[shkkmo]

> I've never understood how inducing demand doesn't count as success.

That depends on what you see as the goal. If the goal is reducing congestion, then induced demand means that particular goal is harder to achieve. If the goal is to get more people driving then induced demand is a clear success.

[tshaddox]

Why in the world would "get more people driving" be a measure of success? For industries that directly benefit from that, sure, but I can't imagine how that could be a societal goal.

[dragontamer]

Transportation is directly related to how much your local cities are doing.

When you order goods from Amazon, that gets delivered to you. It might be a road, sea, rail, or plane, but its transportation. The more of packages ordered / delivered, the more things are happening in the city.

The more jobs being created, the more people will need to transport to-and-from work. The more homes built, the more transportation is needed. Etc. etc.

Its a crude measurement with flaws, but generally speaking, the more transportation that's happening, the bigger and better the city is functioning. People wouldn't travel unless they needed to (travel always sucks: traffic accidents, getting stuck, dealing with others on planes/trains/busses, etc. etc.). But we deal with it because without transit, we couldn't do our daily business.

Be it a meeting for work, going to school, delivering goods or other such need.

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Mass transit options, like Rail, get more things done with far less money. But there's a latency issue: rail can be slower for the individual... but its cheaper and more-bandwidth for the city.

This conflicts with individual options like roads: it costs a gross amount of money for an individual to buy a car / use it on the highways (plus the cost of highways themselves: rubber tires wear out faster than steel wheels on trains. Asphalt roads need replacing more often than steel rail lines. Gasoline costs much more than the electricity used to move a train). But the individual latency is such an advantage, that the individual will typically prefer car travel.

[tshaddox]

Yes, but if you reduced the average amount of time stuck in traffic while the total number and distance of trips remained the same, you certainly wouldn't say that your local city is doing worse. Moreover, if you replaced some car trips with other ways of transporting the same person or freight, that certainly isn't a loss for your local city simply because the number of people driving decreased.

[kmeisthax]

Cars don't have an individual latency advantage. If you want to travel somewhere during rush hour, you still have an hour of latency, even if the trip would ordinarily be 15 minutes.

What they do have an advantage on is not having to synchronize with a schedule. If you need to travel 15 minutes by light rail, but the train only comes around once an hour, then missing the train adds an hour to your trip. It doesn't matter if the train never breaks down and has separated right-of-way - running on time is useless if you're not.

The way you work around that is by running more trains so that they can come more frequently. My rule of thumb is that if a transit line has a frequency of 15 minutes or less, I don't need to worry about the schedule because the time spent waiting for the train or bus is less than the time of the overall trip.

However, this is expensive; it only makes economic sense if you actually have that many riders that need to travel along that line. In other words, demand needs to be aggregated. The problem is that cars work the opposite way: they exist specifically to segregate demand. This occurs both directly and indirectly. The direct effect is the ability to immediately depart, which I already mentioned; but the indirect effect is the result of all the infrastructure that cars need in order to work at all. Things like wide highways and parking lots spread out where people need to go and make it far more dangerous to walk from a train or bus stop to your final destination.

In other words, cars cheat - they don't make your commute better, they make anyone who does not own a car have a worse one.

[asdff]

Freeways also carry significant trucking traffic. Like iPhones and food? Increasing throughput makes these things cheaper to deliver into your home from where they are produced.

[mrfusion]

But more people wouldn’t drive if there wasn’t a benefit to it. So you’re benefiting more people.