Originally Posted by
gerv
... I was reading in the local paper that our recent $110 million freeway expansion no longer helps ease congestion... just 5 years after it was finished.
We really need to think about some strategies for reducing the car population.
Have you read Tom Vanderbilt's
Traffic? If you're curious about transportation infrastructure and driver behavior, it's a must read. A bit dense at times (the reference/notes section is almost 100 pages long), but the information presented therein is fascinating, and highly relevant to anyone who navigates via roads, bikes lanes, or sidewalks (shut-ins will have a harder time relating
).
Anyway, there's an entire chapter titled "Why More Roads Lead to More Traffic", exploring the futility of building our way out of congestion, and the related phenomenon of "disappearing traffic". Disappearing traffic is where, when roads are taken out of a system (usually for maintenance, and occasionally through activism), fewer people drive. That is, without the route available, some people just stay home, or find other means to move themselves. And the converse holds true as well, that if you provide more routes and wider roads, the same number of people will just take more trips. Gains in reduced congestion due to wider and faster roads are quickly eaten up by an increase in driving, as people will just drive more until the new roadway fills up to whatever the drivers who use it feel is the maximum tolerable congestion. More roads = more unnecessary trips.
As for reducing car population, Copenhagen did pretty well when it cut automobile parking from 14,000 to 11,500 spaces, replacing them with parks and bike lanes. As they did, bike traffic rose by %40, and now they have bicycle congestion. Other solutions might be to cut subsidies to oil companies and increase fuel taxes to more realistically price gasoline, or to more closely tie the cost of road maintenance to drivers (increase registration fees so that local road maintenance will draw less upon property taxes, and increase federal fuel taxes to reduce the amount of general income taxes the federal transportation budget draws). Maybe stop widening and re-engineering roads for faster traffic (which makes our cities increasing un-navigible by anyone who doesn't own a car), and shift transportation money from road maintenance to public transportation infrastructure.
Basically, make car ownership more expensive and make car use less convenient, while providing a reliable alternative, and people will drive less. We own more cars than we have people because we can easily afford to. We drive as much as we can because traffic engineers have done everything that they can to make it convenient to do so. We are no longer a one-car-per-household society, because it is so easy not to be. It isn't a conscious decision on anyone's part, we as a species seek out ease and convenience. But knowing this, we can re-shape our culture away from the car, if we truly want to.