this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
873 points (96.6% liked)

Fuck Cars

9776 readers
65 users here now

This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.

This community exists for the following reasons:

You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.

Rules

  1. Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.

  2. No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.

  3. Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.

  4. No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.

  5. No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.

  6. No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.

  7. No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.

Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Found here: https://twitter.com/CarsRuinedCity/status/1677005785862406144?t=Xolo43mUk4GnegFQE19q3g&s=19

Caption: Photo collage of a beach in Alexandria, Egypt, showing a progression in 3 images:

  1. Alexandria "Problem" - empty beach + walking street + 6 lane road with medium traffic + dense mid-rise buildings (likely housing)
  2. Alexandria "Solution" - empty beach (doesn't seem to matter) + narrower walkway or sidewalk + 10 lane brand new and empty road + tiny sidewalk + the same buildings
  3. Alexandria "Results" - crowded beach + crowded beach walkway + traffic jam on the 10 lane road
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

This is one of those arguments that never made sense to me. People like to say that adding lanes just creates more traffic, but what is the proposed mechanism? Does anyone suppose that people who didn't want to go somewhere suddenly remembered that the highway added more lanes, and then decided to go for a cruise?

It suggests to me that the demand for transit far exceeds capacity, or that this traffic would otherwise have just taken a different route. Probably some of both.

That's not an argument to just build 15 lane highways everywhere, just that the common form of the supply creates demand argument seems implausible.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Even if the same number of cars are on the road, it is likely that the bottleneck is somewhere else in the city, so adding 20 lanes won't help the issue anyway.

This like complaining the bathroom is clogged and your solution is to make the showerhead bigger.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

The idea behind induced demand is the easier and more convenient/cheaper you make a method of transit the more people will use it. So if you make driving easier by building a super highway people will default to that whole if you build put a rail network that gets peole to where they need to go they'll take that. Transit being crowded in some ways is a good thing as it shows the route you've got is good but could prbsky do with a capacity upgrade. Of course roads being crowded is bad due to massive space inefficiencies and environmental issues.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

If you're looking for a job and you see an opening but it's going to take you more than an hour each way to get to and from work, doesn't that make that job less desirable than jobs that are closer by?

Conversely if you're looking for a new place to live aren't you going to consider places that are closer to work to be more desirable?

Suddenly there's road expansion and a house that used to be 2 hours drive away is now 30 minutes drive from you. So you buy the house.

This would all work out great if you were the only one that thought this. But unfortunately there are many many more people that will also get a house or find a job that's further way, because it's only a 30 minutes drive now. So now more people are using the highway and that 10 lane highway is clogged, and that commute time starts going back up. But now you have a mortgage now and so you're stuck. Everyday in your car for more than an hour each way again.

Cars are simply an inefficient way to move a lot of people. A highway expansion only temporarily solves the problem, but when the highways work well, more people use it and those inefficiencies rear their ugly head again.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Induced demand kinda follows the same psychological patterns as the rebound effect. Latter is easier to understand however.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That actually does help, I think, for better grasping the concept! Also...

In order to avoid the rebound effect, environmental economists have suggested that any cost savings from efficiency gains be taxed in order to keep the cost of use the same.[7]

Found that tidbit interesting. The concept of removing the cost savings to insulate efficiency gains against the rebound effect is interesting yet weirdly logical

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Here's an explainer for Induced Demand. You'll never guess by who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There are probably a couple mechanisms:

  1. Reduced viability of hyper local services. People drive a longer distance to a central location more than the shorter distance.

  2. Less self-optimization of work-home proximity. People are more likely willing to work further away.

Both can be argued as both a good and bad thing.