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Induced Demand & Roadway Widening: Everything You Always Wanted to Know (and Weren't Afraid to Ask)

Ray Delahanty | CityNerd3 HN recommenders · 2022–2024
120K views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2022-01-20

CityNerd Ray Delahanty explains induced demand and what happens when freeways are widened. He walks through the economics of supply and demand applied to traffic and asks how much new traffic appears and whether congestion returns.

HN commenters link it as a clearer explanation of induced demand for people who have not studied the topic.

Transit, cities & urban planningMicroeconomics & behavioral economics

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3 comments from Hacker News

@noahmasur2022 · in “Why America can’t build”

The problem is that "inducing demand" for people who would otherwise take public transit doesn't actually increase efficiency. Putting more cars on the road is not necessarily a net benefit. See this video from CityNerd for more details: [VIDEO]

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@tidbits2024 · in “In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them”

Books are not a finite resource? Obviously there is a finite number of trees but there are enough for it not to be a bottleneck. Land on the hand is a finite resource, especially in large, urban cities. There is no way to design a highway or other car infrastructure that will meet the demands of any reasonably sized city without dedicating an unreasonable amount of land to cars. Anyway, Ray explains it better than I could and he agrees that the term is bad: [VIDEO]

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@oblio2024 · in “I mapped almost every USA traffic death in the 21st century”

Have you read anything or watched anything about induced demand or did you just read the expression and figured it all out by yourself? [VIDEO]

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