Opinion | There’s one sure-fire way to fix Toronto’s traffic woes. Just don’t expect any candidate to suggest it
Opinion | There’s one sure-fire way to fix Toronto’s traffic woes. Just don’t expect any candidate to suggest it
Congestion is more or less a constant in the kind of cities people want to move to and live in.
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You can move more people by getting some of them to take transit or ride bikes or walk to work, though they are quickly replaced on the road by enough cars to keep the speeds more or less the same (induced demand again).
Did this guy just make the argument that shifting people to cycling and public transit just induces more demand for driving? What a profoundly stupid idea.
Shifting people to active and mass transit options requires making those options more efficient than driving. It means fighting and winning a god damn war on the car; taking away space from cars and giving it to active and mass transit options. At a certain level it is a zero sum game. So no, after the shift to bikes and not just bikes, cars are not coming back.
I think maybe he meant it was a critical mass thing. If you half-ass your cycling and pedestrian infrastructure (ie.: basically all of North America), you remove or narrow motor vehicle lanes. Few people ditch their cars for cycling or walking because the infrastructure still sucks, so all you end up doing is having a bit less space for practically the same number of cars.
Either you make the cycling infrastructure usable and comprehensive or it doesn't work at all.
The whole argument around induced demand is that people have a certain 'tolerance' when choosing a mode of transportation, and if an option becomes intolerable then they'll switch modes to a more tolerable option or forego trips entirely. If enough people mode shift to public transit and cycling then driving becomes faster and some people will switch back to driving or drive for more trips they otherwise wouldn't take until an equilibrium is once again reached between speed and tolerance, so the author's argument is the only way to ensure this equilibrium is reached at speeds that drivers desire is to reduce the number of people in the city overall.
Since this isn't a realistic option, the author argues that 'fixing traffic' needs to be re-framed as 'improving the quality of life for people.' As long as politicians are obsessed with 'fixing traffic' via increasing car speeds and reducing delays for drivers things like cycle tracks and transit lanes are a political albatross around their neck, but if politicians instead frame the objective as improving the quality of life for people moving around the city then things like building more transit lanes, cycle tracks, pedestrianized streets, etc. become more reasonable and justifiable.
For sure I agree that "reduce traffic" is the wrong metric and "improve quality of life" is the right one.
Did this guy just make the argument that shifting people to cycling and public transit just induces more demand for driving? What a profoundly stupid idea.
If we agree the idea (or the fact) of induced demand, then it logically follows that taking people out of cars and into the TTC or onto bikes frees up space on the street which produces induced demand. Nothing stupid about it - straight up logical deduction. :D Unless you take so many people out of the street that the induced demand fails to saturate the streets. Which as the author says doesn't seem to happen in cities where people want to live in. It's not a politically useful argument, but it's valid. 😄
To take people out of cars and onto transit, you must make those options more attractive, efficient, safe, fast than cars. That means taking space from cars to give to protected bike lanes, to separated bus lanes, to pedestrian traffic etc. When you have done that, you remove the thing that induces car demand in the first place.
Yes but the next step is for people formerly in cars to move to these alternate modes of transportation which have higher density, thus if you're really successful at it, at least initially, freeing up more space than you took. Under that possibility, we end up with more empty space on the now narrower street. Which induces demand.
Again, I'm saying that under these assumptions, the author's argument is valid. I'm not saying it's valid in all circumstances or that's it's actually useful, outside of what he used it for. He made it to show that even if we're very good at improving the quality of life of commuters we shouldn't expect to have F150s driving at 50kph through downtown. It's not an argument I'd use in any other setting as it can be misused very easily by people that don't want improved transit or bike infra.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Is the argument that "if you don't take space from cars then they will just come back"? If that's the point, sure.
However, it is true that in a city that is no longer car centric, the people who actually need to drive (emergency vehicles, some categories of disabled people, etc) do have an easier time driving.
Alot of people here in suburbia Scarborough hate bikes, and they regularly break the rules by riding on the sidewalk due to it being unsafe to ride on main east-west/north-south roads. Even the bike lane on hunting wood is a joke as cars are always parked in the biking lane, and there is zero traffic enforcement here.