Why building wider roads is a waste of money - Car Culture #1
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ก.พ. 2023
- The Queensland State Government has opened consultation on the Centenary Motorway Corridor Upgrade. At this point they are seeking community input to develop options for future upgrades. However, the first stage is already decided, with the Centenary Bridge being duplicated to provide 6 lanes, and no transit lanes.
• $244 million for bigge...
However, this early consultation is a golden opportunity to tell the project team that we want to end the cycle of induced demand, not give in to car culture, and demand a transit and active travel focussed upgrade program.
And if they go ahead and just make an 8 lane motorway that's congested in a couple of years anyway, well at least we told them so...
This is the first video in a series about car culture. Induced demand, or Jevons paradox, or whatever other name you can think of, the reality plays out over and over again - road gets congested, public gets cranky, politicians announce they will "bust congestion", more lanes get added, road gets congested again, public gets cranky...you get the picture.
Utopia is a great TV show produced by the ABC - and their clip on Jevons Paradox included in this video is just perfect.
HOW DO YOU GET INVOLVED?
Go to the Centenary Motorway Corridor Upgrade page:
www.yoursay-projects.tmr.qld....
1. Register
2. Add pins on the Interactive Map asking for a busway, better bike connections, better cross-motorway bike and pedestrian connections etc
3. Complete the survey
4. Turn up at the in-person consultation sessions if you're in Brisbane
Centenary Bridge Business Case:
www.statedevelopment.qld.gov....
Everytime I go to catch the bus to Toowoomba, guess what! Stuck in traffic! But I'm sure one more lane will fix it.
Bus lane would fix it!
The population of people out at Springfield/Ripley has also increased dramatically over this period when Legacy Way was built (perhaps because of the upgraded road, people decided they could live out there and commute into the city), and its this projected population increase into the future that accounts for most of those additional car trips anticipated on the Centenary Bridge.
Although there's a train line (at least to Springfield, not yet to Ripley), those suburbs are constructed such that driving to a park-and-ride station is the only realistic way many people can get the train. And those carparks are usually full (because the whole Springfield Central station can only hold about 1.5 trains worth of passengers if everybody drives their own car), so people just drive all the way to the CBD.
The inefficiency of car-oriented planning really just extends to everything everywhere.
2:00 Love the Utopia reference ... '..where did the green go.. classic! And 4:38
"Adding car lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity." - Lewis Mumford, 1955
People needing to travel to work is not the same as obesity.
@@allanmoorhead9492The point of the quote is that you're not addressing the root cause which is more cars than a place can sustain. Cities and towns need to find ways to encourage/incentivize more car-less trips to lower congestion. Widening lanes is reactionary policy; we need to be implementing more proactive and long-term thinking policies.
@@coolsteven2 No, the point of curing obesity is that it is extremely unhealthy, and the root cause is eating too much sugar. This is why loosening your belt will not cure it.
The cause of traffic congestion is not "too many cars". The cause of traffic congestion is not enough roads, as well as poorly designed roads. It is not "reactionary" to provide more of something which is in demand. We don't say "eating too much" is the cause of a food shortage. If there is a food shortage, we provide more food.
We can "sustain" cars if we provide enough roads, just the same as we can sustain the current population with food if we produce enough food. When there is a demand for anything, you produce more of it.
@@allanmoorhead9492 this isnt very complicated. More lanes for cars results in more cars but more cars means more traffic.
@@dont4922 So how does building more lanes create more cars exactly?
Brilliant. You’re a champion! I look forward to the series.
To be fair, the centenary highway links all of west Queensland to Brisbane and the north so all traffic flows through to get to the legacy way. Because of that I can understand adding another lane, just from the ipswich motorway to the moggil road interchange.
But there 100% needs to be bus priority on the stretch between indooroopilly and Mt ommeny because so many buses use that corridor and they are always stuck in traffic. I've heard so many ppl say that they aren't going to catch the bus into the city because they just get stuck in the same traffic.
100% needs a busway from Mt Ommaney to Indooroopilly, and then somehow to UQ. Less fussed about it going all the way to the city, more value in going across to link UQ and then South Brisbane etc.
@@ChrisCoxCycling it would be the dream if we could have west brisbane linked in with the Brisbane metro through UQ
I'm 1964 the year the Centenary bridge was opened the average tradie Ford Falcon Ute was 4651 mm long, today a Ford Ranger is 5110 mm, multiple that little difference by the forecast traffic numbers and your place in the traffic jam is now 6 km further back, entirely caused by vehicle size. Overseas the data has demonstrated time again that induced demand puts money in the pocket of construction entities and costs road users and local business time, money and pollution. Good on you for getting this subject in the limelight.
Thanks Chris. Excellent presentation.
Great video Chris.
All infrastructure causes induced demand: The question is, what is the quality of the demand you want to induce?
Build more road lanes and you’ll get more cars. And you’ll make the roads worse.
Build more rail services and you’ll induce more rail demand leading to more rail services and improvements in rail services.
Build more bike lanes and you’ll encourage more people to ride their bikes which will ironically improve the roads.
Bingo! So the first step is acknowledging that ever increasing car use is a problem. At least in Brisbane, no level of government wants to say that out loud. Instead it's all "busting congestion" and "getting you home sooner".
Car culture has developed a car dependent city, and car dependent city residents demand car dependent solutions. It'll take some leadership to change the paradigm.
Won't induced demand for PT and bicycles cause congestion of PT and bicycle infrastructure? This is the logic you use for roads, why not for PT and bicycles?
@@ChrisCoxCycling The reason we have "car culture" is that cars are simply the most convenient form of travel. This is why new roads "induce" demand and new PT infrastructure does not. We have massive PT infrastructure already and yet we still have congested roads - purely because people prefer to drive than use PT.
@@allanmoorhead9492 I think the idea is to make PT and active transport more attractive than driving. The reason driving is so attractive currently is because our public transport system isn't that efficient (especially when compared with other countries). This is particularly the case in the Western suburbs where the only public transport option (busses) gets caught in the same traffic as cars do, with no dedicated bus lane and no alternative PT options.
My understanding of why induced demand isn't really a concern for public transport is because it is a lot more efficient on space per person compared to private vehicles.
For example a train carriage is say 25m long, while a private vehicle is closer to ~5m long.
Brisbane's ~150m long bombardier trains are said to fit nearly 1000 people at full capacity. This means that even at half capacity (~500 people) a train takes up only 6% of space/length of equivalent passengers in private vehicles
@@melissabell3424 Public transport is inherently inefficient. It can't be made more efficient that cars, except by artificially designing the city so that public transport is given priority over cars and roads are not build to meet demand for car use. Driving is more attractive simply because you can go straight from where you are to where you want to go, without stopping for other people. Public transport is communal transport, which means users share it with thousands of other people.
The train or bus doesn't stop outside your house and go straight to your workplace without stopping. You have to walk to the train or bus stop, wait for the next service, then during the trip the train or bus stops at frequent intervals for other people to get on or off. At the other end, you have to walk to your actual destination. A bus will do a "milk run" along roads which are not directly on your route to work, to cater to a larger number of users in the area between where you get on and where you get off.
Trains and buses carry more people than cars. But they also travel far less frequently than cars. A bus seats 45 people but if there is only a bus every 15 or 30 minutes, it won't carry people at a rate anywhere near high enough to replace the number of people traveling by car along that route, during peak travel times. That bus is also not able to take people to all of the different destinations those people are traveling to further out from the city, or pick up all of the people traveling from the outer region toward the city.
Induced demand is a fallacy for car infrastructure as well. It assume that the sole reason people drive at all is that there is space free to drive on. If this were true, then providing more public transport would have the same effect - people would automatically use it regardless of whether they actually like it. Hence the reason more people drive when new roads are built is because people actually need to drive, and the new road is meeting previously unsatisfied demand. If the new road becomes congested, it only means that not enough road has been built to satisfy all of the existing demand.
But building more roads is not the whole solution. Part of the problem is that roads are free to use (except the few which are tolled - and these are the ones which were built to take people off of the congested roads). If roads were priced for users, only people who genuinely need to use any given road would tend to use it, and other drivers would choose cheaper routes. Prices would tend to regulate use and distribute driving more evenly around the city and suburbs. Roads are just another form of goods or services like any other, and use or consumption should be regulated by prices like any other.
The mathematics for traffic is not water - people think it's flowing like water but like you said the bigger pipe means more attraction to more water. Aside from that have too much lane can cause bottleneck and overtale problem at the entrance and exit
right on point, thanks a lot, our society is addicted to cars and like any addicted person their mind is not working properly as it should, it ruins all aspect of people's daily lives. wasting money, drivers killing people (mostly pedestrians and cyclists), it ruins affordability and subsidizing gas, all ended up in this mess they can't even see the problem in it. I don't these countries getting better in future (mostly non eurpoean countries) they are addicted to car culture
@ChrisCoxCycling After you comment on the last video that I put did not see much to agree with you. However this video does have merit as seeing Europe with their mass transit and a great option. Which would help clear roads for those who work on it. Like logistic and emergency services.
Well made
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one more lane bro I swear just one more lane
I love a good paradox. Great video as usual Chris. Guess you've seen this guy's channel. He makes much the same similarly ignored points about cities in Canada, comparing them to Amsterdam. www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes/videos
Oh yeah, @NotJustBikes is the BEST.