Traffic levels have been the same for 60 years showing induced demand in action. No matter how many car lanes you start with, or how many you add later, they will always be full.

  • Almacca@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    And they’re all still mostly single occupant. Actually, there’s probably more cars in that picture with multiple occupants than I see on average on the roads these days.

  • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    Each lane/road provides a fixed capacity (supply) of vehicles. The induced demand caused by a surplus from a newly constructed road is the economic phenomenon of demand/supply curves which tend towards equilibrium. Same for the desire to build more roads when demand meets or exceeds capacity.

    https://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/supply_and_demand.gif

    This happens in all areas of transportation and human activity, btw, it is not unique to cars.

    The first issue is some wierd expectation that surplus (no traffic) should be the natural state (it isn’t). The second issue, specific to cars, is that roads saturate very quickly and scale poorly, so the return to equilibrium (saturation) happens much faster than other forms of transportation.

  • Dave@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    The amount of innovation and technology that has gone into cars themselves, whilst completely failing to address the broader problem of “how build civilization” is staggering…

    … but completely makes sense in neo-liberal capitalism.