Opinion · Comment
A city that plans for cars will get cars
Every road we widen fills within a year, and every time we act surprised. The traffic is not weather. It is a decision, taken repeatedly.
Every road we widen fills within a year, and every time we act surprised. The traffic is not weather. It is a decision, taken repeatedly.
The ring road opened in March, four lanes wider than the one it replaced, and by the following spring the queue at the eastern junction was exactly as long as it had been before. This is not a failure of engineering. It is the engineering working as designed.
Induced demand is not a theory
Build capacity and it is used; that is the entire finding, replicated in every city that has bothered to measure it since the 1960s. The road did not fail to fix the traffic. The road was the traffic, arriving later.
A city that plans for cars will get cars. A city that plans for people will get a city.
The choice we keep not making
The money for the ring road would have paid for a tram line and eleven years of running it. That was on the table. It was not chosen, and it was not chosen the time before that either.
We are not stuck in traffic. We are the traffic, and we voted for it.