What I take issue with is how misconstrued induced demand is.
I don't think anyone thinks induced demand isn't real - it's how people treat it and wildly misunderstand what it actually is.
When new infrastructure is built, it makes mobility easier. This is a good thing, and is true for all forms of infrastructure, be it cycle lanes, subway lines, or new or expanded highways.
When mobility is easier, people travel more. Again - this is a good thing! People are more willing to make trips when they are easier and get to enjoy a higher quality of life by making the trips to do the things they want to do. Amazing!
What the common media perception of induced demand does is several things:
1. Inflates all those extra trips as being worthless. "If travel times will be the same, we may as well not build the infrastructure" type deal.. which completely ignores that if you double the size of a highway, even if travel times stay the same, you can still accommodate twice as many trips generating GDP, wealth, and quality of life.
2. Assumes that induced demand is unlimited in depth. This is simply not true. The examples used for induced demand in locations like Houston often said "well, traffic was fixed for a few years, then it was just as bad as before", ignoring that population growth was a major driving factor in those trip growth patterns and that without the new infrastructure that trip times would likely be
even worse. Houston is one of the fastest growing metro areas on the continent - it needs new infrastructure. When new road infrastructure is built in low-growth areas, it generally does induce new additional trips but rarely sees congestion return to the same level. It's not inherent in the road itself that these cars appear apparently out of nowhere - those cars come from growth, be it GDP, population, etc.
What induced demand actually is and does is:
1. Better infrastructure attracts more users. This is true of all infrastructure, both transit and highways. A new highway will see more people travel in that corridor just like a new subway line will see more people use it than the bus it replaced. This is good! It's literally the whole reason we build infrastructure.
2. New infrastructure induces demand often by pulling trips off existing corridors - the trips are not inherently new, but when an existing highway is heavily congested people are more likely to use other routes (like local streets). Similarly when a new subway line is built, people using parallel bus routes are more likely to detour to the faster rapid transit route. This detour will continue until travel times decline to an extent that the existing routes become a better option again.. So even if a highway is built and returns to 90% of the congestion it once was, it can still have significant benefits for other areas. This also opens up new opportunities to change the infrastructure on routes that are no longer as busy..
2. New infrastructure influences land use - people are more likely to move somewhere if infrastructure is better. A new highway will encourage more growth around the interchanges just like a new subway line will encourage more growth around the stations.
The "one more lane bro" meme of all highway projects being automatically worthless is just as cringey and incorrect as those who rep highway projects regardless of benefits or impacts.
The reality is that a modern society needs roads - what we as a society should be doing is not banning new roads, particularly since many can have major actual benefits to communities by removing regional traffic off local streets and vastly improving safety.
The reality is that roads and transportation infrastructure in general is tied closely to land use and that there is a lot of nuance on how we can build cities better while not resigning them to being traffic-filled messes because "road=bad".
Many, including not-just-bikes, looks at the Netherlands as a model of how to plan our cities. What you will notice when you look at the Netherlands is that they don't shy away from highways. In fact, the Netherlands has had one of the largest highway expansion programs in europe in the last 20 years. The difference between a place like the Netherlands and Houston is not that the Netherlands doesn't do roads, it's that it balances roads with other options which it carefully designs through both land use plans and infrastructure design for those alternatives to be a competitive choice to driving. The Netherlands over the last 20 years has built out an excellent freeway network and that has allowed cars to be mostly removed from local streets and has built the infrastructure so that it enjoys something remarkable - minimal peak hour congestion even with an extensive and very high quality roads network. This is Amsterdam and Rotterdam at 5:40pm on a wednesday - very little congestion outside of a few accidents.
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How does the Netherlands do this? They build big highways, they provide alternative options, and they build infrastructure faster than the population grows. And with this new infrastructure, they have an excellent quality of life with the public being able to choose transit, cycling, walking, or driving depending on what works best for them and a GDP per capita now 25% higher than Canada.
Freeways should actually be friends of urbanists as they remove traffic from local streets - the Netherlands knows this and builds lots of freeways for cars to operate safely, quickly, efficiently, and away from pedestrians. Stroads are what we should be avoiding - lets build car roads for cars and streets for people.
www.google.com
www.hwy401quintewest.ca
hwy401bellevilletokingston.ca
www.highway401cobourgcolborne.ca
