Building bigger roads won’t make driving nicer. It will make traffic worse. That may seem counterintuitive. It’s also one of the most studied assertions of the last few decades in transport planning. A report from the University of Berkeley shows that for every 1% of extra highway capacity added, traffic volumes increase 0.9% in the longer term. When Houston, Texas expanded the Katy Freeway to 26 lanes at a cost of $2.9 billion, commute times went up. But you don’t have to look to the southern tip of a failed state for examples. Traffic volumes around the $1.4 billion Waterview Tunnel are roughly back to where they were before its construction.
This makes sense when you think about it for more than two seconds. When Apple releases new iPhones, people buy phones. When Hayden Donnell releases episodes of Get It To Te Papa, people watch Get It To Te Papa*. When governments build flash new roads, people drive. Even if the resulting traffic doesn’t clog up the motorways in question, it tends to funnel into suburban streets or smaller highways. The best we can hope for is to shift the bottleneck.
Going all in on roads in an age of climate change impacts scares me (possibly in a very clear way, living in Hawkes Bay and through Gabrielle). Roads, especially where they are bridged over rivers or over hilly terrain, are not resilient transport links.
Making them the only thing getting any investment means alternatives like rail (at the same risk, but slightly more resilient due to needing to cut less of a hillside away and more likely to have tunneled through the worst) and coastal shipping aren’t going to get a look in. As with most things Nactional Fist are doing, it’ll feel ok for a few years, but 10, 15, 20 years from now I fear we will look back on a huge missed opportunity to do things differently.
what do you expect from these bunch of thugs in government? Nats love roads and taking away kids school lunches
Thoroughly depressing.
American here. Hey! Stop copying us
Feels before reals.
It also works both ways: invest in passenger rail, services can improve, and so more people will use trains.
Someone watched Utopia recently…
This reads like they trained an AI on r/newzealand posts and comments, and just let it do it’s thing.
Everything about our society is induced demand. Traffic on the roads? They wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t built it. Public transport users? Wouldn’t be there if 50% of their fare wasn’t subsidised. Air travel? Wouldn’t be nearly as popular if we were still flying DC-3s.
If our government thought the same way this sub does, SH1 would still be gravel.
This is also written on the assumption that everyone only drives at peak times, as someone who is frequently on the road in the middle of the day, I can tell you that Wellington’s motorways and expressways probably save me hours per week.
Does this make sense to you?
This is actually a fascinating look into the simplistic world view of someone like you. Motorways don’t simply end at the CBD like that, with everyone driving to the same place. They have a number of on and off ramps, with people getting off and on before and after the CBD.
Take the Taupo bypass, for example. Would you say not having heavy traffic chugging it’s way through the city centre has improved or worsened the situation?
…someone like you…
I’d engage if you weren’t so inflammatory most of the time, as it stands, I just don’t have the energy.
You’ve argued yourself into a corner with your silly graphic, more like it.
It’s a well studied phenomenon now: more lanes in the long run do not improve traffic, and might also make them worse. There is nothing to dispute about that.
And the graphic portrays the problem perfectly.
Love the fact that you respond by downvoting, with no reply. Coward.
Who me? I have no idea what you are talking about - I didn’t vote you down.
So, they downvoted me, but decided not to upvote you?
Hey, you’re onto something there. Maybe if we better used the capacity of our existing roads we wouldn’t need to spend a whole bunch of money on new ones. Perhaps we could induce some demand for public transport, cycling and walking that take up far less space, and that could reduce congestion by having fewer cars. That would free up space for the vehicles remaining.
