5 comments on Integrating Energy, Transportation and Land Use
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5 comments on Integrating Energy, Transportation and Land Use
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The UK experience is if you build a road, it fills up-- it creates its own demand.
Similarly if you expand an urban area, you create flows of traffic to and from that new subdivision, leading to total traffic flow (on existing roads) than was there before-- households in the new subdivision want to work, shop and play in other places besides the new subdivision, and that creates traffic.
Jane Jacobs pointed out the reverse case very well: close a road, and a significant fraction on the traffic in question disappears (I think this happened on the West Side Highway in New York).
I think this all stems from the unique nature of car travel-- it takes up a lot of road space, but doesn't move many people (at 1.1 people per car which I think is the worldwide developed country average).
It's sprawl that creates traffic, rather than density per se. What happens with density is people make shorter trips and fewer trips by car.
Since people like to live further apart, that seems to be human nature, the trick is to balance the two.
I don't know what the comparable US statistic is.
The countries that have tackled traffic congestion (Netherlands, Denmark) have done so by restricting traffic in favour of pedestrians, and aggressively encouraging bicycles.
There you go. That's the more correct version of your statement, with "congestion" replaced by "traffic". Because "traffic" does have the implication of vehicle-miles-travelled, whereas congestion implies travel that is slower than some theoretical maximum.