[tshaddox]

In some sense I understand what you're saying, but that mode of argument has limitations. Like, you certainly wouldn't say "I don't understand how increasing medical costs doesn't count as success, that means people want to spend their money on medical care, doesn't it?"

[twoodfin]

If you doubled the number of hospital beds, doctors, nurses, diagnostic equipment, labs … and demand was high enough to keep prices constant, you’ve doubled healthcare access at a rate patients were already willing to pay.

“Induced demand” in every other industry is described as “latent demand”.

[sagarm]

Induced demand actually does happen in American healthcare: spending goes up with healthcare availability, but health outcomes do not improve past a fairly low level of usage. This is a waste, not productive economic activity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8057171/

The situation with roads is not that different: building more road capacity incentivizes sprawl, leaving the entire network more congested than it was when you started.

Roads just don't scale. The daily commute is like a distributed shuffle: time to complete the shuffle scales superlinearly, probably quadratically given the limited topologies possible with roads. It's not like you can build a hypercube road network.

[tshaddox]

No one is against increasing access to healthcare. But I deliberately chose the example of healthcare costs to be analogous with people experiencing traffic congestion.

[twoodfin]

Right, and I’m suggesting they are, in fact, quite analogous in this context. If there’s latent, unsatisfied demand for healthcare, and you increase the supply, you shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if the new supply is consumed. More people are getting the healthcare they wanted!

[tshaddox]

Yes, but people aren’t complaining that more people drove the route. They’re complaining that congestion was not reduced. And congestion is bad.

[twoodfin]

Same congestion, more demand being satisfied seems like a win to me—and to the marginal drivers, who decided to start driving when they weren’t before, or the new capacity would not have become congested.

This is such an oddball perspective: EDGE, 3G, LTE mobile networks all became increasingly congested as demand rose to meet supply. But nobody thought building out 5G was therefore pointless.