Charles Marohn takes on the black art of traffic projection in his latest piece for Better! Cities & Towns:
If you go back decades and look at the projections that were made for the present time, they are laughable in how dramatically they underestimated the amount of traffic. We projected out based on what our experience had taught us to anticipate, but we were wrong, and it cost the city a lot of money to retrofit all of the places that were inundated with cars.
We’ve “enhanced” our models now and believe we have it figured out this time, revising the data upward to reflect what we have experienced in the “real” world. This is the essence of modeling, and what else could be more rational?
Or more foolish. …
