I was thinking about induced demand, and I wondered why the argument as it’s made against cars/the expansion of highways isn’t also applied to things like busses. Does it not occur to the same extent?

  • esa@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    The induced demand part involves a cycle of expanding roadways and then building detached housing to use that roadway.

    This would happen with buses, trams and bikes as well but for them the matching housing is a high-density urban fabric, and this is much more frequently blocked by zoning than detached houses. So we get essentially housing crises with incredible prices for quality urban areas as the demand is pretty huge, and some absolutely jam-packed bus and train routes, but following up on that is politically much harder than destroying some farmland or nature area to build suburbs.

    • If traffic is bad then it’s treated as a problem that must be solved
    • If transit is packed like sardines then it’s often ignored
    • If housing that enables a low-car lifestyle is incredibly scarce and expensive it gets waved off with stuff like “it’s not a human right to live in the city” or “but a big building will cast a shadow on my lawn!”