[TulliusCicero]

Force? No. But planning, incentives, market-oriented policies like congestion charges? Sure.

The reason traffic gets so bad during rush hour is a simple case of supply and demand: limited supply road of space, lots of demand, and most importantly, the space is effectively free. If cities charged something approaching market rate for the space, traffic gridlock would disappear.

Of course, this is impractical to do in most US cities, because of a lack of alternative ways to get around. Thus, the first thing that needs to happen is to provide more options; once that's done, you can work on incentivizing people to take the methods that can support more people.

[sbardle]

We have the congestion charge in London. Initially the traffic did drop, but now the traffic is just as busy, and the gridlock lasts all day. Cities like London, NYC and SF are expanding very quickly in terms of population size and density, so in transport terms, the solution will have to be something like automated self driving cars integrated into a conveyor belt like system, which incentivise ride-sharing.

[TulliusCicero]

> We have the congestion charge in London. Initially the traffic did drop, but now the traffic is just as busy, and the gridlock lasts all day.

My guess is that this is for the same reason as the fact that housing prices have gotten crazy high in London over the last decade: demand has continued to outpace supply (and in this case, the congestion charge). I mean, you can always suppress traffic if you're willing to raise the price high enough, right? It's just that politically, that can be a hard thing to do.

> the solution will have to be something like automated self driving cars integrated into a conveyor belt like system, which incentivise ride-sharing.

Sure, Minority Report-style traffic systems are probably a good idea in the long run (although that kind of thing is obviously a very long ways out). We'll still have to make investments in other, denser modes of transportation, though, as well as market-oriented policies like parking fees and congestion charges.

[chongli]

Minority Report style fancy transportation is totally unnecessary. All we need is an automatic congestion charge similar to Uber's surge pricing. Heck, such a system would work great for keeping traffic out of residential areas too.