[njarboe]

The concept of induced demand does not say you can't build your way out of traffic. This idea seems to come up a lot in transportation discussions. Driving a car on a road is not free in either money or time, so when a new road fills up it is because more people are going somewhere they want to go and are pay a cost to do so. Yes, when you build a new road near where there are already traffic jams, the new road gets filled up. This is not some magical thing that with infinite roads people will just drive all day so that they are full. I think most people who use this phrase don't quite understand it. The have learned that cars are morally bad and induced demand is some kind of concept that says building new roads for cars is pointless. I ask you, if there was a way for people to have instant point-to-point transportation that had little environmental impact, would you support its implementation?

The whole point of Musk's tunneling project is that with tunnels you can build as many tunnels as you want without the negative aspects of roads which are mainly taking up surface space and making a lot of noise.

[gowld]

Infinite roads are not an option. If there is more pent-up demand than total possible road capacity, then there will never be enough capacity.

[njarboe]

"If there is more pent-up demand than total possible road capacity, then there will never be enough capacity." That is a tautology.

With tunnels you can probably increase capacity by 100 times without going very deep. That would support some kind of crazy Hong Kong level density of people in the whole LA basin. Everyone in the US could live there. After that happens one can worry about this infinity demand potential.