cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35812571

‘There might be a small benefit at first, but in a year, the traffic will be worse than before as people change their habits,’ says Transport Action Ontario official

Highway expansion leads to more sprawl, worse congestion: prof ‘There might be a small benefit at first, but in a year, the traffic will be worse than before as people change their habits,’ says Transport Action Ontario official.

Vehicle congestion has risen on the 22-kilometre public stretch of Highway 407 East just months after Premier Doug Ford scrapped tolls while promising to save drivers’ money and cut their travel times.

Traffic on major highways around Toronto isn’t improving despite promises of gridlock relief from Premier Doug Ford — and some are questioning the province’s heavy investment in road extensions and new highways.

Highway 401 remains as clogged as ever, and on the 22-kilometre public stretch of Highway 407 East, vehicle congestion is growing just months after Ford scrapped tolls on that section, promising to save drivers’ money, cut travel times and fight gridlock.

Ford himself has acknowledged the problem, saying Highway 407 is “getting pretty busy” since tolls were lifted — even hinting the province may have to consider adding lanes to “lighten up the traffic.”

“I’m always getting the calls — people are coming home from the cottage, it’s getting pretty jammed up on there,” Ford said. “But if it’s jammed up there, I always say it must be taking congestion off another part, I guess the 401.”

Peter Miasek, president of Transport Action Ontario, recently drove the free section of the 407 and found it “pretty crowded.” He said this was easy to predict, pointing to the well-known phenomenon of induced demand — when cheaper or faster driving leads to more vehicles on the road.

Removing tolls, adding lanes or building new highways may speed traffic briefly, but people quickly adjust by driving more and travelling at peak hours, he added.

“There might be a small benefit at first,” Miasek said, “but in a year, the traffic will be worse than before as people change their habits.”

“When you build more highways, you’re lowering the price of driving,” Casello said. “When you lower the price of something, more of it gets consumed. So, the more highways you build, the more people will drive and the more the city itself will expand.”

He says public transport works in the opposite way. Development tends to grow along transit lines, concentrating activity rather than spreading it.

“Because public transit has such scalable capacity, in our own LRT (light rail transit) system here in the small region of Waterloo, we can move about 1,000 to 1,200 passengers per hour on an arterial with only six trains an hour,” he said. “This becomes a very effective way to move high volumes of people.