Maybe bringing up Switzerland as a good example wasn't such a great idea. The Government is currently aggressively trying to pass a 5.3 BILLION infrastructure project to widen all major highways to 6 lanes or more. And the worst part is that it's almost certainly going to happen. Don't be fooled, we also have boomers in the government.
**Limit the access to using roads while providing more effective alternatives to driving!** Seriously, do road planners not realize that every individual lane has a very limited physical vehicle capacity, which includes the required stopping/acceleration lanes space? So why don't they ever seem to consider these physical limitations and where they may end up dumping the traffic to? Seriously, why do they measuring traffic based on vehicle numbers/flow rate and not via the space being required/used? Its kinda dumb considering how space efficient transit like trains, trams, and buses are by comparison, yet planning for them having dedicated lanes, inaccessible to cars. Like build limited access freeways to connect counties and some urban areas, (mainly for industrial shipments) while prioritizing building a almost as impressive system to the interstate system built for rail.
Also avoid, building bottlenecks on roads for god sakes. And replace garbage road networks that don't work, with worthwhile parks, that aren't just glorified one way stroad padding space.
Tbh the biggest problem with fixing America's bad urbanism is gonna be really based on figuring out how to make a square mile that doesnt encourages driving when said square mile has a paved road around all 4 corners on average. All thanks to that land ordinance from the 1800s.
Hello!! Transit planner for Arlington, Virginia here!! SO HAPPY to see us mentioned in this video!! Actually, when building the Arlington portion of the Washington DC metro system, the original plan was to run it in the median of interstate 66 in North Arlignton. The planners for Arlignton County actually convinced them to instead run it underground and underneath the local roads instead, and used the opportunity to begin it's aggressive transit oriented development that has made Arlington such a wonderful place to live. It's one of the few rare examples of planning done right in post-WW2 America. I live in Arlington completely car-free and it is cheap, convenient, and easy to do so!
I can see your point: another video said that trains in the median of a highway may be bad in general because of suboptimal land use around the stops. But also I think when you're stuck in commuter traffic, seeing trains pass you is the best advertisement for using it next time, and perhaps the section at the county-line being in the median is why that line in your county has near-capacity ridership.
Grew up in Arlington, can confirm that the Metro stops on the orange line (out to Ballston on the Orange Line) have fueled decades of booming development. Arlington still has a lot of work to do with regard to getting cars off the road, but they have an excellent head start!
@@sandal_thong8631There is a place for both I think. Especially in places far out from the city center, they are good rights of way to use. The problem is that being around highways as a pedestrian is unpleasant and a massive highway can bi-sect the valuable land around transit into two not as valuable places.
@@AyeCarumba221 in North America, increasing population is not the issue since most housing is single family with huge yards. Slight densification would make a huge difference, since driving isn't needed if you can live walking distance to amenities.
Arlington is an example of what not to do. I lived in Arlington and then moved to Manassas because the rent was half the price. Basically traded twice the commute for half the rent. If they widened the 66 it would relieve the housing pressure and reduce rental prices.
Yeah, this is the point I raise all the time when the state wants to widen highways (contrary to this video, it's more often state than cities). Going fromb1 to 2 lanes is one thing...3 to 4 or more and you better show that the vast majority of drivers are starting and ending their trips well outside the congested areas (they're not). Otherwise you get lane change loss and/or poor lane utilization.
“just one more lane bro. i promise just one more lane and it’ll fix everything bro. bro. just one more lane. please just one more. one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more lane i promise bro. bro bro please i just need one more lane bro”
"Sorry, kids. Daddy spent all the money on beer so there is nothing left for bread and milk for you." Pretty sure there was a book about this. The american government is identical to an abusive lush of a husband.
People also complain when public transport doesn't make a direct profit from tickets - but how many roads make money directly for the local government?
@@alquinn8576 on the other hand if you demolished suburbia and everybody lived close to work like in my home city (Moscow) the prices would be astronomical. A single one room apartment of 430.5 feet in a 1-hour subway ride zone from all popular workplaces costs around $150k bucks here. And if we consider the actual exchange rate which is around 60 bucks per rouble it’s going to cost around 250k$. 250k$ for a one room apartment in a pretty shitty apartment block. Meanwhile in America you can buy entire houses of 1000+ square feet for that price and not feel excluded from society in any way. And now for the best part: the average wage in Moscow is just $2k dollars per month (and it’s already a massive overstatement) so according to your prices the shitty flats we have would cost around half a million of USD.
@@georgeousthegorgeous yeah but that is a whole nother diffrent can of political worms. This is where you have the problem of how mch social aspects does a government include - like for example_ rent control. since if landlords *can* get away with making things more expensive.... they *will*
One of the most depressed I've been was when I was laid off from my job, single (I still am), and living in a suburb. It was in a beautiful newly built neighbourhood, but yet the isolation was unbearable. I was only 20-30 minutes outside the city, but because of traffic the trip took 1-2 hours during rush hour. That meant I had zero incentive to go into the city and socialize or visit my friends. Yeah, that was a depressing time. Anyway, grateful for these videos and community that would understand the frustration. Many North Americans just don't get it.
We get it. Some of my friends live - within the same city - and I still only visit them once every few months because I can't stand being in traffic for 2 hours each way, or public transit for 1 hour each way but it's filthy and crime-laden.
I honestly think one of the biggest reason why I am single is because of where I live. There isn't any way to naturally meet people outside of work (and no, I don't desire to date people at work. That's asking for trouble). I don't want to go to the bars because it's just expensive to do so since I gotta pay for a uber plus drinks. I hung out at bars way more when I was living in the dorms at college because I.. could just walk home. There's no meetups here. There isn't any real third places. It's all corporate fast food places or retail outlets. I'm also convinced online dating is basically dying because people are just promoting their onlyfans or trying to scam (the apps themselves try to get you to pay for a terrible experience which doesn't help). I've basically decided I'm gonna try to get a good paying job to get me out of this hellhole to somewhere that cares about fostering human connection. I don't care if that eliminate the majority of towns as long I'm happy.
@@Shadowninja1200 Online Dating is trash now, since all the sites that - used - to be good, now have the most basic functions paywalled. PoF went from free messaging, down to - 1 - per day, more than 1 requires a monthly fee.
The most baffling part is why two of those 10 lanes couldn't have been dedicated bus lanes. Literally put some barriers in between and markings there and increase the frequency of the bus service. Those things bypassing all the traffic jams could convince a lot of people.
There are too many 4 lane stroads that should have dedicated bike lanes. Also there are 4 lane divided "highways" running through neighborhoods in my area. Take 2 of those and make bike lanes.
I always remind my friends that complain about being stuck in traffic, "You are never IN traffic, you always ARE traffic.". You and everyone else is on this road / highway because there aren't enough alternatives to get some of these drivers to take them. Great video
Actually Work Vans / Trucks get stuck in traffic. Despite the world's best public transportation network you still have loads of people using the car just to get to work in Switzerland. We had basically a decade without inflation, except actually for services depending on big vans full of gear. if a repairman only works 6h hours spending 2.4h stuck in traffic...
@@beyondEV traffic is also other people, the people in work vans would spend far less time in traffic if we get more people out of cars into other modes of transportation if using a car isn't essential.
Thank you for a very well argued video. At 14m 40s you mention the fact that in Switzerland you see lots of wealthy people in the First Class on trains. As a regular visitor to Switzerland who travels around the country on a First Class Swiss Travel Pass I know that to be true. At busy times it may difficult to get a seat in FIRST class. In October 2019 I boarded a crowded train to go from Lausanne to Berne and managed to find a free seat alongside a very well-dressed woman engrossed in her laptop. A casually dressed young man opposite (security?) eyed me suspiciously but relaxed when he realised that I was a tourist. Is this woman somebody important, I thought? Three hours later watching the Swiss TV news, there she was! Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of the Federal Cabinet. In 2024 she is now Finance Minister, and vice-president of the Confederation. In Switzerland the superb public transport means that you do not need a car. And as a commentator to a recent City Nerd video said, in Switzerland using public transport is part of the Swiss 'cultural DNA'.
Wonderful story, thanks for sharing. It's almost a cliche at this point, but: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation” - Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá.
As somebody who is living in Switzerland, it is genuinely AMAZING the amount of people who work during their commute in 2nd class (1st class is really too expensive to be honest). People here work 8 hours and while working during the commute, they can shave these hours off of the regular office hours
public transit has another immense advantage: its no lost time. you can use the time to read, play a game on your phone or do other smaller tasks or activities, making the time the trip takes feel much shorter and pleasant
The downside of public transit is that you can't control your surroundings. In LA people are constantly smoking, playing loud music, and other things much worse. This keeps many people from even thinking about taking it. Lack of quality can negate some of those benefits you posed.
@@wanglelife Well you also can't control the amount of traffic you are in too, and some people like to modify their cars to be as loud as humanly possible. Also being forced to be constantly focused on the road by fear of possible death puts a significantly worse physiological strain on you then say, loud music.
@@wanglelife Having experienced LA buses, the authentic urban experience pushed me right back into an Uber for the remainder of my visit! Holland has enjoyed safe and comfortable transport options that other countries try to emulate without realising you can’t cut and paste solutions on top of different cultural and social circumstances. Poorly lit streets, high levels of urban crime, deserted bus stops, a fractious and anti social populace - all these will deter people from seeking alternatives to their car. I know several people including myself who have recently increased their dependence on their vehicle for safety reasons.
This. An underrated drawback of cars is how much brainpower and focus is being used to focus on the road. So much mental energy we don't HAVE to use for driving, if we could take trains or busses. There's so much creativity getting forced into focus on roads in North America.
@@wanglelife perhaps it is exactly because of the demographics that ride it. The lack of quality and behavior you described in your example is because people do not use it enough. If all kinds of folks were to ride public transit as is common in Europe/Asia, there would be more focus on actually solving these issues. If people just wave it off and go ride their cars, nobody cares enough, right?
I moved to within 1.5 miles of my job. I ride my bike daily. I live two blocks away from my best friend and two blocks away from a grocery store. It's wonderful
Ive been doing a similar thing for awhile, do you ever talk to someone whos in the suburbs and doing the typical stuff and they seem like they live in a whole different world?
@@501lilspoon I'm not sure what you mean, but I do know many people who have greater than 30 minute commutes. I live with my girlfriend who does therapy at client's homes, she drives for a couple of hours a day. Many people's lives are built around their car, if their car fails, they can no longer function in society. Im also a therapist, and many people complain of not being able to afford a car. Not only that, they struggle to get to work without a car, so it's hard to obtain the money to buy a car without already having a car. The system is rigged
"The difference between induced demand for cars and induced demand for other modes of travel is that cars are extremely space inefficient." I think this is the most important sentence of this video. In debates about transport policy in urban areas, I am often accused of being downright anti-car and that it should be about good coexistence in traffic. When I then argue that good coexistence can only work if cars have to give up traffic space, I am often met with a lack of understanding. People have no idea how bad the car is in terms of space consumption.
The poeple who dismiss the space problem should take their tank-like SUVs down some tight curvey rouds in France or Italy and then see, how comfortable they feel when they litterally have to halt and drive half way off the road to pass by another car. Or they should go to a automotive museum and see how much more reasonably sized cars were just a few decades ago. Seriously, compare the development of street width in the last 50 years, one lane today would be good enough for two back then.
The irony is that that anti-car and pro-car are in fact on the same team: we're all anti-traffic. I live in a famously bike-friendly city, which is hard to navigate by car, even harder for outsiders, who aren't used to being overtaken on two sides by very assertively riding cyclists. But after I tell my friends from outside the city: "the reason we are driving at all, is because it is so inconvenient" they mostly quickly learn to appreciate it.
...And if people claim that "Just One More Lane" isn't a thing for trains, they need to have a good look at Real London, and the however many pieces of rail there are that are still somehow slammed for capacity.
My idea is let all the car people go live in there own “city” and pay for all the roads they want themselves, the rest of us can live in nice cities and it won’t be long before the car people want to move because their “city” sucks and is depressing.
@@Deckzwabber I've always thought it an interesting dichotomy. Car folks should be the _most_ aggressive about improving public transport/increasing the size of walkways and bikeways, because it would help remove two of the things that they complain about the most: people driving who _really_ shouldn't, and the "dumbing down" of car driving to assist them.
You touched on something that a lot of people forget: Cars are not the goal. We don't build roads to move *cars*, we build roads to move *people*. Cars are just one way that people navigate those roads. Sometimes advocates against traffic calming or removing on-street parking from a downtown area will argue that it will kill shops. As if the cars were going to spend money. But cars don't spend money. People spend money. Cars are just one way that people get places.
This is why people are outraged by street festivals that “close” the street to cars for a weekend. It gets in the way of cars, and the millions of people attending the festival didn’t count or something… because they’re not cars.
But also people like this channel forget that cars have their own merit and there is a reason why I everyone flocks to them (I am not from the USA). Privacy and the ability to carry things are some of the few reasons why mass transportation will never make cars obsolete. On top of that with cars you have the initiative to move whenever you want wherever you want. The lanes problem boils down to the fact that entrances/exits aren't proportionate to the amount of lanes. So although more lanes mean more cars for that part of the road, it means little if everyone gets stuck at the exits. Or the traffic at the exits causes traffic to the whole highway. Besides that we need to address an issue and that is urban density. There is an upper limit to how large a city can get before traffic (in every aspect not only cars) just becomes too much. Certain architectors and urban planners have noticed the solution. The cities should not only expand at the dimensions but also on the third (height). Such concepts have been introduced with buildings having sky bridges connecting them. In this way you can layer your traffic (whether pedestrian or cars or mass transit). I mostly dislike this channel because it falls in a relatively common pit. It goes to the opposite extreme and only uses the USA as an example when we know that the USA has a very specific problem (urban sprawl). I talk from experience since I have been through highways quite a few times and I mostly uses buses and the underground to move around in my city. Unless you have Tokyo (and Japan in general) level of metro then in a lot of times you would prefer a car. The only downside to a car is the cost.
@@alexandervlaescu9901 This channel does not deny the fact that cars have their uses. It is all about the freedom of choice that people have. Fact is that, especially in the US, that choice does not really exist, as the options are not at an equal level. Public transportation and walking/cycling infrastructure is not invested in nearly as much as car infrastructure. While these options on a societal level are much more efficient, both in terms of costs and time. How this has been treated in the past has created a lock-in situation for the car, which is the urban sprawl issue of the US you talk of. This is exactly what is also highlighted in this video: this is caused and reinforced by the investment in car infrastructure.
@alexandervlaescu9901 I was born in a different country but live in the US now. Cars are not the problem as you say; car dependent urban sprawl is. In my home country (Turkey), you can own a car but since people can live without a car (unlike US), you can reflect true cost of car ownership at the prices. How about 100% sales taxes/fees on cars, 200% tax on gas, 18+ to be able to drive, etc. Yes, people will always own cars but they’d better have a reason to justify that cost.
I keep seeing videos about why many Americans will continue to live abroad rather than returning to the states and about 85% to 90% say they don't own a car and feel happy about it
I live in a suburb, and something that hit me yesterday is so many of these massively wide streets are largely empty outside of the morning when people go to work/school and in the evening when people leave. Outside of that they're just giant wastes of space. So much driving is just going to the same place and back over and over.
@@bwofficial1776 okay? So why not have more things like trains and subway lines that take up way less space? We have those in my city, we just desperately need more of them.
@@bwofficial1776 Don't forget you can average out the peaks and lows using storage. If you need 24kWh of electrical energy per day, that's an average of only 1kW, but solar panels are only going to be generating for a third of that time. Put in a 3kW array and 16kWh of storage, and you can use 1kW all day. Yes, in practice, you'd put in a bit more storage and your panels would generate a bit longer, but it illustrates the principle.
I love the public transportation system here in Aachen (Germany). I live some 30 kilometers away from my job, an I could take my car to drive this way every workday. This would take about 45 minutes per direction. - I could. - But I don't. In Winter time I take my car to go about 5 kilometers to a park + ride (in summer time I do this by bike), there I hop on an express bus and ride down to Aachen in about 60 minutes. Oh, g'dam - this is 15 minutes more than driving myself? But wait - It's the time from door to door! And in this time I sit comfortably in that bus, got my headphones in my ears, my e-book reader in my one hand and a cup of tea in the other and enjoy the trip with drinking, reading and listening to the music. When I enter my office door, I am fresh and relaxed, ready to do my daily work - and when I come back home, I am fresh enough to take care about the kids, of the home, I can do whatever I want and I am not a little bit stressed at all. Yeah, I could be one of those for whom the roads and streets have to be widened, who need more parking lots, who are responsible for tha traffic congestion we all are so sick of - but hey: I am not.
Can confirm this. I lived in Aachen (in the city) for about 8 years. Fun fact: I found It was faster getting around within the city on foot than by bus. Biking was (and still probably is) not so much fun due to hills. E-bike would have solved it though.
I lived in Los Angeles during the massive 405 widening, and the amount of time construction took and traffic congestion and detours it caused to not only fail to alleviate traffic but actually INCREASE IT is absolutely what LA deserves for doing that instead of putting in rail service across the west side.
Obvious reason why more lanes are bad that doesn't get talked about enough. In order to use the extra lanes, cars need to make lane changes. More lanes, more lane changes. Every single lane change slows down traffic, plus adds potential for collisions (which obviously bring traffic to a stand-still).
@@nicknickbon22even 4 lanes is pretty exotic. Whereabouts in Europe do we have 4 lane roads? I've never been on a motorway with more than 3 lanes outside of short merging/splitting lanes at a junction.
@@thesenamesaretaken The Autobahn in and around Berlin has a few four line sections. But that's mostly in between on- and off-ramps, which are so close together that it wouldn't make sense to reduce back to three.
@@thesenamesaretaken in Italy Milan to Bergamo, Modena to Bologna, both around 40 km and Milano to Saronno (a 1km section is even 5 lanes). In the Netherlands there are actually quite a few Km from Amsterdam to Rotterdam and from Amsterdam to Utrecht. Then there’s the Frankfurt to Darmstadt in Germany. There is probably something 4 lanes to, from and around Paris and the same for Madrid.
I don't know if it is the same in other countries, but here in Mexico many roads have an extra lane for emergency and bus stops that needs to be empty. Well, all the time I see drivers try to use them as shortcut before turning and many times they end up stuck trying to get between the other cars waiting their turn and waste more time than if they just followed the rules. Drivers live by the saying "if there is a hole there is a goal".
I live in the suburbs of Chicago where the village is trying to widen a two lane (one lane each way) to a four lane road to reduce congestion. There is congestion for 30 minutes during the morning, and that is because the road passes by a SCHOOL where the kids walk by, crosses the street, and the school buses drop kids off. By widening that road, the road will be MUCH MORE dangerous for the kids to walk across. I'm not sure what the village is thinking. All the residents - especially the parents of the kids from the school and collecting signatures to oppose the road construction.
Do I get this right? Because the children need so much time crossing the street, they try to improve the situation by making them take more time to cross the street? Brilliant!
@@steemlenn8797 Yup. As far as the computer sensors are concerned, there is traffic during the morning. So that data went up to someone that decided that the road needs to be widened. Now, we'll just have more cars waiting for the kids to cross (hopefully), or even worse, more cars driving pass the school super fast and the kids risking their lives to cross the street.
Once it goes to four lanes, the school district has to change things, I think. I moved away awhile ago, but Schaumburg HS is right on Schaumburg Rd, which is four lanes, right? I don’t think the state allows districts to for e kids to cross more than two lanes.
One small nitpick at 20:00: It wasn't really the center-left majority in 2015 that lead to massive mobility improvements, it was the inclusion of the Greens within the governing coalition. The center-left had been in power before (without the Greens) and done diddly squat.
Well, before 2015 Oslo had already had better public transport than the whole of northam, but the greens definitely pushed it further and more actively. Shame it's only in Oslo though, while the rest of the country is same old suburban sprawl...
As a fellow Norwegian living in the general vicinity of Trondheim, I feel like we're like... Well I mean we sure as hell ain't Amsterdam, but I can at least get around. I do appreciate that just last year they built a nice new bike route that gets me closer to the city center *without* having to cross this one awful tiny bridge that is legit the *only* viable bikeway into the city *and is also* a narrow car bottleneck. I almost got hit by a car there once because both of us thought we had the right-of-way. (tbf, the regulations for that are stupid so I think in hindsight the car guy actually *did* have it... because I was *on* my bike instead of walking next to it which *for some asinine reason* completely redefines the hierarchy to make me just count as a driver rather than a pedestrian and therefore mean I do not have priority over cars at crossings.) I mean really, there's enough multi-use paths around that I can get around with reasonably minimal conflict points... It's mostly *in* the city that things get actively awful. Could it be better? Certainly. Do I hope it gets better? Also certainly. Is it even remotely close to the American suburbs we see on channels such as these? Heck no. ...Although one thing is for sure: Norway does seem to be kinda awkwardly split up into "Oslo" and "Not Oslo". Kinda like how our national rail system works fantastic... as long as you're going to Oslo. Going literally anywhere else? You'll probably either need to drive or take a plane.
@@thelordstarfish The population density around Oslo is so much higher than the other parts of Norway that it is very understandable. The Greater Oslo region has about 1.5 Million people all with a short commute to Oslo while the other cities around sub 300K. Norway is however far more car dependant than many European countries, although a lot of if has to do with density or the lack thereof. Seems like we are hell bent on having people living on every island and peninsula (nes). I grew up around Oslo, but have lived in Bergen for over 20years, our infrastructure is lacking.
The only thing I don't understand about induced demand is that when I hear 12 lane highway, my fight or flight kicks in and my brain demands I stay as far away from that nightmare deathtrap at all cost.
Sure, but the induced demand in that case is people avoiding an 11 lane highway because it's to busy. When they hear it's 12 lanes they're relieved because they're imaging 11 lanes worth of traffic spread across 12 lanes. They don't realize it's more like 13 lanes of traffic crammed into 12.
I don't understand concerns with safety around roads. I don't have a problem with walking or bicycling around roads. But I may have unusually low sense of self-preservation.
@@Volkbrecht Sure, navigation around multilane roads is difficult, but I mean specifically safety. I don't feel that I would die there. Using phrases like “deathtrap” is inappropriate IMO and devalues their meanings. I would reserve that phrase for situations difficult to escape and likely causing death.
In my local area we don't have induced demand. We have mandated demand. The councillors are all used car dealers, the mayor owns a road building company, and the existing (pretty shitty) bicycle network is being removed and the roads widened. I literally cannot walk anywhere from my house without walking on a busy road. Not next to a busy road, but actually on the road, with the cars.
Yeah, well that's how it was for North America after World War II. Except the people in office were rented or influenced by the car and tire lobby, not directly made up of people in that industry! I guess the good people in your area need to vote the special interests out!
@@sandal_thong8631 people in general nowadays are too exhausted from work and life to educate themselves during their free time. They're just going to believe what the people with the advertising funds are going to tell them.
Those are glaring conflicts of interest. Your municipality should have ethics rules that disallow this. Maybe there are already existing laws that disallow this but people aren't aware of them?
I giggled at 3:53 "That guy that leaves at 7AM to beat traffic". If you would do this exact thing and take the same route as I take. You are already an hour late "to beat traffic"
that guy is trying to beat the 8AM traffic - too bad that he is beaten by the people who have done that for years and now are trying to beat the 7AM traffic... most of them are considering trying to just stop sleeping so they can skip ahead of the curve and beat the 1AM traffic
I think that getting up at 4 is viable and a way to beat the 6AM traffic. I think that people sleep too late. If midnight would be the actual mid of the night, people would go to sleep at 20 and get up at 4.
@@ryannghiale4056 The time that you see as the upload date is actually the publishing date. NJB uploaded this to UA-cam early, then only made it public now. The person that left that comment had a link to the video before it was made public.
The "economic" analogy of the supply/demand curve is an interesting one. Roadways in North America have become a kind of monopoly, and are now charging us more and more for less and less, with declining service and quality. They can over-promise and under-deliver. And unless a competitor comes about, they will continue to enpoopify themselves and we have no choice but to play by their rules and to pay and pay and pay in money, time, stress, quality of life, peace of mind, and sometimes losing our homes. Bring back transportation competition and a market with viable alternatives to driving! :)
Even the free market would do better than this. All these highways are public funds, paying to support an industry that would otherwise struggle for customers. It's like capitalism, but with the government paying the costs for one team.
@@HiopX the problem literally is that there aren't any alternatives. Making a brand new alternative that improves the situation is something that the free market gravitates to. Except that this analogy is flawed since the "service" in question and "solution" is both provided by the government here. There definitely are private rail companies that have been expanding where the government has refused to themselves though (like Brightline in the USA).
The thing about super wide roads is that a hold-up in one lane has a way of rippling over all of them, sometimes even the opposite direction (when people slow down to see the accident). One guy makes a dangerous lane change and then 5000 people lose 5 minutes each. And the more traffic, the more this happens. That's the difference between a road and a water-pipe: water doesn't flow slower when the pipe comes close to capacity, but a highway close to capacity will become a parking lot every other day.
The elevated expressway in Seoul ACTUALLY used to be a river before they built the elevated expressway on top of it until they tore it down to bring back the river. Meanwhile, Tokyo is also planning to move its elevated expressway underneath the Kanda River. However in my home country, it’s the complete opposite. We have the freaking PAREX (Pasig River Expressway) proposal in Metro Manila that threatens to cover the Pasig River with an expressway AS WELL AS a proposal for a freaking viaduct, threatening to cover the long-neglected Guadalupe River in Cebu City (where I study), connecting the CCLEX (Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway) directly to the city proper itself.
And yet, where I live in Toronto, the road junkies are screaming about the the cost of new bike lanes installed on Bloor Street West. Funny how no one complains about the cost of that extra lane they're adding to the 401. . .
Great line bro. Also i heard, some Robin Hoods, all around USA started to carjack improperly parked car to total a car, and get owner to know about this. Wish them luck!
The transformation of cities that prioritize active transportation, like cycling and walking, is truly remarkable. It not only improves traffic flow, but also creates a more sustainable and healthy environment for everyone.
LOL! While watching this excellent video, UA-cam threw at me not one, not two but three car commercials! We Americans (aka United States) are so in love with our cars. They are "normal", they are status symbols, they are false freedom. I once had a die hard Chicago commuter tell me that he would never take the train into the city, as I was. He said he wanted his freedom. I retorted, "freedom to do what? Freedom from what?" I would get on the commuter train and just relax. Meanwhile people like him, heading to the exact same destination, would get in their cars (leaving their homes earlier than I would for my train, mind you) and fight and grind and stress sit and sit and sit... going to the exact same "loop" area as me.... just to keep their "freedom." I, on the other hand, could get up and move around, or stretch out a bit, and above all else, just relax. Chicago area trains into The Loop are mediocre at best for their comfort and all. But they sure beat driving!
18:17 gotta love the mercedes driver who has absolutely no desire to properly slow down for the woman crossing the street... Cars really do bring out the worst in humans.
SUVs are the worst by far. Think they own the road. Pedestrian? Get out of my way. In my city, just yesterday SUV did hit and run of a 61 year old woman. She died. Hit and runs in general seems to be going up. Drivers don't see themselves as accountable.
Assault is the threat of committing violence. All traffic violations need to be prosecuted as assault with a deadly weapons. What is running a red light or speeding through a pedestrian crossing if not threatening “I will hit you if you’re in my way”? That would get drivers to straighten up and fly right real fast.
No smart pedestrian in the US would even *try* to pull that maneuver with a car approaching, even at relatively traffic-calmed 15 km/h speeds. They'd be savvy enough to wait a whole burdensome 4-6 seconds for the car to pass. Even as a child walking/biking southward home from school at 8-9 years old, I was wise enough to let northbound cars turn left onto the side street I was looking to cross, if I could tell that there was a sufficient gap in oncoming arterial-road* traffic. Sure, maybe I _technically_ had the right-of-way. But you can be right, or you can be "dead right." *Not even a stroad, just 1 lane each way with a central/shared left-turning lane.
My husband and I literally moved to the city we're in specifically for the unique cycling network. I can get to every store I need to by bike within 15 minutes and I ADORE it.
Hey that’s like my village in Germany! Just after I finished school they even built a dedicated bike road etc. which would have made things even faster
There's a reason I take the bus where I can, part of it is that it's cheaper and less stressful for me but part of it is that I hope in doing so it will encourage continued improvement to bus service, in turn creating more demand and start that cycle of better public transit
Plumbing is actually a pretty good metaphor. If you have a basin of water high up, and a basin of water low down, if you make a pipe between them, the water pressure (“water traffic”) will be dependent on how high the top basin is. If you make the pipe wider, that doesn’t decrease the pressure, it just fills the pipe.
This fun analogy can be made even funnier by observing Bernoulli principle: The bigger the pipe, the higher the pressure. (probably does not apply here, but shhh)
I live in a city in LA County (a smaller city east of LA itself) and they were discussing extending the subway line out to us such that it’d be walking distance more or less from my home. I was super excited. They then cancelled the plans due (in large part) to local feedback (mostly concerned about homeless people) and I was SO pissed. People use cars sometimes almost like barriers to protect their little fiefdoms. I saw a similar thing in Washington, DC where the subway gets you TONS of places…except the neighborhood of Georgetown (one of the oldest/wealthiest areas in the city). The closest subway to Georgetown requires a truly Herculean effort to walk to. There are busses, but they are far less appealing and nowhere near as convenient.
Majoring in civil engineering, and seeing these kinds of videos made me want to focus on traffic engineering and public transit. Hope the next generation of transportation planners can help reverse the issues we’ve made for ourselves
I think another video made the point that a lot of city planners know about principles of good planning for transportation, but others like politicians and the public that vote for them do not. This video seems to blame the highway engineers for their proposals, saying they are acting as lobbyists for road expansion because that's their job, rather than giving alternatives to move people.
Being a traffic engineer for a city is very fun and challenging. It's part system engineering and part psychology, which is why I love it. Oh, and there are plenty of US traffic engineers working towards change. But there's always a need for more to help make that shift!
Although induced demand and latent demand do exist, I believe that the conclusions aren’t that simple. There are plenty of cities around the world with decent public transportation that haven’t invested in additional lanes. Many people still choose to buy and use cars. Congestion in many of those places is horrendous. Also, public transport isn’t practical or economically feasible in some low population density areas. IOW, increasing transportation times doesn’t always equate to the additional lanes didn’t help or make the problem less worse.
As someone who used to live in Houston, the infrastructure genuinely made me depressed. Driving an hour and a half in traffic when it should be no more than a 30-minute drive is soul-crushing.
It boggles my mind that Texas does this to itself. The fact that it needed two constitutional amendments to fund 35% of their budget and they have to use it for highway construction/maintenance. TXDOT only uses 2% on public transportation and these funds can only be from mainly state and federal funds.
as someone who currently lives in Houston, same. There's a certain level of irony about the fact I have to take a depressing hour-and-a-half drive full of traffic to go see my therapist lol
@@therealdave06 or maybe they wouldnt have to commute so far, if mixed use zoning was a thing... you know... if people were able to live near their workplace and amenities and services they need... like... in a city or something
Induced demand is a problem for all modes of transit, but it's especially bad for roads for one simple fact: all other modes of transportation stress themselves linearly, but *roads stress themselves exponentially.* A road with 1000 cars has 1000 minds paying attention, 1000 minds starting and stopping because they keep tailgating, and 1000 chances for people to change lanes, screwing over everyone behind them. A train line with 1000 people has 1000 people... Sitting.
The government here in New Taipei is planning to build a two lane elevated expressway in front of my house ruining the riverfront. There is already a 9 lane stroad in front of my house.
@@USSAnimeNCC- A tram line along the waterfront might have been nice than a nine lane superhighway. ("stroad" implies that there is actually space for anything else than moving cars)
Well, thats the thing right: That rich guy in Switzerland sitting in his comfy first class chair, reading his newspaper and sipping his coffee, while getting where he needs to go, is about as far away as it possibly can be from how most North Americans view public transportation. I went to NYC about a year a go for 10 days, so quite enough time to really explore the subway network. And while it is very extensive and convienient, you almost always feel you are in a "second class" system. Old, dirty, lots of weird people hanging out... And every research out there says: When a place looks like that, it just feels unsafe, regardless how safe it actually is. And there is just no way anyone can convince me that this is the best the largest city in the wealthiest country can do.
Wealthy people take the most efficient option. And since they are the ones with the most influence, that infrastruture will recieve the most attention. Being able to take public transport is a sign of affluence, it means you can afford to live close to public transport and do not have to rely on an inefficient car. Cars are for poor people who have to live outside the city.
And reaction to that unsafe feeling (and some of the actual safety issues on NYC subways in the 70s) informed a lot of the design of the Washington DC subway. (stations with vast headroom and long sight-lines, no public restrooms', nicer car interiors with rows of seats instead of benches, etc.) Unfortunately they then immediately shot themselves in the foot by assuming it would almost exclusively be used for business commuting - and so designed in limitations that hurt it to this day. Those included structuring it as a star pattern (focused primarily on connecting suburbs to the city center; not getting around the city or between suburbs), no additional tracks for express trains or to allow track maintenance while keeping regular service going, and planning around a short workday-oriented operating schedule (which also fed into the lack of extra tracks - as they assumed long overnight closure windows they could use for maintenance).
Sitting in a car, it's harder to discover the weirdos, brake checkers, indecisive, wait-I-still-can-get-to-the-exit-lane et c. before they do their act.
"but it might work for us" is one of the funniest clips from one of the funniest shows and it absolutely sums up the entirety of humanity's bad decisions
The Ontario government is running radio spots about how wonderful they are for widening the 401 and other highways. I live in Waterloo and I'm stuck with the 401 to get to the airport, either by private car or by taxi or (with difficulty) bus. If they spent the money on light or heavy rail, or even a dedicated bus lane, I would leave my car behind in a heartbeat. Even with the widening, I can't reliably predict whether the journey will take 1 hour or 3. And during several years of construction, that was between 2 and 4.
Barrie resident: hard agree. Hwy 413 and Bradford bypass anyone? Money would be way better spent on faster rail lines and more frequent trains in and around GTA as well as cross-provincially. I forsee the sprawl NJB identifies with these highway plans. Also want to note that NJB appears slightly more aggressive in this latest vid; this isn't a bad thing as I think we need to start calling out more strongly the irrational, non-evidence based decisions being made.
In Ontario, land use and highway "improvements" have nothing to do with the customer (the taxpaying public). Instead, it has to do with supporting our Premier's buddies, the land developers and wealthy builders. Almost everyone I know would be happy to use public transit if it were offered in an affordable convenient manner. The exception are workers who must travel at very unusual hours for their jobs.
for a fracction the cost of the last 404 expansion they could have accelerated double-tracking the barrie line and running more trains on the other north-south train lines and moved significantly more people.
@@gabygaedecke2411 I am a mobile crane operator and slinger/banksman - this means that even though, on paper one could argue I have a single place of work - the depot where I go when there isn't a job - there are actually weeks where I might not even see that depot, because I'm just slinging those times so I go frrom home directly to sites, could be a mile, could be fifty, and could be three hundred. I and another worker went to london (UK) to do a job south of there. we had to leave at 3am, to get there for twelve pm. And we had the same trip to do in reverse, same day.Thankfully the job was actually rather quick, and not a drag-out 8hour thing like we've had in the past. IF that london job was a "really no equipment needed", we could ahve gotten the train. Except no, because the scheduling for such wouldn't have worked for where we are coming from and going to, because the local train services don't run at night, i.e. the first in the morning would mean we'd be on a afternoon-departure train, and we had other jobs in the preceeding and following days. Between that and the high ticket prices, it really was cheaper to pay overtime for two men, and two full tanks of fuel which essentially is the same as paying for a third person, than it was to just get two blokes south..... and then wonder why they didn't come back, surely it was a return tic-(no.). I'm a fan of NJB's channel. He's talking sense, though I do think he's mentioned but I don't recall, the point that some people *even with alternatives* should drive, or be making use of their own private or company vehicle, rather than public transit. a business man who carries a briefcase going from one city office to another office in a differrent city can get the train. A business owner who runs a construction company is likely going to need to use his own (company) vehicle, because he'll have tools of the trade in it. The people who work with the mobile cranes - that's me - are going to be in a company van carrying extra equipment for the cranes, from chains, slings and shackles, to plates, blocks and mats, and there's jacks and skates and more. He aint getting that on a bus, or a train. And hey, if traffic reduction measures mean most of the people he's stuck in traffic with every day aren't there, but doing their trips via bike bus and train, then he gets home quicker!
You might mention that car use efficiency is also getting worse because cars are getting much bigger per person carried. Bigger cars also affects the parking space needed to store them.
yep people will argue all day that their new hybrid SUV is 'more efficient' than their old car - on fuel. But people in general really haven't started to think about land use. How it doesn't fit in 1 car parking space, it can't fit in the garage any more so now it's on the street.... how now they have more cars.
@@stormveil "yep people will argue all day that their new hybrid SUV is 'more efficient' than their old car - on fuel" Except it actually isn't. The *engine* may be more efficient, but that gets entirely cancelled out by the vehicle being bigger, bulkier, and heavier. For example, the 1984 Toyota Camry I used to drive got 26 mpg, according to Google. A large hybrid SUV today does only barely better than that.
He has mentioned the problems of car size, just not in this particular video. Watch "These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us," another great NJB video
I saw this in action with Highway 24 being completed in the US, which connects Fort Wayne Indiana to Toledo, Ohio. Previously these two cities and the rural towns in between were only connected via county roads and two lane state highways. Living in one of the cities along the highway, we were all happy it was built!! It made it much easier to drive to Toledo or Fort Wayne when we wanted to, and we ended up going much more often. I now know so many people who choose to live in my town and commute to Toledo for their job instead of living closer. And every time I come back to visit family and I drive on that road, I notice the traffic getting worse and worse. The downtown, which actually has great bones - is hollowed out in favor of the new Meijer, Walmart, and Hobby Lobby built next to the highway which was on the edge of town. It’s depressing…
Thank you for the point about induced demand. I often hear re: transit projects that "Won't that induce demand too?" And the answer is yes, it will, and that's a good thing! Cars are large and bulky, even without considering parking space. Walking, cycling, and transit take up far less space and thus are a much more valuable use of the valuable real estate in the interior of cities. Transportation planning, ideally, is about moving the most people in the most efficient way possible--that's usually not by car.
and proper transit can just free a routine, when i know I can do whatever and know that i can go to a nearby subway and go home with just my pass card, id and keys, in a properly built and developed system. i feel that a lot of comments are assuming that just because their transit system is not at tokyo-class, there is no hope for transit ever being a thing where they live. Just being able to go to downtown and back home when for any reason your car is down is already a plus, that's why is a public service as it's core: the growth should be spread to the city itself, in providing value to its citizens, and not only direct financial results
Strangely, I heard a report saying that a subway expansion plan might make more people want to take trips using existing lines which was bad because they were nearly full capacity already. So does that mean they don't want to run longer trains, or more trains more frequently? You'd think they'd want more business since that takes people out of cars?
There is another reason why public transportation is underdeveloped in many places. These modes are required to make a profit. The same requirement is never put on roads, especially in most parts of America. Moreover, tolls are instinctively rejected as government overreach.
roads have military utility thats why. Rail lines are sitting targets roads are a web of alternate routes that vehicles can change on a whim. With rail you need to build a whole new line or series of junctions and new lines to come close to the variability of routes.
Transit systems shouldn't even be reliant on farebox recovery for their funding in the first place. Hong Kong's metro is primarily funded through station-adjacent real estate development that it owns, which has turned out to be wildly successful for both the metro system and the city as a whole. The good news is that other places' systems are finally starting to clue in, like Bart, which is finally, excruciatingly slowly, starting to build high-density mixed use housing and commercial districts at their stations. It's too late for the east Blue Line, which is stuck with the unenviable task of being the 580 median, but the main north-south line between Richmond and San Jose is getting a lot of great improvements.
@@martinpenwald9475 they can but it's immensely more efficient to haul them by train for as long as possible. Part of the reason why the _entire army logistics doctrine of Russia_ is primarily based on a rail network for example. Using rail is cheaper and _a lot_ faster. This is why rail lines are also the way more important target during war, because they are the best way of transporting lots of heavy stuff.
Great work, Jason and Nicole. I say this as someone who couldn't imagine getting around except by any means except car, was a car owner for 10 years, and two car-destroying hit and runs later, I'm a passionate advocate for transit, urbanism, and people powered movement.
I just came back from a few hours of e-bike errands in -3C weather. I started with a coffee (I went by a new shop with a big ass parking lot but no space to lock a bike so I left) then rode about 25 kilometres popping in and out of shops as I saw thing of interest. I just stopped at home for a sandwich (and this video) then I am heading to the gym for a quick workout before it gets dark. This is a day well spent.
The Oslo part reminds me of my time in Hamburg, Germany. After getting there (~450ish km, by car) I could just drop it at a public parking lot for 4,00€ / day, open the local public transportation app, pay for a week-ticket and enjoy everything there without the need for my car. They also tried some things like Barcelona where they removed the cars from certain districs and replaced it with outdoor seatings for the restaurants, lounges, child-play stuff etc as an experiment and it was such a nice change. It was quiet even though there were more people, it was relaxing because no fear of cars (although the idiots on rental scooters still wreaked havoc around town) and all in all I really enjoyed it. Don't know the current state of it, but I hope it grows and flourishes. Shoutout to HVV (the hamburg public transport) as I had no trouble in the 6 or so months commuting to hamburg on sundays and back home on thursdays, getting around town without that car. Night-busses, good daily schedules, easy app to pay for all of it, really enjoyed it. Sadly I'm now back to car land, because in my 300 ppl village there's only 4 busses per day (two in each direction) and the closest trainstation is 10km away without any safe bikelanes to get there, which underlines the whole topic of the video I guess.. I would use my e-bike or take the bus, it's just no feasable. If I want to get to work with public transport currently, switching from bus/rail/bike and back would mean the trip takes roughly 1,5hrs. Meanwhile, with my car, driving the back roads instead of highways to avoid long distance commute traffic in the morning, It takes 20-25 minutes. Guess what I'm choosing?!
10 місяців тому+4
👋 from Hamburg! It's even better with the heavily subsidized Regionalticket with full access to all local transportation in all of Germany and to all regional trains for a 49,00€ flat!
Allegedly only 17 billion dollars is needed to fix homelessness in USA. So much more money goes to these private companies that build nonsense roads. It’s insane to me
In some areas, I think it might be the San Francisco Bay Area, there are more empty homes (mostly owned by companies buying up homes to push up prices) than homeless people, with many of those people sleeping on the streets next to EMPTY HOMES
@@iggyreilly2463 it’s not the only cause but it is a cause. Shortages in housing creates higher prices and reduces discretionary income amongst the population. The higher the cost of living, the less financial stability people have which can lead to homelessness, life stagnation, inability to take moderate risks, etc. If a homeless person is $700 per month away from being housed vs $2,000 per month, which scenario would be easier to overcome?
@@iggyreilly2463There are a lot of factors, but lack of affordable housing is one of them. I guarantee you that if you fix that, you would cut the homeless population by a fifth overnight. The rest either need way more help than an urbanist solution could provide, or prefer the situation, as bad as it seems for the vast majority of us.
I think your style of videos is way better for explaining these topics to average people. The professional urban designer will be able to get into more details, but Joe "I got a shiny new Ford F150" Shmoe will just tune out and not retain or understand any of it. Your videos are really good for dispelling common delusions and misconceptions people have, and they've been very useful to me.
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t This is very easy. All you need to do is have any education past high school and they will automatically dismiss what you have to say. I know this because I talk to them regularly and this is their attitude.
His speaking style, rhetoric, and overall presentation is amazing. I had ideas for videos on most of his topics and without fail his final product is better than mine could have been. He's just really good at this.
He is a bit of a rabid crusader. But not hard enough that you get alienated by his stances. I would compare him to an eloquent trial lawyer or a hell and brimstone preacher. He is that good. And no bland stock footage.
Norwegian viewer here! Very happy to hear Oslo being mentioned, as I think it's an amazing example of not only how to properly manage traffic but also on the fact that bad terrain is no excuse I see a lot of people arguing abroad that their country is too hot or too warm for walking or biking, but just look at us Norway is, for most of the year, extremely cold, and the terrain is also relatively uneven making it possibly the worst case scenario for cycling, and yet by simply doubling down on biking infrastructure it suddenly feels just fine to use it either way Besides, E-bikes and cheap rentable e-kick-bikee exist as well for the lazy ones who don't actually wanna spend the energy biking, and yet it is still just soo so much more efficient than making people use their cars instead I also wanna mention the toll system, I live in an Oslo (Bærum) suburb where people are very conservative and heavily opposed to the tolls as we're likely the only place in the country where pedestrianization is unpopular, but then once it comes to actually getting to the city everyone is suddenly sooo happy to not be stuck in the Thousand Year traffic that usually occurs on the highway there And just in case you're opposed to busses or other specific modes of transportation, here's a list of options I currently have to get to Oslo: -Normal bus line that goes frequently and almost always on time -Express busline that only stops at major stations and has dedicated lanes, usually even faster than using a car -The Oslo Metro "T-bane" that is *always* punctual -Regular train, which are so numerous and spacious that you're guaranteed to get a place to sit, and the seats on this thing are more comfortable than those on cars according to pretty much everyone I've talked with All of the above are also all included in a single ticket, meaning that mixing and matching these is completely possible and normal It really goes to show how large of an effect it makes having different options, Oslo went from being a nightmare to get around in to being near pleasant to travel in, and it has also helped with making the city feel more alive in general now thst you see more people on the streets
Jeff Speck said it best on a strongtowns podcast: American DOT’s are criminally negligent, mindlessly continuing highway expansion and over-engineering roads to compensate for this negligence
And “ in the rear with the gear “ Butieg isn’t doing diddle squat to change its culture. “. Talking about a ladder climber. The term in brackets means “ logistic folk who would not be seen on the frontlines” , btw.
I've had employees at the Texas Department of Transportation tell me with what I presume was a straight face that adding lanes will decrease emissions because it will make traffic go faster, thus decreasing emissions from idling in congestion. It's enough to make my head want to explode.
It may also be a makeup of the legislature. Years ago my government teacher said that if people in urban and suburban Northern Virginia, Richmond and Norfolk could find common cause, then the legislature wouldn't be run by representatives from rural areas and could implement policies that help the most people, which are in their areas.
I love driving. But I hate to commute. Because it's stressful, and traffic is the worst. Besides I can't relax. I like driving in the weekends were I can actually enjoy. Listen to music and don't have somewhere to be and traffic is gonna make me late. I would much prefer to take a train, metro, bus to work. Then I can read or something. And then take the car only when I want to relax.
I don't have a car right now, but when I did, the best commute I had was when I lived 40 miles away from my job and had to be there by 3 AM. There was something so liberating about being able to peel down the freeway in the middle of the night with my music blasting (usually the Space Channel 5 ost at the time) and the cool night wind running through my hair. The drive home always _suuucked_ though because it was usually L.A. bound at 3 PM. I love driving too and I'm disgusted by how horribly designed our cities are and how deplorably underfunded/underdeveloped our public transit is.
Same here. I have been a car enthusiast for my entire life, I love cars; but I hate car dependency. Driving to work everyday is miserable and I'd much prefer to take a bus or a train that way I can get some work done on my commute so I could be out of the office faster. Driving an hour as your commute is wasting time cuz you can't do anything productive in that time.
You got the point, having transportation alternatives makes it better for drivers too, because there are lots of people that drive only because they have to. If you give them alternatives then only people that need to or wants to drive will do it.
I forgot which channel this was, but there was a guy talking about how the local municipality wanted to upgrade a congested road to have more lanes, and as part of the construction work it was narrowed to only one lane in each direction, and traffic flow improved noticeably. Then the municipality decided to expand the road anyway.
The thing that always gets me confused is how building rail, projects will balloon in cost largely because of the struggle to get the land to build it on. And yet....getting 2-3x the land area - still with wide sweeping curves! - for a highway is no biggie at all!
Pretty much because anything percieved as even slightly anti-car is 'doubleplus ungood wrongthink', if you'll pardon my Orwell; or else, is anti-Murica'! and "Communist Talk!"
It will never stop shocking me, particularly the case of the UK struggling to finish a road network due to environmental concerns but then casually just turn around and destroy a forest to plop down a road or other types of useless development
Can someone explain why people look down on public transit? I cannot drive, so I am a bit confused, but I love the bus as I can go online and distract myself immediately after reaching the stop. Driving and cycling requires full attention. Taking the bus requires very shallow attention.
In badly developed countries (and yes USA, falls in that category these days) public transport is often dirty, full of homeless people etc. When you have been harassed by a drunk guy in the bus a few times you might not want to use it anymore. Of course these problems are almost non existent in areas with good funding and less social problems . so the circle is: public transport not funded -> not reliable to use -> people with money don't use it. -> stigma of poor -> less funding -> repeat
In other places being able to take public transit actually is a sign of wealth. It mean you are able to afford to live in a place close to public transit and do not have to rely on a car. Cars are for poor people who have to live outside the city.
@@Blackadder75 The stigma of "public transit is for the poor" may also stem from the cultural norm of cars as status symbols. In Thailand, for example, rich people are always portrayed in the media to own a nice car and live in a big house.
DUDE, that whole thing about highways being built because traffic engineers want to be paid at 11:06 TOTALLY relates to my theory as to why web design has been so terrible for the past decade. Websites like UA-cam, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all had perfectly functional and comfortable UI, but every few years they completely redesign how everything looks because the web designers that work for those companies are desperate to stay employed. They redesign how everything looks and feels, pissing off every user because they want to prove to their employers that they're still needed. If there's nothing to fix, then there's no work to be done, which means they won't get paid any more. I've thought about this for YEARS.
I was sitting 30 minutes in LA traffic jam when it occurred to me that 100 years from now they're going to look back and think that we were crazy. At least I hope they will.
Fantastic video! In the housing sphere, I think both the challenge and opportunity of induced demand is the fact that no one really understands it or its effect. Where I work/live, we are in a full blown housing crisis, and a huge part of it is the fact that we require huge roadway capacity increases to build more housing, which actively kills projects and incentivizes wasting land. It's super hard to get folks to agree to literally just build less road, because the transit isn't there and where will the cars go? Induced demand quite literally kills housing before it's even built.
I just want to say that this happens in large part due to lobbyism from the car and fossil fuel industry. It is very much indeed possible for lobbyism to corrupt everything so much that people on the government level either believe or tell the public that they believe things like this, that more lanes will solve traffic (or for example that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels 🙄🙄)
Also just a lack of eductaion and people voting for populists. If people believe more lanes is the solution, the people screaming hardest for it will be voted for. The fact if it is true or effective or not really is not relevent. The people who are proposing the actual solution to peoples problems will be demolished completely by the people proposing whatever it is that people want to hear or percieve to be the truth or solution. And since most solutions to societal problems generally are counter intuative, most problems tend to only get worse over time in places that heavilly depend on populist politics.
I think it is only part of the problem, since even in countries with good public transportation car ownership is still comparable to the US: In the netherlands it is around 83%.
Thank god (in the US anyways), the market for the main consumer of fossil fuels (electricity), is somewhat privatized. So while that does mean we don’t get nuclear that much (which we really need), it does mean that running coal and gas power plants are being turned off because it’s cheaper to replace an already fully functional gas plant with solar or wind
My city of Grenoble (France) prides itself as one of the greener cities in the country, and it was the "European Green Capital 2022". The same year it saw the completion of a 6km long widening project on it's urban freeway, for a cost of 400 millions euros. 67M€/km. This was founded by a private company which has a concession on this freeway but also on hundred of kilometres of toll roads outside the urban area. In exchange for founding this urban freeway, the company is allowed to raise tolls on the rest of its network, so they definitely count on induced demand to recoup their investment. I'd like to point out a few things about this road : - the new modernised roads is designed for a 90km/h speed limit (they used the corresponding national guidelines) but limited to 70km/h. Of course everyone is speeding because you can hardly go 70km/h in dense traffic going faster than you do. - most trips aren't through traffic but commuters going from one part of the city to another, definitely people who have alternatives to driving and are susceptible to induced demand - meanwhile, the tram lines are just the same today as they were 10 years ago, despite much needed extensions. But of course building tram lines would require the local government to invest its own money, instead of "private money" from increased tolls on the privately operated roads outside the city. - the widening project branded itself as "green" because congestion is supposedly more polluting than congested traffic - the bike network, allegedly the best in the country, is pretty poor, not even a proper network, and only cost the city 10M€ in the last 5 years. - an improved suburban rail network (to RER or S-bahn standards) could help many people commute by train instead of car, but that's require 500 to 1000M€ investments. It's been announced for more than a decade but no funding has been secured thus far.
My favorite way to demonstrate the reason adding lanes doesnt help is because everytime a car changes lanes, for a brief moment it requires space in both lanes. Because these " virtual " cars only exist when changing lanes you can have a block of traffic that was very close to critical density suddenly over capacity because of the influx of virtual cars when people change lanes.
"Om de doorstroming te verbeteren verbreedt Rijkswaterstaat de snelweg A58 tussen Eindhoven en Tilburg, over 28 km, van 2x3 rijstroken." Thanks, Rijkswaterstaat!
Yeah it's absolutely true, the Netherlands is not innocent here. Dutch cities are generally quite good with respect to keeping the negative aspects of cars away, but provincial governments are very often in favor of road widening. But then, Dutch cities tend to be governed by left-wing/green parties, while the provinces are governed by the VVD or, more recently, populist parties. It really does make a difference who's in charge when it comes to car infrastructure. It's going to be interesting in the coming decade to see how Dutch cities, many of which are trying to become autoluw, will handle the huge increase in car traffic that will come from these widened provincial roads and highways.
@@NotJustBikes I think it helps that at least the city centers will still have reduced car traffic, since people would park in a P+R around the edge of the city and then take public transport in. Of course this does require the NS/Public transport to not go downhill even more, or people will end up driving anyway. Personally, since I live more towards the east of the country in gelderland, here most people generally drive. However if i need to be in a city center or somewhere in the randstad I will take the Train because its faster, easier, and I don't have to deal with finding a place to park. Unfortunately since the trains are so expensive often when going to arnhem now with a group we end up driving and parking under the *literal* Central Station and walking from there on out since its over 4x the price to take the train vs drive to the same exact spot the train would stop :(
@@unconventionalideas5683 Unlikely as the majority of people still just want to take the most convenient option. Someone committed enough to an alternative, say for climate reasons, is less rare now, but still would have to be a huge majority to avoid the induced demand.
More lanes is a little bit like getting more chefs to the same dish. No chefs, and it's pretty hard to make it. Too many chefs? Doesn't really do anything better. Perfect amount is one or two chefs, just like lanes :)
Yes, after two lanes you should really start investing into other modes of transport. 2 lanes + bus/cargo/taxi lane would be tolerable for ring roads. Above that it is just a policy fail.
Tokyo is an fantastic example of the importance of public transport. And I am not talking about the 3 busiest train stations all in the middle of Tokyo, but about the price difference for apartments. 10min way to the train station can mean a 30% drop in rent.
That's less "importance of public trasportation", and more so simply the effecs of demand on the prices of housing. The closer to work, shopping, eating, entertainment, and play housing is, the more expensive it's going to be. Has nothing to do with public transportation. The only difference public transportation makes in that scenario is that the 10min commute would become 30min. But, also, depends on the place. Japan isn't that big. 30min is a few towns over for Japan. 30min is across one town in the U.S.A.
good video, I have nothing to add other then complain about traffic and highways. Unrelated: I recently cut down on my highway trips by taking advantage of a convenient train stop a couple of towns over in their historic downtown area. It was my first time ever getting on the train and I needed someone to drive me to my local station, and the train was a whopping 35 minutes late, but I enjoyed the experience! Unlike a bus which stops and scans everyone's ticket one at a time, you just sit down and the conductor verifies that you have a ticket, this saves a lot of boarding time. The seats were spacious and comfortable and once you get moving whew do you move! We were going at highway speeds just without the traffic! Whenever I mention the benefit of trains to my dad, his immediate response is "oh it only goes as fast as a highway" and I'm like "what do you mean, 'only?!"" You mean I get to go as fast as a car without needing to pay attention to traffic?! You mean I can get to downtown and _not_ have to circle for ages looking for a parking space? You mean I can just walk off the platform and find myself in a vibrant downtown filled with shops, restaurants, and parks?! Every time the Californian high speed rail gets brought up, his response is similarly "it'll only go twice as fast as a car" and its like "ONLY???!!!" Sure, it might not compete with a plane in terms of time, but I would far rather take a long train ride to having to deal with a plane. I'll just read a book. Honestly, the only reason Amtrak sucks so bad is just because they have to share the rails with freight and are chronically underfunded.
I only ride plane once. I think true plane is fast, good for long range especially if over the ocean. But waiting in airport and numerous gate was kinda tiring. I also watching too many Mayday: Air Disaster making me worry about flying in plane. Worst scenario of train crash, at least I'm still in land. And the body still recoverable. Short and medium distance, train is FTW for me.
adding more lanes also increases the complexity of each trip, and adds opportunities for conflict on an exponential level: people who migrate out to the hammer-lanes then have to migrate in again to reach their exit, and because most people have greedy driving habits, that means they usually don't begin this migration in time, and take riskier maneuvers than they should to try to make up for not planning ahead. when you have to cross FOUR lanes to reach your exit instead of two, the odds are much higher that some idiot will try to lane-dive across them all. additionally, the more lanes there are, the more difficult it is to figure out which lane you need to be in at highway junctions, especially when there's also an exit at the same location, and/or the split is unintuitive (ie, you want to go west, but the exit for west loops into a cloverleaf on the opposite side. signs and GPS instructions have gotten better, but when exits are close together, you might miss the sign from trying to keep situational awareness with 5 lanes to watch, and it takes longer for GPS to read the instruction to you than you actually have between instructions, so things start to get really dicey, and people do dumb things when they're caught of guard.
Another related point : the extrem left lanes are often forbidden to heavy trucks, a good portion of them being in-transit (the 401 in Toronto or the I-45 in Houston for exemple), so local car traffic has to cross in-transit trucks traffic to exit.
"They" don't want you to travel less... they want you to travel MORE! They (automotive industry and everyone involved) are fully aware that traffic will NOT change for the better with more highways and wider roads, but instead it will make more people buy a vehicle and drive longer and more frequently... Burning more fuel, paying more taxes, insurance, buy spare parts, consumables, tyres and services. By making the roads bigger and cities more spaced apart you are left with no other option than buying a car and paying to everyone involved. You become the product... cars become a subscription. Also, automotive companies receive billions in subsidies and spend millions in lobbying and advertising. They became so big that they make the rules now... they dictate the supply and the demand.
19:40 as an arlington resident, thanks for the shout out. but we still have a lot of work to do. We still lack networks of dedicated bus lanes, and our bike lanes still need more protection and more extensiveness. And our metro isn't _that_ frequent. This leads to people still driving _a_ _lot_ but yeah we're better than most places in the US
But being on the right track with the right mindset is a major plus and good longterm. As said in another video, things just didn't happen overnight in Amsterdam, but they replaced and modified streets over time as they were due for renovation anyway.
I just looked at a plan for Piedmont Rd in Buckhead (Atlanta). They are trying to call it a "complete street". In essence, they are taking a stroad, and adding a lane and making the sidewalk wider encouraging biking on the sidewalk. Just shows that planners will happily bastardize whatever term is in vogue these days
Now you know what they locals are petitioning to incorporate Buckhead as a municipality. So the city of Atlanta can’t have its ways on Buckhead affairs.
@@serafinacosta7118 This has nothing to do with the City of Atlanta. This is Georgia Dept of Transportation which is the state, and don't believe the hype, Buckhead will always be a part of Atlanta, and it's a small minority that call for it to break away
I often drive the entire length of the 401 and I don't look forward to the ridiculously wide parts around Toronto. Even when traffic isn't that heavy, there's always a wall of idiots that forms that slows everyone else down. In 3-4 lane highways, people are generally pretty good about respecting "slow traffic to the right" and "fast traffic to the left". When you get to 4 or 5 lanes or higher, it's a free-for-all of people who think "well, I'm driving the limit".
Plus, with everyone driving so haphazardly, they don't realize they're about to miss their exit, so people from the far left lane suddenly cut across 3-4 lanes of traffic to get to their exit in time. The 401 to 400 exit is the fucking *_worst_* for this, because for BOTH the Express _and_ Collectors exits, it is just the _one_ lane each to cover everyone on the 401 who needs to go northbound. I legitimately feel myself tensing up whenever I have to pass by that interchange.
I love driving a car but I hate driving a car in a city. The traffic is a mess, it's difficult/expensive to park, you are stuck in traffic all the time, you can't do anything else but to focus on the road. Good public transportation is a blessing. Being able to walk or cycle around is even better.
6:16 I drove that 405 commute while it was under construction. It was a nasty broken mess for YEARS while they were building it. After? It was just the same as it was before, and I wasn't driving it at peak traffic. I took it around 11 AM to AVOID all the traffic and wouldn't leave work until 7 PM.
I recently found your channel and you've helped me learn to articulate why I hate driving and biking so much in America. Before that, I had no clue why it felt so uncomfortable to bike on roads and I had no solution to ameliorate that feeling. So, I really appreciate you sparking my interest in proper urban design so that I can hopefully create some change in my area.
I used to live in Atlanta, and one big reason I left was the really bad commute times. There is one section of I-285 (the perimeter highway that goes around Atlanta) that has a maximum of 12 lanes in one section. They plan to increase that to 18 by 2030. They euphemistically in the past called the ongoing expansion of the "Perimeter" the "Freeing the Freeways" project. But honestly it just made it worse every time they increased the number of lanes. It is a horrific example of bad transportation engineering.
This is why I still feel that one of the earliest episodes of Well There's Your Problem -- Episode #5: Traffic Engineering -- is still one of their most important, even after four years and 150 episodes.
It's not bad to sometimes revisit first principles and basic concepts. As I say, every year there's a group of people turning 18 that can vote, but might not have learned about something important.
Love the Oversimplified cameo :D Also 100% agree with you on this. I've lived in Houston and now being in Europe it is absolutely nuts how much easier it is to get around with public transport.
And once you are past 2-3 lanes per direction, the on and off-ramps and streets connecting with those become a massive bottleneck as well. Reconstructing those is often either extremely expensive or actually impossible if you still want to have a city that they connect to. Meanwhile foot- and bike traffic scale at almost no additional cost (in my city, you see a single slim bike lane put more cyclists over a crossing per traffic light cycle than the FOUR car lanes next to it combined) and decent rail networks can also scale to absurd throughput levels with a fairly modest cost per user.
Theres a major infrastructure project happening right outside my job. In some ways it's great. A big mixed use area (including apartments, offices, green space, and retail), new curbed bike lanes, a new bus route to the nearest train station, and adding a side walk where there was a gap on the bridge. But, they're also adding a lane in each direction. Not a bus lane, not turn lanes. Just a lane. My coworkers are so excited. I'm terrified. This is already an area prone to wreckless driving. The traffic is already so high that we give tips and tricks to visitors who need to turn left. New lanes won't fix those problems. In fact, I think it'll be a lot worse.
One of my biggest peeves with the buses around my home town is the lack of "express" buses, with only 10 or so stops per route, rather than 50-80 (or whatever) ... which would be supplied by "typical" buses. So much stopping-starting adds so much time to the trip, especially when only picking up one person, who inevitably doesn't believe in getting their payment ready, until the driver tells them the price (maybe, just maybe, a bunch of them would get it ready while in the queuing to board).
In europe every country, even the poorer ones, moved to electronic payment with chip cards a decade ago. Almost nobody ever pays cash except tourists who haven't gotten the proper bus card yet. which can indeed sometimes be a hassle to get
@@doesnotcompute6078 What? No! 15 stops is either way too short or an express route. Short routes force people to change buses to get across town, which is annoying, even with a highly coordinated network where the connecting bus is waiting. I just counted the most popular route in town here and it's 56 stops for an 8 mile long route. An express route, along the exact same routes with ~15 stops would be ideal, stopping at major stops along that route, as most people go from major stop to major stop, or can get the frequent bus close to them to the major stop, for quicker journey. The journey I took today was 24 stops away and 3 miles (walking distance on GMaps, though the bus takes a longer route, winding through some residential areas, adding maybe 0.75 miles)
@@Blackadder75 Yes, they take electronic payment, but still also take cash, but my comment was to include such, where they don't even try to get their card ready, until they're stood there, in-front of the driver/card reader, which all too often means faffing around in a bag to find wallet, then find the card in the wallet, to then put it all back in place before getting out of the damn way. I swear, they believe the universe revolves around them.
There is a mathematical sweet spot between too many stops and too few. The immediate argument I hear to justify having a stop literally every other block is disabled people, but to be polite if someone's disability is at that level we do have on-call specialty transit available for them already, which is even better suited to accomodate their needs. The other 100 people trying to use the bus to get somewhere should not be held up an additional 10 minutes because of the needs of one person as it just discourages anyone from using the bus at all. Disabled people deserve convenient and accessible transit, but so does everyone else. On the lines I use I really wish they would eliminate every other bus-stop to speed the trip up.
We just visited Victoria BC, Canada. They've reduced the number of car lanes for more protected bike lanes, and a few dedicated transit lanes. I didn't notice an increase in the time to drive around the city, and definitely saw a lot of people riding bikes. We noticed a large increase in mixed land use as well! Some places take time...
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i can finally watch a video from you without it being recommended to me 4 months later
Maybe bringing up Switzerland as a good example wasn't such a great idea. The Government is currently aggressively trying to pass a 5.3 BILLION infrastructure project to widen all major highways to 6 lanes or more. And the worst part is that it's almost certainly going to happen. Don't be fooled, we also have boomers in the government.
**Limit the access to using roads while providing more effective alternatives to driving!**
Seriously, do road planners not realize that every individual lane has a very limited physical vehicle capacity, which includes the required stopping/acceleration lanes space?
So why don't they ever seem to consider these physical limitations and where they may end up dumping the traffic to?
Seriously, why do they measuring traffic based on vehicle numbers/flow rate and not via the space being required/used?
Its kinda dumb considering how space efficient transit like trains, trams, and buses are by comparison, yet planning for them having dedicated lanes, inaccessible to cars.
Like build limited access freeways to connect counties and some urban areas, (mainly for industrial shipments) while prioritizing building a almost as impressive system to the interstate system built for rail.
Also avoid, building bottlenecks on roads for god sakes.
And replace garbage road networks that don't work, with worthwhile parks, that aren't just glorified one way stroad padding space.
Tbh the biggest problem with fixing America's bad urbanism is gonna be really based on figuring out how to make a square mile that doesnt encourages driving when said square mile has a paved road around all 4 corners on average.
All thanks to that land ordinance from the 1800s.
Fact: 90% of city planners quit one lane before they finally fix traffic for real!!!
please change your comment to say 100%
@@TripleYagh It's a meme about gamblers who quit before they "win big"
You are a genius
Could you please explain your joke?
@@TripleYaghcould you please explan?
Hello!! Transit planner for Arlington, Virginia here!! SO HAPPY to see us mentioned in this video!! Actually, when building the Arlington portion of the Washington DC metro system, the original plan was to run it in the median of interstate 66 in North Arlignton. The planners for Arlignton County actually convinced them to instead run it underground and underneath the local roads instead, and used the opportunity to begin it's aggressive transit oriented development that has made Arlington such a wonderful place to live. It's one of the few rare examples of planning done right in post-WW2 America. I live in Arlington completely car-free and it is cheap, convenient, and easy to do so!
I can see your point: another video said that trains in the median of a highway may be bad in general because of suboptimal land use around the stops. But also I think when you're stuck in commuter traffic, seeing trains pass you is the best advertisement for using it next time, and perhaps the section at the county-line being in the median is why that line in your county has near-capacity ridership.
Grew up in Arlington, can confirm that the Metro stops on the orange line (out to Ballston on the Orange Line) have fueled decades of booming development. Arlington still has a lot of work to do with regard to getting cars off the road, but they have an excellent head start!
@@sandal_thong8631There is a place for both I think. Especially in places far out from the city center, they are good rights of way to use. The problem is that being around highways as a pedestrian is unpleasant and a massive highway can bi-sect the valuable land around transit into two not as valuable places.
@@AyeCarumba221 in North America, increasing population is not the issue since most housing is single family with huge yards. Slight densification would make a huge difference, since driving isn't needed if you can live walking distance to amenities.
Arlington is an example of what not to do. I lived in Arlington and then moved to Manassas because the rent was half the price. Basically traded twice the commute for half the rent. If they widened the 66 it would relieve the housing pressure and reduce rental prices.
Less lanes also means less people slingshotting across multiple lanes because they realized their next turn is on the other side of the road.
That is because people are morons who don't pay attention to their surroundings, I see this everyday at work and to and from work
Yeah, this is the point I raise all the time when the state wants to widen highways (contrary to this video, it's more often state than cities). Going fromb1 to 2 lanes is one thing...3 to 4 or more and you better show that the vast majority of drivers are starting and ending their trips well outside the congested areas (they're not). Otherwise you get lane change loss and/or poor lane utilization.
*fewer
@@sethkrueger9294 Both are correct, literally shut up
"a bad driver never misses their turn"
“just one more lane bro. i promise just one more lane and it’ll fix everything bro. bro. just one more lane. please just one more. one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more lane i promise bro. bro bro please i just need one more lane bro”
"I'm not addicted to lanes, I can stop anytime I want!"
Did you know 99% of traffic engineers stop building “just one more lane” right before they permanently solve traffic?
"Do you know what would fix traffic?"
*TRAINS*
Real lane expansion like this hasn't been tried before. Trust me!
Bro
What's especially crazy about the money people spend on more lanes is they then turn around and say they don't have money for public transit.
"Sorry, kids. Daddy spent all the money on beer so there is nothing left for bread and milk for you." Pretty sure there was a book about this. The american government is identical to an abusive lush of a husband.
people could live closer to work if not for insane zoning regs -- that is probably the low hanging fruit
People also complain when public transport doesn't make a direct profit from tickets - but how many roads make money directly for the local government?
@@alquinn8576 on the other hand if you demolished suburbia and everybody lived close to work like in my home city (Moscow) the prices would be astronomical. A single one room apartment of 430.5 feet in a 1-hour subway ride zone from all popular workplaces costs around $150k bucks here. And if we consider the actual exchange rate which is around 60 bucks per rouble it’s going to cost around 250k$. 250k$ for a one room apartment in a pretty shitty apartment block. Meanwhile in America you can buy entire houses of 1000+ square feet for that price and not feel excluded from society in any way. And now for the best part: the average wage in Moscow is just $2k dollars per month (and it’s already a massive overstatement) so according to your prices the shitty flats we have would cost around half a million of USD.
@@georgeousthegorgeous yeah but that is a whole nother diffrent can of political worms. This is where you have the problem of how mch social aspects does a government include - like for example_ rent control. since if landlords *can* get away with making things more expensive.... they *will*
One of the most depressed I've been was when I was laid off from my job, single (I still am), and living in a suburb. It was in a beautiful newly built neighbourhood, but yet the isolation was unbearable. I was only 20-30 minutes outside the city, but because of traffic the trip took 1-2 hours during rush hour. That meant I had zero incentive to go into the city and socialize or visit my friends. Yeah, that was a depressing time. Anyway, grateful for these videos and community that would understand the frustration. Many North Americans just don't get it.
We get it. Some of my friends live - within the same city - and I still only visit them once every few months because I can't stand being in traffic for 2 hours each way, or public transit for 1 hour each way but it's filthy and crime-laden.
I honestly think one of the biggest reason why I am single is because of where I live. There isn't any way to naturally meet people outside of work (and no, I don't desire to date people at work. That's asking for trouble). I don't want to go to the bars because it's just expensive to do so since I gotta pay for a uber plus drinks. I hung out at bars way more when I was living in the dorms at college because I.. could just walk home. There's no meetups here. There isn't any real third places. It's all corporate fast food places or retail outlets. I'm also convinced online dating is basically dying because people are just promoting their onlyfans or trying to scam (the apps themselves try to get you to pay for a terrible experience which doesn't help).
I've basically decided I'm gonna try to get a good paying job to get me out of this hellhole to somewhere that cares about fostering human connection. I don't care if that eliminate the majority of towns as long I'm happy.
@@Shadowninja1200 Online Dating is trash now, since all the sites that - used - to be good, now have the most basic functions paywalled. PoF went from free messaging, down to - 1 - per day, more than 1 requires a monthly fee.
The most baffling part is why two of those 10 lanes couldn't have been dedicated bus lanes. Literally put some barriers in between and markings there and increase the frequency of the bus service. Those things bypassing all the traffic jams could convince a lot of people.
There are too many 4 lane stroads that should have dedicated bike lanes. Also there are 4 lane divided "highways" running through neighborhoods in my area. Take 2 of those and make bike lanes.
“bEcAuSe CaRs aRe mOrE iMpoRtAnT. yOu cAn’T sLoW dOwN dRiVeRs”
Exactly. The only possible benefit from more lanes, is that they might be turned into bus/tram lanes.
Sounds like communism to me, are you a commie? 😡
@@timogul
Why would anyone drive a bus if they are stuck in traffic with all the Suburban Assault Vehicles?
it's certainly beautiful to see a city with people in it, and not just hundreds of cars and desolate buildings
The coming pandemic 2.0: Hold my beer.
If there's one thing I learned from the pandemic its that other people are hell, and now crowded "walkable" neighborhoods turned out to be diseased.
@@mikeydude750 Nobody is forcing you to be around people. Feel free to live in the woods :)
@@tora201jp apparently European cities dealt better with the pandemic than the US
Lol you forget that there's people in those cars? They're not driving themselves
I always remind my friends that complain about being stuck in traffic, "You are never IN traffic, you always ARE traffic.". You and everyone else is on this road / highway because there aren't enough alternatives to get some of these drivers to take them.
Great video
Actually Work Vans / Trucks get stuck in traffic. Despite the world's best public transportation network you still have loads of people using the car just to get to work in Switzerland. We had basically a decade without inflation, except actually for services depending on big vans full of gear. if a repairman only works 6h hours spending 2.4h stuck in traffic...
@@beyondEV traffic is also other people, the people in work vans would spend far less time in traffic if we get more people out of cars into other modes of transportation if using a car isn't essential.
Thank you for a very well argued video. At 14m 40s you mention the fact that in Switzerland you see lots of wealthy people in the First Class on trains. As a regular visitor to Switzerland who travels around the country on a First Class Swiss Travel Pass I know that to be true. At busy times it may difficult to get a seat in FIRST class.
In October 2019 I boarded a crowded train to go from Lausanne to Berne and managed to find a free seat alongside a very well-dressed woman engrossed in her laptop. A casually dressed young man opposite (security?) eyed me suspiciously but relaxed when he realised that I was a tourist. Is this woman somebody important, I thought?
Three hours later watching the Swiss TV news, there she was! Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of the Federal Cabinet. In 2024 she is now Finance Minister, and vice-president of the Confederation.
In Switzerland the superb public transport means that you do not need a car. And as a commentator to a recent City Nerd video said, in Switzerland using public transport is part of the Swiss 'cultural DNA'.
Wonderful story, thanks for sharing.
It's almost a cliche at this point, but: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation” - Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá.
@@Coffeepanda294 This is the first time I've heard the quote, so I think it's one still worth spreading.
As somebody who is living in Switzerland, it is genuinely AMAZING the amount of people who work during their commute in 2nd class (1st class is really too expensive to be honest). People here work 8 hours and while working during the commute, they can shave these hours off of the regular office hours
that's a very lucky sight!
You definitely don't see that in Canada.
public transit has another immense advantage:
its no lost time. you can use the time to read, play a game on your phone or do other smaller tasks or activities, making the time the trip takes feel much shorter and pleasant
The downside of public transit is that you can't control your surroundings. In LA people are constantly smoking, playing loud music, and other things much worse. This keeps many people from even thinking about taking it. Lack of quality can negate some of those benefits you posed.
@@wanglelife Well you also can't control the amount of traffic you are in too, and some people like to modify their cars to be as loud as humanly possible. Also being forced to be constantly focused on the road by fear of possible death puts a significantly worse physiological strain on you then say, loud music.
@@wanglelife
Having experienced LA buses, the authentic urban experience pushed me right back into an Uber for the remainder of my visit!
Holland has enjoyed safe and comfortable transport options that other countries try to emulate without realising you can’t cut and paste solutions on top of different cultural and social circumstances.
Poorly lit streets, high levels of urban crime, deserted bus stops, a fractious and anti social populace - all these will deter people from seeking alternatives to their car.
I know several people including myself who have recently increased their dependence on their vehicle for safety reasons.
This. An underrated drawback of cars is how much brainpower and focus is being used to focus on the road. So much mental energy we don't HAVE to use for driving, if we could take trains or busses. There's so much creativity getting forced into focus on roads in North America.
@@wanglelife perhaps it is exactly because of the demographics that ride it. The lack of quality and behavior you described in your example is because people do not use it enough. If all kinds of folks were to ride public transit as is common in Europe/Asia, there would be more focus on actually solving these issues. If people just wave it off and go ride their cars, nobody cares enough, right?
I moved to within 1.5 miles of my job. I ride my bike daily. I live two blocks away from my best friend and two blocks away from a grocery store. It's wonderful
Ive been doing a similar thing for awhile, do you ever talk to someone whos in the suburbs and doing the typical stuff and they seem like they live in a whole different world?
Right on, @brainwater176, I did the same in 2015. Moved to a house only 2.3 miles from my job and 2.8 miles from my Mom.
You cycle during the winters too?
@@K4113B4113 yep, I live in southern US so it's not that bad. It's been upper 40s this week in the AM
@@501lilspoon I'm not sure what you mean, but I do know many people who have greater than 30 minute commutes. I live with my girlfriend who does therapy at client's homes, she drives for a couple of hours a day. Many people's lives are built around their car, if their car fails, they can no longer function in society. Im also a therapist, and many people complain of not being able to afford a car. Not only that, they struggle to get to work without a car, so it's hard to obtain the money to buy a car without already having a car. The system is rigged
"The difference between induced demand for cars and induced demand for other modes of travel is that cars are extremely space inefficient."
I think this is the most important sentence of this video. In debates about transport policy in urban areas, I am often accused of being downright anti-car and that it should be about good coexistence in traffic. When I then argue that good coexistence can only work if cars have to give up traffic space, I am often met with a lack of understanding. People have no idea how bad the car is in terms of space consumption.
The poeple who dismiss the space problem should take their tank-like SUVs down some tight curvey rouds in France or Italy and then see, how comfortable they feel when they litterally have to halt and drive half way off the road to pass by another car. Or they should go to a automotive museum and see how much more reasonably sized cars were just a few decades ago. Seriously, compare the development of street width in the last 50 years, one lane today would be good enough for two back then.
The irony is that that anti-car and pro-car are in fact on the same team: we're all anti-traffic.
I live in a famously bike-friendly city, which is hard to navigate by car, even harder for outsiders, who aren't used to being overtaken on two sides by very assertively riding cyclists. But after I tell my friends from outside the city: "the reason we are driving at all, is because it is so inconvenient" they mostly quickly learn to appreciate it.
...And if people claim that "Just One More Lane" isn't a thing for trains, they need to have a good look at Real London, and the however many pieces of rail there are that are still somehow slammed for capacity.
My idea is let all the car people go live in there own “city” and pay for all the roads they want themselves, the rest of us can live in nice cities and it won’t be long before the car people want to move because their “city” sucks and is depressing.
@@Deckzwabber I've always thought it an interesting dichotomy. Car folks should be the _most_ aggressive about improving public transport/increasing the size of walkways and bikeways, because it would help remove two of the things that they complain about the most: people driving who _really_ shouldn't, and the "dumbing down" of car driving to assist them.
You touched on something that a lot of people forget: Cars are not the goal.
We don't build roads to move *cars*, we build roads to move *people*. Cars are just one way that people navigate those roads.
Sometimes advocates against traffic calming or removing on-street parking from a downtown area will argue that it will kill shops. As if the cars were going to spend money. But cars don't spend money. People spend money. Cars are just one way that people get places.
This is why people are outraged by street festivals that “close” the street to cars for a weekend. It gets in the way of cars, and the millions of people attending the festival didn’t count or something… because they’re not cars.
I'm also a lot more likely to stop in a shop that I see as a pedestrian than I am as a driver
But also people like this channel forget that cars have their own merit and there is a reason why I everyone flocks to them (I am not from the USA). Privacy and the ability to carry things are some of the few reasons why mass transportation will never make cars obsolete. On top of that with cars you have the initiative to move whenever you want wherever you want.
The lanes problem boils down to the fact that entrances/exits aren't proportionate to the amount of lanes. So although more lanes mean more cars for that part of the road, it means little if everyone gets stuck at the exits. Or the traffic at the exits causes traffic to the whole highway.
Besides that we need to address an issue and that is urban density. There is an upper limit to how large a city can get before traffic (in every aspect not only cars) just becomes too much. Certain architectors and urban planners have noticed the solution. The cities should not only expand at the dimensions but also on the third (height). Such concepts have been introduced with buildings having sky bridges connecting them. In this way you can layer your traffic (whether pedestrian or cars or mass transit).
I mostly dislike this channel because it falls in a relatively common pit. It goes to the opposite extreme and only uses the USA as an example when we know that the USA has a very specific problem (urban sprawl).
I talk from experience since I have been through highways quite a few times and I mostly uses buses and the underground to move around in my city. Unless you have Tokyo (and Japan in general) level of metro then in a lot of times you would prefer a car. The only downside to a car is the cost.
@@alexandervlaescu9901 This channel does not deny the fact that cars have their uses. It is all about the freedom of choice that people have. Fact is that, especially in the US, that choice does not really exist, as the options are not at an equal level. Public transportation and walking/cycling infrastructure is not invested in nearly as much as car infrastructure. While these options on a societal level are much more efficient, both in terms of costs and time.
How this has been treated in the past has created a lock-in situation for the car, which is the urban sprawl issue of the US you talk of. This is exactly what is also highlighted in this video: this is caused and reinforced by the investment in car infrastructure.
@alexandervlaescu9901
I was born in a different country but live in the US now. Cars are not the problem as you say; car dependent urban sprawl is. In my home country (Turkey), you can own a car but since people can live without a car (unlike US), you can reflect true cost of car ownership at the prices. How about 100% sales taxes/fees on cars, 200% tax on gas, 18+ to be able to drive, etc. Yes, people will always own cars but they’d better have a reason to justify that cost.
I keep seeing videos about why many Americans will continue to live abroad rather than returning to the states and about 85% to 90% say they don't own a car and feel happy about it
I moved from SF Bay Area to Europe six years ago and haven´t driven a single time since and I feel happy about it.
I’m actually thinking of moving out of the United States because of the car situation and also the crime situation
I live in Chicago and don't have or need a car and if this wasn't already true for me I'd probably have moved too, financial security or no.
i lived in europe for a year and being able to get around without a car is one thing i really enjoyed
thats why they only get 2 weeks of freedom and many stay inside the states for holiday
We just need a lane for every individual car on the road
Finally someone smart
now THIS is how you solve traffic
We just achieved traffic singularity.
In theory.
now we need the political will and the funding to realize it.
It would be hilarious if you STILL had traffic problems at that point because the intersections were too complex.
🤣👍
I live in a suburb, and something that hit me yesterday is so many of these massively wide streets are largely empty outside of the morning when people go to work/school and in the evening when people leave. Outside of that they're just giant wastes of space. So much driving is just going to the same place and back over and over.
@@bwofficial1776 okay? So why not have more things like trains and subway lines that take up way less space? We have those in my city, we just desperately need more of them.
@@bwofficial1776 Yeah, but car people will complain about "empty buses" running.
@@bwofficial1776 except in this case the unused capacity can be used for something better.
@@bwofficial1776 Don't forget you can average out the peaks and lows using storage. If you need 24kWh of electrical energy per day, that's an average of only 1kW, but solar panels are only going to be generating for a third of that time. Put in a 3kW array and 16kWh of storage, and you can use 1kW all day. Yes, in practice, you'd put in a bit more storage and your panels would generate a bit longer, but it illustrates the principle.
@@Roxor128 there's storage for transportation capacity?
I love the public transportation system here in Aachen (Germany). I live some 30 kilometers away from my job, an I could take my car to drive this way every workday. This would take about 45 minutes per direction. - I could. - But I don't. In Winter time I take my car to go about 5 kilometers to a park + ride (in summer time I do this by bike), there I hop on an express bus and ride down to Aachen in about 60 minutes. Oh, g'dam - this is 15 minutes more than driving myself? But wait - It's the time from door to door! And in this time I sit comfortably in that bus, got my headphones in my ears, my e-book reader in my one hand and a cup of tea in the other and enjoy the trip with drinking, reading and listening to the music. When I enter my office door, I am fresh and relaxed, ready to do my daily work - and when I come back home, I am fresh enough to take care about the kids, of the home, I can do whatever I want and I am not a little bit stressed at all.
Yeah, I could be one of those for whom the roads and streets have to be widened, who need more parking lots, who are responsible for tha traffic congestion we all are so sick of - but hey: I am not.
Can confirm this. I lived in Aachen (in the city) for about 8 years. Fun fact: I found It was faster getting around within the city on foot than by bus. Biking was (and still probably is) not so much fun due to hills. E-bike would have solved it though.
I lived in Los Angeles during the massive 405 widening, and the amount of time construction took and traffic congestion and detours it caused to not only fail to alleviate traffic but actually INCREASE IT is absolutely what LA deserves for doing that instead of putting in rail service across the west side.
I live in Orange County and feel your pain... We should have the best bike lanes and public transport... So frustrating.
@@moon-moth1 It's not too bad at 3 or 4am. 😬😅😔
And it only cost $2.2 BILLION to make traffic (and air quality) worse! Well done Caltrans!!!
Yeah but... Yall are getting the hyperloop tho, I'm sure after spending the 20billion dollars to get it done, is is only any day now. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Obvious reason why more lanes are bad that doesn't get talked about enough. In order to use the extra lanes, cars need to make lane changes. More lanes, more lane changes. Every single lane change slows down traffic, plus adds potential for collisions (which obviously bring traffic to a stand-still).
I think every european who has tried to drive in the US has missed an exit or made a risky lane change because we're not used to more than 4 lanes.
@@nicknickbon22even 4 lanes is pretty exotic. Whereabouts in Europe do we have 4 lane roads? I've never been on a motorway with more than 3 lanes outside of short merging/splitting lanes at a junction.
@@thesenamesaretaken The Autobahn in and around Berlin has a few four line sections. But that's mostly in between on- and off-ramps, which are so close together that it wouldn't make sense to reduce back to three.
@@thesenamesaretaken in Italy Milan to Bergamo, Modena to Bologna, both around 40 km and Milano to Saronno (a 1km section is even 5 lanes).
In the Netherlands there are actually quite a few Km from Amsterdam to Rotterdam and from Amsterdam to Utrecht. Then there’s the Frankfurt to Darmstadt in Germany. There is probably something 4 lanes to, from and around Paris and the same for Madrid.
I don't know if it is the same in other countries, but here in Mexico many roads have an extra lane for emergency and bus stops that needs to be empty.
Well, all the time I see drivers try to use them as shortcut before turning and many times they end up stuck trying to get between the other cars waiting their turn and waste more time than if they just followed the rules.
Drivers live by the saying "if there is a hole there is a goal".
I live in the suburbs of Chicago where the village is trying to widen a two lane (one lane each way) to a four lane road to reduce congestion. There is congestion for 30 minutes during the morning, and that is because the road passes by a SCHOOL where the kids walk by, crosses the street, and the school buses drop kids off. By widening that road, the road will be MUCH MORE dangerous for the kids to walk across. I'm not sure what the village is thinking. All the residents - especially the parents of the kids from the school and collecting signatures to oppose the road construction.
Do I get this right?
Because the children need so much time crossing the street, they try to improve the situation by making them take more time to cross the street?
Brilliant!
@@steemlenn8797 Yup. As far as the computer sensors are concerned, there is traffic during the morning. So that data went up to someone that decided that the road needs to be widened. Now, we'll just have more cars waiting for the kids to cross (hopefully), or even worse, more cars driving pass the school super fast and the kids risking their lives to cross the street.
@@steemlenn8797peak american city planning
Man I miss Chicago, not perfect but I could get by without a car.
Once it goes to four lanes, the school district has to change things, I think. I moved away awhile ago, but Schaumburg HS is right on Schaumburg Rd, which is four lanes, right? I don’t think the state allows districts to for e kids to cross more than two lanes.
One small nitpick at 20:00: It wasn't really the center-left majority in 2015 that lead to massive mobility improvements, it was the inclusion of the Greens within the governing coalition. The center-left had been in power before (without the Greens) and done diddly squat.
Well, before 2015 Oslo had already had better public transport than the whole of northam, but the greens definitely pushed it further and more actively. Shame it's only in Oslo though, while the rest of the country is same old suburban sprawl...
As a fellow Norwegian living in the general vicinity of Trondheim, I feel like we're like... Well I mean we sure as hell ain't Amsterdam, but I can at least get around. I do appreciate that just last year they built a nice new bike route that gets me closer to the city center *without* having to cross this one awful tiny bridge that is legit the *only* viable bikeway into the city *and is also* a narrow car bottleneck. I almost got hit by a car there once because both of us thought we had the right-of-way. (tbf, the regulations for that are stupid so I think in hindsight the car guy actually *did* have it... because I was *on* my bike instead of walking next to it which *for some asinine reason* completely redefines the hierarchy to make me just count as a driver rather than a pedestrian and therefore mean I do not have priority over cars at crossings.) I mean really, there's enough multi-use paths around that I can get around with reasonably minimal conflict points... It's mostly *in* the city that things get actively awful.
Could it be better? Certainly. Do I hope it gets better? Also certainly. Is it even remotely close to the American suburbs we see on channels such as these? Heck no.
...Although one thing is for sure: Norway does seem to be kinda awkwardly split up into "Oslo" and "Not Oslo". Kinda like how our national rail system works fantastic... as long as you're going to Oslo. Going literally anywhere else? You'll probably either need to drive or take a plane.
@@thelordstarfish The population density around Oslo is so much higher than the other parts of Norway that it is very understandable. The Greater Oslo region has about 1.5 Million people all with a short commute to Oslo while the other cities around sub 300K. Norway is however far more car dependant than many European countries, although a lot of if has to do with density or the lack thereof. Seems like we are hell bent on having people living on every island and peninsula (nes). I grew up around Oslo, but have lived in Bergen for over 20years, our infrastructure is lacking.
The only thing I don't understand about induced demand is that when I hear 12 lane highway, my fight or flight kicks in and my brain demands I stay as far away from that nightmare deathtrap at all cost.
Sure, but the induced demand in that case is people avoiding an 11 lane highway because it's to busy. When they hear it's 12 lanes they're relieved because they're imaging 11 lanes worth of traffic spread across 12 lanes. They don't realize it's more like 13 lanes of traffic crammed into 12.
I don't understand concerns with safety around roads. I don't have a problem with walking or bicycling around roads. But I may have unusually low sense of self-preservation.
@@Volkbrecht Sure, navigation around multilane roads is difficult, but I mean specifically safety. I don't feel that I would die there. Using phrases like “deathtrap” is inappropriate IMO and devalues their meanings. I would reserve that phrase for situations difficult to escape and likely causing death.
I hope you read this. This video is being heavily discussed on the Institute of Transportation Engineers forum right now. Great job!
Ah, that's great to hear! And thanks so much for the SuperThanks! 👍
In my local area we don't have induced demand. We have mandated demand. The councillors are all used car dealers, the mayor owns a road building company, and the existing (pretty shitty) bicycle network is being removed and the roads widened.
I literally cannot walk anywhere from my house without walking on a busy road. Not next to a busy road, but actually on the road, with the cars.
Yeah, well that's how it was for North America after World War II. Except the people in office were rented or influenced by the car and tire lobby, not directly made up of people in that industry! I guess the good people in your area need to vote the special interests out!
@@sandal_thong8631 people in general nowadays are too exhausted from work and life to educate themselves during their free time. They're just going to believe what the people with the advertising funds are going to tell them.
mmmm corruption.
I feel so sorry for you I can't believe how depressing it must make you to feel stuck if you dont have a car
Those are glaring conflicts of interest. Your municipality should have ethics rules that disallow this. Maybe there are already existing laws that disallow this but people aren't aware of them?
I giggled at 3:53 "That guy that leaves at 7AM to beat traffic". If you would do this exact thing and take the same route as I take. You are already an hour late "to beat traffic"
that guy is trying to beat the 8AM traffic - too bad that he is beaten by the people who have done that for years and now are trying to beat the 7AM traffic... most of them are considering trying to just stop sleeping so they can skip ahead of the curve and beat the 1AM traffic
So true. You need to be out of the door by 6:30 at the earliest
@@kevjay-med1225That was the old trick, the new trick is to leave at 5:30am to beat the 6:30am traffic
I think that getting up at 4 is viable and a way to beat the 6AM traffic. I think that people sleep too late. If midnight would be the actual mid of the night, people would go to sleep at 20 and get up at 4.
Mix getting up early with how people commonly get up (late), and morning traffic would be spread over 4 hours (I guess).
Well at least now I know I've mastered the skill of fooling people into thinking I'm educated
Well, not "educated" per-se, just "much more educated on the topic than me."
Really, REALLY good video btw@@NotJustBikes
Thanks! That means a lot, coming from someone much more educated on the topic than me!
Did you know there is no solution to car traffic except viable alternative to driving?
Oh shit I forgot to include that in the video! I'll mention it next time.
How did you comment before this video exist?
@@ryannghiale4056 because he did
But, but, freedom, and communism, and america big, and...
@@ryannghiale4056 The time that you see as the upload date is actually the publishing date. NJB uploaded this to UA-cam early, then only made it public now. The person that left that comment had a link to the video before it was made public.
The "economic" analogy of the supply/demand curve is an interesting one. Roadways in North America have become a kind of monopoly, and are now charging us more and more for less and less, with declining service and quality. They can over-promise and under-deliver. And unless a competitor comes about, they will continue to enpoopify themselves and we have no choice but to play by their rules and to pay and pay and pay in money, time, stress, quality of life, peace of mind, and sometimes losing our homes. Bring back transportation competition and a market with viable alternatives to driving! :)
It's like the shoe event horizon, but with highway lanes.
it's like not everything can be handled by the free market
Gotta love spending billions and billions on marginal returns, if you even end up with a positive return at all
Even the free market would do better than this. All these highways are public funds, paying to support an industry that would otherwise struggle for customers.
It's like capitalism, but with the government paying the costs for one team.
@@HiopX the problem literally is that there aren't any alternatives. Making a brand new alternative that improves the situation is something that the free market gravitates to. Except that this analogy is flawed since the "service" in question and "solution" is both provided by the government here. There definitely are private rail companies that have been expanding where the government has refused to themselves though (like Brightline in the USA).
Finally, an urbanist UA-cam video that gets the difference between induced demand and freeing latent demand!
Your unnamed editor is earning their pay, indeed.
Her pay ❤ she writes for Climate Town also.
Like an actual chick or
@@imakedamoney420smokeweed an actual chick, as opposed to?
@@DumbdogsWin a hypothetical chick
@@imakedamoney420smokeweed weird comment but alright....?
The thing about super wide roads is that a hold-up in one lane has a way of rippling over all of them, sometimes even the opposite direction (when people slow down to see the accident). One guy makes a dangerous lane change and then 5000 people lose 5 minutes each. And the more traffic, the more this happens. That's the difference between a road and a water-pipe: water doesn't flow slower when the pipe comes close to capacity, but a highway close to capacity will become a parking lot every other day.
I used to live in central Florida and had to take I-4 to go to school. This exact scenario played out nearly every single day.
The elevated expressway in Seoul ACTUALLY used to be a river before they built the elevated expressway on top of it until they tore it down to bring back the river. Meanwhile, Tokyo is also planning to move its elevated expressway underneath the Kanda River.
However in my home country, it’s the complete opposite. We have the freaking PAREX (Pasig River Expressway) proposal in Metro Manila that threatens to cover the Pasig River with an expressway AS WELL AS a proposal for a freaking viaduct, threatening to cover the long-neglected Guadalupe River in Cebu City (where I study), connecting the CCLEX (Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway) directly to the city proper itself.
And yet, where I live in Toronto, the road junkies are screaming about the the cost of new bike lanes installed on Bloor Street West. Funny how no one complains about the cost of that extra lane they're adding to the 401. . .
Start complaining.
America does in fact have streets - they’re just better known as parking lots.
Great line bro.
Also i heard, some Robin Hoods, all around USA started to carjack improperly parked car to total a car, and get owner to know about this. Wish them luck!
@@nikostalk5730 No I think you mean lane.
The transformation of cities that prioritize active transportation, like cycling and walking, is truly remarkable. It not only improves traffic flow, but also creates a more sustainable and healthy environment for everyone.
17:30 Don't forget that an on-street tram or bus lane can also be used for emergency services.
that Seoul transformation is absolutely gorgeous
LOL! While watching this excellent video, UA-cam threw at me not one, not two but three car commercials! We Americans (aka United States) are so in love with our cars. They are "normal", they are status symbols, they are false freedom. I once had a die hard Chicago commuter tell me that he would never take the train into the city, as I was. He said he wanted his freedom. I retorted, "freedom to do what? Freedom from what?" I would get on the commuter train and just relax. Meanwhile people like him, heading to the exact same destination, would get in their cars (leaving their homes earlier than I would for my train, mind you) and fight and grind and stress sit and sit and sit... going to the exact same "loop" area as me.... just to keep their "freedom." I, on the other hand, could get up and move around, or stretch out a bit, and above all else, just relax. Chicago area trains into The Loop are mediocre at best for their comfort and all. But they sure beat driving!
Cars, the ultimate symbol of freedom (the freedom to follow roads to preset locations, no, off-road is not a response)
18:17 gotta love the mercedes driver who has absolutely no desire to properly slow down for the woman crossing the street... Cars really do bring out the worst in humans.
Audi drivers are even worse. So are BMW drivers. It’s a pattern.
Yeah that was atrocious!
SUVs are the worst by far. Think they own the road. Pedestrian? Get out of my way. In my city, just yesterday SUV did hit and run of a 61 year old woman. She died.
Hit and runs in general seems to be going up. Drivers don't see themselves as accountable.
Assault is the threat of committing violence. All traffic violations need to be prosecuted as assault with a deadly weapons. What is running a red light or speeding through a pedestrian crossing if not threatening “I will hit you if you’re in my way”?
That would get drivers to straighten up and fly right real fast.
No smart pedestrian in the US would even *try* to pull that maneuver with a car approaching, even at relatively traffic-calmed 15 km/h speeds. They'd be savvy enough to wait a whole burdensome 4-6 seconds for the car to pass. Even as a child walking/biking southward home from school at 8-9 years old, I was wise enough to let northbound cars turn left onto the side street I was looking to cross, if I could tell that there was a sufficient gap in oncoming arterial-road* traffic. Sure, maybe I _technically_ had the right-of-way. But you can be right, or you can be "dead right."
*Not even a stroad, just 1 lane each way with a central/shared left-turning lane.
My husband and I literally moved to the city we're in specifically for the unique cycling network. I can get to every store I need to by bike within 15 minutes and I ADORE it.
Hey that’s like my village in Germany! Just after I finished school they even built a dedicated bike road etc. which would have made things even faster
Read that too fast initially as, 'for the unicycling network,' which I equally fully support.
@@wcjerky looool I would also fully support that
Where do you live if you don't mind saying. Super curious sounds like a wonderful place to live, would like to research it@@Dumparino
@@william2058 St. Croix River Valley area in Minnesota. Lots of nice towns and a couple of state parks in the area.
There's a reason I take the bus where I can, part of it is that it's cheaper and less stressful for me but part of it is that I hope in doing so it will encourage continued improvement to bus service, in turn creating more demand and start that cycle of better public transit
That was an interesting display of the projections used to justify projects, versus the actual, on multiple occasions for the same road.
Plumbing is actually a pretty good metaphor. If you have a basin of water high up, and a basin of water low down, if you make a pipe between them, the water pressure (“water traffic”) will be dependent on how high the top basin is. If you make the pipe wider, that doesn’t decrease the pressure, it just fills the pipe.
This fun analogy can be made even funnier by observing Bernoulli principle: The bigger the pipe, the higher the pressure. (probably does not apply here, but shhh)
@@veronikakerman6536 The higher the pressure and the slower the flow, yes!
I live in a city in LA County (a smaller city east of LA itself) and they were discussing extending the subway line out to us such that it’d be walking distance more or less from my home. I was super excited. They then cancelled the plans due (in large part) to local feedback (mostly concerned about homeless people) and I was SO pissed. People use cars sometimes almost like barriers to protect their little fiefdoms. I saw a similar thing in Washington, DC where the subway gets you TONS of places…except the neighborhood of Georgetown (one of the oldest/wealthiest areas in the city). The closest subway to Georgetown requires a truly Herculean effort to walk to. There are busses, but they are far less appealing and nowhere near as convenient.
Majoring in civil engineering, and seeing these kinds of videos made me want to focus on traffic engineering and public transit. Hope the next generation of transportation planners can help reverse the issues we’ve made for ourselves
I think another video made the point that a lot of city planners know about principles of good planning for transportation, but others like politicians and the public that vote for them do not. This video seems to blame the highway engineers for their proposals, saying they are acting as lobbyists for road expansion because that's their job, rather than giving alternatives to move people.
Oh the next generation of transportation planners have to fight politician first because most decision coming from them.
Being a traffic engineer for a city is very fun and challenging. It's part system engineering and part psychology, which is why I love it.
Oh, and there are plenty of US traffic engineers working towards change. But there's always a need for more to help make that shift!
The issue isn't incompetence. There's usually corruption at play.
Although induced demand and latent demand do exist, I believe that the conclusions aren’t that simple. There are plenty of cities around the world with decent public transportation that haven’t invested in additional lanes. Many people still choose to buy and use cars. Congestion in many of those places is horrendous. Also, public transport isn’t practical or economically feasible in some low population density areas. IOW, increasing transportation times doesn’t always equate to the additional lanes didn’t help or make the problem less worse.
As someone who used to live in Houston, the infrastructure genuinely made me depressed. Driving an hour and a half in traffic when it should be no more than a 30-minute drive is soul-crushing.
It boggles my mind that Texas does this to itself. The fact that it needed two constitutional amendments to fund 35% of their budget and they have to use it for highway construction/maintenance. TXDOT only uses 2% on public transportation and these funds can only be from mainly state and federal funds.
as someone who currently lives in Houston, same. There's a certain level of irony about the fact I have to take a depressing hour-and-a-half drive full of traffic to go see my therapist lol
that commute would be 3 hours via bus.
@@kartos. maybe it'd be faster if the road wasn't clogged up by people who don't have to drive
@@therealdave06 or maybe they wouldnt have to commute so far, if mixed use zoning was a thing... you know... if people were able to live near their workplace and amenities and services they need... like... in a city or something
Induced demand is a problem for all modes of transit, but it's especially bad for roads for one simple fact: all other modes of transportation stress themselves linearly, but *roads stress themselves exponentially.*
A road with 1000 cars has 1000 minds paying attention, 1000 minds starting and stopping because they keep tailgating, and 1000 chances for people to change lanes, screwing over everyone behind them.
A train line with 1000 people has 1000 people... Sitting.
It’s actually not exponential, it’s worse. The road has a fixed capacity, meaning travel times shoot to infinity at that limit
The government here in New Taipei is planning to build a two lane elevated expressway in front of my house ruining the riverfront.
There is already a 9 lane stroad in front of my house.
My condoleances. I live in a relatively walkable place in north america and that seems like concrete hell
Oh god why not a train instead facplam
@@USSAnimeNCC- A tram line along the waterfront might have been nice than a nine lane superhighway. ("stroad" implies that there is actually space for anything else than moving cars)
based
I'm so sorry to hear that, sounds awful.
Well, thats the thing right: That rich guy in Switzerland sitting in his comfy first class chair, reading his newspaper and sipping his coffee, while getting where he needs to go, is about as far away as it possibly can be from how most North Americans view public transportation. I went to NYC about a year a go for 10 days, so quite enough time to really explore the subway network. And while it is very extensive and convienient, you almost always feel you are in a "second class" system. Old, dirty, lots of weird people hanging out... And every research out there says: When a place looks like that, it just feels unsafe, regardless how safe it actually is. And there is just no way anyone can convince me that this is the best the largest city in the wealthiest country can do.
Wealthy people take the most efficient option. And since they are the ones with the most influence, that infrastruture will recieve the most attention.
Being able to take public transport is a sign of affluence, it means you can afford to live close to public transport and do not have to rely on an inefficient car. Cars are for poor people who have to live outside the city.
I did the same in NYC on vacation. We took the subway everywhere. Old, dirty, lots of weird people hanging out was the way it was the whole time. LOL
And reaction to that unsafe feeling (and some of the actual safety issues on NYC subways in the 70s) informed a lot of the design of the Washington DC subway. (stations with vast headroom and long sight-lines, no public restrooms', nicer car interiors with rows of seats instead of benches, etc.)
Unfortunately they then immediately shot themselves in the foot by assuming it would almost exclusively be used for business commuting - and so designed in limitations that hurt it to this day. Those included structuring it as a star pattern (focused primarily on connecting suburbs to the city center; not getting around the city or between suburbs), no additional tracks for express trains or to allow track maintenance while keeping regular service going, and planning around a short workday-oriented operating schedule (which also fed into the lack of extra tracks - as they assumed long overnight closure windows they could use for maintenance).
Sitting in a car, it's harder to discover the weirdos, brake checkers, indecisive, wait-I-still-can-get-to-the-exit-lane et c. before they do their act.
@ageoflove1980 Actually that coffee sipping swiss guy was sitting in the on-board restaurant which can be used by passengers of 1st & 2nd class.
"but it might work for us" is one of the funniest clips from one of the funniest shows and it absolutely sums up the entirety of humanity's bad decisions
The Ontario government is running radio spots about how wonderful they are for widening the 401 and other highways. I live in Waterloo and I'm stuck with the 401 to get to the airport, either by private car or by taxi or (with difficulty) bus. If they spent the money on light or heavy rail, or even a dedicated bus lane, I would leave my car behind in a heartbeat. Even with the widening, I can't reliably predict whether the journey will take 1 hour or 3. And during several years of construction, that was between 2 and 4.
Barrie resident: hard agree. Hwy 413 and Bradford bypass anyone? Money would be way better spent on faster rail lines and more frequent trains in and around GTA as well as cross-provincially. I forsee the sprawl NJB identifies with these highway plans.
Also want to note that NJB appears slightly more aggressive in this latest vid; this isn't a bad thing as I think we need to start calling out more strongly the irrational, non-evidence based decisions being made.
I wasn't the least bit surprised when Doug Ford's government decided to move forward with that. He doesn't strike me as an enlightened individual.
In Ontario, land use and highway "improvements" have nothing to do with the customer (the taxpaying public). Instead, it has to do with supporting our Premier's buddies, the land developers and wealthy builders.
Almost everyone I know would be happy to use public transit if it were offered in an affordable convenient manner.
The exception are workers who must travel at very unusual hours for their jobs.
for a fracction the cost of the last 404 expansion they could have accelerated double-tracking the barrie line and running more trains on the other north-south train lines and moved significantly more people.
@@gabygaedecke2411 I am a mobile crane operator and slinger/banksman - this means that even though, on paper one could argue I have a single place of work - the depot where I go when there isn't a job - there are actually weeks where I might not even see that depot, because I'm just slinging those times so I go frrom home directly to sites, could be a mile, could be fifty, and could be three hundred. I and another worker went to london (UK) to do a job south of there. we had to leave at 3am, to get there for twelve pm. And we had the same trip to do in reverse, same day.Thankfully the job was actually rather quick, and not a drag-out 8hour thing like we've had in the past.
IF that london job was a "really no equipment needed", we could ahve gotten the train. Except no, because the scheduling for such wouldn't have worked for where we are coming from and going to, because the local train services don't run at night, i.e. the first in the morning would mean we'd be on a afternoon-departure train, and we had other jobs in the preceeding and following days. Between that and the high ticket prices, it really was cheaper to pay overtime for two men, and two full tanks of fuel which essentially is the same as paying for a third person, than it was to just get two blokes south..... and then wonder why they didn't come back, surely it was a return tic-(no.).
I'm a fan of NJB's channel. He's talking sense, though I do think he's mentioned but I don't recall, the point that some people *even with alternatives* should drive, or be making use of their own private or company vehicle, rather than public transit. a business man who carries a briefcase going from one city office to another office in a differrent city can get the train. A business owner who runs a construction company is likely going to need to use his own (company) vehicle, because he'll have tools of the trade in it. The people who work with the mobile cranes - that's me - are going to be in a company van carrying extra equipment for the cranes, from chains, slings and shackles, to plates, blocks and mats, and there's jacks and skates and more. He aint getting that on a bus, or a train.
And hey, if traffic reduction measures mean most of the people he's stuck in traffic with every day aren't there, but doing their trips via bike bus and train, then he gets home quicker!
You might mention that car use efficiency is also getting worse because cars are getting much bigger per person carried. Bigger cars also affects the parking space needed to store them.
Also some parking garages in the US already collapsed under the weight of the heavier cars
We don't need parking minimums, we need parking maximums.
If your car is too big, you can't park.
yep people will argue all day that their new hybrid SUV is 'more efficient' than their old car - on fuel. But people in general really haven't started to think about land use. How it doesn't fit in 1 car parking space, it can't fit in the garage any more so now it's on the street.... how now they have more cars.
@@stormveil
"yep people will argue all day that their new hybrid SUV is 'more efficient' than their old car - on fuel"
Except it actually isn't. The *engine* may be more efficient, but that gets entirely cancelled out by the vehicle being bigger, bulkier, and heavier. For example, the 1984 Toyota Camry I used to drive got 26 mpg, according to Google. A large hybrid SUV today does only barely better than that.
He has mentioned the problems of car size, just not in this particular video. Watch "These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us," another great NJB video
I saw this in action with Highway 24 being completed in the US, which connects Fort Wayne Indiana to Toledo, Ohio. Previously these two cities and the rural towns in between were only connected via county roads and two lane state highways.
Living in one of the cities along the highway, we were all happy it was built!! It made it much easier to drive to Toledo or Fort Wayne when we wanted to, and we ended up going much more often. I now know so many people who choose to live in my town and commute to Toledo for their job instead of living closer. And every time I come back to visit family and I drive on that road, I notice the traffic getting worse and worse. The downtown, which actually has great bones - is hollowed out in favor of the new Meijer, Walmart, and Hobby Lobby built next to the highway which was on the edge of town. It’s depressing…
Cities makes mobility makes cities
Thank you for the point about induced demand. I often hear re: transit projects that "Won't that induce demand too?" And the answer is yes, it will, and that's a good thing! Cars are large and bulky, even without considering parking space. Walking, cycling, and transit take up far less space and thus are a much more valuable use of the valuable real estate in the interior of cities. Transportation planning, ideally, is about moving the most people in the most efficient way possible--that's usually not by car.
and proper transit can just free a routine, when i know I can do whatever and know that i can go to a nearby subway and go home with just my pass card, id and keys, in a properly built and developed system.
i feel that a lot of comments are assuming that just because their transit system is not at tokyo-class, there is no hope for transit ever being a thing where they live. Just being able to go to downtown and back home when for any reason your car is down is already a plus, that's why is a public service as it's core: the growth should be spread to the city itself, in providing value to its citizens, and not only direct financial results
Strangely, I heard a report saying that a subway expansion plan might make more people want to take trips using existing lines which was bad because they were nearly full capacity already. So does that mean they don't want to run longer trains, or more trains more frequently? You'd think they'd want more business since that takes people out of cars?
There is another reason why public transportation is underdeveloped in many places. These modes are required to make a profit. The same requirement is never put on roads, especially in most parts of America. Moreover, tolls are instinctively rejected as government overreach.
roads have military utility thats why. Rail lines are sitting targets roads are a web of alternate routes that vehicles can change on a whim. With rail you need to build a whole new line or series of junctions and new lines to come close to the variability of routes.
Transit systems shouldn't even be reliant on farebox recovery for their funding in the first place. Hong Kong's metro is primarily funded through station-adjacent real estate development that it owns, which has turned out to be wildly successful for both the metro system and the city as a whole. The good news is that other places' systems are finally starting to clue in, like Bart, which is finally, excruciatingly slowly, starting to build high-density mixed use housing and commercial districts at their stations. It's too late for the east Blue Line, which is stuck with the unenviable task of being the 580 median, but the main north-south line between Richmond and San Jose is getting a lot of great improvements.
@@avroarchitect1793rail has military utility for armored vehicles which would otherwise tear through the concrete and asphalt with their treads
@@amistrophyDo you know that tanks can be hauled on trucks ?
@@martinpenwald9475 they can but it's immensely more efficient to haul them by train for as long as possible. Part of the reason why the _entire army logistics doctrine of Russia_ is primarily based on a rail network for example. Using rail is cheaper and _a lot_ faster. This is why rail lines are also the way more important target during war, because they are the best way of transporting lots of heavy stuff.
In my opinion, those gigantic highways, such as in Houston, look like a very gigantic scar upon the land.
The filth that is Houston is a scar upon that swamp land.
Great work, Jason and Nicole. I say this as someone who couldn't imagine getting around except by any means except car, was a car owner for 10 years, and two car-destroying hit and runs later, I'm a passionate advocate for transit, urbanism, and people powered movement.
I just came back from a few hours of e-bike errands in -3C weather. I started with a coffee (I went by a new shop with a big ass parking lot but no space to lock a bike so I left) then rode about 25 kilometres popping in and out of shops as I saw thing of interest. I just stopped at home for a sandwich (and this video) then I am heading to the gym for a quick workout before it gets dark. This is a day well spent.
The Oslo part reminds me of my time in Hamburg, Germany.
After getting there (~450ish km, by car) I could just drop it at a public parking lot for 4,00€ / day, open the local public transportation app, pay for a week-ticket and enjoy everything there without the need for my car. They also tried some things like Barcelona where they removed the cars from certain districs and replaced it with outdoor seatings for the restaurants, lounges, child-play stuff etc as an experiment and it was such a nice change. It was quiet even though there were more people, it was relaxing because no fear of cars (although the idiots on rental scooters still wreaked havoc around town) and all in all I really enjoyed it.
Don't know the current state of it, but I hope it grows and flourishes.
Shoutout to HVV (the hamburg public transport) as I had no trouble in the 6 or so months commuting to hamburg on sundays and back home on thursdays, getting around town without that car. Night-busses, good daily schedules, easy app to pay for all of it, really enjoyed it.
Sadly I'm now back to car land, because in my 300 ppl village there's only 4 busses per day (two in each direction) and the closest trainstation is 10km away without any safe bikelanes to get there, which underlines the whole topic of the video I guess.. I would use my e-bike or take the bus, it's just no feasable. If I want to get to work with public transport currently, switching from bus/rail/bike and back would mean the trip takes roughly 1,5hrs. Meanwhile, with my car, driving the back roads instead of highways to avoid long distance commute traffic in the morning, It takes 20-25 minutes. Guess what I'm choosing?!
👋 from Hamburg! It's even better with the heavily subsidized Regionalticket with full access to all local transportation in all of Germany and to all regional trains for a 49,00€ flat!
Allegedly only 17 billion dollars is needed to fix homelessness in USA. So much more money goes to these private companies that build nonsense roads. It’s insane to me
In some areas, I think it might be the San Francisco Bay Area, there are more empty homes (mostly owned by companies buying up homes to push up prices) than homeless people, with many of those people sleeping on the streets next to EMPTY HOMES
Just 17 more billion dollars bro I promise , this time we will fix it
@@iggyreilly2463 it’s not the only cause but it is a cause. Shortages in housing creates higher prices and reduces discretionary income amongst the population. The higher the cost of living, the less financial stability people have which can lead to homelessness, life stagnation, inability to take moderate risks, etc. If a homeless person is $700 per month away from being housed vs $2,000 per month, which scenario would be easier to overcome?
@@iggyreilly2463
But by a shortage of affordable housing
@@iggyreilly2463There are a lot of factors, but lack of affordable housing is one of them. I guarantee you that if you fix that, you would cut the homeless population by a fifth overnight. The rest either need way more help than an urbanist solution could provide, or prefer the situation, as bad as it seems for the vast majority of us.
I think your style of videos is way better for explaining these topics to average people. The professional urban designer will be able to get into more details, but Joe "I got a shiny new Ford F150" Shmoe will just tune out and not retain or understand any of it.
Your videos are really good for dispelling common delusions and misconceptions people have, and they've been very useful to me.
He'll also tune out if he knows or suspects you think of him as "Joe Shmoe".
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t This is very easy. All you need to do is have any education past high school and they will automatically dismiss what you have to say. I know this because I talk to them regularly and this is their attitude.
His speaking style, rhetoric, and overall presentation is amazing. I had ideas for videos on most of his topics and without fail his final product is better than mine could have been.
He's just really good at this.
He is a bit of a rabid crusader. But not hard enough that you get alienated by his stances. I would compare him to an eloquent trial lawyer or a hell and brimstone preacher. He is that good. And no bland stock footage.
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t I didn't mean that in a derogatory way, just a stand-in for "average dude".
Norwegian viewer here! Very happy to hear Oslo being mentioned, as I think it's an amazing example of not only how to properly manage traffic but also on the fact that bad terrain is no excuse
I see a lot of people arguing abroad that their country is too hot or too warm for walking or biking, but just look at us
Norway is, for most of the year, extremely cold, and the terrain is also relatively uneven making it possibly the worst case scenario for cycling, and yet by simply doubling down on biking infrastructure it suddenly feels just fine to use it either way
Besides, E-bikes and cheap rentable e-kick-bikee exist as well for the lazy ones who don't actually wanna spend the energy biking, and yet it is still just soo so much more efficient than making people use their cars instead
I also wanna mention the toll system, I live in an Oslo (Bærum) suburb where people are very conservative and heavily opposed to the tolls as we're likely the only place in the country where pedestrianization is unpopular, but then once it comes to actually getting to the city everyone is suddenly sooo happy to not be stuck in the Thousand Year traffic that usually occurs on the highway there
And just in case you're opposed to busses or other specific modes of transportation, here's a list of options I currently have to get to Oslo:
-Normal bus line that goes frequently and almost always on time
-Express busline that only stops at major stations and has dedicated lanes, usually even faster than using a car
-The Oslo Metro "T-bane" that is *always* punctual
-Regular train, which are so numerous and spacious that you're guaranteed to get a place to sit, and the seats on this thing are more comfortable than those on cars according to pretty much everyone I've talked with
All of the above are also all included in a single ticket, meaning that mixing and matching these is completely possible and normal
It really goes to show how large of an effect it makes having different options, Oslo went from being a nightmare to get around in to being near pleasant to travel in, and it has also helped with making the city feel more alive in general now thst you see more people on the streets
Jeff Speck said it best on a strongtowns podcast: American DOT’s are criminally negligent, mindlessly continuing highway expansion and over-engineering roads to compensate for this negligence
And “ in the rear with the gear “ Butieg isn’t doing diddle squat to change its culture. “. Talking about a ladder climber. The term in brackets means “ logistic folk who would not be seen on the frontlines” , btw.
I've had employees at the Texas Department of Transportation tell me with what I presume was a straight face that adding lanes will decrease emissions because it will make traffic go faster, thus decreasing emissions from idling in congestion. It's enough to make my head want to explode.
It may also be a makeup of the legislature. Years ago my government teacher said that if people in urban and suburban Northern Virginia, Richmond and Norfolk could find common cause, then the legislature wouldn't be run by representatives from rural areas and could implement policies that help the most people, which are in their areas.
I love driving. But I hate to commute. Because it's stressful, and traffic is the worst. Besides I can't relax. I like driving in the weekends were I can actually enjoy. Listen to music and don't have somewhere to be and traffic is gonna make me late.
I would much prefer to take a train, metro, bus to work. Then I can read or something. And then take the car only when I want to relax.
I don't have a car right now, but when I did, the best commute I had was when I lived 40 miles away from my job and had to be there by 3 AM. There was something so liberating about being able to peel down the freeway in the middle of the night with my music blasting (usually the Space Channel 5 ost at the time) and the cool night wind running through my hair. The drive home always _suuucked_ though because it was usually L.A. bound at 3 PM.
I love driving too and I'm disgusted by how horribly designed our cities are and how deplorably underfunded/underdeveloped our public transit is.
Same here. I have been a car enthusiast for my entire life, I love cars; but I hate car dependency. Driving to work everyday is miserable and I'd much prefer to take a bus or a train that way I can get some work done on my commute so I could be out of the office faster. Driving an hour as your commute is wasting time cuz you can't do anything productive in that time.
You got the point, having transportation alternatives makes it better for drivers too, because there are lots of people that drive only because they have to. If you give them alternatives then only people that need to or wants to drive will do it.
I forgot which channel this was, but there was a guy talking about how the local municipality wanted to upgrade a congested road to have more lanes, and as part of the construction work it was narrowed to only one lane in each direction, and traffic flow improved noticeably.
Then the municipality decided to expand the road anyway.
The thing that always gets me confused is how building rail, projects will balloon in cost largely because of the struggle to get the land to build it on. And yet....getting 2-3x the land area - still with wide sweeping curves! - for a highway is no biggie at all!
Pretty much because anything percieved as even slightly anti-car is 'doubleplus ungood wrongthink', if you'll pardon my Orwell; or else, is anti-Murica'! and "Communist Talk!"
Yeah I honestly still don't get that
It will never stop shocking me, particularly the case of the UK struggling to finish a road network due to environmental concerns but then casually just turn around and destroy a forest to plop down a road or other types of useless development
POV: You're a planner for Texas DOT and you got kidnapped by NJB at hes yelling at you while you're strapped to a pole in his basement
Wish Canadian cities could realize this.
Yeah, me too. Instead, Ontario is investigating building a tunnel under the 401. 🤦♂️
Can someone explain why people look down on public transit? I cannot drive, so I am a bit confused, but I love the bus as I can go online and distract myself immediately after reaching the stop. Driving and cycling requires full attention. Taking the bus requires very shallow attention.
Public transit usually is (or people think of it this way): slow, crowded, inflexible in terms of time and route, dirty, uncomfortable and expensive.
In badly developed countries (and yes USA, falls in that category these days) public transport is often dirty, full of homeless people etc. When you have been harassed by a drunk guy in the bus a few times you might not want to use it anymore.
Of course these problems are almost non existent in areas with good funding and less social problems .
so the circle is: public transport not funded -> not reliable to use -> people with money don't use it. -> stigma of poor -> less funding -> repeat
classism and a century of propaganda.
In other places being able to take public transit actually is a sign of wealth. It mean you are able to afford to live in a place close to public transit and do not have to rely on a car.
Cars are for poor people who have to live outside the city.
@@Blackadder75 The stigma of "public transit is for the poor" may also stem from the cultural norm of cars as status symbols. In Thailand, for example, rich people are always portrayed in the media to own a nice car and live in a big house.
DUDE, that whole thing about highways being built because traffic engineers want to be paid at 11:06 TOTALLY relates to my theory as to why web design has been so terrible for the past decade. Websites like UA-cam, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all had perfectly functional and comfortable UI, but every few years they completely redesign how everything looks because the web designers that work for those companies are desperate to stay employed. They redesign how everything looks and feels, pissing off every user because they want to prove to their employers that they're still needed. If there's nothing to fix, then there's no work to be done, which means they won't get paid any more. I've thought about this for YEARS.
I was sitting 30 minutes in LA traffic jam when it occurred to me that 100 years from now they're going to look back and think that we were crazy. At least I hope they will.
Fantastic video! In the housing sphere, I think both the challenge and opportunity of induced demand is the fact that no one really understands it or its effect.
Where I work/live, we are in a full blown housing crisis, and a huge part of it is the fact that we require huge roadway capacity increases to build more housing, which actively kills projects and incentivizes wasting land. It's super hard to get folks to agree to literally just build less road, because the transit isn't there and where will the cars go?
Induced demand quite literally kills housing before it's even built.
I remember my dad explaining this to me as a kid. He was never even an anti-car person but he still knew how induced demand worked.
"Except for those who hate their jobs and their families."
I burst out laughing.
I just want to say that this happens in large part due to lobbyism from the car and fossil fuel industry. It is very much indeed possible for lobbyism to corrupt everything so much that people on the government level either believe or tell the public that they believe things like this, that more lanes will solve traffic (or for example that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels 🙄🙄)
Also just a lack of eductaion and people voting for populists. If people believe more lanes is the solution, the people screaming hardest for it will be voted for.
The fact if it is true or effective or not really is not relevent. The people who are proposing the actual solution to peoples problems will be demolished completely by the people proposing whatever it is that people want to hear or percieve to be the truth or solution.
And since most solutions to societal problems generally are counter intuative, most problems tend to only get worse over time in places that heavilly depend on populist politics.
I think it is only part of the problem, since even in countries with good public transportation car ownership is still comparable to the US: In the netherlands it is around 83%.
Thank god (in the US anyways), the market for the main consumer of fossil fuels (electricity), is somewhat privatized. So while that does mean we don’t get nuclear that much (which we really need), it does mean that running coal and gas power plants are being turned off because it’s cheaper to replace an already fully functional gas plant with solar or wind
My city of Grenoble (France) prides itself as one of the greener cities in the country, and it was the "European Green Capital 2022". The same year it saw the completion of a 6km long widening project on it's urban freeway, for a cost of 400 millions euros. 67M€/km. This was founded by a private company which has a concession on this freeway but also on hundred of kilometres of toll roads outside the urban area. In exchange for founding this urban freeway, the company is allowed to raise tolls on the rest of its network, so they definitely count on induced demand to recoup their investment.
I'd like to point out a few things about this road :
- the new modernised roads is designed for a 90km/h speed limit (they used the corresponding national guidelines) but limited to 70km/h. Of course everyone is speeding because you can hardly go 70km/h in dense traffic going faster than you do.
- most trips aren't through traffic but commuters going from one part of the city to another, definitely people who have alternatives to driving and are susceptible to induced demand
- meanwhile, the tram lines are just the same today as they were 10 years ago, despite much needed extensions. But of course building tram lines would require the local government to invest its own money, instead of "private money" from increased tolls on the privately operated roads outside the city.
- the widening project branded itself as "green" because congestion is supposedly more polluting than congested traffic
- the bike network, allegedly the best in the country, is pretty poor, not even a proper network, and only cost the city 10M€ in the last 5 years.
- an improved suburban rail network (to RER or S-bahn standards) could help many people commute by train instead of car, but that's require 500 to 1000M€ investments. It's been announced for more than a decade but no funding has been secured thus far.
My favorite way to demonstrate the reason adding lanes doesnt help is because everytime a car changes lanes, for a brief moment it requires space in both lanes. Because these " virtual " cars only exist when changing lanes you can have a block of traffic that was very close to critical density suddenly over capacity because of the influx of virtual cars when people change lanes.
Nobody is using the space occupied by the virtual car, though. By the time someone does, the real car has merged.
"Om de doorstroming te verbeteren verbreedt Rijkswaterstaat de snelweg A58 tussen Eindhoven en Tilburg, over 28 km, van 2x3 rijstroken."
Thanks, Rijkswaterstaat!
Yeah it's absolutely true, the Netherlands is not innocent here.
Dutch cities are generally quite good with respect to keeping the negative aspects of cars away, but provincial governments are very often in favor of road widening.
But then, Dutch cities tend to be governed by left-wing/green parties, while the provinces are governed by the VVD or, more recently, populist parties. It really does make a difference who's in charge when it comes to car infrastructure.
It's going to be interesting in the coming decade to see how Dutch cities, many of which are trying to become autoluw, will handle the huge increase in car traffic that will come from these widened provincial roads and highways.
@@NotJustBikes a good example of dutch NIMBY'ism.
@@NotJustBikes I think it helps that at least the city centers will still have reduced car traffic, since people would park in a P+R around the edge of the city and then take public transport in. Of course this does require the NS/Public transport to not go downhill even more, or people will end up driving anyway.
Personally, since I live more towards the east of the country in gelderland, here most people generally drive. However if i need to be in a city center or somewhere in the randstad I will take the Train because its faster, easier, and I don't have to deal with finding a place to park. Unfortunately since the trains are so expensive often when going to arnhem now with a group we end up driving and parking under the *literal* Central Station and walking from there on out since its over 4x the price to take the train vs drive to the same exact spot the train would stop :(
@@unconventionalideas5683 Unlikely as the majority of people still just want to take the most convenient option.
Someone committed enough to an alternative, say for climate reasons, is less rare now, but still would have to be a huge majority to avoid the induced demand.
More lanes is a little bit like getting more chefs to the same dish.
No chefs, and it's pretty hard to make it. Too many chefs? Doesn't really do anything better.
Perfect amount is one or two chefs, just like lanes :)
good analogy
Yes, after two lanes you should really start investing into other modes of transport. 2 lanes + bus/cargo/taxi lane would be tolerable for ring roads. Above that it is just a policy fail.
Tokyo is an fantastic example of the importance of public transport. And I am not talking about the 3 busiest train stations all in the middle of Tokyo, but about the price difference for apartments. 10min way to the train station can mean a 30% drop in rent.
That's less "importance of public trasportation", and more so simply the effecs of demand on the prices of housing. The closer to work, shopping, eating, entertainment, and play housing is, the more expensive it's going to be. Has nothing to do with public transportation. The only difference public transportation makes in that scenario is that the 10min commute would become 30min.
But, also, depends on the place. Japan isn't that big. 30min is a few towns over for Japan. 30min is across one town in the U.S.A.
@@ReclaimerTyphoon bot comment
good video, I have nothing to add other then complain about traffic and highways.
Unrelated: I recently cut down on my highway trips by taking advantage of a convenient train stop a couple of towns over in their historic downtown area. It was my first time ever getting on the train and I needed someone to drive me to my local station, and the train was a whopping 35 minutes late, but I enjoyed the experience!
Unlike a bus which stops and scans everyone's ticket one at a time, you just sit down and the conductor verifies that you have a ticket, this saves a lot of boarding time. The seats were spacious and comfortable and once you get moving whew do you move! We were going at highway speeds just without the traffic!
Whenever I mention the benefit of trains to my dad, his immediate response is "oh it only goes as fast as a highway" and I'm like "what do you mean, 'only?!"" You mean I get to go as fast as a car without needing to pay attention to traffic?! You mean I can get to downtown and _not_ have to circle for ages looking for a parking space? You mean I can just walk off the platform and find myself in a vibrant downtown filled with shops, restaurants, and parks?! Every time the Californian high speed rail gets brought up, his response is similarly "it'll only go twice as fast as a car" and its like "ONLY???!!!"
Sure, it might not compete with a plane in terms of time, but I would far rather take a long train ride to having to deal with a plane. I'll just read a book. Honestly, the only reason Amtrak sucks so bad is just because they have to share the rails with freight and are chronically underfunded.
I only ride plane once. I think true plane is fast, good for long range especially if over the ocean. But waiting in airport and numerous gate was kinda tiring. I also watching too many Mayday: Air Disaster making me worry about flying in plane. Worst scenario of train crash, at least I'm still in land. And the body still recoverable. Short and medium distance, train is FTW for me.
adding more lanes also increases the complexity of each trip, and adds opportunities for conflict on an exponential level: people who migrate out to the hammer-lanes then have to migrate in again to reach their exit, and because most people have greedy driving habits, that means they usually don't begin this migration in time, and take riskier maneuvers than they should to try to make up for not planning ahead. when you have to cross FOUR lanes to reach your exit instead of two, the odds are much higher that some idiot will try to lane-dive across them all. additionally, the more lanes there are, the more difficult it is to figure out which lane you need to be in at highway junctions, especially when there's also an exit at the same location, and/or the split is unintuitive (ie, you want to go west, but the exit for west loops into a cloverleaf on the opposite side. signs and GPS instructions have gotten better, but when exits are close together, you might miss the sign from trying to keep situational awareness with 5 lanes to watch, and it takes longer for GPS to read the instruction to you than you actually have between instructions, so things start to get really dicey, and people do dumb things when they're caught of guard.
Another related point : the extrem left lanes are often forbidden to heavy trucks, a good portion of them being in-transit (the 401 in Toronto or the I-45 in Houston for exemple), so local car traffic has to cross in-transit trucks traffic to exit.
"They" don't want you to travel less... they want you to travel MORE! They (automotive industry and everyone involved) are fully aware that traffic will NOT change for the better with more highways and wider roads, but instead it will make more people buy a vehicle and drive longer and more frequently... Burning more fuel, paying more taxes, insurance, buy spare parts, consumables, tyres and services.
By making the roads bigger and cities more spaced apart you are left with no other option than buying a car and paying to everyone involved. You become the product... cars become a subscription.
Also, automotive companies receive billions in subsidies and spend millions in lobbying and advertising. They became so big that they make the rules now... they dictate the supply and the demand.
19:40 as an arlington resident, thanks for the shout out. but we still have a lot of work to do. We still lack networks of dedicated bus lanes, and our bike lanes still need more protection and more extensiveness. And our metro isn't _that_ frequent. This leads to people still driving _a_ _lot_ but yeah we're better than most places in the US
But being on the right track with the right mindset is a major plus and good longterm. As said in another video, things just didn't happen overnight in Amsterdam, but they replaced and modified streets over time as they were due for renovation anyway.
“Nobody goes there anymore. it’s too crowded” - yogi Berra
I just looked at a plan for Piedmont Rd in Buckhead (Atlanta). They are trying to call it a "complete street". In essence, they are taking a stroad, and adding a lane and making the sidewalk wider encouraging biking on the sidewalk. Just shows that planners will happily bastardize whatever term is in vogue these days
Don't even mention Atlanta. This city is just mad max and it'll never ever change
Now you know what they locals are petitioning to incorporate Buckhead as a municipality. So the city of Atlanta can’t have its ways on Buckhead affairs.
@@serafinacosta7118 This has nothing to do with the City of Atlanta. This is Georgia Dept of Transportation which is the state, and don't believe the hype, Buckhead will always be a part of Atlanta, and it's a small minority that call for it to break away
@@scpatl4now thank you and noted.
Thank you so much for your amazing content! Your videos educated me so much!
I'm really glad to hear that! And thanks so much for the SuperThanks! 👍
8:46 OMG ITS LANE MANNNNNNNN!!!! (side note @CitiesByDiana has the funniest shorts and I'm so glad you put one of them in one of your video)
I often drive the entire length of the 401 and I don't look forward to the ridiculously wide parts around Toronto. Even when traffic isn't that heavy, there's always a wall of idiots that forms that slows everyone else down. In 3-4 lane highways, people are generally pretty good about respecting "slow traffic to the right" and "fast traffic to the left". When you get to 4 or 5 lanes or higher, it's a free-for-all of people who think "well, I'm driving the limit".
Plus, with everyone driving so haphazardly, they don't realize they're about to miss their exit, so people from the far left lane suddenly cut across 3-4 lanes of traffic to get to their exit in time. The 401 to 400 exit is the fucking *_worst_* for this, because for BOTH the Express _and_ Collectors exits, it is just the _one_ lane each to cover everyone on the 401 who needs to go northbound. I legitimately feel myself tensing up whenever I have to pass by that interchange.
I love driving a car but I hate driving a car in a city. The traffic is a mess, it's difficult/expensive to park, you are stuck in traffic all the time, you can't do anything else but to focus on the road. Good public transportation is a blessing. Being able to walk or cycle around is even better.
6:16 I drove that 405 commute while it was under construction. It was a nasty broken mess for YEARS while they were building it. After? It was just the same as it was before, and I wasn't driving it at peak traffic. I took it around 11 AM to AVOID all the traffic and wouldn't leave work until 7 PM.
I recently found your channel and you've helped me learn to articulate why I hate driving and biking so much in America. Before that, I had no clue why it felt so uncomfortable to bike on roads and I had no solution to ameliorate that feeling. So, I really appreciate you sparking my interest in proper urban design so that I can hopefully create some change in my area.
I used to live in Atlanta, and one big reason I left was the really bad commute times. There is one section of I-285 (the perimeter highway that goes around Atlanta) that has a maximum of 12 lanes in one section. They plan to increase that to 18 by 2030. They euphemistically in the past called the ongoing expansion of the "Perimeter" the "Freeing the Freeways" project. But honestly it just made it worse every time they increased the number of lanes. It is a horrific example of bad transportation engineering.
This is why I still feel that one of the earliest episodes of Well There's Your Problem -- Episode #5: Traffic Engineering -- is still one of their most important, even after four years and 150 episodes.
It's not bad to sometimes revisit first principles and basic concepts. As I say, every year there's a group of people turning 18 that can vote, but might not have learned about something important.
Love the Oversimplified cameo :D Also 100% agree with you on this. I've lived in Houston and now being in Europe it is absolutely nuts how much easier it is to get around with public transport.
And once you are past 2-3 lanes per direction, the on and off-ramps and streets connecting with those become a massive bottleneck as well. Reconstructing those is often either extremely expensive or actually impossible if you still want to have a city that they connect to.
Meanwhile foot- and bike traffic scale at almost no additional cost (in my city, you see a single slim bike lane put more cyclists over a crossing per traffic light cycle than the FOUR car lanes next to it combined) and decent rail networks can also scale to absurd throughput levels with a fairly modest cost per user.
Theres a major infrastructure project happening right outside my job. In some ways it's great. A big mixed use area (including apartments, offices, green space, and retail), new curbed bike lanes, a new bus route to the nearest train station, and adding a side walk where there was a gap on the bridge. But, they're also adding a lane in each direction. Not a bus lane, not turn lanes. Just a lane.
My coworkers are so excited. I'm terrified. This is already an area prone to wreckless driving. The traffic is already so high that we give tips and tricks to visitors who need to turn left. New lanes won't fix those problems. In fact, I think it'll be a lot worse.
One of my biggest peeves with the buses around my home town is the lack of "express" buses, with only 10 or so stops per route, rather than 50-80 (or whatever) ... which would be supplied by "typical" buses.
So much stopping-starting adds so much time to the trip, especially when only picking up one person, who inevitably doesn't believe in getting their payment ready, until the driver tells them the price (maybe, just maybe, a bunch of them would get it ready while in the queuing to board).
In europe every country, even the poorer ones, moved to electronic payment with chip cards a decade ago. Almost nobody ever pays cash except tourists who haven't gotten the proper bus card yet. which can indeed sometimes be a hassle to get
@@doesnotcompute6078 What? No!
15 stops is either way too short or an express route.
Short routes force people to change buses to get across town, which is annoying, even with a highly coordinated network where the connecting bus is waiting.
I just counted the most popular route in town here and it's 56 stops for an 8 mile long route.
An express route, along the exact same routes with ~15 stops would be ideal, stopping at major stops along that route, as most people go from major stop to major stop, or can get the frequent bus close to them to the major stop, for quicker journey.
The journey I took today was 24 stops away and 3 miles (walking distance on GMaps, though the bus takes a longer route, winding through some residential areas, adding maybe 0.75 miles)
@@Blackadder75 Yes, they take electronic payment, but still also take cash, but my comment was to include such, where they don't even try to get their card ready, until they're stood there, in-front of the driver/card reader, which all too often means faffing around in a bag to find wallet, then find the card in the wallet, to then put it all back in place before getting out of the damn way.
I swear, they believe the universe revolves around them.
@@ChrispyNut not a credit card, but a bus (or general transport) card with a NFC chip you just have to wave before a box.
There is a mathematical sweet spot between too many stops and too few. The immediate argument I hear to justify having a stop literally every other block is disabled people, but to be polite if someone's disability is at that level we do have on-call specialty transit available for them already, which is even better suited to accomodate their needs. The other 100 people trying to use the bus to get somewhere should not be held up an additional 10 minutes because of the needs of one person as it just discourages anyone from using the bus at all. Disabled people deserve convenient and accessible transit, but so does everyone else. On the lines I use I really wish they would eliminate every other bus-stop to speed the trip up.
We just visited Victoria BC, Canada. They've reduced the number of car lanes for more protected bike lanes, and a few dedicated transit lanes. I didn't notice an increase in the time to drive around the city, and definitely saw a lot of people riding bikes. We noticed a large increase in mixed land use as well! Some places take time...