For critics of widening projects, the prime example of induced demand is the Katy Freeway in Houston, one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.
Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.
Matt Turner, an economics professor at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 study on congestion, said adding lanes is a fine solution if the goal is to get more cars on the road. But most highway expansion projects, including those in progress in Texas, cite reducing traffic as a primary goal.
“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history,” Dr. Turner said.
Anti-car people use this to try to explain that adding more lanes doesn’t help traffic congestion. Except that every highway system is different and the vast majority of them don’t have anywhere near those number of lanes. Adding 1 lane to a 2 lane road would dramatically help traffic situations.
If you are ‘pro car’ then you should definitely be resistant to adding lanes (and pro using that money for transit alternatives).
Getting cars off the road is the only thing that’s going to make driving less miserable in the kinds of places were adding lanes is suggested.
And maybe a warm take, while this discussion is going on: Whether or not you’re pro car or anti car, you’re gonna want to provide and improve alternatives to driving. If you’re anti car, it’s so that you don’t need to drive to go from A to B. If you’re pro car, it’s so that others don’t need to drive to go from A to B, keeping more room on the roads for you. Build trains, busses and bike space, and everybody wins.
Just like with nearly anything else, if you do a shit job of implementing something and do a 1/2-ass effort then the results will be shit. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
The US population has grown considerably over the decades and yet our highway traffic system has not even come close to keeping pace. I’M ALL FOR MORE TRAINS and MASS TRANSIT, but I am also not some deluded hippy that thinks we can just get rid of cars and all our traffic problems will magically go away like all your problems after a few hits from a bong.
We need more lanes on MANY highways throughout the nation and this terrible example in Houston doesn’t change that fact.
Hmm for some reason I don’t believe you’ve actually considered opposing views
By definition, if you got rid of cars, you wouldn’t have traffic. Traffic is made from cars.
As many other people have explained, more lanes are not the main solution. Going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 may help, but any more just creates more “induced demand” and more traffic. More cars on the road guarantees more traffic.
There are highways, major streets, and side streets all over LA and NYC. Traffic is still terrible.
Can confirm. My area added a third lane to the highway over the last 10 years or so. So much better than before. One grandma can’t bring the entire highway to a snails pace anymore.
What was the population and commuter increases of your area in the last 10 years? I think that is a big factor people don’t consider.
If it’s relatively stable or slow Y/Y then absolutely it’ll help. But if you live in a place where urban sprawl is the city’s building mandate for the next 20 years, it’ll be like Los Angeles traffic in no time.
Even 290 in Houston got more lanes recently and it’s like night and day.
It’s almost like it’s more nuanced than loud people want to admit.
As with many things there’s not a clear cut answer. I think you could make a strong case for the Katy Freeway expansion being a failure where those resources would have been better spent on other forms of transportation. I’d agree that adding lanes is not always a bad idea, but blindly adding lanes like the US has done for decades has not been a good thing overall, imo. We’re dependent on cars for everything, they’re heating up the planet and they’re a very inefficient solution to the ultimate problem of getting people from point A to B. I’m not so much anti-car as anti-inefficient travel that has saddled us with tons of negative aspects to city life.
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They don’t consider it because they want to be re-elected in the next few years. Fixing a problem that’s more than “the next election” away holds no interest for them, or most of their constituents.