An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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Vancouver’s Planning Director Brent Toderian recommends this article:
Why Building Roads Creates Traffic
… the authors parse their conclusion in pithier terms: “roads cause traffic.” The basis for this confusing reality, write Duranton and Turner, is a three-pronged “fundamental law of highway congestion” that explains why road construction can never keep pace with road congestion:
people drive more when the stock of roads in their city increases; commercial driving and trucking increase with a city’s stock of roads; people migrate to cities which are relatively well provided with roads.
(More here in Streetsblog. Along with this critical comment by the authors:)
These findings suggest that both road capacity expansions and extensions to public transit are not appropriate policies with which to combat traffic congestion. This leaves congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion.
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THE ROAD BUILDERS’ PRAYER – 1956
“Oh Almighty God, who has given us this Earth, and has appointed Man to have domination over it. Who has commanded us to make straight the highways, to lift up the valleys, and to make the mountains lower. We ask thy blessing. Bless these, our nation’s road builders, and their friends.”
Documentary Film: Taken For a Ride
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PROMISES OF CARMAGEDDON
Scot Bathgate sends in a preliminary piece on the end of world promised for LA in July when they close off a section of the 405 freeway:
Authorities will close Interstate 405 to do road work in July, and they took the step Monday of issuing a dire warning a full month ahead of time because of the potential traffic nightmare it could cause on one of the nation’s busiest freeways. … “If you think it’s bad now, let me just make something absolutely clear: On July 16th and 17th, it will be an absolute nightmare,” Villaraigosa said in a parking lot overlooking the freeway, where morning traffic sounded like a rushing river.
So we’ll check in afterwards and see how it all turns out.
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HOW TO PAINT AN INTERSECTION
Portland’s largest street paining at 8th and NE Holman, done a few weeks ago by the neighbours, City Repair, and $2,000:
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I have the Duranton and Turner paper and have read the first few pages. It’s not something that can be summarized really in a couple of paragraphs.
To measure the impact road building has on road traffic they use an instrumental variables approach where the instruments are mid-19th Century explorer routes, late 19th Century railroads, and a late 1940s map for a proposed federal highway system.
As with the various scholarly papers which prove that living in the suburbs makes you fat, causality and correlation are easy to confuse.