Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic.html
Well I can't read the article behind the paywall, but generally this argument comes down to an issue of unclear goals.
Generally people complain that wider highways are still congested but they miss that those congested highways are delivering more transportation from one point to the other.
The goal of a highway is not (generally) to be congestion-free. It's to get transportation from one point to the other, so the congestion is actually a sign of more use of the highway to get there, the wider highway being congested being a sign of success in that goal.
"Fix traffic" is a silly phrase since traffic itself is a fix to the problem of people wanting to get from one place to the other. We keep widening highways because it does contribute to that goal, though.
@volkris @black_intellect more lanes don’t “deliver more transportation”; they just increase pressure on the bottleneck. They don’t magically make a city bigger, add more space to a store, etc.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on the situation.
Traffic is not just a pure, laminar flow. Interactions between vehicles means there is friction all along the route, and that contributes to congestion. Effectively, a crowded street is its own bottleneck.
Just like a pipe carrying water, there is a pressure drop along the length even if there's no one bottleneck at the end. And just like that pipe, there is more capacity with a wider pipe even though the pressure drop remains.
@volkris @chucker @black_intellect Pipes are a terrible analogy for traffic and modern studies keep proving it. A wider herd doesn’t mean the sheep get through the gate faster, especially of the sheep are competing to get through the gate the fastest so that they can get to the food the fastest and eat more than their competition. A wider herd can sometimes be far slower getting through that gate overall without active sheep dogs and other tools to avoid infighting.