Todd Littman nicely demolishes parts of the Fraser Institute’s fatuous report on “Transportation Performance of the Canadian Provinces.”
“A few of these indicators are appropriate and widely used,” says Todd, “but several are ambiguous and biased, and some are illogical. The authors also make the following statement: ‘A particularly thorny area of evaluation is the impact of transportation investment on induced travel and development….. For this first round, we take the conservative position that these impacts are not sufficiently quantifiable for measurement at the provincial level.’ ”
Todd:
This is simply untrue: virtually every serious transportation economist recognizes the existence of induced travel (see http://www.vtpi.org/gentraf.pdf ), and it is simply wrong to claim that ignoring this impact can be considered “conservative”; failing to consider induced travel impacts results in inefficient transportation policies that are wasteful, and therefore the opposite of conservative.
Of course, having to acknowledge the reality of induced traffic would undermine the logic of the Gateway program, and most other road widenings in this region.
But denial of induced traffic was not always so, as Tom Vanderbilt (author of “Traffic”) illustrates in his blog “How We Drive.” There’s a nice post on induced traffic dating back to 1925. And best of all, it comes from an automobile company:
This comes from Alvan Macauley, president of the Packard Motor Car Company, in a 1925 pamphlet titled City Planning and Automobile Traffic Problems:
“Since the advent of the automobile, however, the amount of traffic carried by a main thoroughfare seems to be dependent largely upon how many the thoroughfare can carry.
Increasing the width of roadway and making possible an additional lane of travel each way will in many cases find the added capacity entirely taken up within a few months, either by diversion from other less favorable routes or by actual increase in the use of cars by those living in and passing through the city in question.
Just how this problem can be solved and what provision should be made for future increase in traffic it is difficult to state definitely, and to this extent a count of present traffic might seem to be void of direct results or even of value.”
I really hate to take this off-topic especially since it’s the 1st comment.
Have there been any studies to show the same can be said of social housing? It seems to me if we built even 10,000 new units that they would fill up in short order and new people from across the region/province/canada would migrate here and create a whole new demand for yet additional social housing. I could be completely off on this but it appears to be the case. Just like roads enough is never enough.
“Increasing the width of roadway and making possible an additional lane of travel each way will in many cases find the added capacity entirely taken up within a few months, either by diversion from other less favorable routes or by actual increase in the use of cars by those living in and passing through the city in question.”
This is such a gross distortion. No one believes it’s a one to one relationship, except perhaps for the Rees Bros, and they only say that for public consumption.