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Your footnote says that this is just a name, but I would point out that car-dependent suburbs are relatively new, mostly post WW2. The neighborhoods that urbanists like tend to be the older ones, and in fact often describe this as a "traditional" development style.
This is somewhat true, but far from completely. Highways especially are often the domain of the state or federal government, so you have situations like the state of Texas trying to expand I-35 through downtown Austin that the city generally opposes. Or small groups of individuals who join together based on their self-interest rather than political agreement to oppose changes with nitpicky legal maneuvering. In general, lawsuits filed by individuals or small groups are a common tool to prevent development, and the laws these suits are based on can come from any level of government.
Mind-boggling. It’s as if they want Austin to suck as much as possible. Like the suck is part of the charm.
It sometimes legitimately feels like the state does things for no other reason than to frustrate the city and its residents. In this case I think the relevant state officials really do believe that expanding the highway will reduce congestion in spite of overwhelming empirical evidence, but wouldn't be surprised if they felt the ability to throw their weight around and ignore the city's point of view was a bonus.
Expanding will enable people to further satisfy their powerful preference to live further from work. Congestion and total commute time will of course remain approximately the same. And that's a good thing.
Why stop there? Why not buy everyone their own helicopter? It's not the responsibility of government to try to satisfy everyone's preference on everything at no cost to them. That's not economically efficient.
If we had the technology for Blade Runner style flying cars or something I would support them. If helicopters were quiet, affordable and reliable I would support them. I would certainly not accept an argument along the lines of "mini super helicopters are bad because they let people live in single family homes outside of the urban core". Just as I don't expect the government to hand out free helicopters.
I'm not asking for the government to buy me an SUV. I am going to vote for a very small portion of my taxes being used on basic infrastructure such as light rail in the urban core and a robust freeway network.
Sure, and this all sounds good. But cars are very heavily subsidized. I know people don't like to accept this fact, because they see how much they are paying and assume that it can't be that much after subsidies. The fact is simply that driving is very expensive, and costs aside, is a terrible way to have everyone get around inside a city.
Austin has almost no light rail, and what little there is, isn't near I-35. If it did, this wouldn't be such an issue!
I don't think road costs up being "a very small portion" of taxes. This one project is estimated to cost 7.5 billion; Austin's population is about a million. That's $7,500 per resident. Obviously the state is spending the money in this case, and some of the people impacted don't live in the area, but again it's only one project in one small part of the city.
It crosses I-35, twice. It's not a perfect substitute for I-35 because it doesn't parallel it; the "Red Line" (optimistically named to be forward-compatible with future dreams of having a second color too...) connects downtown to the NW, whereas I-35 is still required for anyone connecting to N, NE, S, or SE. If you want to use rail to skip (most) southbound I-35 traffic you have to divert 3 miles west to the Howard Park&Ride first.
2.5M, if you include the whole metro area. And the metro area is very affected by these decisions; a ton of I-35 traffic is commuting from Pflugerville or Round Rock, and the Red Line goes through Cedar Park and Leander. $7,500 per resident goes down to $3,000 per metro resident.
A lot of the people impacted don't live in the area - if you want to go between Dallas/Ft-Worth (6.5M people) and San Antonio (2.5M), you either take a toll loop (expensive for car drivers, speed limits too high for many truck drivers, miles of extra distance) or you slog through I-35. The relative amount of impact is surprisingly small, though, with something like 85% of I-35 traffic from within the metro area.
The plans I've seen are divided into an 8 mile stretch in the center of the city (the expensive part), 8 in the south, 11.5 in the north. That's almost the entire North-South length of the city! And because Austin's historical philosophy toward East-West arterials has been "What's an East-West arterial?", a lot of travel which isn't really North/South as the crow flies gets fed into I-35 for a congested stretch anyway.
I also wouldn't chalk the whole cost up to "cars are heavily subsidized". The expensive new lanes are slated to be HOV-only, in part to make buses more attractive by no longer forcing them to sit in traffic with single-occupancy commuters. Some of the new features are things like decks and pedestrian bridges, connections between bike paths, etc.
On the other hand, I wouldn't bet on $7.5M being the whole cost or on everything planned being a completed benefit. The $7.1B "Project Connect" expansions to public transit (which you might interpret as "non-car-users are heavily subsidized", to be fair?) have been downscaled to a useless shadow of what was originally promised to voters.
Yes, it's not nearby for most of its length, and even the closest stops to where it crosses aren't very close to the highway (except for the very last one, I think).
That definition requires you to go halfway to San Antonio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Austin
It may stretch along a large distance, but it's still a small portion of the total area--or road mileage, but those are roughly proportional.
Also, if you're going to use the whole Metro area for population to split the cost of a road, you should then also use the whole metro area for the number of roads that have to be paid for.
It will still be a slog, that's the whole point of induced demand! Those other cities, as I've pointed out in this thread, have much better loops. If your primary concern is thru traffic, then look at the loops on the edge of the city.
That's an improvement; we'll see if it turns out that way.
Depends on the details. Probably yes, in practice, but it is possible to have transit pay for itself--Japan, most notably, has private train lines, and NYC used to have private subways. But if you're going to subsidize one form of transportation, transit has fewer externalities and higher capacity.
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Wait, no. That’s the opposite of the point I was making. I-35 through downtown Austin is 3 lanes each direction. It’s awful. That’s the same width as I-35 through rural areas between San Antonio and Waco.
You seem to have fallen for the “induced demand” meme. No, the demand is already there. People want to live in the suburbs and work downtown. If throughput were increased, more people would be able to do that. The welfare of the area would be increased. People wouldn’t have to pay massive rent for shitty apartments near their work. Not to mention the fact that I-35 is, you know, an Interstate. People hate driving through Austin. Other Texas cities with functional freeway systems are objectively easier to get around.
It's not a meme; it's basic economics which is also backed up by fairly overwhelming empirical evidence.
Given Austin's zoning map, a correct statement would be "Austinites are largely prohibited from living anywhere except a suburb or right in the middle of downtown." Also, people may "want"* to live in the suburbs and drive into downtown, but that's not possible. Doubling freeway capacity would not change that, because it is literally impossible to fit the whole population into cars. They simply take up too much space.
*I put "want" in scare quotes because rarely do such people want to pay all of the costs associated with doing so.
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere. It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic, construction, and possibly have their property sized to make room. It would separate downtown from East Austin even more, etc.
There's no reason to have the only interstate go straight through downtown. Lots of cities have interstates that go around the core. San Antonio has 410. Houston has 610 and I think others I don't recall the number of. DFW has 635, 20, and again I think others. Elsewhere, 95 goes totally around Boston, while 90 and 93 go into the city. Austin only has 45, which isn't an interstate and is a toll road, so all the trucks and other thru traffic go through the city even though it's slower.
No, it isn't. Here's a good video by an economist covering it.
I guess if the induced demand argument was rephrased to "in places that already see infrastructure being used, it is likely that people will, eventually, fill the new capacity once new capacity is built" it would be less objectionable. But then it doesn't mean that the solution is automatically "just don't build anything, ever". It may as very well just be to limit the flow of immigration to this area.
You can also make the more subtle argument that, in specific cases, the costs of widening a road are not worth the benefits compared with the alternatives, but I don't buy that as a fully-general argument for all roads everywhere.
I cannot find any information on EE's background; what is the basis for calling him an "economist"? The channel has spawned a number of threads on /r/badeconomics (e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/mt3emq/economics_explained_thinks_theres_us/, https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jg5gpf/economics_explained_on_heres_why_supply_and/,
https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/j8p85o/misleading_with_statistics_how_economics/) so I'm definitely not going to take that channel's word for anything. Speaking of BE, here is a thread which points out that ID is, in fact, just basic supply and demand analysis (and that it doesn't really need a separate name).
This video never addresses actual arguments for ID or the best evidence. In fact, it seems to agree that the elasticity of demand is basically 1, which is true. It A) makes a semantic argument about whether "induced" is a good term, and then B) misrepresents the empirical evidence. For example, following this video, you would think there's only been 1 or 2 studies of ID, one of which just looked at increases in road miles and driving over time, but this is not the case. No citations are provided, either, to check any of his following claims
Who is saying this?
That wouldn't stop the existing residents from using the infrastructure more. And would be a terrible solution for other reasons.
That "more subtle" argument is what I've been trying to convey in this thread--it's almost certainly net negative to double the width of I-35 through downtown Austin, but also for many other similar road projects. You also seem to be missing that a lot of people do expect congestion to be reduced.
Induced demand is often the justification for opposing road widening projects, or even supporting demolishing roads (a "road diet"). I'm not sure what else the conclusion would be, if you not only legitimately believed the version where roads always fill up immediately once you build them, but also that demand would just magically decrease if you took away roads.
I know that it's also used in the reverse direction to justify building buses, bike lanes, etc. Apparently for those modes, the demand that's been "induced" doesn't end up stressing the network to the point of congestion like it would for cars and roads (not sure why; maybe it's just because they're always fundamentally slower than driving?). Regardless, I still think it's justified to describe induced demand as an anti-YIMBY/pro-NIMBY/anti-building/pro-demolishing sentiment, as most of the time, it's invoked as an argument against car infrastructure. If I were making an argument for building bike infrastructure, I would rather argue that the demand is already there, just suppressed.
For what reason would existing residents start using the infrastructure more? Sure, you might see an increase from latent demand, but latent demand is the exact thing that's going to be suppressed when congestion is too high. If it was just latent demand, then the highway wouldn't end up being congested again. It would at worst only reach the point just before travel times significantly start slowing down.
I can think of a few reasons (and this was just me coming up with a third alternative), but let me put it this way: When you have a lot of people in an area, it ends up placing a huge demand on transportation infrastructure. For example, you can look at photo after photo of overcrowded train in Mumbai, India. Is the solution to build more trains? Well, where are you gonna put the trains and tracks? You'll end up having to demolish apartment blocks to do so, but that's introducing the same negative externalities of many road widening projects.
I know Quantumfreakonomics was proposing to double the width, but personally, I believe it would be more reasonable to only add 1 or 2 lanes instead (it looks like there's enough space for it on many parts of the freeway that are at grade with the surface).
In the first few years before population growth catches up, yes. Similar situation with the Katy freeway widening.
Induced demand is an argument against expansions because reducing congestion is a common argument in favor.
I'm not sure if you just haven't ever looked up the actual capacity of different methods or what, but a slower method being less congested doesn't make sense. Their made advantage is that they take up vastly less space per person, space being extremely valuable and limited in more populated areas. (Also, transit naturally lends itself to congestion pricing--if major roads had toll roads with congestion pricing, that would substantially reduce congestion!).
If you equate "building" with "car infrastructure" that's just your issue. You can build things other than highways.
It's not the same, because you can fit vastly more capacity into less space. Trains also often go underground, although I don't think most US cities need that.
What is the point of a 7 billion dollar, multi-year project that will be obsolete in less time than it took to complete?
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Let's say we add the new lanes, and congestion stays the same, and travel times stay the same. Is this a failure?
Let's say you have a single supermarket in a town. It's too crowded, the lines are always long. A second supermarket opens in a town. There's enough demand that, now, both supermarkets are too crowded, and the lines are too long. Is this bad? No, it's strictly an improvement - more people are buying food now! And the supermarket makes more money!
The same is true of 'induced demand' - the goal of 'reduce congestion' wasn't accomplished, but a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to' was. The extra people who drive on the new highway are benefitting greatly from the change - they can now get to places they couldn't before!
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
I think the induced demand idea comes from the observation that while travel times for things like trains are fairly stiff as utilization approaches capacity, roads tend to see a large increase in travel times when approaching capacity. I don't think it's aptly described by induced demand, but it is likely rather frustrating that an increase in capacity is just that, with no decrease in travel times. This is an especially bitter truth because the total throughput may be maximised at less than full capacity.
Yeah. If the only cost one pays to drive is in travel time, and more people want to use the road at 0 congestion than can, congestion will be the 'price' that rises until the market clears. And if the supply curve is X people can use the road at 0 congestion, but X * 1.05 people can use the road at high congestion ... if the demand curve is in the wrong place, everyone can end up with high congestion. But this isn't a "distributive effect" as it'd be if it was a toll price extracting surplus value, because nobody's "getting" the lost time to congestion, it's just burned.
I'm not entirely sure what a 'full capacity but not max throughput' road looks like? (genuine question as opposed to rhetorical)
I wouldn't be surprised if past a certain point congestion decreased capacity.
A traffic jam.
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I missed some of these comments from before.
"Don't tax people as much" is pretty efficient. You can make any project at all seem good by comparing it to something even worse, but this isn't a high standard.
You're not counting any of the money spent as part of the net negative. If we could teleport roads in for free, then yeah, that be a different calculation. But the roads are free to drive on, which means they are being used above the level which is economically efficient, and building more lanes would just exacerbate the problem. This is what I mean by net negative: We're spending more and more money for what is, yes, a fairly marginal benefit. You know what would let a lot more people commute faster, with fewer externalities? A train.
Let me ask you this: Is there any domain where this argument doesn't apply? Should the government supply every good at 0 cost to the consumer? Because I'm pretty sure that communism doesn't work very well.
By this reasoning, any salaried employee is also being used above the level which is economically efficient, at least if the employer has a choice of what assignments to give the employee.
...what?
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If your goal is to reduce congestion, which is typically a major stated goal of these projects, then yes, it's clearly a failure.
I don't think this statement means anything, but also there is no "market" here. The state government just wants to build more highway, regardless of costs or benefits.
I don't know why every time I end up in a discussion about roads on here, all of the car enthusiasts use the same analogy as if I don't understand that more people driving means that more people are going places. That's not the question. The question is how this particular use of space, money, and time compares to alternatives. It's like offering starving people 1,000-dollar truffle mushrooms as food, and then when someone points out that 98% of them are still starving because you could only afford to feed 2%, you pat yourself on the back because, well, you fed some people, right?
Plus, you can't just completely ignore everyone except for the group who benefits. What about the businesses and homes that would be subsumed by the wider freeway? Are they better off? What about people who live in East Austin and would like to be able to get into downtown without driving? What about people who can't or don't want to drive?
Okay, lets bring some numbers into it. I-35 through downtown has an average annual daily traffic count (AADT) of 150,000-200,000. The widest section of the Katy Freeway in Houston has an AADT of about 300,000. It seems plausible that if we doubled the width of I-35 we could get an AADT of 250,000-300,000 before experiencing the current level of congestion. That's 50,000 extra commuters (since AADT measures traffic both ways). To put that in perspective, 50,000 is 4% of the entire population of Travis County. Suppose an entire city block has to be demolished the whole length of the freeway through the county, does that directly impact 50,000 people? Do 4% of the county's citizens live or work directly adjacent to the East side of I-35? It's not like these people are thrown into the fires of Mordor either. The massively increased throughput will open up development opportunities further away from the city center, increasing the supply of housing and driving down rents.
Having your business seized is probably much worse than being able to live in a slightly further out area is good, and destroying the downtown makes it less valuable to everyone, including the new commuters, but as I tried to describe in my replies to curious, the main issue is cost. 7.5 billion is $140,000 per commuter. Another issue is just time--Austin's population increased by 200,000 between 2005 and 2015 (corresponding to each of those commuters supporting a family of 4, though in reality this is generous since families aren't that big any more). Are you going to build another 4 lanes every <10 years? Constant construction, until the whole of downtown is pavement?
The problem isn't being too far from the city, it's limitations on development. There's enormous amounts of underdeveloped land extremely close to downtown. Destroying an apartment building close to downtown so you can build more sprawling houses far away is a terrible way to reduce rents. Similarly, development opportunities far away are much less valuable. Like, this is just so backwards--let's destroy development downtown so we can build slightly more very far away? Should we just not have cities at all?
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By market I meant "the supermarket", not a market in the economy sense, sorry
Well, that's the main stated goal because 'people who do not shop or live or work here, but will after we do ' isn't a particularly valuable constituency for local politics, whereas 'people who live here and want driving to be easier is'. But ... imagine we expand the highways, but we track everyone who uses the highway & their frequency of use in the preceding months, and ban anyone from using the highway more frequently than they did in the past. This would ensure congestion is relieved. But seems dumb, precisely because 'existing people driving a bit faster' seems worse than 'more people using the highway'?
If all the transit-urbanism claims are true and that money should go into efficiently constructed subways instead, and if doing so would cause road use to be demanded so much less that current congestion dries up ... strong assumptions, but then yes, the current highway expansion would be pointless. But given that alternative isn't happening, and both lack of political will and existing dysfunction in construction in the US make it unlikely to happen soon. Whereas the highway expansion is happening. So outside of that, what better alternatives are there for that money, do you think?
It makes the question of 'should we stop handing out the truffle mushrooms'? And - if you're an individual who has that power, yes, you should simultaneously stop buying truffles and start buying rice. But given I don't have that power, I don't see how advocating against building the highway helps much - because if the highway stops, the existing (stronger) forces preventing better (i am assuming they are better for this discussion, haven't thought enough to be sure) forms of transit won't suddenly dissipate, we'll be arguably worse off, without expanded highways or better transit
Ok, the combined revenue (or profit) of the 2 markets is higher than of the single supermarket before. Yes, but this doesn't tell us anything. There is no corresponding value in the analogy, because the roads are free to use. There's also no way to know, in this case, what the correct number of roads actually is, because again there is no market (general definition).
A ban is dumb, but there should be congestion pricing. Keeping the highway uncongested is actually relatively valuable, because it increases throughput. But again, the real problem is that you will never build enough highways. It is impossible.
As the article I linked mentioned, the city recently passed a bond to fund more transit. But overall, I find this logic fairly circular, like when liberal groups use endless litigation to drive up the cost of the death penalty, and then try to have the death penalty banned because it's so expensive. Part of the reason transit is so expensive is because of people who want to build more roads instead. (For what it's worth, I don't think most US cities need a subway. Light rail is fine, and even in the US that compares pretty well in terms of cost per mile per passenger's worth of capacity).
The city is working on better transit, and either project will certainly take years, if not decades, to complete, and probably be subject to substantial opposition and delays. Overall it seems like your argument boils down to "building roads has more existing political support, so let's keep providing more political support to building more roads" which, again, seems circular.
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The market in this case is utility enjoyed by people living where they prefer.
...what? I have no idea what you're trying to say. This is just a non sequitur.
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