gerv 

Sometimes here we talk about building more bicycle infrastructure as though it was some kind of leftist conspiracy.

However, to my experience, talking to city people... they are very gung-ho on seeing more bikes.

And this articles gives a good reason why. Seems like have the car infrastructure increase just guarantees more congestion... no matter what happens.

Effectively, this means bicycle infrastructure is about the only progressive move a city can make.

More at :https://www.fastcompany.com/1756746/b...-traffic-study

eofelis 

I read it somewhere, I don't remember where: "Building more roads to ease traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity."

edit: I googled that phrase and got many hits, that phrase or paraphrase has been used by many.

PolishGuy

I too have read articles, both in print and on the web, that elude to this conclusion. It doesn't surprise me. I live in the Los Angeles Ca region, more specifically the San Fernando Valley area. The valley has long been considered the "bedroom" of the city of LA and has been neglected in so many ways. The place is like a parking lot at times. The more homes, business and shopping centers that are built, the influx or more traffic (cars and trucks) shortly follows. Currently Cal Trans is doing construction on the 5 freeway through Burbank and the east portion of the valley to add an HOV lane and realign the existing traffic lanes. Completion date is posted on the signs at 2014. I'm sure that by 2015 the congestion will be back and the HOV lane under-used. The amount of money spent on this project is way up there. It's long past the time to get rid of the automobile, in all it's variations, as a personal transportation device since it's the problem and not the cure. PG.

fietsbob

corporate state thinks anything that is not increasing the centralized power and wealth increasing
to the War, oil and auto , privatized transportation ,industry is the socialist devil incarnate.

so Public transportation is to be starved and made insufferable.
and Bike infrastructure , which would provide jobs, moving the earth
and laying down smooth surfaces away from cars, is Communisim..

as is having a community at all..

Dahon.Steve

What I found interesting was that the study said that Pubic Transit was not the solution! They felt the problem was so far beyond anything public transit could fix and did not include bike lanes as a solution either.

However, I believe that public transit has to be an option put on the table and not because it will decrease traffic. We need to have more bus and rail because motoring is rapidly becoming unaffordable for the middle and lower classes. It may very well be the only salvation for those living on the edge. The majority of those who are carfree like myself are public transit dependant and not cycle dependant.

Good article although.

gerv 

They were trying mostly to state. rather than solve. the problem. You need to visualize all the freeway and highway infrastructure as a type of vehicle storage area. If you bike to work, another car will be stored in your place. The storage is, of course, temporary and the objective is to store the vehicle for a little time as possible.

However, as more and more people start taking their bike to work, there's new capacity. Cars from distant suburbs can now fit. They can now move their cargo more efficiently.

In a way, I suppose, bicycle and transit infrastructure is making car capacity more efficient.... I think that's what they are saying in this study.

Pobble.808

I have not read the article so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but just based on my own experience I'd have to say that the above conclusion makes sense -- but only if you define "the problem" as being traffic jams. If the problem is simply one of not having a way to get from Point A to Point B in a timely and predictable manner, then train lines and bike lanes (or at least bikes) may well be viable solutions. In fact they are just that in many places.

I've never seen a convincing theoretical explanation of why increased capacity must fail to solve the problem of regular traffic jams in every case, but I have felt the claim made in the OP ("the car infrastructure increase just guarantees more congestion... no matter what happens") to be true based on my own experiences. Or to put it another way, in my (admittedly limited) experience, I've never seen or even heard of a large community in the US or Canada in which motorists don't suffer from congestion on a regular basis, no matter how many highways have been built. Are there any?

Roody

Yes, but I think a two-pronged effort might work. As people ride bikes or take transit more, we muxt simultaneously reduce the capacity of roads for cars. For example, convert existing car lanes to bike lanes and bus lanes, so that there's less space for "storage" of cars on the roads. (This is one reason I support Complete Streets.)

Roody

Have you ever read Traffic by tom vanderbilt?

Pobble.808

Nope. Do tell.

JusticeZero

None I am aware of.
Transportation infrastructure drives investment decisions. People make their decisions where to build businesses, move, etc. based on the transportation system. If you build a road, people build new destinations on the road to go to. Also, people will rearrange their decisions on where to go based on where they feel they can go, in a sort of rent-seeking behavior. When you stretch the road out to a new horizon, people will come up with trips to drive out there.
If the road is empty, there is no disincentive to travel, and the cost of travel, in peoples' minds, seems to be disconnected from the trips themself. Therefore,there is no reason not to zoom twenty miles to grab a loaf of bread.
As traffic increases, annoyance and disincentive increases, but the effect is negligent until the road approaches capacity. This is the point where the road becomes congested, and it's capacity starts to decrease as the load increases - think of a hose which, if you pump stuff through it with more than a certain amount of pressure, tightens up and shrinks. This is the point whereannoyance spikes, and people start complaining to their congressman that they really need to do something about the traffic. They also take trips down the congested road a bit less.
Then they widen the road. Everyone zooms back onto the road, and the cycle repeats.

The way to deal with it is to REDUCE capacity for cars, and REPLACE it with transit infrastructure, which has a fixed capacity and does not degrade if overloaded. You might have to wait for the next train, but if it can carry 10,000 people every hour, it will carry 10,000 people every hour no matter how many people want to make the trip. Far better than the road that carries 4,000 per hour - until rush hour, when that drops down to 200/hour or something hideous like that that backs up and makes a mess. Furthermore, if you annoy car people into getting out of their cars, the net effect will almost always be a plus to the wellbeing of your city and a net savings.

bragi

This seems totally counter-intuitive to me, but I think I can accept it as fact, more or less. When I lived in Denver in the 1990's, the state, at great expense and with a lot of federal assistance, built a couple of freeways to the south and east of the metro area, in order to ease congestion nearer the center. The Dept. of Transportation predicted that these new freeways would not reach capacity for a good 15 years. Congestion did not get better in the center at all, and the new freeways reached, and then exceeded, capacity less than three years after they were completed. Essentially, the roads just expanded the total area that was affected by gridlock, and created 150 square miles of new suburban sh*tholes.

Chris L

Not really. In my experience, the real problem with "bicycle infrastructure" is that most of it fails to serve the needs of a transportational cyclist anyway, so the cyclist just ends up using the same roads as the cars for reasons of practicality.

Yes, as long as someone else is riding them every day while they continue to drive, and as long as those other people stay out of their way. The problem is that everyone thinks this way, so nobody wants to ride their bikes (save for about 1% of the population)

Yes, that works until the people who have tried cycling have realised that the cycling "infrastructure" doesn't get them to work on time, so they all get back in their cars and keep driving. Then the opposition party says "see, nobody is using the bicycle infrastructure", and the money gets re-directed toward building roads. Seen it happen time and again. If a government really wants to do something about it, they'll simply put a tax on driving in the congested area (with exceptions for emergency and delivery vehicles), and eventually people will re-think sitting in their cars for hours a day when it starts costing them money, and they'll start seriously looking at alternatives (which might include *gasp* catching the bus). Anything else is just a token gesture to say "well, we tried" at the next election. And I say this as a life-long transportational cyclist who have never owned or driven a car.

Pobble.808

(Originally Posted by gerv:
However, to my experience, talking to city people... they are very gung-ho on seeing more bikes.)

And my guess is that the same would apply to the building of new rail lines -- people assume that all the other guys will use them, leaving the highway for my personal use as it was intended.
I suspect that the only way to get around this would be to build monorail lines over the highway median, so motorists could watch the trains whizzing by as they sit in their traffic jams. Maybe some of them would get the message, although I vaguely recall having seen something kind of similar to this in LA once and it probably didn't make much difference.

eofelis 

I have this book but I have not read it yet.
I picked it up out of the $1 book bin at Big Lots, if that tells ya anything.

aussie_grl14

That seems to be the CTA's advertising strategy in Chicago. I've been on the Blue Line there and the train runs parallel to the highway (actually right between the lanes) for a good portion of the time. Their ads say something to the effect of "Don't you wish you were on the train actually moving now?" It's been pretty effective for me at least!

Roody

Tom Vanderbilt is a very smart guy who writes about roads, human behavior, and the intersection between the two. His book is called Traffic and it includes a chapter about how new roads create congestion. There are many other topics of interest, including several pages about why motorists don't see bicycles and motorcycles.

Vanderbilt's blog is fantastic, and it seems to be more and more bicycle-centric

Roody

It tells me that you are a good shopper and somebody who knows how to pick out good books. I read Traffic when it first came out--for free from the library.

gerv 

This is a very natural human inclination. They believe that if you can convince a percentage of the population to ride their bicycles, car congestion will ease and they'll have a parking spot downtown when they need it....even though this study states otherwise.

Professionally, they talk about increasing bicycle infrastructure because that's really where the growth area is in urban planning. As mentioned, there's not a lot of enthusiasm for throwing up more freeway infrastructure. And the career path doesn't look all that good.

However it works, it would be great if they could figure out a way to get bicycles safely over the freeways.

Dahon.Steve

Good Lord!

Everyone knows of a story like this. Back in the 80's we used to ride on this horrible road called Tonnele avenue in New Jersey. The road was in bad shape with potholes, and ruts but at least the traffic moved! You see many cars took the Turnpike rather than drive on that road. Now the state fixed the road by repaving it smooth while adding ramps and interchanges so that more cars can enter.

Guess what happend? During rush hour, it's a parking lot for 3 miles going into the Holland tunnel! So much for progress.

ndbiker

When you factor in the reasons for the popularity of cars this all makes sense. People invest in and drive cars because it gives them the freedom to go where they want, when they want at what is perceived at least as the fastest possible speed. There are counter-motivators such as fuel prices and of course congestion. You take away congestion you remove a counter motivation to driving. I predict that as fuel prices increase more and more people will move from SUV into more fuel efficient vehicles. I also predict that once they do they will begin driving more, maybe more than they did before fuel costs went up.

The bicycle is probably faster and more convenient in a high congestion area for an individual on short trips. However, that is where it's advantages end. It can only take one person, it's messy in the rain, when it's too hot, or too cold and generally not as convenient. The folks in this forum have come to terms with all of those short falls for a variety of reasons. One area I have noticed the same phenomenon as it relates to bikes is on our MUPaths. Where they have located "Stations" (places with bathrooms and water which are made to look like old train stations) the bike traffic has picked up considerably especially among recreational riders on the weekends. Those areas where there are merely parking lots are used less. People gravitate towards convenience.

gerv 

There are many reasons why people would choose a bike. Health (especially weight loss..), economy, fun might all be factors that trump convenience. In fact, I believe convenience is over-rated.

cooker

Toronto Mayor Rob ("The war on cars is over") Ford certainly comes to mind.

gerv 

There's a great advertisement for bicycle infrastructure right there.

Chris L

Well, this is the whole point. Bicycle "facilities" are popular with recreational riders, but do nothing for transportational riders, and hence have no real influence on the number of cars using the roads (apart from maybe adding a few extra car trips people take to transport their bike to and from the start of the path). This is why nobody takes "bicycle facilities" seriously when it comes to transport planning.

Hey, I have nothing against recreational riders, and I'm sure there are a lot of benefits to having them around, but let's be realistic about how their presence will (or won't) affect things like traffic congestion and pollution.