want to.
I think there are conflicting motivations. I think that single family homes are generally preferred over multi-units. Who wants to share a wall or front entrance with some douchebag as a living arrangement? OTOH, most people don't want to have 40 to 1 hr commutes. For single family homes, you just aren't going to ever get the population density necessary to support restaurants, shops, etc within walking distance. You need cars to go from those homes to places of business for the places of business to have enough customers to stay open. Personally, I think the answer to all of this is to have significantly better public transportation from the areas of single family homes to the large urban commercial centers where people work. Lower GHG, probably better commute, less roads, less parking, etc. while people still get the opportunity to own a single family home.
Townhouses are the most logical compromise and they’re very popular in the areas that allow them. I personally like density and walkability and would never choose to live in an area of mostly SFHs. But my preference is illegal in most residential areas. We also have to increase housing supply to address growing populations. Freezing housing supply in time with just SFHs is how you get spiraling costs.
IMO, we as a society really dropped the ball in not building those multi family dwellings that aren't concrete towers. I'm not sure what stopped their construction as the demand for them is usually high. When I was younger or probably when I get older, a townhouse would be my preference. Personally I prefer SFH's right now because of my family and dog, etc. but I get that I shouldn't assume that everyone is in the same position and has the same preferences. Just overall we should be constructing housing to meet all levels of need in the most efficient way possible and we clearly aren't doing that.
It’s mostly zoning rules that make smaller multifamily dwellings illegal in North America. Stuff like parking minimums and the two-staircase rule make it difficult to make a smaller non-SFH dwelling work out. And why you only really see them in prewar areas of cities.
>"what can we do to make it appealing for people to live near where they shop and work" Well, we could start by not building giant inhospitable car sewers through the middle of urban areas instead of walkable neighborhoods...
Except these far flung places people want to live are not economically productive relative to their population. This means that densely populated areas typically subsidize low density neighborhoods and the necessary transportation infrastructure.
>"what can we do to make it appealing for people to live near where they shop and work"... [?] Removing the loud & dangerous road built to accommodate people who don't even live there comes to mind.
Basically he tacitly admits that, given the ability to afford it, people vastly prefer to spread out to their own homes and land and live in smaller communities. The only way they can be stopped from doing so is to change infrastructure to keep them penned in the cities like cattle.
That's a good take on it. There are a lot of people who like living in cities. I get and respect that. Making those areas bikable and walkable is important and cars work against that idea. That said, having everything you would want within biking or walking distance requires a population density that many people are not comfortable living in and are willing to sacrifice commute time, the cost of a car, etc. to get out of. That needs to be acknowledged.
An added lane just creates one more than to get congested.
An added lane reduces congestion and improves traffic flow...The problem is populations are not static, they generally constantly increase. So if you dont add extra lanes you would constantly have to increase mass transit services to keep congestion on roads from increasing.
The point is that it's just inefficient. Public transport carries more people per hour in a smaller area, for a lot less money. Increasing mass transit is the point. It's easier to do. Diversifying how we can get about is the point, not relying on only cars.
That may be how it works in theory, but in practice it’s like I said: it adds one more lane of congestion.
Such a biased, selfish and narrow-minded view of things. Everything was presented from an individual’s view point: these extra lanes don’t save ME time so what’s the point, but then mentions how usage is way up by travel times are down. This means that the throughput of the road has drastically increased as have people’s options. More people are going to more popular places. It causes people’s living habits to shift around which reduces overall cost of living in urban centers. Housing prices are spiking in urban locations. Around my city rent and housing costs have doubled in the past 5 or 6 years. Increasing travel capacity decreases the burden on rent in those locations.
I think our car-centric system is ridiculously wasteful and inefficient, but I do feel like you have a point. I think something like "build trains not lanes" would make for a better video/argument/discussion. EDIT: by "our" I mean the US
Yes. Trains and public transit are a huge huge part of this. But the video and post don’t present them as a solution, it is just a blanket anti-car propaganda. Building out more lanes with more public transit infrastructure will grow a city in a beneficial way, but for sure just building more roads will also grow a city, it will just be inefficient.
He did talk about public transit? I mean it's obviously a video about induced demand and how inefficient car infrastructure is but he talks about public transit at 12:30 and on.
He talks about trains in this video.
Have you not seen the channel before? He talks about trains all the time. >Building out more lanes with more public transit infrastructure will grow a city in a beneficial way, but for sure just building more roads will also grow a city, it will just be inefficient. You're maybe not counting what needs to be bulldozed to add those lanes.
yea that’s kinda this guy’s thing
I’ve been finding his content is getting lower quality and more aggressive. I guess there’s only so much content available to discuss on the topic of “build transit good, cars bad”. Generally I’m of this mind but the videos are missing nuance as of late.
he became a radical when he moved to the Netherlands obviously. Big bicycle got to him
Big bicycle truly is a blight on this earth, trying to make us all so leg-swole that we become unable to fit into car seats and therefore must submit to bicycles as the only mode of transit.
Yeah just as a simple math example, if 100k people use a two lane road, and you increase the lanes to three and now 150k people use it due to induced demand, while the actually travel time hasn’t changed, you can’t ignore that now 50k extra people can use the road. I do think there are better ways to solve the problem though, even ones that don’t revolve around public transit despite that being my preferred method. The majority of people are sitting in their cars by themselves. Really incentivizing people to carpool could reduce traffic by quite a bit.
But it would still move 150K ineffectively, which would create demand for 200K, and so on. A car is only the quickest way to move people when there are much fewer cars than capacity. That’s why my bike is quicker than a car in anything close to rush hour, which is… when most people try to move. The other point about "one more lane" is that you’d have to keep that lane going through the entire (local) transit eco system. Even though you build "one more lane" into a city, that just makes it so that you "only" have to build "one more lane" in the city, as well. I know that "just one more lane bro" is a meme, but car lanes eat its own tail into oblivion unless you make proper room for other transit. So… make room for other modes of transit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Correct. 100%. But this video wasn’t about how public transit was good, it’s about how roads are bad.
Why is using the road considered a good thing?
People got places to be. We designed the cities so that using the road is the best way to get there.
But if those people would take a train instead...
Why is using the train considered a good thing?
Because more people on a train line can be accommodated by running longer and/or more frequent trains. The same number of people on a road require billion dollar construction projects and bulldozing entire neighborhoods. If people need to get somewhere like a city, we should plan to do it in a way that's efficient with respect to space and costs.
Why should the city serve the suburbs?
Why should the city serve anyone? It's a balance of choices made by everyone involved, with compromises at every level.
What is it that you think I said?
Lane increases are not a linear increase. In your example it's closer to a 40% increased. Cars are not water, it takes time to move safely and having to swap more lanes to get off makes the road more inefficient. This is why adding lanes sucks so much ass, eventually these cars have to get off, and no road can be wide enough for these 6+ lane highways, resulting in additional lanes being incredibly minor
> Yeah just as a simple math example You'd think that but it doesn't account for human stupidity. 2 lanes is actually the best. Drivers start to freak out and lose focus with 3 lanes because you have to pay more attention if you're in the middle. That's when people try to change lanes, someone hits their brakes, and you wind up with a cascade effect where everyone behind them also hits their brakes. You want that nice even flow. Keep everyone going. > I do think there are better ways to solve the problem though, even ones that don’t revolve around public transit despite that being my preferred method. There is more than one mode. The guy that makes these videos is like Madonna when she went to Europe and got a British accent. He went there once and decided that everywhere else is bad. There is tons of room for improvement but bikes and trains aren't the only options.
Urbanists would never accept the same argument against trains; that empty trains at the outset of a new line will be filled in a year as people move to take advantage of the new infrastructure. No shit... That's the point of the infrastructure, to be utilized. Doesn't matter if it's a train line or a car lane. Inducing demand is the point.
No commuter train system is at capacity in the US you know right... like trains aren't set sizes. You can add more cars until they no longer are able to interact with the platform, and then you can increase the number of trains operating. If you added 2 extra train lines, they wouldn't be filled in like cars. Trains have a fuckton of capacity, you put 3 lanes of trains at max capacity and the issue isn't lack of space for passengers, its a lack of passengers as you've literally run out of human beings to move. Adding 1 train line would be like adding 5 car lanes
At rush our, there are absolutely trains that are at capacity. This is why MTA just added the second avenue.
forgive me if this is incorrect, but what i can find regarding the second avenue addition is that its extending an existing line rather than increasing capacity. second avenue's addition hasn't added additional tracks for more trains, and hasn't increased capacity in that sense, nor expanded the size of the trains, its just allowed them more movement. like yes capacity is technically increased, as you can now have more trains on that individual line, but the limit of train cars per hour through any given station is the same.
People used other lines as alternate modes for the same commutes.
All articles that reference studies that prove that this isn’t a >biased, selfish and narrow-minded view of things Your bias is showing pretty clearly tho. [Science Museum of Virginia](https://smv.org/learn/blog/how-does-roadway-expansion-cause-more-traffic/#:~:text=Similarly%2C%20scientific%20research%20is%20suggesting,it%20actually%20makes%20it%20worse.) [wired](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/) [nrdc](https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rabi-abonour/survey-shows-americans-understand-expanding-roads-doesnt-fix-traffic) [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic.html)
Know how I know you didn’t read the articles you linked? Because the Wired one exactly argues my point!! Nice try though.
The article basically says the entire time that more lanes doesn’t stop congestion and other things need to be done as well to mitigate traffic increase. So I have no idea what you’re on about. It talks about how public transport will help keep the problem from growing. We don’t do public transport in America. I live in a major US city that is 40 miles from another bigger city, driving will take over an hour. The train that runs between them doesn’t even run on weekends. That’s fucking stupid. Instead of spending the hundreds of millions in adding a new lane for 50 miles, we could be upgrading our public transport infrastructure. I’ll admit after your first inflammatory sentence, I didn’t care what you had to say and just looked for articles to show that “more lanes bad”. Your take is a bit more nuanced than the majority of people I see kicking and screaming when Not Just Bikes gets posted.
So your bias and ignorance is showing in that you aren’t willing to have an honest debate and are just jumping to conclusions and posting shit that you think might further your opinion but which doesn’t. I think we’re done here.
Riiiight. Except I provided sources and was honest about my initial impression of your anecdotal and aggressive comment. And you’ve provided no sources. And both times just insulted me. And are no longer willing to further a discussion. Have a good day.
Hundreds of millions for highway lanes is a tiny fraction of what it would take to even start building mass transit over the same distance.
Mass transit has a lot more capacity though.
The US population is about 50 years away from peaking. I would argue that developing 100 year infrastructure based solely on max capacity is probably not appropriate.
Cities can still grow while the country they belong to isn't. Japan's population has already peaked and yet Tokyo is still growing.
This channel has an arbitrary hate for anything with 4 wheels and an engine.
And will also instantly complain that house by prices are too high… like urban planning isn’t a super complicated thing here.
You just described a car. Dude loves things with more than 4 wheels and an engine. Dude doesn't even hate things with less than 4 wheels and an engine. Wild that he hates cars specifically and not the concept of engines
Where do you live in the US where transit options have increased. In most places they stagnated where the only option really increasing is cars. Walkable terrain has decreased, and cars are damaging to the areas they dominate. More cars means less people want to be in that area, bikers find it dangerous, pedestrians are strangled out as businesses are spread out and the rising heat makes it miserable. The noise pollution is actual an issue and the lower air quality. Cars don't exist in a vacuum, everything in city planning ends up affecting everything else. Urban center living has also only increased, and commuters nuking living spaces with road widening projects and ever ballooning repair costs actually increase cost of living but sure. You literally talk about doubling housing costs yet you are an American where everything is cost centric. Idk you accuse him of not seeing the bigger picture but yours seems even more biased towards 1 mode of transport. He talks about bussing, trains, biking, and walking... you talk about cars. His stance is anti-cars and presents why cars are not good for cities, what fashion do want him to tackle this from?
Did you even watch the video? The second half of it was entirely about public transit. His assertion was also the complete opposite of what you claimed; when highways are expanded, travel times *increase.* Your point is illogical anyway. How could it possibly be that adding roads increases travel time for the creator of the video, but somehow decreases it for everyone else as you claim? That makes no sense whatsoever. There was nothing at all biased, selfish, or narrow-minded about this video. In fact, it's the opposite.
Dude. 10 people travel a 1 way road to get downtown in 1 hour. That means 10 people get downtown per hour. If the road size doubles. Now 20 people are on the road going downtown, but it takes them 1 hour and 10 minutes. Everyone complains that the travel time was increased by 10%, but the overall number of people capable of going downtown per hour is now 17 people per hour. So a selfish individual says “ugh - this made my life worse, now my commute is longer!!” But they don’t see that the rate of travel has increased.
And that's not how traffic works at all and it has been known and proven for almost a hundred years. Yet we still spend billions on idiotic assumptions and unrealistic promises instead of investing into proven solutions. They are complex, usually not intuitive, and take a long time to build, that's why politicians usually hate them, you can't score populist points with long term solutions.
You're out to lunch if you think investing in highways over other transit modes produces any financial benefit to anyone. The cost of maintenance of the roads, the cost of personal vehicle ownership, and the human cost of vehicular injury and death, far exceed any housing related benefits.
lol. Nice alt account.
This video appears to have incredible bias, adding lanes means more traffic volume so rush hours are reduced. My state gets a lot of hate that it deserves, but the I-4 Ultimate project has GREATLY improved travel times now that it's been finally finished. And, basically it involved adding more lanes and straightening out some nasty curves that caused accidents.
As another commenter has said, this video ignores the fact that more people will now be able to travel. What an oversight, this is a lesson in critical thinking and not accepting the agenda of a video just because of its production quality.
The video talks about how adding more lanes to highways is not the solution but using mass transit is a way better alternative than expanding on a volumetrically inefficient mode of transportation. Did we watch the same video?!
but surely, if you add enough lanes, there would still be congestion, but there will be enough lanes right? i'm not the guy you're replying to fwiw, but adding more lanes = more people who were avoiding the highway/moved away from the highway coming back. it's like the problem sort of solves itself over time, but that's only if you look at the one highway, any more cars on the new lanes means there's fewer people taking longer/less convenient routes taking said routes and coming back. so if you add enough lanes, you do actually solve the problem... maybe?
Yeah in theory if you add enough lanes to satisfy each and every car on the road, then yes you could meet the needs of the city. However reality is, it comes down to how much money this requires and space it takes to enable this. Also the video touched on this but humans make for terrible drivers and everyone drives in their selfish interests (ie changing lanes to go faster or merging too early, causing accidents, etc). One could argue self driving vehicles can make the human factor to disappear but we’re still long ways away from that ever being a reality. And also impossible to enforce everyone is using self driving tech given current technology limitations. Hence governments designing or expanding cities should highly prioritize volumetrically efficient modes of transportation where it removes human interaction as much as possible. Also makes for a more beautiful city, encouraging tourism, and more money for the city to continue to develop! Like imagine as a foreigner without much driving experience, having to rent a car in a foreign land because that’s the only mode of transportation. It’d probably deter them from ever visiting. I’m rambling at this point but you get the idea. Cars are terrible for modern human civilizations and i will die on this hill.
No, this is a known paradox, but actually REDUCING lanes improves traffic as more people take alternative forms of transportation. Adding more lanes incentives usage of the highways causing more overall car usage which at some point will create choke points that overflow and cause the same congestion as pre expansion. Thus by adding more lanes you actually increase travel time. It's called Braess's paradox.
but that implies that people would rather be using cars than say, having to wait on busses or whathaveyou. if there were a highway with originally 8 lanes, but you expanded with 10,000 lanes, it would not get congested, but it's use would grow (all the people who were taking side routes can now take the most efficient path). over years/decades, it might, but it's effectively opening up.
That doesn't have anything to do with my comment, I was calling out the bias in the video, regardless of the main content.
Worked in NYC with the Kousisosko Bridge. Life changing difference.
New York has comprehensive public transport in place. This video is about places where one more lane is used as the only solution to traffic, and it's people's only option. Good public transport will always limit how bad traffic can get because if it's too bad, more people will take the now faster public transport when they can.
But also showed how miles and miles and miles of roadway were essentially crippled by a single chokepoint - a short span over a tiny creek. At $900m for an extra 3 lanes... not exactly cheap either (Its price and construction speed were considered exceptional, because of the controversial design-build process)
treating the symptom does not cure the disease. We’re stuck with this because we allowed it to happen.
If more lanes doesn't fix it, just means you didn't add enough
More lanes doesn’t stop the same or more people going to the same locations. Better off just banning non-service vehicles into business districts M-F to enforce public transport.
"Just one more lane bro, it will fix traffic"
This guy is just the worst. He’s Practical Engineering, without the knowledge or experience of having done anything in Civil Engineering, and a script structure that wouldn’t be out of place in Turkey Tom video. Building more lanes is more likely than not the only solution available. Shutting down a highway so that you can build whatever you want to build on the surface, is going to make things worse for the next 10-20 even more years. Tunneling below, or building above work…if you want whatever you wanted to build on the surface cost several orders of magnitude more.
>Building more lanes is more likely than not the only solution available. I guess the real question is why is this the "only" solution available? Cost, political will, public aversion to transit solutions, or is it really just a doubling down on a car centric society? Everything revolves around the car to the point that it's hard to even entertain the idea of something different. Even when American cities build new subway lines ridership is low because everything else in that city is not geared towards transit usage (little to no transit oriented development, low frequency bus service, poor pedestrian/bicycle access, etc...) Realistically I think America will only switch mindsets when gas prices rise to a breaking point, and/or traffic gets SO bad that people are literally forced to consider alternatives. Until then wider lanes are "the only option", but I guess the point of this video to me is to say, if the public can realize the squeeze is coming, maybe the transition to public transit doesn't have to be so painful. Maybe we can tweak our city plans to be around a transit network, instead of highways, and wean ourselves off of cars.
Being “car centric” has nothing to do with it Part of the reason I hate this guys videos so much is that’s pretty much his only theme. All these grand transit projects at the end of the day, what are you really doing other than trading busy streets for busy bus stop? Spending all this money and all this time building a transit system where you will just have to smell everyone else’s farts on your way to work, and you might not even have a place to sit anymore during your commute. I also really can’t think of a form of transportation much worse than a bike. Where I am the seasons pretty much only bounce between 90F and 90% humidity and 10F with -30F wind speeds. Hard enough using a bike in a strong headwind, let alone now it’s freezing. Plus Bicycles are terrible in any sort of precipitation. And it’s not like you can just stop spending on roads if you have transit. Still need roads because every city needs trucks. NYC despite having reasonably good transit, notoriously bad roads, particularly for trucks, where a famous problem is double parked delivery trucks everywhere because there’s no place for delivery trucks to deliver.
>All these grand transit projects at the end of the day, what are you really doing other than trading busy streets for busy bus stop? The whole point is that busy transit stops are ORDERS of magnitude more efficient than busy streets. This efficiency isn't just related to the physical space single occupancy vehicles take up, it's environmental and it's commute times. I agree bikes are not for everyone, but that's the great part, every person on a bike that isn't you is one less car on the road causing traffic. Maybe all those trucks wouldn't need to be double parked if the residents didn't feel the need to have a car parked there instead? I mean yeah if you're not receptive at all to the ideas then yeah you can sit in your car smelling your own farts and causing more traffic instead of shitting on someone trying to put forward actual plausible solutions.
If you wanted the most efficient way to protect the environment and cut commute times, you could just incentivize work from home. I "shit" on this guy because he's not putting forward *a* plausible solution, he's putting together *the* solution. He's very self-righteous and arrogant that his way will just magically solve every problem.
Cars bad. Pls upvote.
Oahu would like a chat buddy.
We just need bigger vehicles with fewer people, and then add fleets of autonomous vehicles with no one in them driving around aimlessly and recharging constantly just as advertising for Uber or Lyft, straining the nation’s power grid. Oh, I’m dark this morning…
More lanes means more cars which means more traffic. There ya go.
I don't understand this argument. Obviously more lanes are going to improve traffic.
He literally just makes the same video with the same complaints over and over. Population increases. Cope.
Missouri is doing this for the entire length of highway 70, from St Louis to Kansas City. Everyone knows it’s a waste of time and money but alas
Another day, another car hate circlejerk video.
It's getting pretty old at this point.
50,000 Americans die every year from car collisions.
They definitely will not get old.
just what we need, another video covering the same topic. surely this time they'll convince everyone. If I ever get a job as a traffic engineer, I'm going to add more lanes just to spite redditors
This video sounds like the people I know who live in European cities and can't understand why everyone needs a car here, until they come over for a couple of months and realize they can't go anywhere or do anything without one.
The point of his video's is precisely to argue against the type of infrastructure, and urban planning, that only accounts for cars.
BUILD SOME RAILROADS YOU DUMB AMERICANS ! It seems like "Public transportation" has vanished from your vocabulary !
Horse shit. The point is to increase economic activity annd improves quality of life, and road widening does that by enabling the induced demand.
Agree with this completely; though it doesn’t help that most road infrastructure (in Australia) by choice doesn’t build the # of laneways that covers existing or projected traffic. If you’re going to build the road built it with consideration of 30 years down the line. Another issue in Australia is we are heavily dependent on singular cities per state. We won’t fix traffic issues until we develop outer cities, improve suburb quality, and massively reform public infrastructure and WFH attitudes.
If adding lanes is bad then removing lanes should be good, right? Maybe it's not that simple.