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…
Examples of the opposite. The Braess-Pardox Enjoy!
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.
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.
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
I think Veritadism just put out a video explaining some paradox about this topic.
Well, they’re adding one more lane right now here for busses only…
