[lazyjones]

I'm so tired of seeing this kind of nonsense over and over again. No, it doesn't take much less space to move 50 people in a bus than with cars because the effing bus doesn't go where 50 random people need to go. And people wouldn't be owning private cars if it wasn't convenient for them, consequently it's impossible that life would instantly improve for everyone if they had to give them up like the author claims. Then this "induced demand" nonsense that pops up all the time. It's impossible because total traffic cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to begin with. The traffic moving to new or wider roads is missing elsewhere, which is usually good.

But hey, go ahead, try this pipe dream in any large city. It'll work great, like that recent "summer of love" in Seattle.

[jacques_chester]

> because the effing bus doesn't go where 50 random people need to go

This would be a problem if the random destinations were uniformly distributed. They are not. They cluster. And indeed there is a feedback loop between public transport and destination desirability.

> It's impossible because total traffic cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to begin with. The traffic moving to new or wider roads is missing elsewhere, which is usually good.

It sounds like you think induced demand is an instantaneous phenomenon. It's not. It's a dynamic system with a variety of stocks and therefore, a variety of delayed effects that show up over spans of time.

But you can simplify it to an abstract model: supply and demand. You can fairly say that there is a supply of car travel and a demand for car travel.

If you lower the cost of something then, all things being equal, the demand rises. If you make car travel faster and more pleasant than it was previously, then demand goes up until it reaches an equilibrium again. It's easy to estimate where that equilibrium lies: around the current travel time for a road before it is expanded. But then the net cost for other uses of the space has risen, because there is less to go around.

Roads are not immune from economics, just as they are not excused from geometry.

[lazyjones]

> If you lower the cost of something then, all things being equal, the demand rises

No. Only in abstract models with potentially infinite supply and demand. If you lower the cost of plaster casts, more people won't break their legs.

> Roads are not immune from economics, just as they are not excused from geometry.

And economics aren't immune from ideology and disingenuous modelling.

[jacques_chester]

> If you lower the cost of plaster casts, more people won't break their legs.

Now you're misunderstanding elasticity of demand and assuming that demand or supply curves are perfectly linear.

Plaster casts are highly inelastic, but if I jacked the price to $100,000 per, demand will fall off fairly sharply.

> And economics aren't immune from ideology and disingenuous modelling.

My experience is that economists know more about economics than people who beat up the strawman versions.

Your position, as I understand it, is that some other model correctly describes the demand for road travel. What is it? And why is road travel the exception?

[lazyjones]

> My experience is that economists know more about economics than people who beat up the strawman versions.

And mine is that economists disagree with each other more than with anyone else.

> Your position, as I understand it, is that some other model correctly describes the demand for road travel. What is it? And why is road travel the exception?

What model specifically are you talking about? We have N lanes going from A to B, if we add 1 lane, total traffic from A to B will increase regardless of any other circumstances? Is that it?

[robbyt]

People own private cars in the US because the real cost of owning a car is hidden from the car users. E.g., subsidized roads, gas, automobile industry bailouts, and finally global warming and climate impact.

European cities have far fewer cars than similarly sized American cities. Gas and car ownership taxes are are also more expensive in Europe compared to America. The reason for this is that the actual cost of car ownership in the US is being passed on to future generations.

[lazyjones]

> European cities have far fewer cars than similarly sized American cities. Gas and car ownership taxes are are also more expensive in Europe compared to America. The reason for this is that the actual cost of car ownership in the US is being passed on to future generations.

No, the reason for this is that European cities are much older and denser, hence streets are narrower, garages are often impossible to build. Gas is more expensive because most cities in Europe have to import it from far away and because taxes are generally higher, not because we're beacons of virtue while the USA is car owners' heaven.

Here in Austria, the average car owner pays a few 1000 $ per year in car-related taxes plus highway tolls, gas prices are high ($8-9 per gallon) and people are complaining just as much about the cost of car ownership being passed on to future generations or the general public. All while our car taxes/tolls are used to maintain highways and those are used by everyone's cargo deliveries, bus travels and so on.

[ianai]

Gas subsidies have to be amongst the worst things we’re doing to ourselves. But we’re practically forced to them because of the secondary price effects.

[deagle50]

This. If the true cost of driving was passed onto the consumer, cars would get dropped faster than cable TV.

[esoterica]

> try this pipe dream in any large city

Ummm, you do realize that in most large cities around the world (including NYC, although excluding many US cities), most people do not use cars as their main mode of transportation right? It's not some crazy utopian hypothetical, it's literally how most dense cities already work.

> It's impossible because total traffic cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to begin with.

You don't need an "infinite" number of people or cars for induced demand to apply, you just need the number of people/cars to be >>> the road/parking capacity (which is true for any dense city).

[lazyjones]

> It's not some crazy utopian hypothetical, it's literally how most dense cities already work.

In which large city is private car ownership prohibited?