Hey everyone, this video is intended as an outreach for those not yet familiar with this basic phenomenon. Make sure to share it with friends, family and acquaintances to raise awareness about the issue, thus hopefully help elect politicians who won't think of widening roads as an effective solution to traffic!
As an American, I miss having the luxury to look forward to the future and hope to see infrastructural improvements. Now the only thing to look forward to is which constitutional rights won't be stripped.
the issue isn't that driving is faster, the issue is that the car centric design does not allow for the bikes and public transport to fill the gap. netherlands rarely has any traffic issues just because it has a dedicated infrastructure and road design that actually makes sense. bigger is not better
Another thing to keep in mind is you can only widen the highway, not everything else. Offramps, city streets, intersections, most bridges, you can't widen these. No matter how wide you make the highway, everyone is funneling off to the same one- or two-lane offramps. You can't avoid the bottleneck, it WILL slow down your road no matter how wide it is
Anyone that's played cities skylines will know that if a road is jammed and you upgrade it with more lanes, the jam just moves to the side roads and ends up jamming the main road again.
I see this in Kuala Lumpur, there is astonishing infrastructure highways on top of highways on top if highways You get to 2 km of your exist and you're stuck!
Public transit is sometimes portrayed as the enemy of driving, but it's quite the opposite. If your commute is not well covered by public transit or if you, like me, simply like driving, public transit is beneficial to you too. Simply because it removes traffic and frees up parking spots. It also gives you a possible alternative in case your car breaks down or you wanted to have a few beers after a night in the cinema.
Public transit is good only if it's well done. In the US, it's done badly and everything is focused on just cars that it's still faster in traffic than by public transit since most of them will be stuck in this traffic as well.
But everyone who has a car/can drive will prefer driving, u have ur own ac, comfortable and assured seats etc etc... its just so much better than public transport as it is right now. I think no city is really at a point qhere public transport is better than cars and currently even the best designed europeans cities do not have better transports, they just make it hard to drive, forcing people to use public transport in a way (lower parking spaces, higher cost for parking, added cost for maintainable of the car and yearly check ups, highway costs, costs to enter the city center... etc....etc...etc...... Public transport vehicles really need to be improved.
@@mattia8327 Public transit has many disadvantages compared to cars, so they have to make the most of their advantages. Those being lower cost and higher speed in rush hour traffic. What usually turns people away is the lack of flexibility, which can be made up for with dense network and short intervals. Personally, if I was working in the city, I'd probably ride the tram on most days. When I was studying in Prague I just left my car at Strahov and used the subway throughout the week. Driving through the congested city just wasn't worth it. Anyway my point is that even as a driver you too benefit from public transit, as it reduces traffic and frees up parking spots.
@@mattia8327 I know plenty of car owners (myself included) who prefer transit. You’ve also left out a whole host of pros such as the ability to take a nap, get work done, zone out, play games, not spend your mental energy on driving and watching cars around you.
@@mattia8327 That's not really true, European cities do have food public transport, and if people take them it's not because cars are banned but because it's convenient. My family in Paris don't own a car because they go everywhere through metro. It has exits like everywhere and you'll never be far off of your destination, maybe 5 min walk away. It's much more convenient than a car
There was a time in the US that the government wanted to invest more in rail infrastructure and other forms of public transportation. However, that's when the powerful car companies got scared that they might sell less cars as a result, so they lobbied the government to not make those investments and instead to use the money to build more roads. They were successful and ever since the US has in general had terrible public transportation compared to the rest of the developed world.
My city (Pittsburgh) used to have a robust network of trolleys that ran all over downtown and adjacent neighborhoods. My grandmother has stories about how she and her friends were able to take the trolley all over town as kids even though her parents weren’t available to drive her. Unfortunately I never knew these trolleys. They ripped them all out to make it easier to drive around downtown and they were all gone by 1980.
@@Dave01Rhodes "Easier" to drive. The perverse truth is that the more car-centric an area gets, the worse the driving experience also becomes! (to say nothing about the experience for other modes)
@@Kotifilosofi Capitalism isn’t lobbying the government for business interests. In a fully capitalist system, the government could not favor one mode of transportation over the other.
There's also an issue that this video didn't touch upon for the sake of brevity, but which is really important: adding more lanes does not increase capacity in a linear way. After 6-8 lanes, more lanes can actually reduce capacity because people still enter through the rightmost lane and and still need to make it back there in order to exit, which means there's a lot of lane switching and yielding, which slows down traffic and reduces capacity.
@@Demopans5990 It's very common to see fools going slow in the fast lane. With only two lanes in total, the likelihood of getting stuck behind them is very high.
Another problem on top of this is: -Bigger road nearby -> Many people drive on that road -> Lets build a shopping center or an Ikea or resort or whatever nearby -> More people on the road -> Make road bigger | and then it all starts over again
Same with neighborhoods. Bigger road -> lets build neighborhoods around big road -> more people driving -> Road clogged -> make road bigger -> build neighborhoods around bigger road -> etc
And another short one on top: you've built your Ikea or resort in the middle of fucking nowhere. Anyone going there as an actual destination will use your Highway, as there is no rails, buses or any other alternatives.
This is what has happened in the Washington, DC metro area. Every time they increase road capacity, it makes it easy to build a bunch of office parks and condos further out from the city, so that's what they do. Businesses see office space that's a fraction of the cost because of the land value out in that sprawl, and so they fill up those parks and the people who work there fill up the housing. Then traffic gets 5x worse, so the politicians decide to increase road capacity, and so on. The sprawl has now gone out so far from the city that there was talk of creating a second beltway literally over 25 miles from the city. They simply seem incapable of learning. Meanwhile their metro system which used to be amazing, has been underfunded for decades and is now a complete mess. Change needs to happen at the political level or they will just make it worse.
The problem with reverse induced demand, is that often times local governments reduce the roads in some way, because that is easy, but don’t make the requisite public transport investments, because that is hard. Or they make the investment, but don’t allow a lag time for the infrastructure to actually get built.
Recently happened in Barcelona, where I live. The local authorities decided to restrict the access of old combustion cars into the city after a certain date, in order to reduce traffic and pollution. That's fine. But they didn't reinforce public transport services in any way, so suddenly there was a lot of people that couldn't drive to the city and the same public transport as before to absorb all that new demand. That's totally not fine.
@Sinneslöschen Living in Germany here, near a major city. Lucky enough to have decent connection via public transportation both in town and to the major city. I still will never ever use the public transportation as long as I have a choice again. I've been through 20 years of usage and I am just done with it. Trains which are late or don't drive at all, bus-drivers which can't drive, rude/loud/obnoxious/unhygienic passengers, overcrowded trains and buses, failure to accomodate for non-standard passengers (good luck finding a good seating having a height of nearly 2m) and a general trend in society to be hyper-punctual, so you'll almost always have to pick a train an hour too early, just to be there on time rather than risking to be 5 minutes late. Fuck. That.
works in Japan cities with thousands of people riding trains and hundreds of train lines with barely any cars on road because - has nice biking lanes - weather (yes, weather, I live in the tropical equator so walking and biking under searing hot sun 365 fkin sucks) - cars are expensive - inconvenient to have cars at all (parking is expensive, roads are narrow etc) - plenty of railway lines basically makes cars redundant
Even if this is a "simpler" video for folks who are not that familiar with these things, I want to comment on how amazing your editing has become since about a year ago!
There's a major point that car-lovers need to realise. If improvements are made to public transport, infrastructure changes to improve foot/bike travel, and so on, you drastically reduce the number of people using cars out of necessity. In an ideal world, where cars are only used by people who actually like them and want to have them, can you imagine how much better the driving experience would be?
They also need some sort of security in that cars and car roads won't be eliminated entirely. Which shouldn't take much, conciader how absurd that is. But I think what's often in this sort of video is an undertone of "cars are dumb and bad" which for someone who likes cars is probably quite repulsive and polarizes the issue between people receptive to public transportation and eternal car drivers (some by necessity, some for pleasure. doesn't matter).
lol almost everyone likes to drive a car, there's no such a thing as necessity in most of cases in most of cities. A car lover has to stop being a car lover and using a car in the city for traffic jams to vanish. Not saying this is a bad thing, but those car lovers would disagree
@@tobyalder42 no, there are people who wants to drive cars juat to go to their destination that cannot be reach with available public transportation, what he meant about "car lovers" are the enthusiast who drive for fun
@@gehcontent5618 As I said in most cases the destinations are reachable by public transport, just people are either lazy or want extra comfort or privacy of their own car.
I absolutely love cars. Cars are one of my biggest hobbies. But you know what i hate? Traffic. I would absolutely love to commute via train to work day-to-day, and have even more time and money to spent on my hobby weekend car that drives maybe 5000km a year in the weekends. 99% of the population are not car enthusiasts, and could live without a car entirely. Supporting proper public transit and making infrastructure around walking and biking helps everyone, INCLUDING car enthusiasts.
I'm on the opposite side - I hate cars, never even learned how to drive, and I'm so happy to live in a city where you can get to literally any point by metro, trains, buses or just walk if you want
@@steffengustavsen9678 I live in a town of about 1000 people. There is 1 small corner store, and a kindergarten. I'm a graphic designer. Not really possible.
As an American train enthusiast I'd love to see passenger service return. A few years ago my town widened a main road by two feet on either side and claimed it would be a four lane road. Before they did this it was a beautiful drive as there were trees that created a natural tunnel affect providing shade in our hot humid area.
I can't speak for Houston, I hear it's a total clusterf*ck, but as a transportation consultant in the Dallas area, there has been a notable shift in pedestrian/bicycle accommodation in projects. Every single project that includes an urban portion, includes sidewalks and some level of bicycle accommodation. The most recent iteration is shared-use paths for pedestrian/bicycle accommodation rather than putting bike lanes next to vehicle lanes, so it's safer for everyone. Also, the proposed high-speed rail from Dallas to Houston recent got past a big hurdle regarding eminent domain for land acquisition so it looks like that's still moving along.
@@Fireslingerpirate Do you make this same complaint every time the government acquires land for a highway expansion? Because they do this literally all the time.
@@thefarstar4367 No. I make that complaint when they're carving up every farm and ranch for hundreds of miles for a rail system that isn't needed and isn't wanted by a large number of Texans. It's completely wrong to blatantly steal people's land especially when it benefits them not at all.
@@silentwf I disagree with the premise of taking land from people to enrich a private company while the people who are having their land taken from them do not benefit. Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Kelo v City of New London that this abomination is constitutional so here we are. Doesn't mean I have to agree or like it.
I’m really glad this video was made. There’s already quite a lot of content on more complex and particular issues concerning traffic, but I’ve always struggled to find a short basic video to explain to my family in two minutes why you can’t just make everyone drive and how people change from cars to other modes of transport when sufficiently encouraged. And even though I live in Europe (Poland) my family REALLY needs this kind of explanation………
Luckily for you, Poland has a quite decent and affordable public transport network. I lived in Gdańsk a few years ago and moving around the city and to other cities was super convenient and reliable (Of course rural areas might not be so well served). I especially appreciated the local SKM trains in Gdańsk/Trójmiasto area, one of the best city transports I've ever experienced. I used them every single day and many nights too (it was a 24/7 service, only stopping between 01-03 am for maintenance!!), they didn't fail me even once, and I was paying like 20€ per month! Why would anyone use a car in that city is still a mystery to me haha
@pyropulse I think I'd rather suffer walking to public transportation than continue to risk my life and the lives of others every day on the freeway. And PUBLIC space IS your space; YOU would be paying for it dummy. Nobody is trying to take cars from you either; most of us just want alternatives. I'd still own a car and use public transportation if both were accessible to me.
@pyropulse If there weren't benefits to living in cities, no one would live in them. There's your answer And also, sure, cars are more comfortable than public transport most of the time but just because you cannot get your ass up on a bus doesn't mean it's terrible. There are a ton of advantages public transport has over cars and you are ignoring all of them. If you go on public transport, you have to walk more than a car which, amazingly, Is good. Its a lot cheaper, its vastly more ecological, its frees up a ton of land because it doesnt have to be used for parking lots. You can use the time inside the bus/tram to do stuff as you dont have to concentrate. Young people have access to it and can move without being tethered to their parents. The parents have more time as they dont have to drive you around everywhere. Poor people have access to it. What do cars have? Comfort and cargo, great. A shift to public transport is simply more logical.
Reminds me when everyone in New New York became stupid and trains crashed into one another. So the mayor said *"We're sending more trains!"* Scary how in rl we're adding more lanes.
@@Sarahbryson321 no, even in central, it is mainly private cars who clog the roads. however i dont know anyone who would even think of driving into central for any reason, so this is a litteraly, no one drives in london, because there are too many people driving in london.
City planning is the one issue I can see myself actually canvassing for. Housing and transportation effect basically every aspect of our society, and it’s disappointing to see that most people talk about gas prices when they should be upset about being forced to own a car in the first place.
Well, that's because most people aren't upset with their cars. I think a good design should allow people to follow their own preference. They shouldn't be forced to take the bus, train or car, but decide on their own. Of course, there are pros and cons to every transportation method. That's something to keep in mind.
@@Jimraynor45 I agree to having choices, but paying $450/month + Gas, getting stuck in traffic and sharing the road with reckless drivers is a choice I wish more people would catch onto.
@@Pancakegr8 You gotta keep in mind, alternative transportation methods have their drawbacks. You might say a crowded bus or train is better than a traffic jam, but if you ask yourself, would you rather be in a traffic jam or a crowded bus? The answer may not be so obvious.
@@Jimraynor45 If the bus is crowded 24/7, then that's an indication that you need to increase capacity with a train, bigger buses, more frequent buses, a tram, etc, any of these options. Crowded buses aren't a sign that public transport isn't good enough - it's a sign that capacity needs to be increased. The difference between this and cars is that road capacity is, in practice, finite because you can't build a road big enough to avoid traffic jams, but you *can* change your bus to a train without actually taking up that much more room relative to the increase in capacity.
One thing I never see when people are talking about induced demand is reduced density. That is, when you expand roadways, you are ALSO eliminating homes, businesses, and other services, which now need to be "further out". So, for example, people who were previously living in a dense city with nearby businesses and shops that they could quickly reach, with a short car ride or even a bike ride or a walk, now need to take a long car ride to access the same services.
That's more a side effect of instant transport wherever you want. If it only takes an extra 3 minutes to go to a fancier business compared to walking to nearby local businesses, why not? It's a thing you never really think much about. I would say the suburb is more the one that causes people to travel farther for goods and services as they literally are designed to spread people out. This necessitates things being farther away as the residential area is huge and inefficiently spaced. I know I live in a very small suburb right at the edge of the city I live in, but it's just a bit too far to walk to most businesses. I know as I used to get a bus ride to the nearby school to get back home. It took like 10 minutes to walk home, or it took just less than a minute to drive that. That's also about as far as the closest small businesses. That's already a bit long for most people. In comparison I can just drive to the gas station down the street in 2 minutes by car. This is basically the side effect of this strategy. Its a shame as my mother and father said there used to be a trolley going down the road in front of ours. You just jump on and off when you get where you want. Not only was it more environmentally friendly, it was cheaper than owning a car, and was nearly as fast. But they ripped it out to make the roads wider for turn lanes and to add a third lane going through the city.
Yep the best design decision is to make cities walkable and services within reach, because then a lot less people take cars all the time every day and you get less traffic overall.
I imagine because it's a tiny factor (but I don't actually know). Let's do some math Imagine you have a city with: * An 20km diameter * 4 major roads going through the city (so 8 entries/exits). * You widen these roads by two lanes each. The roads are ~160km long if they go straight through the city. (4*20km). But let's make that 200km to account for obstacles like rivers and the like. Let's say adding two lanes takes away 10m (4 per lane, some extra) of useable space next to the road. So the extra road comes at the cost of (length * 0.01)km² which comes out to 2km² This means the city grows from an 20km radius to a 20.06km radios (60 meters). It really doesn't make much of a difference. Now of course this all gets compounded if you start enlarging more/minor streets. But even if you add 2 lanes to 2000km of streets it only makes the city larger by 300m which is likely less than what one would have expected. There are reasons to be against wider roads. There are very good reasons to be for investment into public transport over investing into road widening. But reduced density is likely not all that relevant.
@@TheSilverwing999 That is an unachievable fantasy. Why do so many have such ridiculous romantic attachments to 19th century living? Cars are very good for human health and productivity, on balance.
@N Fels Not all cities look like in America. I live in a suburb of around 20k people that has 4 restaurants, 2 gyms, 2 convenience stores, 1 grocery store and a subway station all within 2 minutes walk from my building, the number of services increase if I walk 10 minutes. There is no shopping mall and only a few of the services are focused right next to the subway station. A 3 minute metro ride (1 station) and I hit a huge shopping center but it takes 30 minutes to reach the central station, and there are neighborhoods like this even further out.
In the area of California where I live, there is a massive road widening project going on which is causing a lot of traffic right now. Every single time I have to drive through it, I can’t help but think this is all completely pointless
The 91? I swear coming up from the Temecula Valley it will always be faster to head to the desert via Anza, and go around and come from the north into LA, then to deal with the unending construction in the rest of the I.E.
I use public transport to commute in my city. It is a soul crushing experience being a sardine packed in with total strangers for 1.5 hours every day. The only real solution is to not live in a city.
People don't understand choke points aren't solved by widening roads. Since choke points are not on the highway, but at the exit of the highway, which if the road gets wider, will only get choked up faster. So unless you build like four lane roads everywhere and no traffic stops, wider highways will do nothing.
Widening roads definitely helps that. If there's 1 lane and the exit is backed up, everyone stops. If there's two lanes, at most half the traffic stops. And so on. The idea of induced demand is that if it's so bad, people will try to find alternatives (probably alternative roads). This is a misleading video because induced demand absolutely helps traffic, just as a whole in that area, not for any single road.
The morons who decided that Katy Freeway needed managed lanes which in this case are Hov lanes/toll roads with multiple entrances and exits on the LEFT side of the freeway made tons of choke points.
@@delos2279 Except you erroneously assume that only people on the outermost lane want to exit. Induced demand doesnt create magic cars that dont want to exit, they will leave at most exits proportionally as much as they did before. So when you double the lanes, there will be two clogged lanes. Because not everyone pulls over 5miles before the exit, so they choke two lanes to death near the exit. Dont call a video misleading when you dont understand the concept it covers.
I've heard a different version of the final saying, it went like this: "A developed country isn't where everyone drives a car, it's where the rich use public transport"
Explain your reasoning behind this. I don’t see why we need to hate on the ‘rich’. What’s wrong with the privacy and comfort of a car? I notice that in public there’s always someone who will talk loudly on the phone, or groups of people shouting loudly, some people coming in sweaty/smoker’s smell/smelling of alcohol, antisocial behaviour (eg putting feet on seats), crying babies, too warm in summer and too cold in winter etc. And, no, noise cancelling headphones barely keep out those noises as they work best for droning background noise. You can’t beat the comfort of a nice comfortable air conditioned car with your own personal space and peacefully enjoying music/conversation with your passengers
@@avidutubeuser007 apa yang nyaman dari berkendara yang lambat akibat terjebak kemacetan? bahkan jika mobil memiliki ac, musik favorit dan privasi terbaik tetap saja menghabiskan waktu untuk hal sia-sia akibat kemacetan merupakan hal yang membosankan
This is something I remember thinking when I was a kid. I'm from Mexico city and around 2000 the city went through a bit of a transformation from being car centric to acommodating other means of transportation (namely bikes and public transport like electric buses). Many people at the time were outraged by the change, stating that that would only clog the traffic even more, their counter argument being that what we needed were more lanes. Even as a child I knew that was dumb, because of what Adam explains here (more lanes means more people use more cars). Although the switch from cars to public transport was very much driven by gentrification, Mexico city is a very good example of how that change can benefit the everyman as we went from spending a lot on gas, to spending barely the equivalent of a dollar to get from one extreme of the city to another.
Sounds like your country's leaders don't have their head up their asses, I wonder if the reason for this is because much of Mexico's population being much poorer thus they can't afford a car let alone any gas for it. What's your take on this? Speaking of that, gentrification is becoming a huge issue in American cities, every single neighborhood is becoming a fucking suburb. What's with people's obsession with fucking suburbia? they're expensive for the taxpayers and residents, they have no alternative means of transportation outside of cars and they're super inconvenient since they're usually very far away from essential areas like parks, hospitals and other businesses. They're practically fancy slum towns. In fact, in some countries like France and Brazil, suburbs are where the poor because they're always far away from where all the basic services are.
Me acordé del distribuidor vial que construyó AMLO cuando era jefe de gobierno de la Ciudad de México, según él era para "aliviar" el tráfico y hacerlo más dinámico pero todos sabemos como terminó eso jajajajajajaja...
I think the best example is singapore cus thats where i live and its very crowded in a small tiny asś nation but still we did managed to decrease the car problem by either putting transit or bicycles and also increasing the car price cus why bother travel 10km on a car when you can take the bus or transit or even on bike.
@@Founderschannel123 if I am not mistaken, Singapore achieved its aims by restricting car use, eg banning certain cars on certain days etc. Such measures are politically risky. I too live on a small island state of roughly 30km across (Malta), but would not use public transportation because it takes ages to travel with, if it arrives! Size alone is not a factor, it is urban transport planning that counts. You may be interested in this shorts that I did mainly for my compatriots. th-cam.com/play/PLPXiiVdxACsT_FnP_EXpzrIs8y8TVSV4r.html
I think a lot of this comes down to the automotive industry having a ton of political influence. They actively look to prevent expansion of public transportation since that would reduce demand for cars.
Are you sure it's not the demand for cars leading the lawmakers to be pro-roads over trains, and the demand for American manufacturing jobs leading them to be pro-auto industry? Because it's not the automobile industry that elects your local government, and that's the folks who vote whether or not to fund municipal public transportation projects.
@@theKashConnoisseur There are direct political dynamics at play. For example I went to school for transportation design, and in 10 years of observing school projects at this one design school, I've only ever seen 1 train project. This is because the student projects are mostly funded by sponsors, who dictate the brief of the project, which 9 times out of ten is some type of car, truck, or racecar. So even in a creative setting where the world is presumably your oyster, as an undergrad where we're literally making things that will never exist in real life, an automotive company will never be motivated financially to fund a student project designed for public utility because not only will they not gain intellectually from it, they also don't want to be seen as being in favor of any mode of transport that affects their bottom line, or is antithetical to their business model. Unless they decide to get into the bus or tram business which they won't (because there's no money in it. They'd only want to sell their proprietary ultium battery technology to other companies that do any public good like that. The students are also disincentivized to deviate from what the companies are looking for because almost everyone is in serious debt and wan's to land a job and doesn't want to risk being too radical to not get hired.
@@MrAlziepen It makes sense that you can't find public transportation sponsors, as public entities funded through taxes shouldn't be wasting money on sponsoring design students. However, you might try your luck pitching to engineering firms which would be bidding on public transit projects. They might indeed want to see ideas for rail lines. What do you think has more influence on the local politics which vote on public transit projects: Big Auto in Detroit who has no idea that Hillsboro Oregon is thinking about adding a new rail line, or the large Portland engineering firms who are directly tied into then planning and bidding process of bringing such a project to life? I think that conspiracy theories about corrupt politicians selling themselves to the highest bidder are temping narratives, but they ignore the more plausible explanations for why democratically elected officials favor some projects over others. Hint: they tend to favor things that help them get and stay elected. Generally this means they follow the broad expectations of the voting majority. What's sad is most of the population doesn't even bother to vote, and so they literally forgo their opportunity to have a say yet feel entitled to complain.
@@theKashConnoisseur I think your right in your assessment that the mundane explanation of politicians protecting their own interests and the status quo is the driving dynamic broadly speaking. However in other public sectors like energy specifically in regard to Joe Manchin and his gob coal operation, I understand that he's not breaking any laws per say, but definitely using his political prowess to protect his assets in a manner that is in my opinion pretty slimy, because it's not even pretending to be good for the environment. But I'd also add that yes, to stay elected politicians will opt for the status quo of their base, or their corporate donors which help them get elected. I understand that through voting at the local level is how the funding happens for these projects and I guess I just wonder if people know what they really want or not, or are basically not voting in their own interests because they're caught up in the spectacle of national politics, where a lack of education of how public transportation infrastructure is intended to function is adding to the problem of people making informed decisions about their communities. I understand that narratives are powerful, and that even with the post office there are active means to try and sabotage that public utility and point at its dysfunction as a throughline to getting postage completely privatized, and they'll likely succeed with wide support because largely the populous has been exposed to the convenience of Amazon, and thinks that's the way forward in spite of pee bottles. So no, I don't think there are conspiracies in automotive, just the standard market driven algorithmic capital accumulation model. There are a few startups that are trying to make these hyper efficient solar cars, and it's baffling how many people think that the market doesn't want that, even though there are over a quarter million pre orders for Aptera vehicles. So I just wonder how can elected officials be so sure if their constituents want public transport or not if their entire experience of it (if any) is that it's terrible largely from under funding.
why does your country have a system where corporations have influence over your elected governments? seems the issue is deep into the structure of your government itself.
My family used a study about this in a lawsuit against having their land and trees being destroyed for a widened road. It was unsuccessful because those who were for the project had more money. EDIT: Ok, so my brain messed up and confused this conflict with another one, the Road Widening hasn't resulted in a lawsuit, which I'm surprised because my family has been sued THREE TIMES over that piece of land when I was growing up. (It's a big house that belongs to my family on my mother's side, that was built by slaveowners, and my mom's obsession with it had basically ruined my childhood.) However, we haven't gotten any compensation via emminent domain, so it could end up in a lawsuit. The study was actually used in a formal complaint to the town funding this. (Farragut, TN, for what it's worth) The town is basically run by corrupt rich assholes, and it's considered one of the worst towns in the entire state.
It's not money, it's the absurdly broad deference for "public works" projects. Exemplified by the unfortunate Supreme Court decision of Kelo vs. City of New London. Which found that "economic benefits are a permissible form of public use that justifies the government in seizing property from private citizens."
An important thinking about trafic jam is also the amount of vehicle that can go through exits: most of the jams I see here are because the entrance/exits sucks, so everyone must slow down, and because there's too many people, cars start to clog at the exchange speed
@@freeeeplay You do realize that doesnt mean adding more lanes right? That means repurposing lanes. In fact, you can solve a LOT of traffic issues by using 2 lanes to exit the highway, and only 1 lane to enter the highway. Since the maximum addition of cars to the road is half of the maximum reduction of cars to the road, this would prevent a lot of traffic jams due to entering and exiting the road. Then a secondary solution is to enter cars from the center of the road onto the highway, and let them exit on the sides of the road. This way, no one near the center of the road is planning to get off anytime soon, while everyone near the sides of the road is planning to get off within the next 15 minutes of driving. A tertiary solution is to split the roads near cities, and add at least 3 points of entry and exit on practically opposite sides of the city. That way you might have 10 lanes total, but they are each on practically opposite sides of the city. And due to the inconvenience to some, this means more people are likely to take public transport Doing this also means that there is a downside: a minimum amount of lanes for a highway(namely, 3), but it also means there is a maximum efficiency(5 lanes, 2 lanes to steer off, 2 lanes to keep flowing, 1 lane to steer on). Any more lanes than that will reduce efficiency quite significantly, or the efficiency of traffic remains roughly the same. The traffic flow would improve, the capacity on roads would be lower and overall, you'd be where you need to be at a somewhat optimal time regardless how you decide to travel.
@@Predated2 We need more exit lanes and more lanes.. cheaper gas and cars. More parking lots so it all gets easier . Actualy we just need Paking lots not more lanes . parking lots have best of both worlds.. lots lanes , exits to other lanes parking space ! and more asphalt. WIN WIN just add some petrol stations.
@@shrike6259 parking isn't the problem, it's the highways and how we define it. A highway, in layman's term, has one purpose. Its purpose is to go from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. Which means minimizing the amount of roads crossing and stops possible while keeping the size of a highway under reasonable limits. America's definition of a highway is the same except they forgot the minimizing road intersections and stopping part, instead they building things around it, like shopping centers, houses, factories, near a highway. There they add roads connecting a highway with stoplights and road intersections. This will cause a lot of problems. If you want to prevent highway congestion I recommend you to watch a YT channel, Not Just Bikes, here he would explains the woes of America's road infrastructure and how to solve them
Not to mention that when making calculations of cost, we also need to consider the price of owning a car. Whether it's buying gasoline, performing maintenance, or literally just the cost of the vehicle itself, cars are expensive, and a lot of people would be paying less overall if some of that money was put into buses and trains so they didn't need to drive their cars every day.
@@mistersir3020 what's the reason to even go outside the city? When I leave town, it's usually for business or holidays, either way far enough for driving a car to be not feasible. And for the rare cases when my close ones gather to have like a bbq in a forest, there's always a commuter train going in its general location.
@@diggernick01 Cities suck. Some of us don't want to live in cages. But temperaments differ and let's say you don't see a problem with raising children in a noisy concrete jungle where you don't have nature (or have to share it with dozens of people within view). To me, all the hours spent planning route, waiting for trains and buses, walking the final two miles, ... isn't worth the $2-3k per year that a car costs. Especially because you can rely on it at any moment. In Ukraine last year, your bolls were in a vice if you depended on public transportation (which is most people over there), as you weren't allowed on it without your dose of experimentacious medical procedure.
@@mistersir3020 I mean sure, it's nice having a car if you're planning to go out of town or live somewhere rural, but it shouldn't be a necessity for everyday city life. Where I live, pretty much everything I need is within walking or cycling distance, and for the places further away there's almost guaranteed to be a bus stop within a 10 minute walk. It really beats having to drive everywhere.
You are correct, but you take the wrong conclusion. The car has a rather substantial fixed cost, which does not go away by using the bus. Meaning that going by train has to be a lot cheaper than gas to justify the time commitment. Depending on the situation I have to take the bike to the city where cars cannot reach, and the car to a friend in rural areas where a bus would drive only for me, or the train in rare cases where I dont need a car at my destination. Of course, that means paying upkeep for all 3 of these options.
I understood another factor to be the vehicle capacity of the destination. A city's streets can only hold so many cars, so no matter how many lanes you add to the highway going to the city, once the city streets are jammed, the highway will back up. Its like putting a bigger hose into a pool and expecting it to hold more water. It doesn't hold more water, it just fills faster.
Love the picture of Naypyitaw, Myanmar. Fun fact, when I went to the "abandoned 20-lane highway" in 2020 expecting to lie down in the middle of the road without bother, there was already too much real traffic. Induced demand in action
For a while I was thinking "wait a second, why isn't there induced demand on the public transit and why doesn't that clog up the system?" The solution is: yes there is induced demand; and in that case, it's, within reason, a good thing, instead of reducing the quality of service, it increases the quality of service as it allows for more mode upgrade room and more mode hopping. And higher density modes just don't need that much more space once you shed a 2-ton personal protective cage around every individual person. But also the induced demand is less high in mixed zoning where you can potentially sleep, shop and work in direct vicinity from each other.
@pyropulse Cities have massive economic advantages to the country, it's more efficient to start a business where there is already a large consumer base. This improves the economy of the city, so more people move there. Cities are not going anywhere anytime soon, so we should improve them as much as possible. And I live in a city and can do all of the things you mentioned except guns, because my country has half decent gun control laws and I don't need one anyway, and snowboarding, because of the climate.
@pyropulse people in places with well designed public transit can literally do all of this while not having the burden of exorbitant car ownership costs.
@pyropulse Yes, but people who want to live in a city get stuck in the car. Almost everyone in the U.S. already has a car, so the "freedom" shouldn't be of a concern anymore.
Not to mention that, on a theoretical level, "adding lanes" is a brute force solution, which is the least sophisticated way of solving any problem: add potency, instead of downright cracking/changing the system. The revolution was not adding more postmen, so that the physical letters could be delivered faster (potency), the revolution was making the letters non-physical, digital (changing the system).
cars are much more convenient than busses, trains, or bikes. There is no revolution. Its like trying to replace digital mail with physical mail because the servers are slow. And then when you try upgrade the servers people say no because it would make more people use digital mail.
@@ancellery6430 the only reason they’re more convenient is because trains and public transit is inconvenient on PURPOSE in most of north america. like, how is it convenient if you get into parking hell if you go downtown or have to park at home on the street? and how could you expect buses to be convenient if they a. have next to no budget and b. spaces between everything is so vast because of the insane urban planning ideas america has always had
Sometimes a decent retread of older practices can be a good thing though. Perhaps instead of looking for brand new proposals which cost money and time to make, maybe you could look to the past and try a second attempt on older, lapsed proposals. Things like the Lower Manhattan Expressway and some other Robert Moses era proposals. Yes, they may be brute force solutions as well, but at least you get a second round of debate and save plenty of time and money on planning?
@@shanekeenaNYC but this is simply a waste of money in the end because it can’t scale any further. the only way to truly scale is with mass transit, the only alternative would be to not expand large centralized and densely populated cities.
Here in Ottawa we have one of the rare examples of a highway widening project that actually did reduce congestion in a lasting way. Back in the 90s, we got an NHL hockey team, complete with a massive new stadium out in the cornfields in the west end. The main way to get from the city center to the stadium was the 417 west, a two-lane (in one direction) highway that simply hadn’t been built to move a hockey stadium’s worth of people at the same time. On game nights, the 417 became completely unusable, clogged so badly that it might be faster to walk. This didn’t just affect the game audience, it also impacted other people who lived in the west end and used the 417 for commuting. The city government started a project to expand the highway from two to three lanes (again, in one direction, so four to six lanes total). And it basically solved the Game Night Congestion Problem. Game nights are still a bit clogged, but nothing like what it was before. I’m not an expert but I think the reason this worked is that the demand for the road wasn’t driven by the road itself, but by an exogenous source of demand: the NHL schedule.
I think you are right that venue driven demand is different from population driven demand in that it can't grow beyond the venue's capacity. However, after riding a bus from a random parking lot to a concert i think all large venues should have some form of transit integration. Be it a full metro/train station in the basement or a bus hub on ground level, and then have this transit scaled for the departing demand which will follow a very predictable schedule making it possible to plan around. And once you get people just a little ways away from the venue the congrestion just evaporates. (I have also driven out of a concert before and that is an experience i have 0 desire to ever repeat)
@@jasonreed7522 Oh yeah, I fully agree. Here in Ottawa we relatively recently also opened up a new football stadium, TD Place, which is much more centrally located than the hockey arena I mentioned above. It has absolutely no on-site parking; if you want to get there for a game or show, you need to bus in, and they run special buses using the local school bus fleet on game nights. It works great!
Another thing that I haven't seen pointed out is that more lanes induce more lane switching which induces traffic jams. Take the following situation: Your road is 3 lanes wide in the direction that you are going to. There is an important off-ramp on the right side, that's one lane wide. This off-ramp leads to a bottle-necked area (e.g. down town, where you can't easily widen the road). So the off-ramp will be totally jammed, even though it's not the bottle neck. But for someone going straight on the 3 lane road we were talking about in the beginning, this shouldn't matter, right? 1 lane off, 2 clear ones left for people going straight. Wrong. Because some idiot stuck in the right lane will see that the lane to his left is open, so he switches to that lane to squeeze into the off-lane right before the off ramp. This then blocks people going straight on the 2nd lane, so the 2nd lane starts to be jammed. So someone who wants to get off, will switch to the 3rd lane, to squeeze over two lanes right before the off ramp, which then blocks up the 3rd lane. I see that every single time I take the A22 in Vienna going eastward. And it really doesn't matter how many lanes you build, cause the bottleneck is almost always somewhere else.
I always think it’s important to mention that requiring a car effectively imposes a multi-thousand dollar tax on every person, regardless of ability to pay, where the proceeds of that tax go toward warming the atmosphere.
I think if you worded it like this, you would sell the idea way more in America. People like cars because of the freedom. But theres not much freedom if the gov is practically forcing you to use a car 24/7. There should options out there for people who want to be frugal and not spend money on cars. Luckily enough though, most big cities have decent public transit systems. However travelling inbetween cities still requires either a greyhound or a car. I love cars, and hope I get to own a hellcat in the future. But your average dude in a civic who dont care much about cars shouldnt be forced into using it. Gov should balance public and private transit depending on the state of the population imo. I hope they dont go too much for public transit and completely abolish cars, and I hope they dont go too much with cars and make public transit impractical.
Yeah in Australia running a car cost thousands and thousands of dollars a year in compulsory insurance, registration fees, fuel excess, maintenance and service, depreciation etc. Meanwhile, public transport is subsidised and cheaper during off peak times. Therefore a lot people either take the bus or train to work. There are lots of new bike paths as well plus if you are an office worker you can mostly work from home. Having said that if you are a blue collar worker and work in an industrial area or need to drive to get job sites you will most probably need and want a car.
@@honkhonk8009 Especially for city centers, I wish there would be car-free zones. Subways and trams are much faster and the pollution and noise gets reduced by a lot.
@@jonasklose6472 true, i rarely go into the inner part of my city because the only option is car basically. Then you have to find parking, which there's never enough of so you have to park far away and walk, but then you have to walk through intersections full of cars that don't really pay attention to pedestrians to get to where you're going. In america pedestrians are just a nuisance/an inconvenience to the car-centric design of our cities. We do have buses but they're unreliable and I don't really feel safe on them, especially since covid. I always wear a mask in public but god help you if you touch anything with your bare hands on a public bus
My favourite toy in my youth, apart from Nintendo systems, was a toy train in a simple little loop that was based on the movie Anastasia, and which was purchased from Burger King I think. Something so simple was so great.
I think induced demand also works for public transport. I live close to a railway but I never used it because the train was never available when I wanted it. Recently it was extended to service urban growth, needing more trains to serve more people it became more convenient for me. I now have a car in the drive way which is costing me $100 per month for registration and I am not sure why I need it.
On top of it working, you also got multiple different mechanics to induce demand. The most obvious is having more busses/trains on the same route so instead of having a bus every 60 minutes, you get one every 5. Increases time flexibility, thus inducing demand. The second one is having more different routes, so you don't have to switch as often to get somewhere, making it faster and more comfortabel. The third is adjusting stop density in less populated areas. There are existing bus routes in various countries where you phone (or use an app) to 'call a bus to stop at the bus stop you want to go in, and where you want to get off. The busses have say 100 stops, but are only planned to stop at maybe 20 of them max, since every bus only has a limited amount of passengers. That way you can get a very high stop density without having longer bus travel routes (a lot of the routes will go down main roads, with loops through side streets for all the optional stop). You make the ways to the bus much shorter, thus inducing demand. And that's omly the 3 obvious and straightforward ones, there's many more to maximise cost per gain for any situation puboic transit could face.
Exactly. The more people using public transit, the more trains/busses can be run, the faster/more efficient it becomes for everyone using it. Conversely the more people driving, the LESS efficient it becomes. A transportation system built around personal cars as default is inherently fucked, just no logical way it can function efficiently. And that's not even getting into what you're hinting at which is that even when people DO drive as their sole mode of transportation, their cars just sit on pavement doing nothing for upwards of 20 hours a day. The space wasted on cars goes far beyond expansive highways.
This is also why you never see trains on the train line and why the bike lanes are "always empty"... a train every 10 minutes means you're not going to see one if you glance at it, and even 1000 bikes an hour means that unless something stops the bikes and they pile up you just don't see a "big crowd of bikes" the same way you see a giant traffic jam (doesn't help that the bikes move faster than {cough} "traffic")
I ve experienced train traffic jam in tokyo. A proper traffic jam. Trains stopping/moving back to back slowly in morning rush hours. BUT even that traffic jam could carry orders of magnitude more people than cars. Also, modern urban high capacity metro/train lines can be so frequent that there almost no delay between them. And in rush hours they usually are. There is a limit in all cases. Trains are not something magical like elon's magic tunnels.
@N Fels The issue there is more that the public transport capacity is far too low for how crowded their cities are. Also the "don't get in trouble" culture makes it more likely for people to just accept things and actively look the other way. Not really an argument against public transport in itself - especially since those cities are so densely packed, there's definitely not the space for all those extra cars...
@@MW-dg7gl I live in an American suburban city where suburban housing is built close to businesses or SFHs can be reused as offices or workspaces with no overall difference in market price
@@MW-dg7gl in the US only a small percentage of jobs are located in the center of cities. Jobs are widely dispersed throughout regions, most heavily in suburbs actually.
@@MainMite06 See: Adam's video on urban planning. Pretty much exactly what he recommends. But the vast majority of Americans dont have that luxury. Unfortunately
@@ThreeRunHomer in the suburbs? Maybe that's true for massive cities and tiny towns. all of the cities and towns I lived in most of the work was either outside residential limits, or sectioned off from the suburban areas.
The Japanese ran into a similar effect recently in Tokyo. It used to be that the JR East Saikyo Line commuter trains from Saitama Prefecture south into central Tokyo were woefully overcrowded, but the opening of the private railway “F Liner” service was supposed to cure that problem. One issue: F Liner itself became super popular, and the relief of overcrowding on the Saikyo Line was less than anticipated.
That’s exactly what people don’t understand. Like the speed of any system, the transport system can move as fast as the slowest element in the chain. You can build the largest highway ever conceived. As long as that traffic volume is spilled onto 2-3 lane roads, you will still have traffic jams. Remember. If you are stuck in traffic , you are part of the problem.
This is also born of part of the problem of the 'infrastructure' that so many politicians love pushing. The idea of building 'roads and bridges' is nice on paper, but unless they're building *alternatives* to those roads and bridges, it means nothing. But lobbyists and politicians LOVE bills like that because it makes it *seem* like something is getting done without actually fundamentally fixing any real problems, while also giving away tons of money to construction conglomerates.
In my city the counselors elected to government make less than I do in salary but somehow own houses in the city and vacation properties in the islands. They live a lifestyle of someone making 10 times as much. Do the math on that one.
It is easier to widen a road and make economic incentives / disincentives than planning good public transport, that's for sure. th-cam.com/play/PLPXiiVdxACsT_FnP_EXpzrIs8y8TVSV4r.html
@@fatmn Which hey, fair's fair on that. Not denying your point, merely saying that most of the time, when the USA does 'infrastructure' it's usually just giveaways to the rich, rather than actually fixing major problems with said infrastructure itself.
"If lane reductions are coupled with investments into bike lanes and public transit, traffic gets a lot less severe" What investors read: "If lane reductions , traffic gets a lot less severe"
induced demand is only a fraction of the issue, like some top comments point out, exit and entry lanes are still bottlenecked, alternative routes away from highways need to be also be put into consideration, I sometimes use entire flanks and get to my destination around the same speed as the clogged highway. and not to mention whole idea of suburbs making homes further and further away from workplaces and such means more and more people just simply need a highway to get to places, since suburbs are way too sparce to have people reasonably reach bus and train stops on foot
@N Fels getting rid of cars depends. In high density cities it would be ideal to get peoples off their cars but the same cant be said with places with like 5000 peoples or smt like that. Here both are equally good while public transit is cheaper and more efficient the car can get you there quicker, as both ways are represented and the population density isnt that big too we can avoid all the traffic jams. Ofc there should be no ban for cars
I'm a genius atheist, so I must deign to inform you that this video was an accident, not intelligently-designed. Grow up. Evolve. Get an education. Atheism: 1. Logic: 0. Atheism wins again.
Great line at the end and what you said is just a fact and reality for me now too. I live in berlin and my parents gifted me a car. I never wanted one. I had to pay 100€ per month (excluding gas) and constantly got tickets for parking in special zones, because the parking space is limited af. Also commuting to work in the morning is horrific, when the streets are full because of all the workers in cars. I sold it, got myself the 9€ per month ticket and use the PT a lot now. To be fair i bought myself a motorcycle, which is imo still much better than a car since its smaller, can travel through lanes and has very low emmissions compared to cars. Thanks for your videos Adam ;)
Be careful with motorcycles, though... I lost one of my balls (yes, I lost a testicle) on a crash. It wasn't even my fault. Didn't really affect reproduction, and I am only alive because of prompt ambulance response and me wearing my helmet. If ambulance had taken too long, I would have bled to death. Be careful out there!
Of course a 1 seater motorcycle has less emissions than a 5 seater (+truck) car. You’re not wrong (especially since you drive alone), but it’s not a very fair comparison. The average full car gets far better per person mpg than the average motorcycle.
@@MrCaome theory versus reality, and yeah would be damn interesting to find out just how many drive their cars around single and double most of the time
In Germany now, we actually have quite an opposite situation (albeit really temporary) where the trains and buses are overcrowded for the most part, and that's due to the 9 euro ticket, with which everyone who buys it can use all the public transportation and regional trains for essentially 9 euro per month. It was introduced for the whole duration of the summer, apparently to recompense for the rising fuel prices. I think it is interesting, and would love to hear what you think about that sort of a solution!
Would be hilarious to have this video inverted. "We have now widened the railway to three tracks per direction, but the trains are still clogged up. That's because of induced demand, and that's why we should be adding more lanes to the highway and have more people driving instead." (just a bit of satire, I'm pro public transport)
Adam, you will love this. I live on the island of Newfoundland. 125 years ago they built a railway at narrow guage at vast expense and nearly bankrupted the dominion, on a system incompatible with the rest of the North American network as all train cars coming across the gulf on the ferry would have to have their axles re-adjusted. Fast forward to 1986, We are unfortunately annexed to Canada, and the federal government didn't want to fund the railway any longer, so in empty promises to us they took up 1000 km worth of rail track in the promise of a double laned highway from St John's to Port Aux Basques. 35 years after that, We've lost the railway, but never got the highway expansion either. Now the railbed is used as an auxillary highway for dirtbikes, quads and side-by-sides, and the Trans-Canada highway is choked with tractor trailers carrying every kind of freight 1000 km to the capital St John's at the farthest eastern edge of the island.
@@heyfriend8519 laughs in "Deutsche Bahn", in "Bayrische Verkehrsminister" ...... We definetly made the perfect drama in which Germany looks like it does sth. for public transport while shutting down railways and putting all money for traffic in Bavarian highways. "sank you for travälong with Deutsche Bahn" (perfect summary from Wise Guys) So We basically gone away from trains.......
That 26-Lane Road hat me astonished... When you counted the people in the cars and fit them in a train, i was even more surprised. I admit i have kind of underestimated public transport. In regards to your road-statement: never noticed this problem in Switzerland. I think its more of a problem with huge cities/urban areas in general.
I read even in a museum somewhere in california, cars are cultural mistake. If you look back to the time before cars were invented, the trains were the main transportation. And every development(residence, stores, shops etc) are concentrated around trains stations. So most lands were untouched to natural environment as majority of land use were around trains stations. Since cars were invented, the amount of land use for development of freeways, parking lots and residences are far beyond reach now. Anywhere the road goes, you can use the land for another subdivision houses, malls etc. Just look at LA area now, its mostly covered with cement with very little space for green. California is an irony of a place
@@freddybell8328 trains go where there is only rails available. while roads and freeways go everywhere so its obvious the area of land needed to accomodate this is much much bigger. not to mention parking lot for all those cars. do you even need to imagine this?
@@freddybell8328 by the way in that museum they even show the amount of land use change pre/post car era in picture so it was easier for people like you
@@quesee08 Have u considered for one second, that the us population since the invention of the car grew 10 times of what it was.... even w trains only the amount of infrastructure grew imensly. Not to say cars are not making problems but they also have their legit uses, we just overuse them.
Cars have advantages over other forms of transportation, especially when it comes to delivering supplies and goods with trucks. Problem is not cars themselves but the fact american society relies on them way too much at the expense of other forms of transportation. When majority of space in a city is reserved for parking instead of shops, apartments and restaurants, something has gone haywire in the city planning.
The philosophy is so simple: Is driving effective and fun? No, because there are too many cars on the road. How do we make driving effective and fun? Make it so that there are fewer cars on the road. How do we reduce the number of cars on the road? Make it so that you can get around without cars, so that people who don't want to drive in the first place don't have to drive. Better public transit essentially means more road per car and the driving experience is just much better all around. Sometimes I wonder if car people advocating against public transit really like the idea of driving, or just cars themselves, because apparently people like to stare at taillights instead of an open road ahead through their windshield.
As a former resident of Los Angeles county, one additional bit of fun is watching roads widened just before/after (depending on direction) entering a natural barrier that just gets more lanes to bottleneck, causing all kinds of fun when attempting to pass through. Now that I live in Orange County, CA (just to the South), I get to deal with the "solution" of private toll roads which means I have to fork over an additional $5 for the privilege of shaving 5-10 minutes off my commute. Even though I'm avoiding the nuisance of traffic, these toll roads can only go to less populated areas (generally richer areas, as well) since the primary highways hit the biggest destinations; and that's additional $$ to fund the gas for those extra miles I'm driving for that circumventing path.
Ugh. I hate toll roads. We don't have any in my state. It wasn't until we headed out east on a family vacation when I was 15 that I first saw a toll road in real life. I was very confused at first as to why we were slowing down and traffic was backing up. I expected there to be an accident or road construction. Instead, we came to a toll booth where Dad pulled a bunch of change from his ashtray (where Dad always keeps spare change in his vehicles) to pay the toll. Up until that point, I thought toll roads were one of those weird throwback things that was referenced in movies and books, but no longer actually relevant in real life. I'm still amazed that ppl put up with it - especially as half the time, they only get financed through public funds in the first place.
Completely true, however I highly doubt anyone in the U.S. government would ever consider this. Or actually they do know, but are funded by the automobile and fossile rule industry and won't give up the sweet sweet profits.
I'm not sure if the car industry is to blame, but yes, they wouldn't want it taken away. Then again we can't even meet demand right now. This is actually a product of US exceptionalism, an idea concocted after WW2 about the future of transportation. Probably didn't think it was a bad idea at the time, but we know better, but we can't undo 70 years of it either.
@@sabastianbragg1740 The Green New Deal hasn't been written and isn't in effect. If you're against it already, you're being propagandized. The biggest red flag is when a politician like Ted Cruz blames current failures like the Texas snow blackouts on a law that doesn't exist.
@@sprockkets It's true we can't magically snap our fingers and disappear the consequences of 70 years of mistakes, but we can start working towards a better future. I've been seeing a lot more support for mixed use zoning and more/better/safer bike infrastructure over the past couple years. Heck, just this year, as of Jan 1, 2022, California has ended the single family zoning *mandate.* That is, single family homes can still be built, but it's no longer illegal to build literally anything else. It's still not fully mixed use zoning, but multifamily buildings can be constructed in many more areas than before. And I've seen Dutch-style protected intersections gaining steam. You can make a difference by going to your town's city hall meetings. Just go there and share a different opinion. These places are mostly populated by bored, retired, old, but mostly well-meaning old people. They can often be convinced of local improvements like this.
I left the states to the EU for many reasons, this one being near the top. Aside from renting a van a couple times for moving I've not had any reason to drive in 4-5 years. My first job 20 years ago had a 1.5h commute 5 days a week. Who wants to get to their death bed to say 'Well, spent a few years in total needlessly sitting in traffic.' ? Count me out !
In Chesire, we can see this effect. Middlewich has a train line, but no station. And it is ALWAYS Middlewhich which ends up with traffic. In Manchester, the difference between car and walking results is amazing, as walking is always more direct then navigation the one-way system.
@@lordgemini2376 It would. Maybe not for the first few months as people begin replanning their routes, but afterwards those wanting to go to Middlewich can take the train and walk, and those going through Middlewich for rural places can take the car on roads with less traffic.
Funnily enough I think a few UK councils have started to ‘make walking faster’ on deliberate (mine included). Unfortunately where I am this doesn’t serve any benefit if you intend to travel slightly further (e.g. getting bus to the station), since these now take longer too.
I can't stress enough how right is the statement you make at the end of the video. It's 7 years I live in Oslo and I can't quantify how good is living withouth a car and still being free to go wherever I want, in time! I grew up in Palermo (southern Italy) where public transport is terrible and the traffic jams are legendary. Still, to go somewhere in palermo the car was the best option. Here in Oslo the car is the worst option when it comes to move around the city (in particular downtown). Super expensive parking, small roads, expensive toll and excruciatingly long red lights. That's how you force people to go by public transport or bike (while offering a good service, of course)
As a person who lived in Houston for many years and seeing constant construction on the highway that was immediately obsolete upon completion, this video speaks to me On a deep and personal level
but its wrong you just said it is wrong it was "immediately obsolete" because the choke points of highway exits cause the traffic not "induced demand".
I agree with the premise but you’ve oversimplified the comparison. Cars are great for getting straight to a specific place. You can replace the roads with trains, but then if people have to get another train, a bus, a taxi, because the distance from the station to their actual final destination isn’t walkable within a reasonable amount of time, that isn’t going to be fun. Smaller, denser countries like Japan, UK, and a lot of European countries benefit from that. The US though is so spread out. The most common solution here in the UK is to take your bike on the train, but that does reduce their capacity especially if everyone is doing that. Electric scooters are an improvement in that respect. I think we need to focus more on actually reducing the need for travel in the first place.
Germany made a 9€ ticket. You can take any train for 9€/month. So the cities save a lot of money in road maintenance because people take the train. The cities safe so much that the missing income from the ticket prices can be payed and there is still more saving.
@@aroace7913 Yeah, absolute bullshit-management by the government, just because the Greens needed some candy for their clientele after FDP got their useless rebate on fuel. There was no way for Deutsche Bahn and other transport services to react at such short notice (availability of trains, busses, etc due to planned maintenance, availability of drivers due to their duty rota or even just not enough personell).
It’s almost as if, having actual capitalism , would create demand, when the only reason these things don’t happen, is because lobbyists are able to pay government to do this their way?
"A developed country is not where everyone drives a car. It’s where nobody needs a car to get around." This should be the motto of every politician/town planner or whoever.
Explain your reasoning behind this. I don’t see why we need to hate on cars. What’s wrong with the privacy and comfort of a car? I notice that in public there’s always someone who will talk loudly on the phone, or groups of people shouting loudly, some people coming in sweaty/smoker’s smell/smelling of alcohol, antisocial behaviour (eg putting feet on seats), crying babies, too warm in summer and too cold in winter etc. And, no, noise cancelling headphones barely keep out those noises as they work best for droning background noise. You can’t beat the comfort of a nice comfortable air conditioned car with your own personal space and peacefully enjoying music/conversation with your passengers.
Really? Because I live in Europe, and my country has a railway system that is the envy of every liberal American and the widest road we have is 16 lanes + 8 emergency lanes for a total of 24. My country is associated with everything but cars.
@@rongeurtsvankessel1908 Very few highways in my country have more than 2 lanes. The widest highway i have seen in person was a 3 or maybe 4 lane highway when I was abroad in Germany.
Actually I've talked to road design engineers and they call the effect latent demand. Designers can't guess the real need for road capacity so they just use the current road usage and try to fix that. What they can't know is how many people would actually need to use the road if there was a good road to use. While bikes, trains, buses are great IF you have a good connection and stations on both ends that are close enough to walk to (and weather is cooperating), in many cases cars just are necessary (grocery shopping, transporting small kids, etc...) so people are going to have to own them anyways. Worst situation is when you have great bus service (lowest cost and most versatile solution) but the bus gets stuck in traffic do to all those damn cars on the road.
In properly designed neighborhoods, a car is unnecessary for transporting small children or groceries, since if the distances are small enough those can easily be done on foot or using a bicycle.
@@Landrassa1 Unfortunately very few places are "properly designed", normal families with 2-3 kids can't carry all the kids and a trunk full of groceries on a bike to get to the grocery store 10 km from home. If what you say was true, traffic wouldn't be a problem anywhere.
@@banto1 Why would it be 10 kilometers away? You put it where people need it, so right in the middle of a residential area, and all of a sudden thousands of people have easy access to it. This isn't rocket science. I have literally never lived anywhere that didn't have the basic amenities within walking or cycling distance.
@@Landrassa1 You're very lucky. I've never lived in a place where that was true and don't know anyone that does. You probably are also blessed with a terrain that makes bike travel easy. Lots of people don't have your advantages. Let's trade places and see how you manage when you need to adapt to your new more difficult surroundings and stressed financial status. Don't make the assumption that if something is true for you then it MUST be true for everyone.
Have you ever been at a crowded concert, like *Travis Scott's 2021 Astroworld,* and have remember the *crucial reason WHY* the moshpit area experienced an overcrowding of people?: -Too many people wanted to see Travis Scott and Drake perform, the security, the moshpit itself, the event holders, & most importantly *the performers* were not capable of controlling the massive crowd and blood shedded that night.
Another big problem with car-centric cities is that all those cars have to be parked somewhere. The usual solution is to put massive parking lots in front of every destination, which makes public transport even less desirable since it'll drop you off in front of a massive parking lot instead of anywhere near your actual destination.
Why would public transportation drop you off in front of large parking lots? I mean I can see how that would happen occasionally with certain stops but overall you're really reaching here.
Counter argument: *Some auto corporations like Volvo cars, General Motors, Volkswagen group, or Mercedes benz make city buses and can make profit from civic tax dollars by the cities giving the buslines improvements* Thus: car companies arent always evil
Authorities in London recently closed one of our river bridges. Drivers howled that this would make life impossible. Instead they just used other means of transport and used their cars less.
You really just made the whole thing sound so damn simple just by saying "we won't solve traffic by widening roads just like we won't solve obesity by widening out belts."
@@afhostie With my back, I shouldn't even _lift_ a train, let alone _throw_ it. Come to think of it, we shouldn't throw lanes, either. Your point appears to be that an integrated design/plan should be used for transit. I agree. One starting point is to stop the sprawl of car-centric suburbs. Adding transit to car-centric suburbs is more expensive and more intrusive than following a plan that makes multiple modes of transit convenient. I expect that house values in the suburbs will change based on the availability/proximity of multiple modes of transportation. For many people, car-dependent properties will lose their appeal. (Some will still signal their status by living in places where they must rely upon the automobile, some will put up with the expense of autos because they want those properties for other reasons.)
Can you send this to Doug Ford, the Conservative Premier of Ontario, Canada? He wants to build a stupid multi-lane highway across farmland because the other multi-lane highways are "filled up". He does not want to deal with the issues of why they are filled up, he just wants to build more because it's 1965 in his head.
I've lived in Los Angeles for almost 3 years, visitied a lot the two years before after living all my life in a beautiful, four-lane-max community (two lanes each direction). I am amazed/appalled by (yet participate in) the car/traffic/freeway culture here and kind of hate myself for it. That freeway in Texas makes me feel strangely fortunate.
I grew up about an hour from the nearest highway (not counting the 2lane total surface roads predating the interstate) and watching these videos makes me happy i did. Now i live in CT which is exactly famous for being a highway distopia but it is pretty close, especially Hartford with its left lane exits/merges and basically every town/city cutting itself off from its waterfront with highways. (Ironically CT has a nearly perfect geometry for trains with hartford)
They keep talking about widening US-22 in Lehigh Valley, PA, and I'm over here like, "It won't fix anything!" I-78, which runs parallel to US-22 already has 6 lanes, but it constantly gets shut down by car accidents, tractor-trailers accidents (they keep speeding on this highway) and traffic jams. Once, I was stuck on that highway for THREE HOURS on what was SUPPOSED to be a 15-minute trip.
@@MainMite06 There used to be a railroad that connected Allentown with Philadelphia, but it was replaced by that stupid I-476, which I hate driving on, because it's always under construction and driving on it is exausting!
Loving the smaller videos. They explain single concepts that you then use to talk about bigger issues in longer videos, great idea! Like an urbanism basics video capsule 👍🏾
We tried this "just add more lanes" thing in CA, even to the point where we stacked 4-lane freeways. That turned out to be catastrophic when one of the biggest collapsed during an earthquake in the 1980s, and killed a lot of people. We don't stack our freeways anymore. And some of the freeways literally always have traffic, and can no longer be widened (past the normal 8 lanes, 4 both ways). But everybody starts throwing tantrums when the cities propose adding more bus stops, more busses to the fleet, and any more passenger rail extensions...
Cars can be used in a reasonable way... it's just not every day commutes. They're quite nice for taking a holiday trip, taking your bike to a mountain trail or bulk shopping. But noone should have to drive their car every day.
@@mikek9297 That's true, but there also needs to be a real choice. I should be able to get my bike on public transport to go riding. And I shouldn't be forced to use a car to go on holiday. I'm on holiday in Germany atm. There has been no need for a car so far, so it is apparently perfectly possible.
> I believe the ONLY use a car should have, is for heavy lifting. This is the core of the problem of the debate. One side outright doesn't want people to be able to use cars for their own transportation. You can't have a rational discussion about the pros and cons of various types of road construction if one side is going to throw all evidence out the window that doesn't conform to their extreme position.
@@lightfeather9953 You do realise that one side has totally dominated the debate for about 100 years. And not just the debate. The car advocates have taken over and effectively destroyed whole cities and left zero choice for anything else. So it's a bit rich to now complain when people start to push back.
It's surprising how people (especially Americans) underestimate public transport and the wondrous effects it can bestow. Let's have a quick thought experiment... Let's say, within the topic of this video, your on a 12 lane highway, and 1,000 people want to get between point A to point B. On average there is 1.5 people in each car, so around 660 cars are on the road to get to point A to B. Let's think how big a car is to how much is being used by 1.5 people.... Yeah, alot of space is being wasted. So now I pose this question, how many people can fit in a bus... and what is the space being used by each individual... It is amazing how efficient and effective it is. Let's say a single decker bus can hold 60 people but is only at half capacity, which is unlikely, you could use 33 buses to fit all those people. And remember, the cost of driving is split between all the passengers. So you could travel between point A to point B for 30th of the cost of fuel and you don't have to pay insurance, tax or and maintenance on that vehicle... Wow. It is also a huge benifit to the environment too. Although a bus's engine might emmit more that a car's engine, again the emissions are split between the passangers. Also, there would be less materials needed to be mined, transported and constructed compared to what is needed for 600+ cars, so even less emmisions. Better yet, a electric bus powered directly by the grid can be more efficient and environmentally safer than any other transport, other than a train. You can drive in a bus drunk... You can relax.... (Like Elon promises with FSD) It is probably the single most important inventions... and yet people have a negative stigma of public transport like buses because the car industry wants you to believe that public transport takes away your rights and are designed for poor people that can't afford the luxurious car of the future... I rest my case... Well done Adam for a another great video!
The thing Europeans don't understand about American travel is that there are not 1000 people going from A to B. There are 1000 people going from 1000 different starting points to 1000 different destinations. Where do you put the train stations? While on the destination side you could argue that a metro or bus system would be sufficient to move people around the city how would you go about collecting up 1000 people spread around in a 60-100 mile radius around the city at your train station. I'm not against public transport, but it needs to be understood that simply slapping down some trains is next to useless. Public transportation is a system, and a failure at any point in the system will result in people resorting to private transport (cars). In order to have good public transportation in the US we will need to redesign our communities to facilitate that.
@@JustinGochenour I totally agree with you. Public transport is a single solution to a bigger problem that requires more than one solution to solve. I just believe that America's system can definitely be supported by more public transport and less car-centric suburbs. If you are an American, I want to ask you, do you choose your car or walk/public transport, why? Most cities and towns have their important amenities (like shops or malls) far away from the homes, to the point that cars are a necessary part of travel, of course not all cities have this problem, but a majority of American suburbs and cities are like this. Again, I agree that public transport is a system that is susceptible to problems and accidents. All forms of transport are. I just go off facts and statistics, and whenever public transport have been implemented in a city/town correctly, it definitely lowers congestion and creates cleaner air and can be faster ( for some) than private transport. I'd like to pose another question. Let's say history goes on a different path, and everyone owns their own plane, take off and fly to their destination. Would you think this is a better form of transport than everyone using shared planes all at once to get from point A to B. Of course it isn't a perfect analogy and it's like comparing apples to oranges. However, it does make you think the same about cars, would it be better if everyone used a larger shared viechle that can get alot of people from point A to B than private cars. Like you said, alot of people want to get to alot of different locations at once, and that's why city design is as crucial to transport than transport itself. If six different shops are on the edge and are on other sides of cities and jobs are spread unevenly across a city it would create nightmare scenarios for public transport, and can make it seem as though public transport is obsolete to private transport. But with the right city-planning, right routes for public transport and maybe even some incentives (like tax-cuts for using public transport or bikes and taxing CO2 emissions) than you could see cooler, cleaner cities that are designed for humans, not cars. Thank you by the way, many people just blow this information off and decided not to rebuttal. I think the back and forths like these can help design a better future!
Reverse induced demand ... my home town took it a little bit too far: the historic city center used to be clogged with traffic everywhere. Downtown squares were parking lots; They turned most of the downtown streets and squares into pedestrian zones, left a few streets for residents and delivery and very few at the edge of downtown were left free for normal car traffic. To still attract customers to the shops downtown, there were 3 park garages at the edge of downtown: one in the west, one in the south and one in the east. It was great, it really was. But in recent years they took it a step further, and now people which want to park at 2 of these garages think twice about going there at all. Why? Because some streets were shut down for individual traffic, making it super hard to actually get to those garages, and later on to leave that area again. Also some alternative routes to get there were shut down, some one-way streets were turned around etc ... so traffic in the remaining streets builds up even more, making it again harder to get to the park garage ... so many customers want to avoid that trouble and simply drive to one of the malls outside the downtown area, park right there and will go to the shops there as well; They won't take the bus going downtown from there, even with buses going every minute ...
They could change the zoning laws to allow for things other than single family housing to be build near downtown, therefore allowing for more access to downtown
@@ZMW7 Yeah, stuff like this has to be done piecemeal alongside improvements in land use and transit options. The point is to provide incentives for people to leave their car behind when they make a trip, not to decide against the trip entirely (or go somewhere else). It's a balancing act.
@@NoahPurdyFR not in my city ... they tried trams decades ago, but they demolished the tram network and right now the entire public transit network within the city and most of the county is carried out by buses, and train services from the 3 stations providing anything from regional to long distance and international rail services. But rail isn't really relevant for the local public transit in case of that city Light rail, metro, tram, subway, anything like that wouldn't really be an option to replace the buses there. Thing is: they built the park garages at the edge of downtown on purpose, to allow them to easily get to and from the downtown area without the need to park the car somewhere else, jump onto the bus and then get off the bus downtown. Now 2 out of 3 park garages are difficult to reach and businesses in the downtown area really see dropping customer numbers. I must admit: I don't go downtown any more as well ... I used to love it, but the way it's now I hate it. It's not like bus service would be poor. There are multiple bus lines serving the area on a tight schedule, but leaving it as the only more or less good option is the issue. Making access to those park garages difficult indirectly is just stupid
In the US it's probably moreso that people are willing to travel from farther away (often enabling them to take advantage of cheaper rent etc) with more road capacity rather than switching away from alternatives... Since there aren't really alternatives.
In the most points you are right. But just a train with 500 seats dondt get rid of 500 cars. There are much more things you need of think to. Bus lanes and trains are always good, but you can't get rid of all cars. But there are some things that help very good. A good example is Heilbronn, a city in Germany. They have a lot of busses, and also some mediums trains that's also cross the city. They have a lot of free park and ride parking spots where are train stops where the city ends. Parking in the city is expensive, but people from smal villages want to visit the big city also. So, they drive near to the city, go to the train that don't drive through they smal village and drive in the city without paying a lot for parking. Everything is central, so it's easy to carry your stuff you buy in the train. The City is very nice, a lot of trees, big sidewalks, bus and cycling lanes. And there a no big traffic jams. I think they are solve the problem perfectly without somebody gets angry. Because its the best solution for everybody.
In addition to "induced demand", there's the fact that traffic does NOT behave like a liquid! It's more like a gas that can spontaneously condense into slow moving pockets when the "temperature" gets too low, or density gets too high. When the traffic is slowed to a crawl, it barely matters how many lanes you have. The total throughput is "extremely low". The challenge is in making sure the traffic flow never "condenses" or "crystallizes" in the first place.
I wish people would talk more about how traffic has phases like this. In my experience, it has three matter phases that are only dependent on density, driven by lane changes and speed. If neither restriction is present, its like a gas. If you cannot move at the speed you want, its quite similar to a liquid. If you cannot lane change, its very similar to a solid. Lane changes also induce a lane to slow down, to accommodate the new car. Phantom traffic jams in this context are similar to pressure waves, albeit with a nonlinear phase change element to it. This implies that preventing phase changes from accidents, traffic jams propagating onto a highway, or lane change speed reductions are the right way to improve traffic flow. So naturally, preventing lane changes using slip lanes, expressways, or bus/train only lanes should yield more ideal results than blindly making the pipe wider. Unfortunately these lanes are often paid, making them useless to the average commuter, which only serves to make the problem worse.
You overlooked the additional effect that not only do people tend to move from public transport to cars if you widen/build more roads, but people tend to travel further. Eg they live further away, or get a job further away. Or they make journeys they would not have otherwise made.
I feel like so many people get left out of this conversation. As someone from the US mid-west (yes, plenty of people live here. it's reasonably priced too ;) ) It seems like when Europeans and US coastliners think about American cities, they think about NYC but more car-dependent, like these highways are a continual choice. Most mid-western cities are just huge suburbs. The people here buy houses in the suburbs, perhaps a county a way, because there is no dense housing in the city, and also in America we are taught that houses are a safer financial decision than living in an apartment, if you can afford it. A house is seen as an "investment" that you make and build until retirement. So many people, if there was no traffic, would already be driving 30-60 minutes to work, especially in the mid-west and south. And people literally don't see anything that can be done about it. There's also just not anywhere for public transportation to go or lead to. The zoning is all over the place. There's no prevailing districting like you see in Asia or many European places. A big population in America works corporate jobs and those can go anywhere, including right next to this suburb on the other side of town that happens to not be the suburb I live in. But I can't move my house there because housing market, job stability, etc etc. So yes, to milquetoast Jerry supporting the nuclear family, driving 60 minutes seem like the better option. And I really can't fault him for it, tbh.
I see your point, but I think this comment sadly just goes to show that building low density housing across a large expansion of land (aka your typical suburb) is simply bad urban planning. Things like good public transit and basic services within walking distance aren't economically or pracitically feasible in this type of environment, not to mention the enormous land use involved. Most people are then stuck with driving everywhere and you can't really blame them for it.
@@traveller23e There's a lot more stuff you can do by owning a house, like leveraging it for important loans. An important thing is "equity" which means theoretically you will always be able to sell your house, even if you haven't paid it all off yet, and get your money back plus how much it increased in value. With an apartment, you're just throwing money at a landlord and never seeing any of it back.
The picture on the right at 2:11 is from my hometown! Sadly trains are rather slow here, for various reasons. One of them is difficult terrain to build tracks on. Going to certain places I would be faster by road bike than by train x.x (though I would sweat it)
@@ungesagt people here are absolutely in love with their gas-guzzling tin cans so practically speaking, no, it's not. It would result in the first revolt in the country since 1713.
![Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere) [ST05]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ORzNZUeUHAM/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey everyone, this video is intended as an outreach for those not yet familiar with this basic phenomenon. Make sure to share it with friends, family and acquaintances to raise awareness about the issue, thus hopefully help elect politicians who won't think of widening roads as an effective solution to traffic!
@White Star Alliance he's made a fair few, plus that's a bit of a rude way to ask for something
Can you make a video about pro Russian tankies how stupid they are
As an American, I miss having the luxury to look forward to the future and hope to see infrastructural improvements. Now the only thing to look forward to is which constitutional rights won't be stripped.
so the anti car version of prager u?
the issue isn't that driving is faster, the issue is that the car centric design does not allow for the bikes and public transport to fill the gap. netherlands rarely has any traffic issues just because it has a dedicated infrastructure and road design that actually makes sense. bigger is not better
Another thing to keep in mind is you can only widen the highway, not everything else. Offramps, city streets, intersections, most bridges, you can't widen these. No matter how wide you make the highway, everyone is funneling off to the same one- or two-lane offramps. You can't avoid the bottleneck, it WILL slow down your road no matter how wide it is
This. I thought that was the actual answer to the title, but I surprisingly found it missing from the video altogether.
Anyone that's played cities skylines will know that if a road is jammed and you upgrade it with more lanes, the jam just moves to the side roads and ends up jamming the main road again.
@@Philafxs was expecting this. The channel risk over focusing on one issue
I see this in Kuala Lumpur, there is astonishing infrastructure
highways on top of highways on top if highways
You get to 2 km of your exist and you're stuck!
Just make 20 lane wide ramps and have the road continue with the same width across the entire country, all branching off from 40 lane wide highways
Public transit is sometimes portrayed as the enemy of driving, but it's quite the opposite. If your commute is not well covered by public transit or if you, like me, simply like driving, public transit is beneficial to you too. Simply because it removes traffic and frees up parking spots. It also gives you a possible alternative in case your car breaks down or you wanted to have a few beers after a night in the cinema.
Public transit is good only if it's well done. In the US, it's done badly and everything is focused on just cars that it's still faster in traffic than by public transit since most of them will be stuck in this traffic as well.
But everyone who has a car/can drive will prefer driving, u have ur own ac, comfortable and assured seats etc etc... its just so much better than public transport as it is right now.
I think no city is really at a point qhere public transport is better than cars and currently even the best designed europeans cities do not have better transports, they just make it hard to drive, forcing people to use public transport in a way (lower parking spaces, higher cost for parking, added cost for maintainable of the car and yearly check ups, highway costs, costs to enter the city center... etc....etc...etc......
Public transport vehicles really need to be improved.
@@mattia8327 Public transit has many disadvantages compared to cars, so they have to make the most of their advantages. Those being lower cost and higher speed in rush hour traffic. What usually turns people away is the lack of flexibility, which can be made up for with dense network and short intervals. Personally, if I was working in the city, I'd probably ride the tram on most days.
When I was studying in Prague I just left my car at Strahov and used the subway throughout the week. Driving through the congested city just wasn't worth it.
Anyway my point is that even as a driver you too benefit from public transit, as it reduces traffic and frees up parking spots.
@@mattia8327 I know plenty of car owners (myself included) who prefer transit. You’ve also left out a whole host of pros such as the ability to take a nap, get work done, zone out, play games, not spend your mental energy on driving and watching cars around you.
@@mattia8327 That's not really true, European cities do have food public transport, and if people take them it's not because cars are banned but because it's convenient. My family in Paris don't own a car because they go everywhere through metro. It has exits like everywhere and you'll never be far off of your destination, maybe 5 min walk away. It's much more convenient than a car
There was a time in the US that the government wanted to invest more in rail infrastructure and other forms of public transportation. However, that's when the powerful car companies got scared that they might sell less cars as a result, so they lobbied the government to not make those investments and instead to use the money to build more roads. They were successful and ever since the US has in general had terrible public transportation compared to the rest of the developed world.
My city (Pittsburgh) used to have a robust network of trolleys that ran all over downtown and adjacent neighborhoods. My grandmother has stories about how she and her friends were able to take the trolley all over town as kids even though her parents weren’t available to drive her.
Unfortunately I never knew these trolleys. They ripped them all out to make it easier to drive around downtown and they were all gone by 1980.
@@Dave01Rhodes "Easier" to drive. The perverse truth is that the more car-centric an area gets, the worse the driving experience also becomes! (to say nothing about the experience for other modes)
The USA is such a model country of capitalism.
yeah sometimes too much money is also not good.
bcz this wouldn't be possible in my country
@@Kotifilosofi Capitalism isn’t lobbying the government for business interests. In a fully capitalist system, the government could not favor one mode of transportation over the other.
There's also an issue that this video didn't touch upon for the sake of brevity, but which is really important: adding more lanes does not increase capacity in a linear way. After 6-8 lanes, more lanes can actually reduce capacity because people still enter through the rightmost lane and and still need to make it back there in order to exit, which means there's a lot of lane switching and yielding, which slows down traffic and reduces capacity.
There’s definitely a diminishing returns factor.
I've also noticed that people changing lanes slows down traffic, and the more lanes, the more people are changing lanes.
3 lanes is the best for highways. 2 if said highway only allows cars. Anything else is detrimental
@@Demopans5990 It's very common to see fools going slow in the fast lane. With only two lanes in total, the likelihood of getting stuck behind them is very high.
@@Demopans5990 anything more than 4 per side is ridiculous
Another problem on top of this is: -Bigger road nearby -> Many people drive on that road -> Lets build a shopping center or an Ikea or resort or whatever nearby -> More people on the road -> Make road bigger | and then it all starts over again
Would that be traffic oriented development?
Kind of like the Philippines.
Same with neighborhoods. Bigger road -> lets build neighborhoods around big road -> more people driving -> Road clogged -> make road bigger -> build neighborhoods around bigger road -> etc
And another short one on top: you've built your Ikea or resort in the middle of fucking nowhere. Anyone going there as an actual destination will use your Highway, as there is no rails, buses or any other alternatives.
This is what has happened in the Washington, DC metro area. Every time they increase road capacity, it makes it easy to build a bunch of office parks and condos further out from the city, so that's what they do. Businesses see office space that's a fraction of the cost because of the land value out in that sprawl, and so they fill up those parks and the people who work there fill up the housing. Then traffic gets 5x worse, so the politicians decide to increase road capacity, and so on. The sprawl has now gone out so far from the city that there was talk of creating a second beltway literally over 25 miles from the city. They simply seem incapable of learning.
Meanwhile their metro system which used to be amazing, has been underfunded for decades and is now a complete mess. Change needs to happen at the political level or they will just make it worse.
The problem with reverse induced demand, is that often times local governments reduce the roads in some way, because that is easy, but don’t make the requisite public transport investments, because that is hard. Or they make the investment, but don’t allow a lag time for the infrastructure to actually get built.
*cries in australian*
Recently happened in Barcelona, where I live. The local authorities decided to restrict the access of old combustion cars into the city after a certain date, in order to reduce traffic and pollution. That's fine.
But they didn't reinforce public transport services in any way, so suddenly there was a lot of people that couldn't drive to the city and the same public transport as before to absorb all that new demand. That's totally not fine.
This! I'd love no to be car dependant, but if I have to plan 1.5-2h ahead just to go somewhere 20km away, something's not right
@Sinneslöschen Living in Germany here, near a major city. Lucky enough to have decent connection via public transportation both in town and to the major city. I still will never ever use the public transportation as long as I have a choice again. I've been through 20 years of usage and I am just done with it. Trains which are late or don't drive at all, bus-drivers which can't drive, rude/loud/obnoxious/unhygienic passengers, overcrowded trains and buses, failure to accomodate for non-standard passengers (good luck finding a good seating having a height of nearly 2m) and a general trend in society to be hyper-punctual, so you'll almost always have to pick a train an hour too early, just to be there on time rather than risking to be 5 minutes late. Fuck. That.
works in Japan cities with thousands of people riding trains and hundreds of train lines with barely any cars on road because
- has nice biking lanes
- weather (yes, weather, I live in the tropical equator so walking and biking under searing hot sun 365 fkin sucks)
- cars are expensive
- inconvenient to have cars at all (parking is expensive, roads are narrow etc)
- plenty of railway lines basically makes cars redundant
Even if this is a "simpler" video for folks who are not that familiar with these things, I want to comment on how amazing your editing has become since about a year ago!
I mean it is more editing than talking over a random picture of an urban sunset or something, yes.
There's a major point that car-lovers need to realise. If improvements are made to public transport, infrastructure changes to improve foot/bike travel, and so on, you drastically reduce the number of people using cars out of necessity. In an ideal world, where cars are only used by people who actually like them and want to have them, can you imagine how much better the driving experience would be?
They also need some sort of security in that cars and car roads won't be eliminated entirely. Which shouldn't take much, conciader how absurd that is.
But I think what's often in this sort of video is an undertone of "cars are dumb and bad" which for someone who likes cars is probably quite repulsive and polarizes the issue between people receptive to public transportation and eternal car drivers (some by necessity, some for pleasure. doesn't matter).
lol almost everyone likes to drive a car, there's no such a thing as necessity in most of cases in most of cities. A car lover has to stop being a car lover and using a car in the city for traffic jams to vanish. Not saying this is a bad thing, but those car lovers would disagree
@@tobyalder42 no, there are people who wants to drive cars juat to go to their destination that cannot be reach with available public transportation, what he meant about "car lovers" are the enthusiast who drive for fun
@@gehcontent5618 As I said in most cases the destinations are reachable by public transport, just people are either lazy or want extra comfort or privacy of their own car.
@@tobyalder42 yeah also that
This is what a good explainer video should be: short, simple, and straight to the point. Also, I love this new(ish) editing style
Heh that's the kind of videos i create
@@DyslexicMitochondria Just found another amazing channel!
@@DyslexicMitochondria , Agreed, checked out your channel. Thanks for the suggestion. v
@@DyslexicMitochondria lmao more shameless than the bot above you.
This would be a great TH-cam short. It would probably also get more traction that way.
I absolutely love cars. Cars are one of my biggest hobbies. But you know what i hate? Traffic. I would absolutely love to commute via train to work day-to-day, and have even more time and money to spent on my hobby weekend car that drives maybe 5000km a year in the weekends. 99% of the population are not car enthusiasts, and could live without a car entirely. Supporting proper public transit and making infrastructure around walking and biking helps everyone, INCLUDING car enthusiasts.
I'm on the opposite side - I hate cars, never even learned how to drive, and I'm so happy to live in a city where you can get to literally any point by metro, trains, buses or just walk if you want
Yes because if more people use transit it can result in less cars on the road meaning more fun for the car enthusiast.
you could do like almost everyone did 200 years ago. Just live close to where you work and walk.
@@steffengustavsen9678 this is not possible for everyone, but with homeoffice getting more common it changes a bit
@@steffengustavsen9678 I live in a town of about 1000 people. There is 1 small corner store, and a kindergarten. I'm a graphic designer. Not really possible.
As an American train enthusiast I'd love to see passenger service return. A few years ago my town widened a main road by two feet on either side and claimed it would be a four lane road. Before they did this it was a beautiful drive as there were trees that created a natural tunnel affect providing shade in our hot humid area.
In my city, its hard *not to find* a suburban road not tunneled out by low hanging branches!
Ask your government. TH-cam commenters can't do much for you
Sheldon Cooper wants to know your location.
@@anonymousinfinido2540 accepted!
Have you read The Geography of Nowhere (1993)?
I can't speak for Houston, I hear it's a total clusterf*ck, but as a transportation consultant in the Dallas area, there has been a notable shift in pedestrian/bicycle accommodation in projects. Every single project that includes an urban portion, includes sidewalks and some level of bicycle accommodation. The most recent iteration is shared-use paths for pedestrian/bicycle accommodation rather than putting bike lanes next to vehicle lanes, so it's safer for everyone.
Also, the proposed high-speed rail from Dallas to Houston recent got past a big hurdle regarding eminent domain for land acquisition so it looks like that's still moving along.
It is unfortunately true that the eminent domain was upheld for the high speed rail. Disgusting government overreach.
@@Fireslingerpirate Care to explain why it's overreach?
@@Fireslingerpirate Do you make this same complaint every time the government acquires land for a highway expansion? Because they do this literally all the time.
@@thefarstar4367 No. I make that complaint when they're carving up every farm and ranch for hundreds of miles for a rail system that isn't needed and isn't wanted by a large number of Texans. It's completely wrong to blatantly steal people's land especially when it benefits them not at all.
@@silentwf I disagree with the premise of taking land from people to enrich a private company while the people who are having their land taken from them do not benefit. Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Kelo v City of New London that this abomination is constitutional so here we are. Doesn't mean I have to agree or like it.
I’m really glad this video was made. There’s already quite a lot of content on more complex and particular issues concerning traffic, but I’ve always struggled to find a short basic video to explain to my family in two minutes why you can’t just make everyone drive and how people change from cars to other modes of transport when sufficiently encouraged. And even though I live in Europe (Poland) my family REALLY needs this kind of explanation………
Luckily for you, Poland has a quite decent and affordable public transport network. I lived in Gdańsk a few years ago and moving around the city and to other cities was super convenient and reliable (Of course rural areas might not be so well served).
I especially appreciated the local SKM trains in Gdańsk/Trójmiasto area, one of the best city transports I've ever experienced. I used them every single day and many nights too (it was a 24/7 service, only stopping between 01-03 am for maintenance!!), they didn't fail me even once, and I was paying like 20€ per month! Why would anyone use a car in that city is still a mystery to me haha
@@osasunaitor lmao polish guy took the opportunity to brag about his country
@pyropulse I think I'd rather suffer walking to public transportation than continue to risk my life and the lives of others every day on the freeway. And PUBLIC space IS your space; YOU would be paying for it dummy. Nobody is trying to take cars from you either; most of us just want alternatives. I'd still own a car and use public transportation if both were accessible to me.
bad memories from train/rail is embedded in people's brains for decades.
@pyropulse If there weren't benefits to living in cities, no one would live in them. There's your answer
And also, sure, cars are more comfortable than public transport most of the time but just because you cannot get your ass up on a bus doesn't mean it's terrible. There are a ton of advantages public transport has over cars and you are ignoring all of them. If you go on public transport, you have to walk more than a car which, amazingly, Is good. Its a lot cheaper, its vastly more ecological, its frees up a ton of land because it doesnt have to be used for parking lots. You can use the time inside the bus/tram to do stuff as you dont have to concentrate. Young people have access to it and can move without being tethered to their parents. The parents have more time as they dont have to drive you around everywhere. Poor people have access to it. What do cars have? Comfort and cargo, great. A shift to public transport is simply more logical.
Phillip Fry expressed this perfectly in Futurama: "nobody drives in New York; there's too much traffic."
same in london
Reminds me when everyone in New New York became stupid and trains crashed into one another. So the mayor said *"We're sending more trains!"* Scary how in rl we're adding more lanes.
@@SpahGaming London it’s largely buses
@@Sarahbryson321 no, even in central, it is mainly private cars who clog the roads. however i dont know anyone who would even think of driving into central for any reason, so this is a litteraly, no one drives in london, because there are too many people driving in london.
I think thats why most people use bus or subway
City planning is the one issue I can see myself actually canvassing for. Housing and transportation effect basically every aspect of our society, and it’s disappointing to see that most people talk about gas prices when they should be upset about being forced to own a car in the first place.
Well, that's because most people aren't upset with their cars. I think a good design should allow people to follow their own preference. They shouldn't be forced to take the bus, train or car, but decide on their own. Of course, there are pros and cons to every transportation method. That's something to keep in mind.
@@Jimraynor45 I agree to having choices, but paying $450/month + Gas, getting stuck in traffic and sharing the road with reckless drivers is a choice I wish more people would catch onto.
@@Pancakegr8 You gotta keep in mind, alternative transportation methods have their drawbacks. You might say a crowded bus or train is better than a traffic jam, but if you ask yourself, would you rather be in a traffic jam or a crowded bus? The answer may not be so obvious.
@@Jimraynor45 If the bus is crowded 24/7, then that's an indication that you need to increase capacity with a train, bigger buses, more frequent buses, a tram, etc, any of these options. Crowded buses aren't a sign that public transport isn't good enough - it's a sign that capacity needs to be increased. The difference between this and cars is that road capacity is, in practice, finite because you can't build a road big enough to avoid traffic jams, but you *can* change your bus to a train without actually taking up that much more room relative to the increase in capacity.
stop drinking and driving and they wont take your car away
„Im always stuck in traffic“
YOU.ARE.THE.TRAFFIC
One thing I never see when people are talking about induced demand is reduced density. That is, when you expand roadways, you are ALSO eliminating homes, businesses, and other services, which now need to be "further out". So, for example, people who were previously living in a dense city with nearby businesses and shops that they could quickly reach, with a short car ride or even a bike ride or a walk, now need to take a long car ride to access the same services.
That's more a side effect of instant transport wherever you want. If it only takes an extra 3 minutes to go to a fancier business compared to walking to nearby local businesses, why not? It's a thing you never really think much about. I would say the suburb is more the one that causes people to travel farther for goods and services as they literally are designed to spread people out. This necessitates things being farther away as the residential area is huge and inefficiently spaced.
I know I live in a very small suburb right at the edge of the city I live in, but it's just a bit too far to walk to most businesses. I know as I used to get a bus ride to the nearby school to get back home. It took like 10 minutes to walk home, or it took just less than a minute to drive that. That's also about as far as the closest small businesses. That's already a bit long for most people. In comparison I can just drive to the gas station down the street in 2 minutes by car. This is basically the side effect of this strategy.
Its a shame as my mother and father said there used to be a trolley going down the road in front of ours. You just jump on and off when you get where you want. Not only was it more environmentally friendly, it was cheaper than owning a car, and was nearly as fast. But they ripped it out to make the roads wider for turn lanes and to add a third lane going through the city.
Yep the best design decision is to make cities walkable and services within reach, because then a lot less people take cars all the time every day and you get less traffic overall.
I imagine because it's a tiny factor (but I don't actually know). Let's do some math
Imagine you have a city with:
* An 20km diameter
* 4 major roads going through the city (so 8 entries/exits).
* You widen these roads by two lanes each.
The roads are ~160km long if they go straight through the city. (4*20km). But let's make that 200km to account for obstacles like rivers and the like.
Let's say adding two lanes takes away 10m (4 per lane, some extra) of useable space next to the road. So the extra road comes at the cost of (length * 0.01)km²
which comes out to 2km²
This means the city grows from an 20km radius to a 20.06km radios (60 meters). It really doesn't make much of a difference.
Now of course this all gets compounded if you start enlarging more/minor streets. But even if you add 2 lanes to 2000km of streets
it only makes the city larger by 300m which is likely less than what one would have expected.
There are reasons to be against wider roads. There are very good reasons to be for investment into public transport over investing into road
widening. But reduced density is likely not all that relevant.
@@TheSilverwing999 That is an unachievable fantasy. Why do so many have such ridiculous romantic attachments to 19th century living? Cars are very good for human health and productivity, on balance.
@N Fels Not all cities look like in America. I live in a suburb of around 20k people that has 4 restaurants, 2 gyms, 2 convenience stores, 1 grocery store and a subway station all within 2 minutes walk from my building, the number of services increase if I walk 10 minutes. There is no shopping mall and only a few of the services are focused right next to the subway station. A 3 minute metro ride (1 station) and I hit a huge shopping center but it takes 30 minutes to reach the central station, and there are neighborhoods like this even further out.
In the area of California where I live, there is a massive road widening project going on which is causing a lot of traffic right now. Every single time I have to drive through it, I can’t help but think this is all completely pointless
The amount of time you lose because of construction now, you will never regain in your life time. Think of that.
How much you want to bet that some Car company like GM lobbied the project to get that extra lane added
The 91? I swear coming up from the Temecula Valley it will always be faster to head to the desert via Anza, and go around and come from the north into LA, then to deal with the unending construction in the rest of the I.E.
@@bakomusha I was actually referring to the 405, but yeah the 91 is just as bad, if not worse
I use public transport to commute in my city. It is a soul crushing experience being a sardine packed in with total strangers for 1.5 hours every day. The only real solution is to not live in a city.
People don't understand choke points aren't solved by widening roads. Since choke points are not on the highway, but at the exit of the highway, which if the road gets wider, will only get choked up faster. So unless you build like four lane roads everywhere and no traffic stops, wider highways will do nothing.
you missunderstood the whole point of this video
@@darkmoon556 I think he did. He is just adding another reason as to why widening roads doesn't work.
Widening roads definitely helps that. If there's 1 lane and the exit is backed up, everyone stops. If there's two lanes, at most half the traffic stops. And so on. The idea of induced demand is that if it's so bad, people will try to find alternatives (probably alternative roads). This is a misleading video because induced demand absolutely helps traffic, just as a whole in that area, not for any single road.
The morons who decided that Katy Freeway needed managed lanes which in this case are Hov lanes/toll roads with multiple entrances and exits on the LEFT side of the freeway made tons of choke points.
@@delos2279 Except you erroneously assume that only people on the outermost lane want to exit. Induced demand doesnt create magic cars that dont want to exit, they will leave at most exits proportionally as much as they did before. So when you double the lanes, there will be two clogged lanes. Because not everyone pulls over 5miles before the exit, so they choke two lanes to death near the exit. Dont call a video misleading when you dont understand the concept it covers.
I've heard a different version of the final saying, it went like this:
"A developed country isn't where everyone drives a car, it's where the rich use public transport"
wow bro i dont think i ever heard this one!!!
yeah i heard it in the new njb video
That was said no less than by the president of Colombia
Explain your reasoning behind this. I don’t see why we need to hate on the ‘rich’. What’s wrong with the privacy and comfort of a car? I notice that in public there’s always someone who will talk loudly on the phone, or groups of people shouting loudly, some people coming in sweaty/smoker’s smell/smelling of alcohol, antisocial behaviour (eg putting feet on seats), crying babies, too warm in summer and too cold in winter etc. And, no, noise cancelling headphones barely keep out those noises as they work best for droning background noise.
You can’t beat the comfort of a nice comfortable air conditioned car with your own personal space and peacefully enjoying music/conversation with your passengers
@@avidutubeuser007 apa yang nyaman dari berkendara yang lambat akibat terjebak kemacetan? bahkan jika mobil memiliki ac, musik favorit dan privasi terbaik tetap saja menghabiskan waktu untuk hal sia-sia akibat kemacetan merupakan hal yang membosankan
I agree
This is why we should increase the flow rate of highway traffic to 4000000 m/s
@Why what is here?
@@ahmadzahraniAAZ looks like bot to me so probably not good idea to click the link
Germany has entered the chat.
Include stroads so you can die because you chose to cross the stroad instead of driving 20 meters.
That's barely 1.3% of the speed of light. I think we could do better.
This is something I remember thinking when I was a kid. I'm from Mexico city and around 2000 the city went through a bit of a transformation from being car centric to acommodating other means of transportation (namely bikes and public transport like electric buses). Many people at the time were outraged by the change, stating that that would only clog the traffic even more, their counter argument being that what we needed were more lanes.
Even as a child I knew that was dumb, because of what Adam explains here (more lanes means more people use more cars).
Although the switch from cars to public transport was very much driven by gentrification, Mexico city is a very good example of how that change can benefit the everyman as we went from spending a lot on gas, to spending barely the equivalent of a dollar to get from one extreme of the city to another.
Sounds like your country's leaders don't have their head up their asses, I wonder if the reason for this is because much of Mexico's population being much poorer thus they can't afford a car let alone any gas for it. What's your take on this?
Speaking of that, gentrification is becoming a huge issue in American cities, every single neighborhood is becoming a fucking suburb. What's with people's obsession with fucking suburbia? they're expensive for the taxpayers and residents, they have no alternative means of transportation outside of cars and they're super inconvenient since they're usually very far away from essential areas like parks, hospitals and other businesses. They're practically fancy slum towns. In fact, in some countries like France and Brazil, suburbs are where the poor because they're always far away from where all the basic services are.
Im from Mexico City too
Me acordé del distribuidor vial que construyó AMLO cuando era jefe de gobierno de la Ciudad de México, según él era para "aliviar" el tráfico y hacerlo más dinámico pero todos sabemos como terminó eso jajajajajajaja...
I think the best example is singapore cus thats where i live and its very crowded in a small tiny asś nation but still we did managed to decrease the car problem by either putting transit or bicycles and also increasing the car price cus why bother travel 10km on a car when you can take the bus or transit or even on bike.
@@Founderschannel123 if I am not mistaken, Singapore achieved its aims by restricting car use, eg banning certain cars on certain days etc. Such measures are politically risky.
I too live on a small island state of roughly 30km across (Malta), but would not use public transportation because it takes ages to travel with, if it arrives!
Size alone is not a factor, it is urban transport planning that counts.
You may be interested in this shorts that I did mainly for my compatriots.
th-cam.com/play/PLPXiiVdxACsT_FnP_EXpzrIs8y8TVSV4r.html
I think a lot of this comes down to the automotive industry having a ton of political influence. They actively look to prevent expansion of public transportation since that would reduce demand for cars.
Are you sure it's not the demand for cars leading the lawmakers to be pro-roads over trains, and the demand for American manufacturing jobs leading them to be pro-auto industry?
Because it's not the automobile industry that elects your local government, and that's the folks who vote whether or not to fund municipal public transportation projects.
@@theKashConnoisseur There are direct political dynamics at play. For example I went to school for transportation design, and in 10 years of observing school projects at this one design school, I've only ever seen 1 train project. This is because the student projects are mostly funded by sponsors, who dictate the brief of the project, which 9 times out of ten is some type of car, truck, or racecar. So even in a creative setting where the world is presumably your oyster, as an undergrad where we're literally making things that will never exist in real life, an automotive company will never be motivated financially to fund a student project designed for public utility because not only will they not gain intellectually from it, they also don't want to be seen as being in favor of any mode of transport that affects their bottom line, or is antithetical to their business model. Unless they decide to get into the bus or tram business which they won't (because there's no money in it. They'd only want to sell their proprietary ultium battery technology to other companies that do any public good like that. The students are also disincentivized to deviate from what the companies are looking for because almost everyone is in serious debt and wan's to land a job and doesn't want to risk being too radical to not get hired.
@@MrAlziepen It makes sense that you can't find public transportation sponsors, as public entities funded through taxes shouldn't be wasting money on sponsoring design students. However, you might try your luck pitching to engineering firms which would be bidding on public transit projects. They might indeed want to see ideas for rail lines.
What do you think has more influence on the local politics which vote on public transit projects: Big Auto in Detroit who has no idea that Hillsboro Oregon is thinking about adding a new rail line, or the large Portland engineering firms who are directly tied into then planning and bidding process of bringing such a project to life?
I think that conspiracy theories about corrupt politicians selling themselves to the highest bidder are temping narratives, but they ignore the more plausible explanations for why democratically elected officials favor some projects over others. Hint: they tend to favor things that help them get and stay elected. Generally this means they follow the broad expectations of the voting majority. What's sad is most of the population doesn't even bother to vote, and so they literally forgo their opportunity to have a say yet feel entitled to complain.
@@theKashConnoisseur I think your right in your assessment that the mundane explanation of politicians protecting their own interests and the status quo is the driving dynamic broadly speaking. However in other public sectors like energy specifically in regard to Joe Manchin and his gob coal operation, I understand that he's not breaking any laws per say, but definitely using his political prowess to protect his assets in a manner that is in my opinion pretty slimy, because it's not even pretending to be good for the environment. But I'd also add that yes, to stay elected politicians will opt for the status quo of their base, or their corporate donors which help them get elected. I understand that through voting at the local level is how the funding happens for these projects and I guess I just wonder if people know what they really want or not, or are basically not voting in their own interests because they're caught up in the spectacle of national politics, where a lack of education of how public transportation infrastructure is intended to function is adding to the problem of people making informed decisions about their communities. I understand that narratives are powerful, and that even with the post office there are active means to try and sabotage that public utility and point at its dysfunction as a throughline to getting postage completely privatized, and they'll likely succeed with wide support because largely the populous has been exposed to the convenience of Amazon, and thinks that's the way forward in spite of pee bottles. So no, I don't think there are conspiracies in automotive, just the standard market driven algorithmic capital accumulation model. There are a few startups that are trying to make these hyper efficient solar cars, and it's baffling how many people think that the market doesn't want that, even though there are over a quarter million pre orders for Aptera vehicles. So I just wonder how can elected officials be so sure if their constituents want public transport or not if their entire experience of it (if any) is that it's terrible largely from under funding.
why does your country have a system where corporations have influence over your elected governments? seems the issue is deep into the structure of your government itself.
My family used a study about this in a lawsuit against having their land and trees being destroyed for a widened road.
It was unsuccessful because those who were for the project had more money.
EDIT: Ok, so my brain messed up and confused this conflict with another one, the Road Widening hasn't resulted in a lawsuit, which I'm surprised because my family has been sued THREE TIMES over that piece of land when I was growing up. (It's a big house that belongs to my family on my mother's side, that was built by slaveowners, and my mom's obsession with it had basically ruined my childhood.) However, we haven't gotten any compensation via emminent domain, so it could end up in a lawsuit. The study was actually used in a formal complaint to the town funding this. (Farragut, TN, for what it's worth) The town is basically run by corrupt rich assholes, and it's considered one of the worst towns in the entire state.
F my friend, may those funders stub their toes in every door they go through
What case was this? You're saying that the judge ruled against your family because they were bribed?
@@lightfeather9953 They likely mean the defending team had higher fee lawyers, and as a result, better resources.
@Why 😊🖕
It's not money, it's the absurdly broad deference for "public works" projects. Exemplified by the unfortunate Supreme Court decision of Kelo vs. City of New London. Which found that "economic benefits are a permissible form of public use that justifies the government in seizing property from private citizens."
An important thinking about trafic jam is also the amount of vehicle that can go through exits: most of the jams I see here are because the entrance/exits sucks, so everyone must slow down, and because there's too many people, cars start to clog at the exchange speed
we need more entrance and exit lanes.
@@Keyro10bit nnnnnoooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
@@freeeeplay You do realize that doesnt mean adding more lanes right? That means repurposing lanes.
In fact, you can solve a LOT of traffic issues by using 2 lanes to exit the highway, and only 1 lane to enter the highway. Since the maximum addition of cars to the road is half of the maximum reduction of cars to the road, this would prevent a lot of traffic jams due to entering and exiting the road.
Then a secondary solution is to enter cars from the center of the road onto the highway, and let them exit on the sides of the road. This way, no one near the center of the road is planning to get off anytime soon, while everyone near the sides of the road is planning to get off within the next 15 minutes of driving.
A tertiary solution is to split the roads near cities, and add at least 3 points of entry and exit on practically opposite sides of the city. That way you might have 10 lanes total, but they are each on practically opposite sides of the city. And due to the inconvenience to some, this means more people are likely to take public transport
Doing this also means that there is a downside: a minimum amount of lanes for a highway(namely, 3), but it also means there is a maximum efficiency(5 lanes, 2 lanes to steer off, 2 lanes to keep flowing, 1 lane to steer on). Any more lanes than that will reduce efficiency quite significantly, or the efficiency of traffic remains roughly the same.
The traffic flow would improve, the capacity on roads would be lower and overall, you'd be where you need to be at a somewhat optimal time regardless how you decide to travel.
@@Predated2 We need more exit lanes and more lanes.. cheaper gas and cars. More parking lots so it all gets easier . Actualy we just need Paking lots not more lanes . parking lots have best of both worlds.. lots lanes , exits to other lanes parking space ! and more asphalt. WIN WIN just add some petrol stations.
@@shrike6259 parking isn't the problem, it's the highways and how we define it.
A highway, in layman's term, has one purpose. Its purpose is to go from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. Which means minimizing the amount of roads crossing and stops possible while keeping the size of a highway under reasonable limits. America's definition of a highway is the same except they forgot the minimizing road intersections and stopping part, instead they building things around it, like shopping centers, houses, factories, near a highway. There they add roads connecting a highway with stoplights and road intersections. This will cause a lot of problems. If you want to prevent highway congestion I recommend you to watch a YT channel, Not Just Bikes, here he would explains the woes of America's road infrastructure and how to solve them
Not to mention that when making calculations of cost, we also need to consider the price of owning a car. Whether it's buying gasoline, performing maintenance, or literally just the cost of the vehicle itself, cars are expensive, and a lot of people would be paying less overall if some of that money was put into buses and trains so they didn't need to drive their cars every day.
Secondhand cars aren't expensive. And you need a car anyway to go anywhere outside the shitty.
@@mistersir3020 what's the reason to even go outside the city? When I leave town, it's usually for business or holidays, either way far enough for driving a car to be not feasible. And for the rare cases when my close ones gather to have like a bbq in a forest, there's always a commuter train going in its general location.
@@diggernick01 Cities suck. Some of us don't want to live in cages.
But temperaments differ and let's say you don't see a problem with raising children in a noisy concrete jungle where you don't have nature (or have to share it with dozens of people within view).
To me, all the hours spent planning route, waiting for trains and buses, walking the final two miles, ... isn't worth the $2-3k per year that a car costs. Especially because you can rely on it at any moment. In Ukraine last year, your bolls were in a vice if you depended on public transportation (which is most people over there), as you weren't allowed on it without your dose of experimentacious medical procedure.
@@mistersir3020 I mean sure, it's nice having a car if you're planning to go out of town or live somewhere rural, but it shouldn't be a necessity for everyday city life. Where I live, pretty much everything I need is within walking or cycling distance, and for the places further away there's almost guaranteed to be a bus stop within a 10 minute walk. It really beats having to drive everywhere.
You are correct, but you take the wrong conclusion. The car has a rather substantial fixed cost, which does not go away by using the bus. Meaning that going by train has to be a lot cheaper than gas to justify the time commitment.
Depending on the situation I have to take the bike to the city where cars cannot reach, and the car to a friend in rural areas where a bus would drive only for me, or the train in rare cases where I dont need a car at my destination.
Of course, that means paying upkeep for all 3 of these options.
I understood another factor to be the vehicle capacity of the destination. A city's streets can only hold so many cars, so no matter how many lanes you add to the highway going to the city, once the city streets are jammed, the highway will back up. Its like putting a bigger hose into a pool and expecting it to hold more water. It doesn't hold more water, it just fills faster.
Love the picture of Naypyitaw, Myanmar. Fun fact, when I went to the "abandoned 20-lane highway" in 2020 expecting to lie down in the middle of the road without bother, there was already too much real traffic. Induced demand in action
For a while I was thinking "wait a second, why isn't there induced demand on the public transit and why doesn't that clog up the system?"
The solution is: yes there is induced demand; and in that case, it's, within reason, a good thing, instead of reducing the quality of service, it increases the quality of service as it allows for more mode upgrade room and more mode hopping. And higher density modes just don't need that much more space once you shed a 2-ton personal protective cage around every individual person.
But also the induced demand is less high in mixed zoning where you can potentially sleep, shop and work in direct vicinity from each other.
True, but if you sleep, shop, and work all in the same area walking or biking start to look like mighty attractive options.
@@traveller23e once you're not chained to a car, you get a lot more flexibility with modes! That's the thing.
@pyropulse Cities have massive economic advantages to the country, it's more efficient to start a business where there is already a large consumer base. This improves the economy of the city, so more people move there. Cities are not going anywhere anytime soon, so we should improve them as much as possible. And I live in a city and can do all of the things you mentioned except guns, because my country has half decent gun control laws and I don't need one anyway, and snowboarding, because of the climate.
@pyropulse people in places with well designed public transit can literally do all of this while not having the burden of exorbitant car ownership costs.
@pyropulse Yes, but people who want to live in a city get stuck in the car. Almost everyone in the U.S. already has a car, so the "freedom" shouldn't be of a concern anymore.
Not to mention that, on a theoretical level, "adding lanes" is a brute force solution, which is the least sophisticated way of solving any problem: add potency, instead of downright cracking/changing the system. The revolution was not adding more postmen, so that the physical letters could be delivered faster (potency), the revolution was making the letters non-physical, digital (changing the system).
the muskian smoothbrain solution is to add the "depth" by making tunnels instead. 3d is always better than 2d right
cars are much more convenient than busses, trains, or bikes. There is no revolution. Its like trying to replace digital mail with physical mail because the servers are slow. And then when you try upgrade the servers people say no because it would make more people use digital mail.
@@ancellery6430 the only reason they’re more convenient is because trains and public transit is inconvenient on PURPOSE in most of north america. like, how is it convenient if you get into parking hell if you go downtown or have to park at home on the street? and how could you expect buses to be convenient if they a. have next to no budget and b. spaces between everything is so vast because of the insane urban planning ideas america has always had
Sometimes a decent retread of older practices can be a good thing though. Perhaps instead of looking for brand new proposals which cost money and time to make, maybe you could look to the past and try a second attempt on older, lapsed proposals. Things like the Lower Manhattan Expressway and some other Robert Moses era proposals. Yes, they may be brute force solutions as well, but at least you get a second round of debate and save plenty of time and money on planning?
@@shanekeenaNYC but this is simply a waste of money in the end because it can’t scale any further. the only way to truly scale is with mass transit, the only alternative would be to not expand large centralized and densely populated cities.
Here in Ottawa we have one of the rare examples of a highway widening project that actually did reduce congestion in a lasting way.
Back in the 90s, we got an NHL hockey team, complete with a massive new stadium out in the cornfields in the west end. The main way to get from the city center to the stadium was the 417 west, a two-lane (in one direction) highway that simply hadn’t been built to move a hockey stadium’s worth of people at the same time. On game nights, the 417 became completely unusable, clogged so badly that it might be faster to walk. This didn’t just affect the game audience, it also impacted other people who lived in the west end and used the 417 for commuting.
The city government started a project to expand the highway from two to three lanes (again, in one direction, so four to six lanes total). And it basically solved the Game Night Congestion Problem. Game nights are still a bit clogged, but nothing like what it was before.
I’m not an expert but I think the reason this worked is that the demand for the road wasn’t driven by the road itself, but by an exogenous source of demand: the NHL schedule.
I think you are right that venue driven demand is different from population driven demand in that it can't grow beyond the venue's capacity.
However, after riding a bus from a random parking lot to a concert i think all large venues should have some form of transit integration. Be it a full metro/train station in the basement or a bus hub on ground level, and then have this transit scaled for the departing demand which will follow a very predictable schedule making it possible to plan around. And once you get people just a little ways away from the venue the congrestion just evaporates. (I have also driven out of a concert before and that is an experience i have 0 desire to ever repeat)
@@jasonreed7522 Oh yeah, I fully agree. Here in Ottawa we relatively recently also opened up a new football stadium, TD Place, which is much more centrally located than the hockey arena I mentioned above. It has absolutely no on-site parking; if you want to get there for a game or show, you need to bus in, and they run special buses using the local school bus fleet on game nights. It works great!
Another thing that I haven't seen pointed out is that more lanes induce more lane switching which induces traffic jams. Take the following situation: Your road is 3 lanes wide in the direction that you are going to. There is an important off-ramp on the right side, that's one lane wide. This off-ramp leads to a bottle-necked area (e.g. down town, where you can't easily widen the road). So the off-ramp will be totally jammed, even though it's not the bottle neck.
But for someone going straight on the 3 lane road we were talking about in the beginning, this shouldn't matter, right? 1 lane off, 2 clear ones left for people going straight.
Wrong. Because some idiot stuck in the right lane will see that the lane to his left is open, so he switches to that lane to squeeze into the off-lane right before the off ramp. This then blocks people going straight on the 2nd lane, so the 2nd lane starts to be jammed. So someone who wants to get off, will switch to the 3rd lane, to squeeze over two lanes right before the off ramp, which then blocks up the 3rd lane.
I see that every single time I take the A22 in Vienna going eastward.
And it really doesn't matter how many lanes you build, cause the bottleneck is almost always somewhere else.
I think this is main reason and building more lanes wont give you weeks or months of no traffic at rush hour.
I always think it’s important to mention that requiring a car effectively imposes a multi-thousand dollar tax on every person, regardless of ability to pay, where the proceeds of that tax go toward warming the atmosphere.
I think if you worded it like this, you would sell the idea way more in America.
People like cars because of the freedom. But theres not much freedom if the gov is practically forcing you to use a car 24/7.
There should options out there for people who want to be frugal and not spend money on cars.
Luckily enough though, most big cities have decent public transit systems.
However travelling inbetween cities still requires either a greyhound or a car.
I love cars, and hope I get to own a hellcat in the future. But your average dude in a civic who dont care much about cars shouldnt be forced into using it.
Gov should balance public and private transit depending on the state of the population imo. I hope they dont go too much for public transit and completely abolish cars, and I hope they dont go too much with cars and make public transit impractical.
Yeah in Australia running a car cost thousands and thousands of dollars a year in compulsory insurance, registration fees, fuel excess, maintenance and service, depreciation etc. Meanwhile, public transport is subsidised and cheaper during off peak times.
Therefore a lot people either take the bus or train to work. There are lots of new bike paths as well plus if you are an office worker you can mostly work from home.
Having said that if you are a blue collar worker and work in an industrial area or need to drive to get job sites you will most probably need and want a car.
@@honkhonk8009
Especially for city centers, I wish there would be car-free zones. Subways and trams are much faster and the pollution and noise gets reduced by a lot.
@@jonasklose6472 true, i rarely go into the inner part of my city because the only option is car basically. Then you have to find parking, which there's never enough of so you have to park far away and walk, but then you have to walk through intersections full of cars that don't really pay attention to pedestrians to get to where you're going. In america pedestrians are just a nuisance/an inconvenience to the car-centric design of our cities. We do have buses but they're unreliable and I don't really feel safe on them, especially since covid. I always wear a mask in public but god help you if you touch anything with your bare hands on a public bus
@N Fels Weak bait
As a Stadler engineer I'm happy to see you mentioning our train as an exemplary solution :)
My favourite toy in my youth, apart from Nintendo systems, was a toy train in a simple little loop that was based on the movie Anastasia, and which was purchased from Burger King I think. Something so simple was so great.
The cool thing is some American commuter rail systems are either already, or are planning to use Stadler trains.
I think induced demand also works for public transport. I live close to a railway but I never used it because the train was never available when I wanted it. Recently it was extended to service urban growth, needing more trains to serve more people it became more convenient for me. I now have a car in the drive way which is costing me $100 per month for registration and I am not sure why I need it.
On top of it working, you also got multiple different mechanics to induce demand.
The most obvious is having more busses/trains on the same route so instead of having a bus every 60 minutes, you get one every 5. Increases time flexibility, thus inducing demand.
The second one is having more different routes, so you don't have to switch as often to get somewhere, making it faster and more comfortabel.
The third is adjusting stop density in less populated areas. There are existing bus routes in various countries where you phone (or use an app) to 'call a bus to stop at the bus stop you want to go in, and where you want to get off. The busses have say 100 stops, but are only planned to stop at maybe 20 of them max, since every bus only has a limited amount of passengers. That way you can get a very high stop density without having longer bus travel routes (a lot of the routes will go down main roads, with loops through side streets for all the optional stop). You make the ways to the bus much shorter, thus inducing demand.
And that's omly the 3 obvious and straightforward ones, there's many more to maximise cost per gain for any situation puboic transit could face.
Exactly. The more people using public transit, the more trains/busses can be run, the faster/more efficient it becomes for everyone using it. Conversely the more people driving, the LESS efficient it becomes. A transportation system built around personal cars as default is inherently fucked, just no logical way it can function efficiently. And that's not even getting into what you're hinting at which is that even when people DO drive as their sole mode of transportation, their cars just sit on pavement doing nothing for upwards of 20 hours a day. The space wasted on cars goes far beyond expansive highways.
This is also why you never see trains on the train line and why the bike lanes are "always empty"... a train every 10 minutes means you're not going to see one if you glance at it, and even 1000 bikes an hour means that unless something stops the bikes and they pile up you just don't see a "big crowd of bikes" the same way you see a giant traffic jam (doesn't help that the bikes move faster than {cough} "traffic")
You can see a big crowd of bikes in the Netherlands: th-cam.com/video/n-AbPav5E5M/w-d-xo.html
@N Fels Interesting. Do you have a link or anything regarding the proposed social credit system? I'd like to read more about it.
I ve experienced train traffic jam in tokyo. A proper traffic jam.
Trains stopping/moving back to back slowly in morning rush hours.
BUT even that traffic jam could carry orders of magnitude more people than cars.
Also, modern urban high capacity metro/train lines can be so frequent that there almost no delay between them. And in rush hours they usually are.
There is a limit in all cases. Trains are not something magical like elon's magic tunnels.
Um...Have you SEEN a group of Cyclists? They spread out for miles.
@N Fels The issue there is more that the public transport capacity is far too low for how crowded their cities are. Also the "don't get in trouble" culture makes it more likely for people to just accept things and actively look the other way. Not really an argument against public transport in itself - especially since those cities are so densely packed, there's definitely not the space for all those extra cars...
As an American I wish we had more alternatives to driving. Driving is the only thing that makes sense in 95% of the country.
Living close to work is much more effective than relying on any kind of transit.
@@MW-dg7gl I live in an American suburban city where suburban housing is built close to businesses or SFHs can be reused as offices or workspaces with no overall difference in market price
@@MW-dg7gl in the US only a small percentage of jobs are located in the center of cities. Jobs are widely dispersed throughout regions, most heavily in suburbs actually.
@@MainMite06 See: Adam's video on urban planning. Pretty much exactly what he recommends. But the vast majority of Americans dont have that luxury. Unfortunately
@@ThreeRunHomer in the suburbs? Maybe that's true for massive cities and tiny towns. all of the cities and towns I lived in most of the work was either outside residential limits, or sectioned off from the suburban areas.
The Japanese ran into a similar effect recently in Tokyo. It used to be that the JR East Saikyo Line commuter trains from Saitama Prefecture south into central Tokyo were woefully overcrowded, but the opening of the private railway “F Liner” service was supposed to cure that problem. One issue: F Liner itself became super popular, and the relief of overcrowding on the Saikyo Line was less than anticipated.
But now imagine how big the highways would need to be to replace their surface metro.
@@cola98765 I honestly didn't mind the busy Japanese trains
Not only induced demand, but also the increased complexity of interactions on the highway. So in theory, widening roads actually makes traffic worse.
That’s exactly what people don’t understand. Like the speed of any system, the transport system can move as fast as the slowest element in the chain. You can build the largest highway ever conceived. As long as that traffic volume is spilled onto 2-3 lane roads, you will still have traffic jams. Remember. If you are stuck in traffic , you are part of the problem.
This is also born of part of the problem of the 'infrastructure' that so many politicians love pushing. The idea of building 'roads and bridges' is nice on paper, but unless they're building *alternatives* to those roads and bridges, it means nothing. But lobbyists and politicians LOVE bills like that because it makes it *seem* like something is getting done without actually fundamentally fixing any real problems, while also giving away tons of money to construction conglomerates.
In my city the counselors elected to government make less than I do in salary but somehow own houses in the city and vacation properties in the islands. They live a lifestyle of someone making 10 times as much. Do the math on that one.
@@fallenshallrise I'm sure everything and everyone involved is working *perfectly* fine. /s
It is easier to widen a road and make economic incentives / disincentives than planning good public transport, that's for sure.
th-cam.com/play/PLPXiiVdxACsT_FnP_EXpzrIs8y8TVSV4r.html
To be fair, in the US a lot of our bridges are so dilapidated they're straight up dangerous
@@fatmn Which hey, fair's fair on that. Not denying your point, merely saying that most of the time, when the USA does 'infrastructure' it's usually just giveaways to the rich, rather than actually fixing major problems with said infrastructure itself.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from cities skylines, it’s that gridlock is an inevitability regardless of what you do, including widening roads
just add more trains and buses, duuuuh
Not inevitable, good city planning just takes practice and skill. It's easier when using mods that give you more control over roads and traffic.
What I learned from C:S, is that banning the motor vehicles solves almost all of the problems
"If lane reductions are coupled with investments into bike lanes and public transit, traffic gets a lot less severe"
What investors read: "If lane reductions , traffic gets a lot less severe"
induced demand is only a fraction of the issue, like some top comments point out, exit and entry lanes are still bottlenecked, alternative routes away from highways need to be also be put into consideration, I sometimes use entire flanks and get to my destination around the same speed as the clogged highway. and not to mention whole idea of suburbs making homes further and further away from workplaces and such means more and more people just simply need a highway to get to places, since suburbs are way too sparce to have people reasonably reach bus and train stops on foot
@N Fels getting rid of cars depends. In high density cities it would be ideal to get peoples off their cars but the same cant be said with places with like 5000 peoples or smt like that. Here both are equally good while public transit is cheaper and more efficient the car can get you there quicker, as both ways are represented and the population density isnt that big too we can avoid all the traffic jams. Ofc there should be no ban for cars
The evolution of your editing style for visuals is really cool. :)
I'm a genius atheist, so I must deign to inform you that this video was an accident, not intelligently-designed. Grow up. Evolve. Get an education. Atheism: 1. Logic: 0. Atheism wins again.
Great line at the end and what you said is just a fact and reality for me now too.
I live in berlin and my parents gifted me a car. I never wanted one.
I had to pay 100€ per month (excluding gas) and constantly got tickets for parking in special zones, because the parking space is limited af.
Also commuting to work in the morning is horrific, when the streets are full because of all the workers in cars.
I sold it, got myself the 9€ per month ticket and use the PT a lot now.
To be fair i bought myself a motorcycle, which is imo still much better than a car since its smaller, can travel through lanes and has very low emmissions compared to cars.
Thanks for your videos Adam ;)
Be careful with motorcycles, though... I lost one of my balls (yes, I lost a testicle) on a crash. It wasn't even my fault. Didn't really affect reproduction, and I am only alive because of prompt ambulance response and me wearing my helmet. If ambulance had taken too long, I would have bled to death. Be careful out there!
Of course a 1 seater motorcycle has less emissions than a 5 seater (+truck) car. You’re not wrong (especially since you drive alone), but it’s not a very fair comparison. The average full car gets far better per person mpg than the average motorcycle.
@@peterparker1724 Only issue there is that most cars that are on the road is used by 1 person.
@@peterparker1724 yet everbody drives alone
@@MrCaome theory versus reality, and yeah would be damn interesting to find out just how many drive their cars around single and double most of the time
In Germany now, we actually have quite an opposite situation (albeit really temporary) where the trains and buses are overcrowded for the most part, and that's due to the 9 euro ticket, with which everyone who buys it can use all the public transportation and regional trains for essentially 9 euro per month. It was introduced for the whole duration of the summer, apparently to recompense for the rising fuel prices. I think it is interesting, and would love to hear what you think about that sort of a solution!
Would be hilarious to have this video inverted.
"We have now widened the railway to three tracks per direction, but the trains are still clogged up. That's because of induced demand, and that's why we should be adding more lanes to the highway and have more people driving instead."
(just a bit of satire, I'm pro public transport)
Adam, you will love this. I live on the island of Newfoundland. 125 years ago they built a railway at narrow guage at vast expense and nearly bankrupted the dominion, on a system incompatible with the rest of the North American network as all train cars coming across the gulf on the ferry would have to have their axles re-adjusted. Fast forward to 1986, We are unfortunately annexed to Canada, and the federal government didn't want to fund the railway any longer, so in empty promises to us they took up 1000 km worth of rail track in the promise of a double laned highway from St John's to Port Aux Basques.
35 years after that, We've lost the railway, but never got the highway expansion either. Now the railbed is used as an auxillary highway for dirtbikes, quads and side-by-sides, and the Trans-Canada highway is choked with tractor trailers carrying every kind of freight 1000 km to the capital St John's at the farthest eastern edge of the island.
This channels basically exist to proof how trains are the solution for almost every problem we have
and I love it
"Trains are the solution for almost every problem we have" Please tell me you're not German.. we tried to stop you guys from thinking that way.
He just love's trains and is forcing his will upon us xD
@@heyfriend8519 the British and the Indians love train too.
@@heyfriend8519 laughs in "Deutsche Bahn", in "Bayrische Verkehrsminister" ...... We definetly made the perfect drama in which Germany looks like it does sth. for public transport while shutting down railways and putting all money for traffic in Bavarian highways. "sank you for travälong with Deutsche Bahn" (perfect summary from Wise Guys) So We basically gone away from trains.......
US city planners: "I'll pretend I didn't see that."
I love how the solution is nearly always public transport, yet they keep opting for wider and new roads
That 26-Lane Road hat me astonished... When you counted the people in the cars and fit them in a train, i was even more surprised. I admit i have kind of underestimated public transport. In regards to your road-statement: never noticed this problem in Switzerland. I think its more of a problem with huge cities/urban areas in general.
I read even in a museum somewhere in california, cars are cultural mistake. If you look back to the time before cars were invented, the trains were the main transportation. And every development(residence, stores, shops etc) are concentrated around trains stations. So most lands were untouched to natural environment as majority of land use were around trains stations. Since cars were invented, the amount of land use for development of freeways, parking lots and residences are far beyond reach now. Anywhere the road goes, you can use the land for another subdivision houses, malls etc. Just look at LA area now, its mostly covered with cement with very little space for green. California is an irony of a place
"I read even in a museum"
Oh so it must be true? If the museum says so after all...
@@freddybell8328 trains go where there is only rails available. while roads and freeways go everywhere so its obvious the area of land needed to accomodate this is much much bigger. not to mention parking lot for all those cars. do you even need to imagine this?
@@freddybell8328 by the way in that museum they even show the amount of land use change pre/post car era in picture so it was easier for people like you
@@quesee08 Have u considered for one second, that the us population since the invention of the car grew 10 times of what it was.... even w trains only the amount of infrastructure grew imensly. Not to say cars are not making problems but they also have their legit uses, we just overuse them.
Cars have advantages over other forms of transportation, especially when it comes to delivering supplies and goods with trucks. Problem is not cars themselves but the fact american society relies on them way too much at the expense of other forms of transportation. When majority of space in a city is reserved for parking instead of shops, apartments and restaurants, something has gone haywire in the city planning.
I like your comparison of highway widening to loosening your belt !
The philosophy is so simple:
Is driving effective and fun? No, because there are too many cars on the road.
How do we make driving effective and fun? Make it so that there are fewer cars on the road.
How do we reduce the number of cars on the road? Make it so that you can get around without cars, so that people who don't want to drive in the first place don't have to drive.
Better public transit essentially means more road per car and the driving experience is just much better all around. Sometimes I wonder if car people advocating against public transit really like the idea of driving, or just cars themselves, because apparently people like to stare at taillights instead of an open road ahead through their windshield.
As a former resident of Los Angeles county, one additional bit of fun is watching roads widened just before/after (depending on direction) entering a natural barrier that just gets more lanes to bottleneck, causing all kinds of fun when attempting to pass through. Now that I live in Orange County, CA (just to the South), I get to deal with the "solution" of private toll roads which means I have to fork over an additional $5 for the privilege of shaving 5-10 minutes off my commute. Even though I'm avoiding the nuisance of traffic, these toll roads can only go to less populated areas (generally richer areas, as well) since the primary highways hit the biggest destinations; and that's additional $$ to fund the gas for those extra miles I'm driving for that circumventing path.
Nothing says "capitalism" better than making a buck on a broken system.
Ugh. I hate toll roads. We don't have any in my state. It wasn't until we headed out east on a family vacation when I was 15 that I first saw a toll road in real life. I was very confused at first as to why we were slowing down and traffic was backing up. I expected there to be an accident or road construction. Instead, we came to a toll booth where Dad pulled a bunch of change from his ashtray (where Dad always keeps spare change in his vehicles) to pay the toll.
Up until that point, I thought toll roads were one of those weird throwback things that was referenced in movies and books, but no longer actually relevant in real life. I'm still amazed that ppl put up with it - especially as half the time, they only get financed through public funds in the first place.
Completely true, however I highly doubt anyone in the U.S. government would ever consider this. Or actually they do know, but are funded by the automobile and fossile rule industry and won't give up the sweet sweet profits.
So you agree the green new deal is a scam?
I'm not sure if the car industry is to blame, but yes, they wouldn't want it taken away. Then again we can't even meet demand right now.
This is actually a product of US exceptionalism, an idea concocted after WW2 about the future of transportation. Probably didn't think it was a bad idea at the time, but we know better, but we can't undo 70 years of it either.
@@sabastianbragg1740 The Green New Deal hasn't been written and isn't in effect. If you're against it already, you're being propagandized.
The biggest red flag is when a politician like Ted Cruz blames current failures like the Texas snow blackouts on a law that doesn't exist.
@@sprockkets It's true we can't magically snap our fingers and disappear the consequences of 70 years of mistakes, but we can start working towards a better future. I've been seeing a lot more support for mixed use zoning and more/better/safer bike infrastructure over the past couple years. Heck, just this year, as of Jan 1, 2022, California has ended the single family zoning *mandate.* That is, single family homes can still be built, but it's no longer illegal to build literally anything else. It's still not fully mixed use zoning, but multifamily buildings can be constructed in many more areas than before. And I've seen Dutch-style protected intersections gaining steam.
You can make a difference by going to your town's city hall meetings. Just go there and share a different opinion. These places are mostly populated by bored, retired, old, but mostly well-meaning old people. They can often be convinced of local improvements like this.
@@discipleoferis549 forgot the word, "overnight"
I left the states to the EU for many reasons, this one being near the top. Aside from renting a van a couple times for moving I've not had any reason to drive in 4-5 years.
My first job 20 years ago had a 1.5h commute 5 days a week. Who wants to get to their death bed to say 'Well, spent a few years in total needlessly sitting in traffic.' ?
Count me out !
1h30 of driving everyday? can't you live closer?
@@daviddavidsonn3578 2x 45 minutes is a common time if you need to commute by car.
A developed country is not where everybody drives a car it's where you don't need one to get around Man is that so truth
In Chesire, we can see this effect. Middlewich has a train line, but no station. And it is ALWAYS Middlewhich which ends up with traffic.
In Manchester, the difference between car and walking results is amazing, as walking is always more direct then navigation the one-way system.
They're planning on reopening the Middlewich railway branch connecting Crewe to Altrincham and Manchester. It'll hopefully help with traffic!
@@lordgemini2376 It would. Maybe not for the first few months as people begin replanning their routes, but afterwards those wanting to go to Middlewich can take the train and walk, and those going through Middlewich for rural places can take the car on roads with less traffic.
Funnily enough I think a few UK councils have started to ‘make walking faster’ on deliberate (mine included). Unfortunately where I am this doesn’t serve any benefit if you intend to travel slightly further (e.g. getting bus to the station), since these now take longer too.
Adding lanes in Cities Skylines be like:
Cars: _"We are all gonna use one single lane. uwu"_
At least in cities skylines cars can't crash and cause backups that way.
I can't stress enough how right is the statement you make at the end of the video. It's 7 years I live in Oslo and I can't quantify how good is living withouth a car and still being free to go wherever I want, in time! I grew up in Palermo (southern Italy) where public transport is terrible and the traffic jams are legendary. Still, to go somewhere in palermo the car was the best option. Here in Oslo the car is the worst option when it comes to move around the city (in particular downtown). Super expensive parking, small roads, expensive toll and excruciatingly long red lights. That's how you force people to go by public transport or bike (while offering a good service, of course)
As a person who lived in Houston for many years and seeing constant construction on the highway that was immediately obsolete upon completion, this video speaks to me On a deep and personal level
but its wrong you just said it is wrong it was "immediately obsolete" because the choke points of highway exits cause the traffic not "induced demand".
D-D-Dude, J-just one more lane I promise, It'll solve everything.
I agree with the premise but you’ve oversimplified the comparison. Cars are great for getting straight to a specific place. You can replace the roads with trains, but then if people have to get another train, a bus, a taxi, because the distance from the station to their actual final destination isn’t walkable within a reasonable amount of time, that isn’t going to be fun. Smaller, denser countries like Japan, UK, and a lot of European countries benefit from that. The US though is so spread out. The most common solution here in the UK is to take your bike on the train, but that does reduce their capacity especially if everyone is doing that. Electric scooters are an improvement in that respect. I think we need to focus more on actually reducing the need for travel in the first place.
Germany made a 9€ ticket. You can take any train for 9€/month. So the cities save a lot of money in road maintenance because people take the train. The cities safe so much that the missing income from the ticket prices can be payed and there is still more saving.
@@JanFWeh
Only because they did not have enough busses etc. but overall traffic reduced heavily on the streets.
The main disaster is that they didn't make it permanent...
@@JanFWeh It succeeded in showing us where we need to invest in the near future. Namely public transport.
So you can ride an ICE as well with that 9€-ticket?
@@aroace7913 Yeah, absolute bullshit-management by the government, just because the Greens needed some candy for their clientele after FDP got their useless rebate on fuel. There was no way for Deutsche Bahn and other transport services to react at such short notice (availability of trains, busses, etc due to planned maintenance, availability of drivers due to their duty rota or even just not enough personell).
But Adam, less cars on the road means less money for politicians from car and oil lobbyist!
It’s almost as if, having actual capitalism , would create demand, when the only reason these things don’t happen, is because lobbyists are able to pay government to do this their way?
"A developed country is not where everyone drives a car. It’s where nobody needs a car to get around." This should be the motto of every politician/town planner or whoever.
There is another one that says: "A developed country is not where the poor drives a car. Its where the rich use public transport".
@@MarceloBenoit-trenes Also good.
@@MarceloBenoit-trenes Why would ppl who can afford comfort use something uncomfortable
@@mansory7996 In a developed country public transport *is* comfortable.
Explain your reasoning behind this. I don’t see why we need to hate on cars. What’s wrong with the privacy and comfort of a car? I notice that in public there’s always someone who will talk loudly on the phone, or groups of people shouting loudly, some people coming in sweaty/smoker’s smell/smelling of alcohol, antisocial behaviour (eg putting feet on seats), crying babies, too warm in summer and too cold in winter etc. And, no, noise cancelling headphones barely keep out those noises as they work best for droning background noise.
You can’t beat the comfort of a nice comfortable air conditioned car with your own personal space and peacefully enjoying music/conversation with your passengers.
Dude, living in Europe, hearing about a 26 lane road is crazy
Really? Because I live in Europe, and my country has a railway system that is the envy of every liberal American and the widest road we have is 16 lanes + 8 emergency lanes for a total of 24. My country is associated with everything but cars.
@@rongeurtsvankessel1908 Very few highways in my country have more than 2 lanes. The widest highway i have seen in person was a 3 or maybe 4 lane highway when I was abroad in Germany.
Actually I've talked to road design engineers and they call the effect latent demand. Designers can't guess the real need for road capacity so they just use the current road usage and try to fix that. What they can't know is how many people would actually need to use the road if there was a good road to use. While bikes, trains, buses are great IF you have a good connection and stations on both ends that are close enough to walk to (and weather is cooperating), in many cases cars just are necessary (grocery shopping, transporting small kids, etc...) so people are going to have to own them anyways. Worst situation is when you have great bus service (lowest cost and most versatile solution) but the bus gets stuck in traffic do to all those damn cars on the road.
In properly designed neighborhoods, a car is unnecessary for transporting small children or groceries, since if the distances are small enough those can easily be done on foot or using a bicycle.
@@Landrassa1 Unfortunately very few places are "properly designed", normal families with 2-3 kids can't carry all the kids and a trunk full of groceries on a bike to get to the grocery store 10 km from home. If what you say was true, traffic wouldn't be a problem anywhere.
@@banto1 Why would it be 10 kilometers away? You put it where people need it, so right in the middle of a residential area, and all of a sudden thousands of people have easy access to it. This isn't rocket science. I have literally never lived anywhere that didn't have the basic amenities within walking or cycling distance.
@@Landrassa1 You're very lucky. I've never lived in a place where that was true and don't know anyone that does. You probably are also blessed with a terrain that makes bike travel easy. Lots of people don't have your advantages. Let's trade places and see how you manage when you need to adapt to your new more difficult surroundings and stressed financial status. Don't make the assumption that if something is true for you then it MUST be true for everyone.
The tide's shifting. This high gas prices opened people's eyes.
I absolutely loathe that I can't get around without a car in AZ.
Genius. You can't have a traffic jam if there's nowhere for the traffic to jam.
Have you ever been at a crowded concert, like *Travis Scott's 2021 Astroworld,* and have remember the *crucial reason WHY* the moshpit area experienced an overcrowding of people?:
-Too many people wanted to see Travis Scott and Drake perform, the security, the moshpit itself, the event holders, & most importantly *the performers* were not capable of controlling the massive crowd and blood shedded that night.
Another big problem with car-centric cities is that all those cars have to be parked somewhere. The usual solution is to put massive parking lots in front of every destination, which makes public transport even less desirable since it'll drop you off in front of a massive parking lot instead of anywhere near your actual destination.
Why would public transportation drop you off in front of large parking lots? I mean I can see how that would happen occasionally with certain stops but overall you're really reaching here.
cars can be parked underground.
"Just add another lane bro"
US politicians, car and oil corporations
Counter argument: *Some auto corporations like Volvo cars, General Motors, Volkswagen group, or Mercedes benz make city buses and can make profit from civic tax dollars by the cities giving the buslines improvements*
Thus: car companies arent always evil
Authorities in London recently closed one of our river bridges. Drivers howled that this would make life impossible. Instead they just used other means of transport and used their cars less.
You really just made the whole thing sound so damn simple just by saying "we won't solve traffic by widening roads just like we won't solve obesity by widening out belts."
Someone smart can make a complicated issue seem simple. Someone dumb will make any simple issue as complicated as possible :)
@@cheetoschrist5685 Too true.
We likewise won't solve traffic by just throwing trains at it anymore than we'll solve obesity through liposuction
@@afhostie true, that's why there is a whole field of studies on urban transport planning
th-cam.com/play/PLPXiiVdxACsT_FnP_EXpzrIs8y8TVSV4r.html
@@afhostie With my back, I shouldn't even _lift_ a train, let alone _throw_ it. Come to think of it, we shouldn't throw lanes, either.
Your point appears to be that an integrated design/plan should be used for transit. I agree. One starting point is to stop the sprawl of car-centric suburbs. Adding transit to car-centric suburbs is more expensive and more intrusive than following a plan that makes multiple modes of transit convenient.
I expect that house values in the suburbs will change based on the availability/proximity of multiple modes of transportation. For many people, car-dependent properties will lose their appeal. (Some will still signal their status by living in places where they must rely upon the automobile, some will put up with the expense of autos because they want those properties for other reasons.)
1990: one more lane will fix it
2000: one more lane will fix it
2010: one more lane will fix it
2020: one more lane will fix it
2022: ...
Can you send this to Doug Ford, the Conservative Premier of Ontario, Canada? He wants to build a stupid multi-lane highway across farmland because the other multi-lane highways are "filled up".
He does not want to deal with the issues of why they are filled up, he just wants to build more because it's 1965 in his head.
Lmao, they always be building new highway's. The 400 is never not filled
Why wont you do it?
He probably has some very good friends, I mean acquaintances which just so happen to build roads.
I've lived in Los Angeles for almost 3 years, visitied a lot the two years before after living all my life in a beautiful, four-lane-max community (two lanes each direction). I am amazed/appalled by (yet participate in) the car/traffic/freeway culture here and kind of hate myself for it. That freeway in Texas makes me feel strangely fortunate.
I grew up about an hour from the nearest highway (not counting the 2lane total surface roads predating the interstate) and watching these videos makes me happy i did. Now i live in CT which is exactly famous for being a highway distopia but it is pretty close, especially Hartford with its left lane exits/merges and basically every town/city cutting itself off from its waterfront with highways. (Ironically CT has a nearly perfect geometry for trains with hartford)
They keep talking about widening US-22 in Lehigh Valley, PA, and I'm over here like, "It won't fix anything!" I-78, which runs parallel to US-22 already has 6 lanes, but it constantly gets shut down by car accidents, tractor-trailers accidents (they keep speeding on this highway) and traffic jams. Once, I was stuck on that highway for THREE HOURS on what was SUPPOSED to be a 15-minute trip.
Is Lehigh Valley not connected to SEPTA's transports in any way shape or form?
Cause i feel SEPTA can solve half of the traffic issues in a heartbeat
@@MainMite06 There used to be a railroad that connected Allentown with Philadelphia, but it was replaced by that stupid I-476, which I hate driving on, because it's always under construction and driving on it is exausting!
@@Trainfan1055Janathan Hows the bus system? (If no is the answer, then i see why your city is transit hell!)
Loving the smaller videos.
They explain single concepts that you then use to talk about bigger issues in longer videos, great idea!
Like an urbanism basics video capsule 👍🏾
As a city builder game player, best way to deal with traffic is by closing your eyes.
fuck we have a cities skylines player
We tried this "just add more lanes" thing in CA, even to the point where we stacked 4-lane freeways.
That turned out to be catastrophic when one of the biggest collapsed during an earthquake in the 1980s, and killed a lot of people.
We don't stack our freeways anymore. And some of the freeways literally always have traffic, and can no longer be widened (past the normal 8 lanes, 4 both ways).
But everybody starts throwing tantrums when the cities propose adding more bus stops, more busses to the fleet, and any more passenger rail extensions...
I believe the ONLY use a car should have, is for heavy lifting.
Cars can be used in a reasonable way... it's just not every day commutes.
They're quite nice for taking a holiday trip, taking your bike to a mountain trail or bulk shopping. But noone should have to drive their car every day.
@@mikek9297 That's true, but there also needs to be a real choice. I should be able to get my bike on public transport to go riding. And I shouldn't be forced to use a car to go on holiday. I'm on holiday in Germany atm. There has been no need for a car so far, so it is apparently perfectly possible.
@@bugsygoo perfect Timing have Fun with the 9-Euro-Ticket
> I believe the ONLY use a car should have, is for heavy lifting.
This is the core of the problem of the debate. One side outright doesn't want people to be able to use cars for their own transportation. You can't have a rational discussion about the pros and cons of various types of road construction if one side is going to throw all evidence out the window that doesn't conform to their extreme position.
@@lightfeather9953 You do realise that one side has totally dominated the debate for about 100 years. And not just the debate. The car advocates have taken over and effectively destroyed whole cities and left zero choice for anything else. So it's a bit rich to now complain when people start to push back.
Nice and to the point! Definitely a useful video for those just getting into these topics.
It's surprising how people (especially Americans) underestimate public transport and the wondrous effects it can bestow. Let's have a quick thought experiment...
Let's say, within the topic of this video, your on a 12 lane highway, and 1,000 people want to get between point A to point B. On average there is 1.5 people in each car, so around 660 cars are on the road to get to point A to B. Let's think how big a car is to how much is being used by 1.5 people.... Yeah, alot of space is being wasted. So now I pose this question, how many people can fit in a bus... and what is the space being used by each individual... It is amazing how efficient and effective it is. Let's say a single decker bus can hold 60 people but is only at half capacity, which is unlikely, you could use 33 buses to fit all those people. And remember, the cost of driving is split between all the passengers. So you could travel between point A to point B for 30th of the cost of fuel and you don't have to pay insurance, tax or and maintenance on that vehicle... Wow.
It is also a huge benifit to the environment too. Although a bus's engine might emmit more that a car's engine, again the emissions are split between the passangers. Also, there would be less materials needed to be mined, transported and constructed compared to what is needed for 600+ cars, so even less emmisions. Better yet, a electric bus powered directly by the grid can be more efficient and environmentally safer than any other transport, other than a train.
You can drive in a bus drunk...
You can relax.... (Like Elon promises with FSD)
It is probably the single most important inventions... and yet people have a negative stigma of public transport like buses because the car industry wants you to believe that public transport takes away your rights and are designed for poor people that can't afford the luxurious car of the future...
I rest my case...
Well done Adam for a another great video!
Why make an essay to make a case on the comment section of a youtube channel where everyone watching already agrees with the initial premise?
@@peterdisabella2156 I can practice...
@@peterdisabella2156 But I'm not wrong with the statement I made, right?
The thing Europeans don't understand about American travel is that there are not 1000 people going from A to B. There are 1000 people going from 1000 different starting points to 1000 different destinations. Where do you put the train stations? While on the destination side you could argue that a metro or bus system would be sufficient to move people around the city how would you go about collecting up 1000 people spread around in a 60-100 mile radius around the city at your train station.
I'm not against public transport, but it needs to be understood that simply slapping down some trains is next to useless. Public transportation is a system, and a failure at any point in the system will result in people resorting to private transport (cars). In order to have good public transportation in the US we will need to redesign our communities to facilitate that.
@@JustinGochenour I totally agree with you. Public transport is a single solution to a bigger problem that requires more than one solution to solve. I just believe that America's system can definitely be supported by more public transport and less car-centric suburbs.
If you are an American, I want to ask you, do you choose your car or walk/public transport, why?
Most cities and towns have their important amenities (like shops or malls) far away from the homes, to the point that cars are a necessary part of travel, of course not all cities have this problem, but a majority of American suburbs and cities are like this.
Again, I agree that public transport is a system that is susceptible to problems and accidents. All forms of transport are. I just go off facts and statistics, and whenever public transport have been implemented in a city/town correctly, it definitely lowers congestion and creates cleaner air and can be faster ( for some) than private transport.
I'd like to pose another question.
Let's say history goes on a different path, and everyone owns their own plane, take off and fly to their destination. Would you think this is a better form of transport than everyone using shared planes all at once to get from point A to B. Of course it isn't a perfect analogy and it's like comparing apples to oranges. However, it does make you think the same about cars, would it be better if everyone used a larger shared viechle that can get alot of people from point A to B than private cars.
Like you said, alot of people want to get to alot of different locations at once, and that's why city design is as crucial to transport than transport itself. If six different shops are on the edge and are on other sides of cities and jobs are spread unevenly across a city it would create nightmare scenarios for public transport, and can make it seem as though public transport is obsolete to private transport. But with the right city-planning, right routes for public transport and maybe even some incentives (like tax-cuts for using public transport or bikes and taxing CO2 emissions) than you could see cooler, cleaner cities that are designed for humans, not cars.
Thank you by the way, many people just blow this information off and decided not to rebuttal. I think the back and forths like these can help design a better future!
I was gonna go ahead and slap this one into my watch later list where it would gather dust, but I decided to just watch it now and I’m glad I did.
Reverse induced demand ... my home town took it a little bit too far: the historic city center used to be clogged with traffic everywhere. Downtown squares were parking lots; They turned most of the downtown streets and squares into pedestrian zones, left a few streets for residents and delivery and very few at the edge of downtown were left free for normal car traffic. To still attract customers to the shops downtown, there were 3 park garages at the edge of downtown: one in the west, one in the south and one in the east. It was great, it really was.
But in recent years they took it a step further, and now people which want to park at 2 of these garages think twice about going there at all. Why? Because some streets were shut down for individual traffic, making it super hard to actually get to those garages, and later on to leave that area again. Also some alternative routes to get there were shut down, some one-way streets were turned around etc ... so traffic in the remaining streets builds up even more, making it again harder to get to the park garage ... so many customers want to avoid that trouble and simply drive to one of the malls outside the downtown area, park right there and will go to the shops there as well; They won't take the bus going downtown from there, even with buses going every minute ...
They could change the zoning laws to allow for things other than single family housing to be build near downtown, therefore allowing for more access to downtown
There are other ways to get to places than cars. Maybe a small metro line could work.
@@ZMW7 Yeah, stuff like this has to be done piecemeal alongside improvements in land use and transit options. The point is to provide incentives for people to leave their car behind when they make a trip, not to decide against the trip entirely (or go somewhere else). It's a balancing act.
@@ZMW7 you mean in the city I talked about (which isn't in the US), or about how it would be an option for cities in the US?
@@NoahPurdyFR not in my city ... they tried trams decades ago, but they demolished the tram network and right now the entire public transit network within the city and most of the county is carried out by buses, and train services from the 3 stations providing anything from regional to long distance and international rail services. But rail isn't really relevant for the local public transit in case of that city
Light rail, metro, tram, subway, anything like that wouldn't really be an option to replace the buses there.
Thing is: they built the park garages at the edge of downtown on purpose, to allow them to easily get to and from the downtown area without the need to park the car somewhere else, jump onto the bus and then get off the bus downtown. Now 2 out of 3 park garages are difficult to reach and businesses in the downtown area really see dropping customer numbers.
I must admit: I don't go downtown any more as well ... I used to love it, but the way it's now I hate it.
It's not like bus service would be poor. There are multiple bus lines serving the area on a tight schedule, but leaving it as the only more or less good option is the issue. Making access to those park garages difficult indirectly is just stupid
The obvious solution is to dig a single-lane tunnel under the roads and create new traffic jams down there (!)
🤔Why not use those tunnels for subway trams/trains and leave the cars to run above to save ventilation needs?
In the US it's probably moreso that people are willing to travel from farther away (often enabling them to take advantage of cheaper rent etc) with more road capacity rather than switching away from alternatives... Since there aren't really alternatives.
In the most points you are right. But just a train with 500 seats dondt get rid of 500 cars. There are much more things you need of think to.
Bus lanes and trains are always good, but you can't get rid of all cars. But there are some things that help very good.
A good example is Heilbronn, a city in Germany.
They have a lot of busses, and also some mediums trains that's also cross the city. They have a lot of free park and ride parking spots where are train stops where the city ends.
Parking in the city is expensive, but people from smal villages want to visit the big city also.
So, they drive near to the city, go to the train that don't drive through they smal village and drive in the city without paying a lot for parking. Everything is central, so it's easy to carry your stuff you buy in the train.
The City is very nice, a lot of trees, big sidewalks, bus and cycling lanes. And there a no big traffic jams.
I think they are solve the problem perfectly without somebody gets angry. Because its the best solution for everybody.
anything larger than a 3 lane highway is disgusting, an eyesore and unnecessary
*Tell that Netherlands who has 6 lane highways outside the cities!*
When i heard the "26 lanes" part my european brain couldn't belive it and i had to rewatch that fragment just to make sure i haven't misheard that ;_;
In addition to "induced demand", there's the fact that traffic does NOT behave like a liquid! It's more like a gas that can spontaneously condense into slow moving pockets when the "temperature" gets too low, or density gets too high.
When the traffic is slowed to a crawl, it barely matters how many lanes you have. The total throughput is "extremely low".
The challenge is in making sure the traffic flow never "condenses" or "crystallizes" in the first place.
I wish people would talk more about how traffic has phases like this.
In my experience, it has three matter phases that are only dependent on density, driven by lane changes and speed. If neither restriction is present, its like a gas. If you cannot move at the speed you want, its quite similar to a liquid. If you cannot lane change, its very similar to a solid. Lane changes also induce a lane to slow down, to accommodate the new car. Phantom traffic jams in this context are similar to pressure waves, albeit with a nonlinear phase change element to it.
This implies that preventing phase changes from accidents, traffic jams propagating onto a highway, or lane change speed reductions are the right way to improve traffic flow. So naturally, preventing lane changes using slip lanes, expressways, or bus/train only lanes should yield more ideal results than blindly making the pipe wider. Unfortunately these lanes are often paid, making them useless to the average commuter, which only serves to make the problem worse.
@@Copperbotte Well said!
You overlooked the additional effect that not only do people tend to move from public transport to cars if you widen/build more roads, but people tend to travel further. Eg they live further away, or get a job further away. Or they make journeys they would not have otherwise made.
Im happy most roads in Germany have one to three lanes and there are no plans to add any
Fühl ich
I feel like so many people get left out of this conversation. As someone from the US mid-west (yes, plenty of people live here. it's reasonably priced too ;) ) It seems like when Europeans and US coastliners think about American cities, they think about NYC but more car-dependent, like these highways are a continual choice. Most mid-western cities are just huge suburbs. The people here buy houses in the suburbs, perhaps a county a way, because there is no dense housing in the city, and also in America we are taught that houses are a safer financial decision than living in an apartment, if you can afford it. A house is seen as an "investment" that you make and build until retirement.
So many people, if there was no traffic, would already be driving 30-60 minutes to work, especially in the mid-west and south. And people literally don't see anything that can be done about it. There's also just not anywhere for public transportation to go or lead to. The zoning is all over the place. There's no prevailing districting like you see in Asia or many European places. A big population in America works corporate jobs and those can go anywhere, including right next to this suburb on the other side of town that happens to not be the suburb I live in. But I can't move my house there because housing market, job stability, etc etc. So yes, to milquetoast Jerry supporting the nuclear family, driving 60 minutes seem like the better option. And I really can't fault him for it, tbh.
How is owning an American house a long-term investment? Does that only apply to older buildings, or new construction too?
I see your point, but I think this comment sadly just goes to show that building low density housing across a large expansion of land (aka your typical suburb) is simply bad urban planning. Things like good public transit and basic services within walking distance aren't economically or pracitically feasible in this type of environment, not to mention the enormous land use involved. Most people are then stuck with driving everywhere and you can't really blame them for it.
@@traveller23e There's a lot more stuff you can do by owning a house, like leveraging it for important loans. An important thing is "equity" which means theoretically you will always be able to sell your house, even if you haven't paid it all off yet, and get your money back plus how much it increased in value. With an apartment, you're just throwing money at a landlord and never seeing any of it back.
People also tend to forget size. America is fucking huge lmao.
Moving closer to where you work is always an option. People like to pretend they can’t, but they could if they really wanted to.
The picture on the right at 2:11 is from my hometown! Sadly trains are rather slow here, for various reasons. One of them is difficult terrain to build tracks on. Going to certain places I would be faster by road bike than by train x.x (though I would sweat it)
Is it possible to reduce the size of the road and build a train line next to it?
@@ungesagt people here are absolutely in love with their gas-guzzling tin cans so practically speaking, no, it's not. It would result in the first revolt in the country since 1713.
Politicians: Lets just add a lane for every us citizen, that will probably solve it