I think there was at least one case where the city went broke maintaining roads and everyone left. That was a success.
That was my every childhood game of SimCity.
My back was to put in rail everywhere with zero roads. People constantly complained about wanting roads, but there was never any congestion. And the desire for roads never seemed to affect anything.
Having been on a small town board, the truth is roads are funded at the state level (may vary by state) with funds distributed to the county governments, who maintain the county highways. The towns and cities get some amount from the county and more from the state to be used for anything highway related.
If this were not the case, and all else being equal many rural towns would go under. Private transportation is currently being subsidized at rates sometimes much higher than the property tax income the towns bring in. It's unsustainable and barely working like everything else, it's like long term vision is irrelevant and only short term gains are even considered....
CityNerd did a video explaining why this happens. It's because city planners and traffic engineers assume that the same proportion of people will drive in the future, just that there will be more of them. So if you assume everyone's still going to drive you have to build more lanes because everyone will drive.
Examples of the opposite. The Braess-Pardox Enjoy!
North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.
90% of city planners quit one lane before fixing traffic forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeFw0I-igI
Robert Moses needs to be more (in)famous as the pioneer of this kind of bullshit. The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a must-read book for anybody that wants to know how the US got so fucked up.
It works exactly as intended, to drive sales of cars.
Building roads does decrease congestion. Just don't place them randomly. Use simulations and modern traffic engineering. Do you think that inaction build the Netherlands?
The netherlands did a lot more than just build roads. They built bike lanes, transit, walkability and made it legal for density to exist in their city, all things that north american cities resist as if it were the plague.
Removing roads decreases congestion: Braess' paradox
Roads for private cars are generally overbuilt and run directly into Braess' paradox. E.g. Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse.
This is ehy im overall neutral on adding lanes.
This post is about the lack of scientific evidence for your theory. Care to supply some?
Assume the same conditions as of the famously quoted Braess' paradox (you do know the sources of what you are claiming, don't you?).
Consider then a subgraph consisting of three path-connected points A, B and C that is also a subtree of a larger more complicated graph representing the entire connected road network. Assume also for simplicity that the three points are equidistant and that A and C are connected through B only and that B is their only connection to the larger network.
Adding a road from A to C would now reduce congestion on the subtree, and cannot increase it on the larger graph due to the tree structure. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader, i.e. you.
TL;DR Wasted my time replying to a sea lion.
Sometimes removing roads actually helps congestion
That's equivalent to only well placed roads removing congestion.
Sure an extra lane can relieve congestion, for a bit then 10 years later you're back to where you started or worse.
This is mostly due to the fact that American cities grow sprawl and not density. So basically unless there's a population collapse adding another lane is a temporary solution.
That's why they are basically always adding new lanes, they can't keep up with the demand. So instead of continually trying to keep up with demand it's time to work on reducing demand
Exactly this post is just extremely uninformed - but since we're in "fuck cars" I'm assuming things don't have to actually be true to fly here. Just anti-cars.
Doubles as the shelf where she keeps her fucks.
Yup. They're just going to add tolls to some of the lanes and make you pay more to use what you already paid for anyway.
Congestion pricing, on the other hand: observably a good policy.
I call them bribery lanes.
Some of that, probably, but also poor road planning combined with Braess' paradox.
Just one more study bro
Well, they're adding one more lane right now here for busses only...
I think Veritadism just put out a video explaining some paradox about this topic.
