Roads: Ontario/GTA Highways Discussion

[nfitz]

Induced demand is wildly misrepresented on the internet and generally very misunderstood - you have a good inkling of idea on that one. It's far from unlimited and is not anywhere close to the phenomenon it is made out to be in most places online.

I don't think that induced demand is even the biggest issue. Surely it's latent demand that's the issue.

 

[lenaitch]

It would be an interesting legal exercise to consider the implications of banning a certain class of vehicle from a major highway. It would be a different argument than, for example, banning trucks from city streets or banning pedestrians, bicycles, etc. from most major highways because those have a foundation in safety and there are reasonable alternatives. Banning a class of vehicle because it is inconvenient or disruptive might be problematic. There is also the issue of commercial motor vehicles that would have to use the 401 simply because they need to access a business.

No doubt the tolling software could differentiate commercial motor vehicles. It is currently done for other classes of vehicles and owners/ operators as well as differentiating between classes of vehicles for toll rate periods. The proposal of eliminating tolls only for certain periods is interesting. For 'enroute' trucks; those who are simply traversing the city, companies and schedules would adapt. Even for the vagaries of travel times, long haulers could wait in lay-by lots or commercial truck stops. When you get paid by the kilometer, drivers would no doubt get grumpy being paid nothing to sit.

 

[afransen]

I'm not the brightest bulb on the string, and I sort of get the concept of 'induced demand', but there must be other factors at play. Population growth will obviously increase demand on everything from roads to transit to sidewalks, but four-laning Hwy 11 to North Bay, 69/400 to Sudbury or Hwy 416 haven't turned them into bumper-to-bumper.

Another dynamic involving heavy trucks in stop-and-go traffic is, in addition to simply consuming more real estate, they accelerate and decelerate (particularly accelerate) differently than smaller vehicles. Moving CMVs to Hwy 407, in the near term anyway, I think would have a significant impact on Hwy 401 movements.

You won't be eliminating CMVs on the 401, just adding enough to the 407 to congest it too.

 

[innsertnamehere]

I don't think that induced demand is even the biggest issue. Surely it's latent demand that's the issue.

yes, latent demand is often misconstrued as "induced" demand. I.e. a highway is widened but traffic at 5pm doesn't get any better as everyone who avoided making trips at that time or shifted travel times to off peak periods now does those trips at peak.

This is made out as if the roads project was pointless, ignoring that more people are now making trips at their preferred time, and the reduced amount of congestion experienced in the off-peak hours due to the traffic shift. It also ignores that many road projects actually do improve peak hour travel times for many years after expansion, and that often traffic growth is from growth for which the projects were specifically designed to support.

The debate about road projects shouldn't be "it's useless so don't do it", it should be "will this project support the type of growth and mobility we want?" Widening the Gardiner probably won't do what we want it to. Widening a highway to support industrial and logistics growth? That's a different value proposition.

Also generally too much energy is spent on transportation planning and not enough on land use planning, which is the real biggest influence on transportation modal decisions. Many people drive because they have to, and no matter how much transit we build it will be hard to get people onto transit as it simply won't be competitive. We need to design cities to support transit, and we have made a lot of progress on this front in the GTA (almost too much in some ways). We also have to be realistic about how much driving can realistically be avoided in a western economy and what realistic modal shifts can be expected.