> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.

Even with that unrealistically idealised scenario, if you had similarly idealised public transport (station within 5 minutes walk either end, trains every 5 minutes) I'd still choose the train much of the time. I could actually get something done on my laptop instead of having to concentrate on the road, plus I could get up for a stretch mid journey (without stopping). It would be different if I had a lot of luggage or was bringing the kids, though.

My point is that driving is not always inherently more attractive than public transport.

After writing that post, I started drafting an edit to acknowledge that clever marketing is another way to encourage greater use of public transport. In my mind I imagined a campaign highlighting the time people get back not having to drive through heavy traffic. The advertisement could say, "Give yourself more time to do the things you love," accompanied by a wholesome image of a smiling person reading a book on the train.

Then it occurred to me that nobody would actually be reading a book. They would be doom-scrolling Instagram or watching wingnut political propaganda on YouTube. I'm starting to wonder if people might be mentally better off behind the wheel...

Making driving worse instead of making public transport better is such a public sector-brained take.

> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.

Cars don't even have tables; let alone toilets, dining areas, sleeping cabins, etc. Even those which do (e.g. RVs) would require a solo traveller to stop in order to use them.

No thanks, I'll stick to the train.

Increasing ownership and fuel costs is wrong, as it makes life more difficult also for people living in areas where public transport is not feasible.

yes, lets make things harder for people in certain situations cause we know what's best for them.

> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.

What kind of nonsense is this? People take public transport it's better than driving. You don't need to expend mental cycles focusing on the road, you can do something else while you're on the go: chat to friends, browse the internet, read a book, sleep, etc. Driving is dead time.

> People will generally choose whichever mode of transport is most convenient

ok that is one fourth of the conversation, or less.. sure, marketing and economic signals.. got it.

The historic rise of the personal auto versus all else was partly fueled by a social dynamic where "privelage is defined by the ability to remove yourself from the dirty and dangerous crowds of non-privelaged humans".. Autos have dramatically filled the transportation sector because clean and intelligent ME can ride next to foul dangerous person YOU without contact reliably.

Notice the profound growth of personal aircraft for the newly wealthy. Google upper-levels are famous for this. Personal aircraft are some of the most anti-ecological and anti-efficient modes of transport ever.. check out the stocks and sales figures.. huge growth in the last years.

America and others have successfully made ugly reality of social constructs into marketing talk and "rational decisions" but the reality is not fully described by those IMHO

Yep. In the future, only billionaires and politicians shall be allowed private travel. The common man shall be crammed into public transport where he can sweat, sneeze, touch, grab etc. the rest of the common man.

Forcing the public to abandon the comfort of private travel seems right out of the WEF playbook.

Yup... hours of commuting time just to sit in Zoom/Teams/Slack/whatever calls while in the office instead of at home makes no sense at all, and is bad for the environment (even if you use public transportation, not going to the office still emits less CO2 than going there). But because RTO is just a way of trying to get rid of employees without severance costs, these and other points will invariably fall on deaf ears...

I wonder if a very small tax for RTO (perhaps with exemptions for manual jobs) would do the trick?

I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.

One of the problems indeed.

Though IMHO it's just lack of political will.

Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost. Data centers are infamously now being built at society expense (electricity and water capacity), sometimes literally in peoples backyards.

At the moment I don't have the receipts, but from anecdotes - it's all just political will.

There's a highway extension? Some properties are taken by eminent domain, some other NIMBYs are told to just suck it up.

Data center? Forget about it - foundations are being laid this moment (sometimes no matter the law)!

High speed rail? We must listen to every NIMBY on the proposed path, hence it will take 200 years to listen to all complaints and align opinions of the people impacted. Millions speant on "research, enviornmental impact and public opinion" - project stalls and is closed after 5 years.

NB: I am not from USA, I think this pattern fits many (especially western) countries. Successful projects (I repeat myself) are always based on political will, when rule/law framework is designed to make such projects easier and much cheaper.

NB2: Also as with anything - when you start building you get experience and expertese - the more you build the cheaper it gets. A lot of places havent built new train/metro/tram line in decades - hence all expertese must be built from scratch (from policies, to government clerks knowing how to deal with such projects, to construction businesses who never built rail in 50 years, etc.).

The challenge that "developed" countries / cities have is that there's already a lot of existing (and aging) infrastructure around.

Meanwhile in other countries they build new cities from scratch, including infrastructure based on current-day knowledge of how these things pan out long term.

I think the US has the space and funds to do so. If they were to build a new city from scratch for the next 250 years, what would it look like?

This feels like an instance of America being unable to build things due to corruption.

Two miles of any lane shouldn't cost over a hundred million dollars per mile. Repainting a lane should be vastly less and even if they're building a new flyover just for buses it shouldn't cost that much. Something is happening there. It is not getting built in an effective way.

> However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects.

A very good way to deal with this is to recognize that all infrastructure needs maintenance and periodic replacement. Once it is time to replace a road, that is when you change it to include bike paths, bus lanes and so on.

You need some foresight, planning, make new road designs part of law, and political will. Some countries have made this work very well.

Okay, how would you spend $346 million?

The whole point of a city is all the destinations you can teach. Less km means you can go less places. No density isn't an answer, because some destinations are not dense, and even if they are we can cram more places in.

I've been traveling around in Europe without a car for several days now, including several fairly rural areas.

There's a distinctly American trope in play, that if the bus or train doesn't stop more or less exactly at your destination, then it's going to be totally useless. Except, you look at the rural European countryside, and there is still a fairly reliable--and well-used, certainly not "only one rider on the bus"--bus system. And this is in the countryside that is less densely populated than most American suburbs or exurbs. It is totally possible to make mass transit work, even in the car-oriented hellscape of most American cities.

The main thing that American public transit systems seem to be really allergic to is the concept of frequency--a high frequency transit system is generally necessary for usability, but your typical American transit system responds to a perennial funding crisis by cutting frequency, which tends to lead into a ridership death spiral--cutting frequency cuts ridership, loss of ridership leads to loss of funding, which they respond to by cutting frequency.

> The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.

IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.

I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:

> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.

Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.

[1] correct me if I am wrong on this.

I believe this is based on actual average usage, not by assuming the vehicles are full.

> It's widely accepted that less congestion will encourage people to travel by car more, which will soon eat up the gains

This is not only not widely accepted but extremely misleading. The nature of "induced demand" is really that congestion suppresses demand. Which behaves in an entirely different way than the name implies.

If demand was being induced then all attempts to relieve congestion would be permanently impossible, which is nonsense. There are empirically places with less traffic congestion. Whereas if demand is being suppressed then an apparent capacity shortfall in the amount of 0.5X may really be a shortfall of X. Adding 0.5X then doesn't work, because congestion will remain until you add X, with the suppressed demand filling back in to the extent that you satisfy it.

In order to relieve the congestion you have to add enough capacity to satisfy the demand that would exist in the absence of congestion, which is more than the amount that exists now, but not an infinite amount that unconditionally consumes all possible capacity or efficiency increases.

In a situation like this, induced demand could "easily" (on a technical, not a political sustainable level) be combated by shifting subsidies from car -> public transport. Induced demand won't be taken up as readily if there is a significant monetary penalty for it.

In many instances removing or repurposing lanes (road diet) decreases congestion much more effectively than just adding capacity.

Congestion occurs naturally regardless of capacity due to fluctuations in flow (jitter) more often than being over capacity (this is civil engineering 101). By repurposing lanes for dedicated turn lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, and/or pedestrian walkways, you remove many of the triggers for jitter.

Synchronizing traffic (connected autodrive?) would do much more for removing congestion than just adding high over head capacity.

https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/road-diets/road-diet-c...

Induced demand is a real, observed phenomenon for both roads and public transport. However, because of density differences, it is generally easier to increase service frequency for public transport than to add lanes for low-density road traffic.

Empirically, this pattern is observed repeatedly.

> If you believe that adding lanes doesn't reduce congestion, then you must also believe that adding transit doesn't reduce congestion.

The problem with road congestion is the number of personal vehicles inefficiently carrying 1-2 people while taking up a lot of space on the road.

In any situation where the roads would be clogged with personal vehicles an effective transit network will be carrying dozens or even hundreds of people per vehicle in vehicles that may not even be sharing the same lanes and thus can't contribute to road congestion.

1. Like others said - induced demand. You add one highway lane - more people will jump into cars to use it. You add tram/metro line instead - same people would like to use that instead of sitting in traffic jam, taking away traffic from the highway.

2. Continuing from first point - see linked graph in parent comment. Light rail has an order of magnitude capacity per lane compared to cars. For 20 lane highway you'll need 2 lines of light rail or 1 lane of "heavy rail" (as per graph). Insane difference!

3. There's a reason "one more lane" is a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...

You're completely wrong on safety. Driving is much much more dangerous than trains by orders of magnitude.

I know what you're getting at when you write safety, but I want to be clear that this is not the same thing as safety.

Do you think Google should get government sign-off on every change to its routing algorithm?

I had a similar question and am generally curious if google has an internal IRB or equivalent for these studies. Given their outsized influence, there is a reasonable chance of uncoordinated interaction between their efforts and other ongoing studies. For a trivial example, consider interaction between google maps rerouting experiment near an event and localized uber surge pricing.

I think that's already very much a problem, and given that they constrained it to routes that didn't have a significantly different drive time the risk seems low.

This is also my experience. It would suggest routes that make no sense (to a local) in an attempt to “divert” away from traffic, which ends up costing more time and petrol anyway.

City planners and zoning have been a disaster for US cities.

Found the European :)

It can’t be helped. Roads are not only locally funded and the only thing allowing residents to free-ride on everyone else’s contribution to this commons is the information asymmetry. It’s similar to the fact that San Franciscans and Athertonians have “slow streets / no through streets” which allow a few to retain exclusive road use for themselves.

With increased information comes more efficient utilization and no doubt the free-riders will find that troubling since it’s no longer a free ride with the asymmetric effect where they can use my roads but I can’t use theirs.

In an ideal world, we would use our Fastraks to charge for marginal road use and a locality can recoup capital investments it made by charging appropriately for marginal use.

Do you not have shoulder lanes? I ask because I’ve lived places that don’t and I’ve always wondered if you just die if EMS doesn’t have a lane to get to you.

Any examples?

Another random fact is that Norman Mailer coined ‘factoid’ to refer to a fabrication presented as fact, but now means the opposite (as in, a fact presented as a fact, not a fact presented as fabrication).

So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.

> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options,

Yup.

And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.

Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.

> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.

Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.

Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.

This is like, a post-hoc rationalization.

Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)

If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.

If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.

The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield.

There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.

I am liking the term “car brained” more and more for this type of attitude.

Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.

The relative price of those cramped urban centers where this is true suggests that at least a few more people would choose this path if it were cheaper.

Here is your easy solution:

Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2

Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.

The best way is to change our communities, even if that takes time and money.

This sounds simple, but many people are already living further away because they can’t afford to live downtown near where they work. Add kids into the equation, and many people who could live there without them are also forced out.

Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.

I've had this experience. 10 minutes in it hit me that we're all only here only because Google suggested so.

It was some kind of dirt road that almost never had this sort of traffic and you could see that from the faces of the locals, as we were passing them by at maybe twice walking speed.

So many god damn unprotected left turns on mapping software. Some of them illegal too like asking you to do it when a sign says no left turns during listed hours.

Apple Maps does this too but the threshold seems to be higher - it's a lot less willing to do it.

I've had Google try to route me across private property (an apartment complex parking lot) to avoid a signaled intersection and save a couple of minutes.

You wouldn't just charge more for driving. You do it in combination with funding public transport, building safer cycling routes, and removing roadblocks from building cheap housing near PT hubs.

Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.

In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.

Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.

Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?

Wrong term, indeed :)

Government data sources can input real time data into Google Maps [1]. So, it's more likely than not that local police or state DoT is behind that.

[1] https://contentpartners.maps.google.com/

The whole idea is to let people slip in the gap. It's the very lack of gaps that causes the whole jam in the first place.

Much as they have features for walk / bike / transit traffic, they could suggest step-by-step carpool instructions: "1. meet with (other Google Map carpool user) X at location Y. 2. In one car, both of you drive to location Z."

Obviously, huge challenges here (is person X a serial killer, etc.) But Google can handle moonshots.

All attempts to reimagine transport are train but worse, except for the occasional bike but worse.

Every now and then, an especially inventive inventor manages to do both at once. And that's how you get the Shweeb.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7qNOtgrIjO4

People hate patronizing systems in their cars already, not sure this would help

Ticket everyone who deviates from the mean speed too much. You wanna stop at the end of the ramp instead of merge then fine, but it'll cost you the same as the guy who's going 100 in the same stretch.

nope, software patents are stupid

What is the minimum market share you need to make this work (a) assuming competition stays "neutral" and (b) assuming adversarial actions?

Sure. Pedestrian deaths are above the 2015 levels in all the large West Coast cities that went full-on with the Zero Vision project. Numbers are for 2015 and 2025.

Seattle: 7/18

Portland: 11/20

LA: 130/150

SF is unchanged at 24 (they had a HUGE drop from 2024, luckily).

And no, the following excuses do not apply:

COVID - deaths started growing _before_ COVID.

Car size increase - cars did not increase significantly during this time.

Population increase - ditto.

If you drive the same route frequently you can definitely figure out which intersections/areas are improperly configured. There's a stretch of road I drive on several times a week where the speed limit was dropped from 40 to 30 a couple years ago, but the lights are all still timed for 40. If you speed you get a sea of green, but if you drive the new speed limit you end up stopping at half the lights.

I like XKCD but I don't really agree with the underlying premise of this one.

When I was in the Netherlands, one of the global gold standards in terms of urban planning and design, I noticed it wasn't only more pleasant as a pedestrian or cyclist, it was more pleasant as a driver as well. Lights were smart and did not sit on red forever if you were the only one waiting at an intersection.

This comic suggests there's some "invisible, massively complicated" mesh of signal interactions we can never possibly fathom, and therefore wasting precious hours over the course of our lives sitting at an intersection is the most optimal one.

The Dutch have figured this out, why can't North America?

I would occasionally go to the office toward the tail end of covid and traffic was essentially non existent. We were well past the big lockdowns and shuttered restaurants at that point but RTO hadn't kicked in. It wouldn't take much to drastically change the traffic landscape.

37% is a huge amount though. Obviously fixing the problem would require many different solutions to come together, but that's an immense improvement that can be made with a mere law.

Just drive anywhere with more than usual density in traffic and you’ll find trucks in the fast lane when they stop and start create gaps in the fast lane where no traffic can go. If you took out trucks altogether during peak hours you wouldn’t have these slow bubbles of traffic at the worst times..

Edit: let’s think of this from a pure scientific point of view - if you had 3 lanes and split traffic across them based on a range of speed - that would be the most optimised in terms of throughput for all lanes. Now, consider a reverse Amdahl's Law… what’s the worst thing you could do to make the fastest lane crawl which in effect kills total throughput across ALL lanes? Put a slow truck in it! Put a few, and you’ve just turned the lane giving you the highest throughput to most likely the slowest lane.

I just parked my car after another morning of commuting. Thought experiments alone in today’s traffic again confirmed my theory.

They aren’t dangerous. Road fatalities are still very low per mile driven and are falling over time. Cars are getting safer all the time with their sensors and intelligent features like automatic braking. The war on cars is an irrational safetyism campaign driven by selfish bicyclists more than anyone else. And the goal vision zero proposes makes no sense because it doesn’t account for the benefit of cars.

Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?