[azylman]

> Sometimes you just need a wider road. Pretending that's never the case is preposterous. If that was true then why do we keep multi-lane highways open instead of closing all but one of the lanes? Wouldn't that improve traffic, under this theory?

You're setting up this strawman where the argument is "improve roads" vs. "do nothing". That's obviously not the case. The argument is "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit". Demonstrably, improving roads is worse than improving public transit. You refer to this as a "fool's conclusion" yet this has been a well-known fact in the field for almost a century. The wikipedia article I linked has some good information on this if you'd like to learn more.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Your setting up this strawman where the argument is "improve roads" vs. "do nothing".

Your claim is this:

> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand

That claim is false and is not a straw man because you actually claim it.

Improving mass transit might work as an alternate solution, sometimes, in specific contexts.

That doesn't prove that adding more lanes wouldn't also work, and it's also not universally true.

A large fraction of the traffic on I-95 is trucks. How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?

Many highways are congested at a specific choke point. You could make a completely free thousand mile an hour bullet train to transport people from one side of the choke point to the other and solve nothing because people would get to the other side without a car and be unable to get the last ten miles to their destination. But once you get past the choke point, the traffic diverges in every direction and there is no longer enough density to justify a mass transit route.

Sometimes you just need a wider road.

[azylman]

Maybe try quoting the entirety of what I said?

> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand [1]. You really need large-scale investments in public transportation for this.

Clearly "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit"...

> How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?

You're again arguing against something no one ever said. No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses. Again, we're discussing where to allocate incremental improvements to existing systems. No one is suggesting doing nothing or, worse, shutting down existing systems.

Using your specific example of semi-trucks, moving more traffic (such as daily commute) to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it. And additionally, freight trains already make up a fairly large percentage of our freight network (~30%) so rail is actually a great alternative to semi-trucks in many cases.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Clearly "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit"...

You: Cars are never a solution because they can't go faster than 15 MPH. You really need horses for this.

Me: Cars can go faster than 15 MPH in many cases. Horses can't be used to transport industrial boilers and such.

You: Clearly you missed the part about the horses.

> No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses.

You have a two lane road that needs to be a four lane road to handle the amount of traffic it would have without congestion.

If more than half of the traffic that would occur without congestion is trucks, you physically cannot relieve the congestion with mass transit, because relieving the congestion would require removing more than 100% of the non-truck traffic.

> Moving more traffic to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it.

This the other stupidity with induced demand. It's not induced, it's suppressed by congestion, which means that any alternative means of relieving the congestion will also restore the demand.

Suppose you actually built mass transit and removed the equivalent of one lane worth of traffic from the road. Now you still need to add the other lane because the reduction in traffic congestion restored demand for the road and offset what was removed by the improved mass transit.