
The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic - oftenwrong
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/8/28/the-mobility-trap-why-well-never-fix-congestion-by-speeding-up-traffic
======
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We
don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work
farther away from each other.

That is a good thing. One of the reasons why the Bay Area is so expensive is
that the commute to cheaper areas in Central Valley is so long. Mobility
allows choices. The type of home and the neighborhood you want to live in, is
no longer as tightly coupled to the type of job you want to do, the place of
worship you want to attend, the school you want your kids to go to, or the
doctor your family wants to see.

Yeah, having a corner grocery might be good, but without mobility, the grocers
are going to realize that you don't really have much choice about buying from
them, and maybe start charging higher prices, or not stocking as much variety,
or higher fewer people and having less service.

Mobility means more choice, and more decoupling. This means you not having to
live in a high priced, crappy home because of proximity to your job. The
further the distance we can make 30 minutes of commute, the more choices
people have.

~~~
CalRobert
But the high speed of travel is effected by making virtually everything
pavement. You're just traveling through nothing (well, asphalt).

Thanks to parking minimums the actual buildings you want to go to are
_dwarfed_ by their parking lots.

[https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-
flo...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/the-whole-city-of-florence-
could-fit-inside-an-atlanta-interchange/)

Also, forcing everything to be so far apart makes it nearly impossible to
traverse on foot, serve with public transport, ride a bike to, etc.

~~~
hnal943
Dense urban living also requires most of your surroundings to be pavement.

~~~
MrAlex94
Have you never been to old European cities? They’re beautiful and dense. Hell,
even London has many parts that are dense compared to US cities yet are
beautifully old and green (like Hampstead and Highgate!).

At the end of it, we live in a world where every bit of profit matters more
than earning slightly less and having something better looking.

I mean let’s compare Los Angeles County vs Greater London: 4,058 sq mi vs 606
sq mi Density 2,100/sq m vs 14,550/sq mi.

I mean the difference is insane! And ignoring the towers springing up all over
London because of greedy developers, London doesn’t feel all that cramped or
as if there’s concrete everywhere.

US cities need better public transport and more dense areas. Leave the rest to
nature!

~~~
WalterBright
> greedy developers

What's wrong with people building things that others want to buy?

~~~
ambernightcrush
What's wrong is that there is no profit in selling real estate and housing at
below market value, by definition. And in places like the bay, market rents
are not affordable to an increasingly large population. Hence, the greedy
perception. Developers are acting in self interest and the old system of
financing predicated continuous wage growth.

~~~
WalterBright
Not building towers will result in even higher prices for housing.

~~~
MrAlex94
At least in the UK the price per square foot greatly increases after each new
build that replaces an older one. Surely prices would go down? You can even
verify yourself. Go on a property portal such as Zoopla or Rightmove and
compare the cost of a new build and old build in the same area. I have yet to
find one where the new build is cheaper per square foot.

~~~
CalRobert
Of course, people like newer things. But how was the cost of surrounding old
builds affected?

~~~
MrAlex94
> But how was the cost of surrounding old builds affected?

Not sure I understand?

Edit: Anyway, the poster I was replying to was making the point that these
towers are alleviating demand and subsequently pushing prices down, which is
not happening.

~~~
WalterBright
That is not what I wrote. I said the prices with the tower would be lower than
prices without the tower, which is not the same as saying prices would
decline.

I.e. relative vs absolute.

~~~
MrAlex94
[https://content.knightfrank.com/research/478/documents/en/20...](https://content.knightfrank.com/research/478/documents/en/2012-1101.pdf)

This research shows that there’s an average of 1.5% price increase per floor.
Care to share a counter-claim source?

~~~
WalterBright
Increasing the supply of something simply does not cause price increases. If
the price increases, it's because demand is increasing even faster than
supply.

~~~
MrAlex94
At this point there’s no way you aren’t pulling my leg. The research paper
showed that increasing the amount of floors increases the price per floor. Are
you saying that these towers control demand? So if they lower the amount of
floors then suddenly demand is going down because they are cheaper?

Also I do hope you know the context of my posts relate to the UK market?

~~~
CalRobert
People like living high above traffic. There's a reason penthouse apartments
are at the top.

~~~
MrAlex94
Bar the main roads, there’s not a lot of traffic down residential streets in
London.

------
rayiner
This article disproves itself. The two chief errors are as follows:

1) The article incorrectly discounts the value of time saved by avoiding
congestion. The study the article cites actually estimates $7/hour for time
saved on a commute, plus a whopping $22/hour for increasing reliability on a
commute:
[http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf](http://faculty.bus.lsu.edu/papers/pap16_07.pdf).
Both figures are critically important.

As to time savings, transit commutes are significantly longer:
[https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute](https://www.geotab.com/time-to-
commute). 30% of public transit commutes in NYC are over 1 hour, compared to
just 10% of car commutes. 28% of car commutes are under 30 minutes, versus
just 6% of transit commutes. In Dallas, a place without the geographic
constraints of NYC, 57% of car commutes are under 30 minutes. People in Dallas
are accruing tremendous time value savings by driving as compared to people
taking transit in NYC.

As to reliability--while in theory transit should be highly reliable, in
practice it isn't. In DC, rail on-time performance is just 87%, meaning you'll
be late once a week on average. NYC's performance is worse--it recently just
broke 80% on-time performance: [https://www.metro-
magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway...](https://www.metro-
magazine.com/news/photos/734837/nyc-subway-on-time-performance-passes-80-for-
first-time-in-6-years/74646).

All this has a practical ramification. The US has some of the fastest commutes
in the OECD:
[https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling...](https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf).
48 minutes per day for the US, versus 101 for heavily transit-dependent Korea.

2) The article acknowledges that from 1982 to present, we have been able to
increase vehicle miles traveled per day by 60% without significantly
increasing daily commutes. The article illogically assumes that there is no
value to that increased mobility. But if there wasn't nobody would do it.
People do it because they would rather have a bigger, newer house, in a place
with better schools, than a shorter commute. The article not only fails to
quantify the value of those additional amenities, it refuses to acknowledge
they even exist.

~~~
robocat
Whenever I read a smalltowns article, the article assumes high density living
is great or can be drastically improved, and usually bakes in some arguments
about why low density suburbs are evil.

They seem to completely ignore the votes made by people's feet on something so
important to most of those people.

I have experienced some of the costs and benefits of both city and rural
lifestyles, in a variety of countries.

I dislike anyone trying to restrict that choice (even if it is for the good of
X).

~~~
tynpeddler
Their argument is much more disturbing than that. They argue that middle to
upper class suburban living is subsidized by taxation on people living in high
density neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are predominantly populated by the
poorer people. In other words, rich people are making choices and getting poor
people to pay for them.

It's not that low density suburbs are evil, its that towns and cities are
making unsustainable financial decisions based on deeply flawed information
and as a results are bankrupting themselves and trapping poor people in urban
blight.

~~~
sokoloff
_In other words, rich people are making choices and getting poor people to pay
for them._

How much in taxes are even being paid that are being "wasted" on the rich's
choices?

------
cromwellian
This is like arguing having a faster CPU, GPU, more memory, or more networking
speed always ends up with the same delays.

Your modern word processing software seems as low or slower at reacting to UX
than old 16/32-bit processors from the 90s, even though your computer is
exponentially faster.

But this completely ignores the RADICAL improvement in capability. The latest
word processors may not render at 60Hz, with 16ms latency to UI events, but
they are multilingual, they support vector fonts, they have collaboration
features, and on and on.

Some basic phone operations might be more convenient on an old feature phone
than a modern touch phone, but the smartphone delivers to much more.

Our transportation infrastructure is our nervous system, our circulatory
system. Maybe adding more neurons won't let you think faster. But it might
make you think in ways you couldn't before. Other animals can process and
react to stimuli vastly faster than we can, but our 'latency' perhaps affords
us greater capabilities.

More than thinking about individual latency, it might be worth considering
whether hyper-mobility benefits the overall system granting group benefits
that exceed individual costs. (or positive externalities that exceed negative
externalities)

~~~
24gttghh
I'm pretty sure the negative externality of burning more fossil fuels because
we're driving farther than ever before is a big enough problem that no
positives like being able to live in a house with a big lawn is worth it.

------
mjevans
This isn't what they studied, but a simple thought experiment shows a limited
use case where traffic absolutely can be helped by speeding things up.

Let's imagine a world where self driving cars are required for freeway
driving; this allows them to respond in a predictable and timely manor with
respect to directives to avoid lanes (and not jump the line) as well as to go
at an exact speed.

An event (accident, whatever) obstructs One of Five possible lanes for use
(including the HOV lane) on a section normally rated at 60 MPH.

This reduces the capacity of the road by 1/5th, or alternately, one lane of
flow should be re-distributed across 4 lanes (1/4th per lane).

Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self-
driving cars. There is a lead up zone where the speed is expected to ramp up
to the new target, followed by a merge zone where the lanes reduce and the
flow is re-shaped to balance traffic evenly. The cars would then pass the
incident zone in this higher speed lane-compressed flow, before expanding out
and then slowing back down to normal speed.

Due to the unexpected nature of the incident there has also been a buildup of
volume before the incident, so to alleviate that slightly higher flow will be
allowed to drain the high pressure area.

In the above hypothetical case, for 4 out of 5 lanes nornally at 60MPH, I
would prefer to imagine: (1 + 1/4) * 60MPH => 75, but round up another 5 MPH
for the bypass flow for a total of 80MPH in the corrected flow area.

Many sections of freeway could likely support that safely ; they're often
engineered very well but have conservative speed limits set for political and
driver quality reasons. However some sections would 'cap out' at a lower
actually safe speed; in those sections the above procedure could help minimize
the traffic flow impact.

However... CGP Grey really nailed the real problem:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE)

~~~
dev_dull
> _Idealized solution: A temporary bypass zone is communicated to the self-
> driving cars._

There’s so many great opportunities like this once the cars are self driving
and connected. For example, a ten lane highway _without dividers_! 8v2 split
depending on the time of day and traffic patterns. How many times have you
been stuck in a lane with the other lanes in the other direction completely
open?

~~~
nostrademons
Also, drafting. With human drivers it's not feasible to have cars travel 6
inches behind each other, because human reaction time is shitty enough that
everybody would crash. With computer control you could easily have cars match
speeds, then slowly get closer until they latch together and form a train.
This'd both dramatically increase the carrying capacity of roads (with the
default 1-car-length-per-10mph-of-speed rule, 7/8 of a highway is empty
space), and it would improve fuel economy by reducing cross-sectional area and
wind resistance.

~~~
sushisource
This is still a terrible idea. What happens when the car in front of you has
an axel failure?

Oops, my car's instant reaction time is worth nothing because the brakes
cannot physically prevent my imminent death.

~~~
nostrademons
It seems like this is the exact same problem that was solved (to our
satisfaction, at least) by trains over a century ago. If you're riding on the
light rail and the train car ahead of you has an axle failure, what happens?
We don't think very much about this case, because in practice it basically
never happens.

~~~
sushisource
It works because they're physically connected already, which would be really
really difficult with cars (standardizing the connectors, etc etc). Agreeing
on a standard protocol for communication is a hard enough problem to start
with.

~~~
nostrademons
Nobody who's looked at the economics of self-driving cars realistically thinks
private ownership is an option: if you're putting that much capital investment
in a vehicle that could operate 12-16 hours/day, your amortized costs go up by
a factor of 6-8 if it's only operating for 2 hours/day. If we get self-driving
cars it'll be in the form of ridesharing or rental services.

Agreeing on a standard protocol for both connectors and communications is a
relatively easy problem if you have an industry with a dozen or so operators
rather than 300 million private owners. It also solves the other major reason
trains don't regularly crash, which is regular maintenance.

~~~
xyzzyz
_Nobody who 's looked at the economics of self-driving cars realistically
thinks private ownership is an option: if you're putting that much capital
investment in a vehicle that could operate 12-16 hours/day, your amortized
costs go up by a factor of 6-8 if it's only operating for 2 hours/day. If we
get self-driving cars it'll be in the form of ridesharing or rental services._

This same reasoning applies to non-self driving cars, but somehow we do have a
few privately owned cars around. The only way self-driving would make it any
different would be if self-driving cars were so much more expensive that only
very few would be able to afford it. If you however try to estimate the shape
of the demand curve, you'll note that even today that are plenty of cars sold
at $100k mark, so unless self-driving cars are many hundreds of thousands of
dollars each, you'll still see privately owned self-driving cars.

More importantly, once the technology is out in the wild, many manufacturers
will copy it, and it will push down the markup for self-driving capability
rather low. You can sell a self-driving Toyota Corolla for $100k if you're the
only manufacturer of self-driving cars. Once Nissan and Ford have their own
equivalent technology, you can no longer do that.

~~~
Gibbon1
When I think of the economics of self driving cars I pull out of my keister a
sub $10k price for that option and then estimate the monthly amortization cost
at 'under $200/mo'

At that point I start worrying that self driving cars externalize the cost of
congestion off the driver to the public at large. Everyone has to deal with
congestion except the people inside their self driving cars yapping on their
phones.

------
epx
I have a first-hand experience: my town created a lot of "binaries", that is,
converted pairs of streets into one-way avenues, in order to speed traffic.
But now one needs to drive 4x longer to reach the same destination. Even if
average speed increased 2x (and it did not), everybody stays on road 2x
longer.

~~~
wnoise
Making lots of one-way streets is certainly an overused hammer, but it
shouldn't double the distance traveled, it should add at most three blocks,
and usually far less.

~~~
epx
Sure, the changes went beyond one-way streets, that was one of the tools; but
the final result was, you used to be able to go A to E almost straight, now
you need to go A,B,C,D,E.

------
Reedx
One of the biggest reasons I'm looking forward to self-driving cars is to
solve the traffic wave[1] problem. These are so unnecessary and deeply
frustrating. When I started paying attention to what was causing traffic in
the Bay Area I saw them all the time. There's so much added congestion due to
erratic speeds, merging too late, rubbernecking and so on.

1)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_person...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/5tf814/how_one_persons_sudden_brake_can_create_a_wave_of/)

~~~
epistasis
The entire point of this article is that doing something to solve the traffic
wave problem still won't fix congestion, and is in fact the entire wrong
problem to solve!

I think that the article is a great refutation of the value of self-driving
cars as a solution to our traffic woes. Self-driving cars optimize the wrong
thing, enabling out-size use of miles travelled, and will make us less happy
than if we instead optimized for accessibility, as this article argues.

~~~
wozniacki
As much as its in-vogue thing to push for higher density living some of us
dread living close to each other like the plague, for very well founded
reasons that have been proven right over and over again.

Our population density (in the United States) is very high as it is in, most
metropolitan regions. I'm sure there are perfectly valid reasons for some to
want to live in close quarters to one another. But it isn't for everyone given
the intense polarization of the American public off late, around even issues
that were unchallenged only a few years ago. Unfortunately, there is no end in
sight for this development. It's better for everyone to choose to live as they
see fit for their safety & security. (Tim Ferriss even cites risk of terrorism
for him leaving the Bay area entirely! [1])

Fully autonomous zero-waste cars should be welcomed and not shunned.

[1] I am Tim Ferriss, host of “The Tim Ferriss Show” and author of “Tribe of
Mentors.” AMA!
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6zrh1/)

~~~
sushisource
I think the problem here is you can't have both things. You can't say "I hate
other people and want to live away from them" and at the same time say "...but
it's also my right to access all the same stuff people who are willing to live
near each other have access too".

So, if you want to be a hermit, go for it, but you shouldn't expect the entire
world to conform to your concept of what _you_ like even though it's
demonstrably less efficient.

~~~
scrumbledober
Why not? If we have the technology to solve that problem is there any reason
not to?

~~~
Johnny555
It's not a solved problem, and it's not just s simple technology problem. It's
a problem of getting a large number of people from far-flung suburban or even
rural areas into a small urban area, and then back home again.

It's still the last-mile into the city that's going to be congested, and far
flung commuters complain about local commuters "Don't make dedicated bus
lanes, they slow my car commut!" or "Get those bikes off the road, I'm already
driving an hour to get to work, they are slowing me down" or "What do you mean
you want me to park outside of the city and take the train, I'm already in my
car, I'm not going to go park and then ride a train".

------
40acres
Would love to see a study that examines the level of racial segregation within
a city and how it correlates with commute times from suburbs / exurbs into
that city.

Segregation, and the lack of resources that go to certain neighborhoods
because of it, generally make large swaths of an area undesirable to people
who have enough means for options. Dealing with a longer commute seems like a
trade-off that many Americans have made given the choice of 'undesirable
segregated neighborhood' and 'too rich for my blood'.

------
zajio1am
Seems to me that the article does not get the reason why people move to big
cities:

> So what do we achieve by building new highways and speeding up travel? We
> don't actually shorten people's trips; we just enable them to live and work
> farther away from each other.

If people can live and work farther away while keeping travel time the same,
then they have more opportunities for work and leisure in their reachable
distance. That is major advantage of living in a big city compared to a small
town.

------
hnal943
> We can always travel more miles at higher speeds to reach the same
> stuff—family, friends, jobs, dining, shopping—if technology and cheap energy
> enable us to keep spreading out. Heck, some of us might commute to the moon
> if we could.

This is where the argument unravels for me. Mobility is obviously preferable
to immobility, and family is a great example as to why! It's very rare to have
your entire extended family in one city. The ability to keep in contact with
people who are far away is an obvious good.

Also, I'm not sure about commuting to the moon (although if it was fast
enough, why not?), but it would be cool to visit. The increased ability to
travel broadens people's perspectives.

I don't understand why this is the fight they want to have.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Mobility is obviously preferable to immobility, and family is a great
> example as to why! It's very rare to have your entire extended family in one
> city. The ability to keep in contact with people who are far away is an
> obvious good.

That's fine for freeways that people are taking across multiple states. When
trips are too long to work as commutes, the level of traffic is low lower and
you're immune to induced demand from everyday traffic.

But this is about the roads that get you around a city. If you make those
roads a lot wider, but the housing density drops 3x, your ability to visit
family doesn't improve at all.

Increasing the distance you can go in 6+ hours broadens horizons. Increasing
the distance you can go in 30 minutes inflames sprawl and congestion, unless
you have some kind of efficiency miracle to apply to the construction.

------
esotericn
Increasing the number of lanes of traffic available increases the number of
people who can get from A to B using that network during a specific time
period.

Whether "congestion" increases or decreases is besides the point. Congestion
is definitional in economically successful urban areas.

The trivial example is to imagine a theoretical road with free-flowing traffic
and a 10mph speed limit. Add another lane and now twice as many cars can get
from A to B (if the demand comes). No individual car will make the journey
faster.

------
readams
There are two dimensions under which we can alleviate traffic problems. One is
to increase throughput of roads and transportatio, and the other is to
increase density and otherwise make efforts to allow people to live closer to
their jobs and services they need.

The article would have us believe that only one of these things exists or
could be useful, when in fact both can be true and both can help to improve
the situation.

~~~
wnoise
Both can be true, but if society has already spent a lot on one, than it can
be much much more efficient to gather the low hanging fruit on the other.

------
dbalbright
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

------
Causality1
>a staggering tripling of the developed land area with zero net population
growth

Sounds like a good thing to me. Cramming twenty-six thousand human beings into
each square mile of space is every bit as perverse as our modern diet of fat
and sugar, or spending sixteen hours a day sitting down staring at a screen.

------
ghobs91
Road traffic is caused by two main things: congestion and bottlenecks.

Congestion is solved by properly designing cities and their transit systems so
that there's an optimal ratio of car/bus/train/bike use.

Bottlenecks are solved by properly designing the road network itself so that
you don't have situations where 5 lanes become 2, or highway onramps/off-ramps
that are too short and cause an entire lane to be backed up by people entering
and leaving.

Yes adding more lanes by itself doesn't solve the problem due to induced
demand, but refusing to expand highways while simultaneously neglecting to
have transit keep up with growth is even worse.

I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit
expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to keep
up with growth.

~~~
YokoZar
> I personally think that all new housing should have a state "transit
> expansion" tax per unit of housing it introduces, to allow the system to
> keep up with growth.

Why not just tax the transit use directly? That way you remove the complexity
of determining which new housing is reducing traffic (by letting people
commute less) and which housing is increasing traffic by how much.

~~~
me_again
Taxing transit use directly is called a bus ticket.

However when you provide unmetered road usage you also need to provide
subsidies to persuade people to use transit, which is what transit taxes do.

~~~
YokoZar
There are other ways to do road pricing: odometer taxes, toll roads, even fuel
taxes.

------
dsfyu404ed
Fixing congestion by speeding up traffic is a red herring. Think of peak usage
(rush hour) like pouring a 5-gallon bucket into a sink. The peak volume will
always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big the pipe is but a big
pipe sure helps it go away faster. This principal applies to mass transit as
well. There will always be backup, like on the subway platform at 5:05pm, but
more capacity (more lanes, faster flow, more frequent service, etc) means it
will cycle through faster.

This article's gripes about measuring the cost of congestion are mostly
accurate. That TTI study is laughable. Their gripes about mobility not being a
goal are totally bunk. I understand their agenda and why they feel this way
but the reduction in cost of moving a fixed distance has enabled us to
massively increase our standard of living. They just don't like it because
it's made certain other societal problems more bearable so we haven't fixed
them yet (e.g. terrible zoning in some places) and it's environmentally
unfriendly. Barring some revolution in transportation on par with the
automobile I doubt they'll go unfixed that much longer.

I'm not in the least bit sympathetic to the author's belief that increased
difficulty of travel is good. I grew up somewhere that was hard to get to and
the economic reality that bring sucks (your dollars only go like 80% as far)
and people would be stupid to want to impose on this on themselves. The author
is conflating his distaste for the automobile (which is fashionable and has
some merit,especially on environmental grounds) with a distaste for lower
cost/higher speed transportation in general. If you were to re-write his
article and instead complain about how city buses and subways have made it
possible for people's range to extend beyond their neighborhood or imagine
some alternative reality in which cars are replaced with carbon neutral mass
transit of equivalent cost/throughput it would become immediately apparent how
nonsensical this distaste for reducing the time/money cost of physical
distance is.

Edit: My analogy is for reasonable pipe sizes only.

~~~
mehrdadn
> The peak volume will always be able to overwhelm the pipe no matter how big
> the pipe

This doesn't make sense? If your sink's pipe was 1 meter in diameter you
wouldn't overwhelm it with 5 gallons would you?

Not saying that should be the goal, but the reasoning seems wrong...

~~~
SilasX
True, but the point is, making pipes big enough to actually make this work ...
is physically impossible with current constraints.

------
tempsy
If the Green New Deal passes, a really interesting consideration would be a
bill that would actually require employers to let (or require) employees to
work from home a certain number of days a week.

~~~
RandallBrown
Do you have a source or article about that?

I would be interested to see what that means for places where you can't work
from home (restaurants, doctor's offices, etc.)

I work from home full time and it's pretty incredible (despite being a little
bit lonely.)

~~~
tempsy
No because it is my personal idea.

Obviously this is really only relevant for knowledge workers. There would be
of course exceptions for anyone who needs to physically be at their workplace
to do their job.

------
seanmcdirmid
Huh, nothing about the potential for self driving cars to optimize road usage?
Yes, it does require 100% buy in, and it will probably happen in Asia and
Europe before the USA, but a fleet of self driving vehicles can theoretically
coordinate in ways people can’t (not to mention the standard lack of parking
needed for taxi-like personal transportation).

But then would people just live even further out, given that even drive time
is now free?

------
whycombagator
> very rarely would anyone be willing to spend 6 minutes worth of their wages
> (say, on an express toll lane) to avoid that congestion—turns out this has
> been studied and people will pay, on average, more like $3 an hour, or well
> under minimum wage.

That doesn't quite make sense to me. If someone makes 60k a year (USA GDP per
capita) then, roughly speaking, isn't 6 mins of pay for them $3? Most tolls
are <= $3 in my experience

~~~
xyzzyz
This doesn't make sense to me either. Most people would gladly spend $3 to
save an hour of their life.

~~~
Johnny555
Express tolls here max out at $10 - I'll pay the $10 if it saves me 30 minutes
(the toll signs also give expected travel times for the express (toll) lanes
compared to the regular lanes).

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wwarco
Uhhhhhhhh.... Okay let the bridges fall.. let that be on responsibility on the
locals? Engineers? As opposed to a trading system that works?

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cadence-
Perhaps the solution to traffic is remote work + Starlink? Most of the jobs in
downtowns of big cities seem to be office jobs in skyscrapers. Can’t most of
those people just work from home instead? This would also increase demand for
local restaurants and shops to serve all those people working from home.

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known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry)
purchased a London cab so that he could use bus and taxi lanes to efficiently
drive around London

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atlantictopacif
Unstated assumption: living in an inner city is the best way to live; living
in the suburbs is worse, and living in a rural area is the worst.

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jldugger
It's pretty straightforward logic: if driving places cost you 10 percent less
time, would you drive less, or more?

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alephnan
How about max-flow min-cut theorem?

~~~
anticensor
That assumes complete control of the network. Even one unknown link would
break the flow optimisation.

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whalesalad
The only way to fix traffic is to fix the problem plaguing virtually every
human in the world right now: the inability to be deliberate, focused, and
mindful about the task that they’re currently engaged in.

Doesn’t matter what bandaids we slap on it, more rail, more carpool lanes,
wider roads, etc... those are all treatments to the symptoms not the root
cause.

I would posit that if people were mindful and conscious about driving, traffic
would improve dramatically. Get off your phone. Stop thinking about the emails
in your inbox. Don’t worry about the dinner date you have tonight. Focus.
Drive. Be mindful. Be aware.

~~~
saagarjha
I find your “solution” hard to put into effect, since most people find driving
in traffic to be boring.

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whalesalad
So by virtue of the fact that traffic is boring, folks have the right to
become distracted and put their attention elsewhere?

It’s a chicken/egg problem. If people were more focused, there would be less
traffic. If there was less traffic, there would be less boredom.

~~~
saagarjha
Well, yes? You can drive and think about other things–honestly, I wouldn’t
believe you if you said you _don’t_ do this in.

