General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

I disagree with the article.

Congestion = loss of productivity or quality of life.  Disney figured this out in its theme parks - originally, people thought "big lines = yay, lots of people, I must be making money!", but no - because they're stuck in line, not spending money.  So, Disney invented free virtual queuing (FastPass), available to all guests - so they can be out spending money instead of stuck in line.  It's a win-win.

I don't think you can just cross your arms, close your eyes and nod your head up and down in satisfaction and go "Yup, this is great" at hundreds of thousands of people stuck in traffic.

What I would say is that it is an unavoidable consequence of a densely-packed, attractive place to be — even pedestrian areas can be congested if they’re popular enough — so it can be evidence of something good. But it’s absurd to call congestion itself good.

However, just because it is bad doesn’t mean the obvious response of widening the road is correct. If a road is congested, that means there is insufficient capacity for the people who want to use it. That in turn is at least in part because there is no fee for using the road, so people use it whether or not they actually need to. But if a large capacity expansion is warranted, that can be had for much less cost by building rapid transit. A 4-lane road where 2 of the lanes are LRT tracks has an unbelievably high capacity, way more than twice the capacity of a 2-lane road.