| Every additional lane and rail is a good thing because it is a net increase in capacity. Even if it's an expensive road or rail it removes the traffic that considers it a good value from everywhere else. >Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out. Crappy infrastructure increases the cost of geographic distance and that's bad for everyone. > You can't build your way out of traffic Reducing traffic isn't the point. The point is getting more people and goods to and from where they need to be. You can slap a $100 price on a subway ticket or a $100 toll on the highway if you want to reduce traffic. That doesn't help anybody except the people rich enough to regularly pay it. > The only solutions are tolls or quotas. Which themselves have a bunch of negative side effects because you're basically forcing that traffic onto other roads or other forms of transit and many trips will be forgone in the process. You can't create capacity out of thin air by manipulating the cost (money, time or some other metric) of the different transit options. You can only create the illusion of capacity by forcing traffic elsewhere. >In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt. Or a sign that your prices are so high that other options are still less worse by comparison. |
It's economic activity that has a huge amount of negative externalities and infrastructure cost. So if the economic activity generated has a value less than that of the externalities and costs, society is worse off.
So we need a way of limiting demand so that any trip whose benefit is less than its infrastructure and negative externalities doesn't happen.
Currently we mostly do this by making trips really slow and annoying during rush hour. There's obviously a better way but tolls are political suicide.