Three Reasons Why Congestion Decreases When Cities ‘Delete’ Road Lanes
From StreetsBlog.org
By Kea Wilson
wildly inaccurate comment from Elon Musk about the traffic impacts of deleting lanes for drivers is prompting a conversation about the little-known phenomenon of “reduced demand” — and how advocates can better debunk common congestion myths that powerful, but often ill-informed, people continue to promulgate.
In a much-tweeted-about comment at the Financial Times “Future of the Car”conference on Tuesday, the Tesla and Boring Company founder dismissed the phenomenon of “induced demand” as “one of the single dumbest notions I have ever heard in my entire life,” despite more than a century of research that confirms that increasing lane capacity for drivers only temporarily relieves gridlock before beefed-up roads attract new motorists and development, miring even more travelers in traffic jams along the new and “improved” corridors.
“If adding roads just increases traffic, why don’t we delete them and decrease traffic?” Musk added. “And I think you’d have an uproar if you did that. … It boggles my mind that people wouldn’t think [building tunnels to curb congestion] would work. … It’s working really well already in Vegas.”
Photo by Iwona Castiello d’Antonio on Unsplash
