The biggest myths about economics, debunked | Economics Explained

[@midnightflare9879]

As an Adam Something fan, I can safely say, it's okay to like driving. It's only bad, when you are forced to drive because you have no real options. In reality, there are very few train poeple, bike people or car people. Most folks just take whatever method is the fastest or most convinient. As long as we make sure the most convinient methods are the ones best for our city, climate and health, the ramaining few car lovers won't make any problems.

[@luispereztasso]

Exactly, the point of Adam is not to demonize any car user, but to hold accountable any policy that gives priority of that type of person over the rest that uses public transportation and avoiding making a better one.

[@secrets.295]

But these days there seems to be a push from politicians to end driving cars and people must only use public transport.

[@j.s.7335]

Excellent comment; it better get the most likes.

[@hidesbehindpseudonym1920]

I would use my car less if I had better options. I would definitely be open to a smaller lower speed car, like an enclosed bike.

[@penonpaper3132]

@@secrets.295 And like 99% of politicians, they are out of touch. Though I don’t really know if the ones you are describing even exist in large enough numbers. I shouldn’t have to get in my 2 ton steel box with rubber wheels to cross a 4 lane street and make my way to a restaurant or grocery store nearby. The alternative in my city as of right now is to walk like a mile down the road to a crosswalk that doesn’t even work or risk being fined like $500 for jaywalking. That’s ridiculous and unnecessary.

[@mattiasthorslund6467]

One thing about public transit that is often misunderstood among drivers is how it benefits them even if they never ride it themselves. Those 25 people on the bus could have been as many more cars on the street. Those 1000 people on the commuter train would have been that many more cars on the freeway. Not just people who would have driven their own car, but also non-drivers who would have gotten a ride. And getting a ride often means the driver drives back alone, which means even more trips. So a good transit system definitely means fewer cars on the roads and less traffic.

[@bunnssgalore5407]

Even if every driver is aware to that fact, if the urban design is both unfriendly to pedestrians and public transport, it will not be enough to convince them to not have a need for a car to go from point A to point B. You wouldn't want to walk around a city with tiny or even absent sidewalks with hazards all around, or use public transport where passengers are packed like sardines in a can.

[@djinn666]

No, a good transit system means more people traveling. It does not mean less cars on the road. The people who rode the trains did so only because driving sucked. The moment traffic got better, they would've gone back.

[@thetrainguy1]

​@@djinn666 Then you make driving more expensive than taking public transportation.

[@whiteerdydude]

​@@djinn666 that's definitely untrue lol. I'd much rather take a train, bus, bike or walk than drive. Anecdote aside, cars are way more expensive than every other transportation method, except possibly planes. Why would I spend $/€10k+ a year on a car when I could spend 1k on train or bus passes. Also, guess who has to pay to repave those massive amounts of road? Tax payers. It cost less tax money to maintain rails than roads.

[@djinn666]

@@whiteerdydude If you're taking public transit because owning a car is too expensive, then you don't matter for congestion. You would not have driven regardless.

[@VladToronto]

The problem is that on the highways, the bottlenecks are generally not the lanes but the offramps to destinations. If you have a highway dropping people off downtown, you can expand the highway all you want, but you won't be able to increase capacity downtown without bulldozing existing real estate (may not be as relevant in cities like Houston, but relevant in places like NYC). So no matter how much capacity you add to the highways, there will always be traffic jams.

[@computernerdtechman]

Adding very expansive public transit doesn't get rid of bottlenecks. New York City is a prime example. They have a very expansive transit system, yet bottlenecks still clog NYC.

[@ishathakor]

@@computernerdtechman it doesn't get rid of them but it does reduce them. imagine if all of nyc's 2.4 million subway riders and 1.2 million bus riders got off of public transit and into cars. it would make the city unlivable.

[@TPrivate]

@@ishathakor If there was no transit, there would be less people there. Duh. They wouldn’t all get cars. They should require passing 3rd grade to vote...

[@newagain9964]

@@computernerdtechman wow. how much paint chips did you eat as a kid (or as an adult)???

[@computernerdtechman]

@@newagain9964 Please check the battery in your carbon monoxide detector, because your speaking nonsense.

[@loogabarooga2812]

Important point about traffic volume and congestion: Widening arteries without also widening everything else either creates new chokepoints or exacerbates existing ones. Oftentimes the highway onramps are where traffic is the worst. And you can't widen everything

[@alexander15551]

This is a key point! There was a recent infrastructure project in my area where they created a new on-ramp from one major highway to another. The only problem was, right after the on-ramp they immediately necked the highway down from 4 lanes to 3 lanes. As you can probably guess, traffic didn’t improve in this area

[@lloydgush]

You don't need to widen everything, just some WD 40 and it will slide right in.

[@svr5423]

you can't widen everything, but that takes traffic away from neighborhoods. What do you do if the highway is congested? Your GPS will route you right through the 30kph streets in the neighborhoods, because it's faster. Traffic naturally finds a way. If you can make traffic flow faster, the amount of car hours on the road reduces drastically - with the same amount of km driven.

[@bigbadlara5304]

7:21

[@drscopeify]

There are great tactics to solve these issues. For example here in Seattle area all highway onramps have a traffic light to slow slow down merging traffic during heavy highway traffic hours and there is on most also an HOV lane for 2+ people cars so they can skip the light to incentivize carpool or car sharing.

[@genericytprofile852]

8:02 I understand what you're trying to say here but I think you're missing the bigger picture on how induced demand is talked about within urbanist circles. The solution to congestion is never talked about as simply removing lanes. That would be missing the many many other factors that contribute to car use in general. When talking about city planning we need to consider things like land development, public transit placement, and support for all levels of transit systems. One of the main problems in alot of north american cities is that we've prioritized car centric planning for everything. From expansive suburban developments, to massive parking requirements, to getting rid of most of our mid density housing. And this has lead to most people _needing_ a car just to get anywhere. And so when officials say they want to expand a road to help fight congestion, they're missing the core issues of why the roads get so clogged up in the first place. When you expand a roadway to carry more traffic, you often need to expand the roads it offloads onto as if you don't it just creates bottlenecks where they meet. At a certain point you really start to get diminishing returns for only marginal increases in throughput. That's mainly what the talk surrounding that particular phenomenon is about. So in combatting congestion it's never really about taking away lanes. It's about supporting all tiers of transit with good land usage. It goes roughly, walking > biking > bus/tram > metro/rail. And cars can help fill in the areas not quite covered by them. And if you think about it, imagine a bus on the road. Now imagine 10-30 cars there instead of a bus. Having transit, while may not be for everyone, majorly reduces the space taken up by commuters. This is great for everyone, even car owners. So no need to apologize for being a car person. A well made city with good transit options are pleasant for everyone to be in. And having much denser zoning policies, instead of this suburban sprawl we see everywhere, will help with incentivizing walking/cycling as they become actually viable.

[@betula2137]

Thanks for writing so I don't have to 😅

[@rikwisselink-bijker]

Presenting removing lanes as the solution is about as stupid as presenting an extra lane as a solution. Neither solves the core problem.

[@betula2137]

@@rikwisselink-bijker and it's not the mainstream urbanist argument, it's just one chosen for the video because some say so

[@chaklee435]

I don't think "induced demand" is a good summary to represent the compelling bigger picture you painted. EE is doing the technically correct annoying academic thing where he examines the precise meanings of words and ideas without voicing any support for any course of action.

[@yashagrawal88]

Very important.

[@matta6088]

To me, the problem seems that our cities (Australia) were built wrong to begin with. Extreme sprawl and little public transport investment has created our preference for cars, because our shortsighted development has made alternatives so poor.

[@iamthinking2252_]

Some capitals in Australia actually started sprawling due to railways. Not nearly as far as today, but definitely further than one could walk than an hour

[@cherriberri8373]

America is the same, but all the historic cities built before the car had public transit and were all gutted and replaced with parking and buisnesses with far larger parking lots, decreasing density firther and making public transit less and less favorable in a politicians mind- not impossible, just not politically favorable.

[@Blkhole02]

Most Australian cities developed predominantly after the invention and adoption of the automobile, so I'd argue that your cities were actually built correctly, with the automobile as the primary means of transporation in mind. While a balance between the two is obviously the desired outcome, as someone living in an European city with predominantly historical streets and urban planning made in the 1800s, I often dream of broad American-style motor lanes and proper parking spots, instead of navigating narrow one-way streets and narrowly avoid a fender bender each time I try to park. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.

[@FlatKitten]

​@@Blkhole02 parking in American cities is a nightmare dude. You can't escape that aspect of cars. It's far too expensive and/or not enough of it where you want to be.

[@Alltoc]

Exactly, people are not the problem, poorly designed transport systems are That's why I think it is bad when EE throws shade at Adam Something with "Sorry, I am everything wrong with the world", suggesting Adam says that individual people are the problem for not taking bad public transit. Just shows that he doesn't understand urbanists

[@LucasDimoveo]

I grew up in NYC, and since leaving a decade ago I've found it hard to exist in most places in the US. There aren't many places in America where walking or taking public transporation is painless. This isn't an economic argument, obviously, but there has to be something to be said of the "pay to play" of forcing people to have cars. When I was a kid if I could counjure up a few dollars I could see entirely different parts of the city, interact with totally different people , hear dozens of different languages, and largely just expose myself to more of humanity. Growing up poor in a car dependent place means you are completely locked out of the cultural and economic opportunities of relatively "close" places. It's insanity.

[@kaseywahl]

Spot-on. I grew up in South Dakota, where it's basically a requirement to have a vehicle to even participate in the job market. It wasn't until I moved outside of the US until I realized how incredibly unreasonable of an ask it is to do that for most people in the world.

[@Ivanfpcs]

You should always have the freedom to chose, there needs to be enough good public transportation for it to be viable to live without a car

[@GiRR007]

I mean... Yeah? Its a really big country, personal transportation is gonna be a requirement. Large overly dense citys like NY are more strange than the normal distribution of people.

[@Ivanfpcs]

​@@GiRR007 There are many big cities in the US without any kind of public transportation system

[@GiRR007]

@@Ivanfpcs Exactly, thus it makes even less sense for less populated areas if not even all large cities have it or need it.

[@MrPrevedmedved]

New demand comes from buliding new houses farther away from city center. If you need 15 minutes to walk to your office from your apartment and then you buy a house and drive 15 minutes because now there is new highway that makes it possible, well, construction of the highway just created demand. This is the reason why effects are not instant and delayed by several years.

[@theBear89451]

Yes, home cost near work = home price away from work + cost to drive.

[@StLouis-yu9iz]

How could he talk about the economic impacts of personal automobiles w/o addressing the suburban sprawl Ponzi scheme?! Spreading infrastructure out to low density areas is the biggest economic problem of car-centric development. The tax return on that land use won’t be enough to meet our maintenance obligations soon.

[@madelineariah]

Construction of the house created the demand, not construction of the highway. Construction of the highway in your example satisfied the demand the house created.

[@samkelo27]

@@theBear89451 yeah plus places to live within the city are often apartments and townhouses while outside you can get yourself a bigger house with a garden for the same or less amount of money or more if it's really big or is in those affluent neighbourhoods

[@kaplanbahadir2301]

@@StLouis-yu9iz he probably didn't mention it, because it's a problem unique to the US. It doesn't apply to most places.

[@maryanchabursky9148]

I like the channel, however as an econ student I must point out that the induced demand section is plain wrong. Induced demand is defined as: “the increase in quantity demand (Qd) as a result in of a decrease in price from an increase in supply”. So it seems EE misunderstood the definition of induced demand (he seemed to think that induced demand was related to a shift in the demand curve, which btw is related to price through income). In reality induced demand just means that by making driving much cheaper, you increase the consumption of driving. Now an IMPORTANT NOTE economists use economic cost (accounting cost + opportunity cost). This is important because it says that by decreasing the cost of driving you also increase the cost of all other forms of transportation (since OC of driving depends on other forms of transportation). All this is not even getting into the unique behaviours of public goods (like the fact that public roads are non-excludable goods). To summarize, for every additional road you build you make driving less expensive and other forms of transportation more expensive, thus the increase in supply will be consumed almost fully leaving you at similar levels of consumption per public good (i.e. the traffic will not be reduced by much of at all). I also find it a bit annoying the way that he presents the criticism of the study as if it questioned the existence of induced demand, when in reality most issues were in the exact price elasticity of demand (by what percentage does driving increase for a 1% decrease in price). Most people correctly point out that by allocating such a high degree of public spending (G) to driving infrastructure, other substitute forms of transportation are less invested in, further increasing their OC. The reason that many cities prioritize private car roads is because at this point the marginal revenue returns to spending on roads is higher due to the prolific ownership in cars in the first place. The only way to change this is to start investing more into other forms of transportation (even if that means bearing a higher marginal cost for a time) in order to get to the point where marginal returns exceed the marginal returns on investing in roads.

[@SpencerLupul]

more comments like this plz

[@yummychips_]

or just build new cities with better infrastructure and less car centric idiocy.

[@joesterling4299]

​@@yummychips_ I'm sure razing cities, and then rebuilding them from the ground up will be great for the environment, and so cheap to do too. Then all you have to do is take people's cars and individual homes away, force them into public transport and apartment buildings, make even old people pedal their own bicycles, and everyone will love you. They'll build statues in your honor.

[@Limewire1984]

@@yummychips_ Car-centricity will be around as long as the people believing and embracing it are around. Solution? Wait for them to die and stop voting.

[@stephoh8613]

Super clear! This is what should have been in the video!

[@bensteele5801]

I think the point most urbanists make with induced demand is that there is a fixed budget for transportation, so if you want to reduce traffic you are much better off investing in public transit such as trains or busses because people using these modes are not driving and causing traffic. As these modes become more popular, instead of constantly having to expand and take up more space, they can often just become more frequent and increase vehicle size. This means that increasing the capacity of these modes costs much less than increasing capacity for drivers. I think one of the biggest things people don't realize about induced demand is that the method of doing this is vastly different for different modes of transport. For cars, you pretty much have to build a new lane to increase capacity and induce demand. There isn't a good way to increase capacity using existing lanes (ignore busses, since they aren't viable on highways unless they have their own lane anyways). In contrast, to increase capacity/induce demand for trains, there are a few options. Trains often don't run at max frequency and can have variable length. To increase capacity you can simply run more trains, which is more convenience for passengers and increases capacity. You can also increase the length of trains, which might not be more convenient, but does increase capacity. The cost to implement either of these solutions is vastly less than creating a whole new track or a whole new lane on a highway. Also, you don't need any more space for these solutions.

[@heychrisfox]

Exactly this. Induced demand isn't a problem to be solved; it's the result of poorly designed infrastructure.

[@TheRealDionysos]

That is not easy. The trainstations have fixed lenghts and increase frequenzys would just increase costs. I dont think many more people would use more public transport if it arrives more often. Maybe on the countryside but for the countryside its not profitable to drive with many trains. In citys you have most waiting between 10-20 mins. At least in europe.

[@AllenGraetz]

All modes of transportation have traffic. For mass public transit, it can and does occur both on the vehicles ( rail or bus ) and also at the stations. Any perception that mass public transit is traffic free is wrong.

[@evennot]

Underlying equation is pretty simple though. People want to have comfortable personal means of transportation and drastically reduce overall transport effectiveness. When solving this problem urbanists are trying to make personal transport as uncomfortable as possible to increase effectiveness + they try to sugarcoat it so the people will believe that it's worth it. Not because they are evil (I swear, at least 20% of them aren't /s). Also barracks with 40 people per room are super effective in terms of construction, heating, light. It's easy to regulate. But most people would decline such accommodation if they can afford a better alternative. Busses are the same thing.

[@sor3999]

Then they should say that "public transport is a better efficient use of fixed budgets" than this induced demand nonsense.

[@RyuukoKobayashi]

I appreciate the honesty about your views on cars vs other forms of transportation. Personally I don't want to get rid of cars, I just want to have the other options reasonably available to me. Right now I have no trains, very spotty bike infrastructure, and a terribly unreliable bus route. Living in the "land of the free" and feeling like I don't have the freedom to choose how I get around.

[@FinneasJedidiah]

Seriously, I love cars, but what I like even more is being able to travel without putting wear and tear on my car, and for a fraction of what it would cost in gas and parking costs

[@shorewall]

You're free to walk. :D "I'm in the Land of the Free, but I don't get no free lunch? SMH."

[@FinneasJedidiah]

@@shorewall this is- quite frankly- an idiotic take. Is it really too much in your tiny, primitive mind to ask that policymakers take a little of the money being spent on roads, and instead make it so that people can get from their home to work/school/the store/entertainment without either driving, or walking for an hour along unsafe roads that don't have sidewalks? Not to mention all of the people who have disabilities that mean they ARENT free to walk. Hopefully next time you make a comment you'll actually put an ounce of thought into it. I'm sure- despite my name calling- that you are actually intelligent enough to recognize the root issues here.

[@Boomflame82]

No good urban planner ever, even in recent years, has had a goal of eliminating cars entirely.

[@RyuukoKobayashi]

@@shorewall believe me I do plenty of that too, but we sure could use more sidewalks around here (if not multi-use pathways). Even walking in most places by me is considered dangerous due to the lack of pedestrian friendly pathing. Not asking for a free lunch, just a better return on the taxes I pay.

[@Yezu666]

Strong Towns and the like when talking about car infrastructure do point out that increase in that department directly increases congestion, but mostly by making alternatives less viable, not driving more attractive. Building more car roads and highways will result in more cars, mostly because in reality by choosing car infrastructure, public infrastructure is neglected.

[@jeremymercer5655]

I agree with your assessment. I found the way that not just bikes described induced demand was oversimplified to the point where EEs criticism is valid. For example, interstate 85 through Atlanta is 14 lanes wide at some points and still has traffic issues. Reducing it to 9 lanes wouldn't help anything because it would not improve the ability to bike or walk through the area. Now if you increase a 2 lane road to a 4 lane road in a city, you may inadvertently make the area less walkable and as a result drive more people to use cars.

[@lolnyanterts]

@@jeremymercer5655absolutely.

[@a-iz4pg]

@@jeremymercer5655 "EEs criticism is valid." No it's not, he didn't even get the definition right or understand the basic concept of induced demand.

[@danycashking]

If i may point out one issue in both the study you mentioned on induced demand and your own analysis. Yes it may shift demand rather than create it, but e.g. public transport or biking is much more space-efficient, you move lots of people on a small footprint. If the demand shifts to driving, yes a car in theory carries on average 5 people, but most cars are driven by a single person on their own. So if the demand shifts 1000 persons from a metro to driving, the increase in space taken up by those people driving individual cars is exponentially larger so a small addition in road capacity can still be overwhelmed by a comparable increase in demand by people, if those people each drive individually as their footprint is very large. Additionally, this doesn't take into account that MOST congestion is not caused by the roads themselves but by drivers and their behaviour like tailgating, breaking harshly for no reason, merging without warning etc. causing a chain reaction of slow downs. More drivers on the road means more of these chain reactions even if the capacity in there should allow for efficient throughput. This is most obvious when you compare highways from countries with very good and patient drivers to countries where people have a lot of road rages or straight up trash asshole culture.

[@Muzikman127]

unless there's something I'm missing, I don't think you mean exponentially, I think it's just a linear relationship. I think maybe you just meant like "a lot"? Otherwise, good comment.

[@shraka]

@@Muzikman127 They're right, it's exponential. Even in an ideal world where you can infinitely add lanes to a freeway at some point (depending on drive behaviour) the added real world capacity for an extra lane is less than the first three lanes. On top of this the more entrances and exits you put in, the more you slow the actual freeway. If you have infinite space and just add another freeway at the optimum size, you're adding congestion around the entrance and exit points to the freeway, plus extra time on the road to get to the second freeway - and that assumes everyone uses perfect demand predicting navigation systems. Then at the destination you need wider roads and more parking which makes walking less viable, which makes people use cars to get between buildings at their destination, which is more cars on the road. Basically cars have a significant geometry problem.

[@SuperNugget92]

​@@shraka Not really. Of course there are real world variables and boundaries to almoast every scenario. Still, mathematically speaking its not correct, because then nearly everything would be exponential, wich defeats the whole concept.

[@shraka]

@@SuperNugget92 Umm… No? What I’m saying is you can grow a train line linearly. A single automated metro line can carry 90k pax / hr, or double track it for 180k (which is way more than you’d ever need on one corridor) or just add more if you need more. Meanwhile a freeway’s extra lanes are not linear - after about 4 they start to drop off the more you add. That’s what makes it exponential. To get even 50k pax / hr you’d need 36+ lanes and complex space consuming traffic corralling features. Also a 3 lane freeway is going to carry ~5400 pax / hr, while a 6 lane will carry under 10,000 - a train line can do both of those in the same foot print and realistically you’ll only need an extra set of tracks if you need a different destination, so in that way it’s also exponentially more.

[@SuperNugget92]

@@shraka okay, consider my comment as withdrawn.

[@jasmikko]

In my experience here in Amsterdam, it's both the high cost of parking in the city center and the effeciency and accessibility of the public transport that incentivies me to always prefer public transport of over using a car. I think both factors should be present for me to be consistently choose one over the other.

[@urbanistgod]

So basically cars are fundamentally better, but your city artificially makes public transit “better” by making driving inconvenient? Got it.

[@seanthe100]

That makes sense in a densely populated nation that literally had to reclaim land from the ocean. It does not apply to all nations

[@jasmikko]

In most cases of solo travel like commuting to work I would always prefer not to drive. So I can use my time better at doing other stuff and be more relaxed. Only when traveling with all the family members and moving around big stuff that makes use of car a necessity, in my case at least.

[@zyansheep]

@@urbanistgod possibly better for anyone who can afford a car and drive it. Which _not everyone can_. And the existence of cars makes life worse for everyone who can't use one. Imo, better just not to have them in densely populated residential or commercial areas.

[@stuartwithers8755]

@@urbanistgod The high cost of parking is not arbitrary. Land costs money. Concrete costs money. There are opportunity costs for something else being there. If your parking is free, it's arbitrarily cheap.

[@cad4246]

I've had far more bad experiences stuck in traffic in a car vs public transport. And I never use the car to commute to work, when the traffic tends to be the worst. I think one thing a lot of people miss is that even if public transport takes longer you can use that time much more productively. You can move around and stretch, eat properly, read, catch up on messages or work, have a proper conversation and so on.

[@alechagen6291]

One thing I've noticed (in the US, anyway) is that people will use one bad experience or excuse to never ride public transit again, but the bad experiences from driving (awful traffic, near-accidents, blown tires from potholes, etc.) don't make the same people say "I'm never getting on the freeway again!" Some people have almost zero tolerance for any issues or inconveniences from mass transit, while a plethora of problems from driving doesn't elicit the same response.

[@nomadben]

​@@alechagen6291Wow, I never thought about that. I wonder why.

[@betteramulet50]

@@nomadben It’s because they’re used to it. Most Americans (and Australians, people from most places outside Europe really) haven’t grown up regularly taking PT and walking over the last couple of generations, so they are more familiar with the experience of driving. When they then venture into PT etc, they are comparing the experience through a base lens of what they feel transportation should feel like to them, which is how it feels to drive/be driven. The lack of familiarity means they are not comfortable, and the lack of comfort means they are more primed to notice anything threatening or generally uncomfortable. When shitty things happen when driving, on the other hand, they are still broadly associated in their mind with their baseline experience. So even though they give it frustrating, it is still just part of their norm, and thereby don’t have the added layers of psychological tension activated that they do when they’re doing something that isn’t their norm. So basically, we have an internet familiarity bias, and will tend to overlook/underestimate the negatives associated with an experience we find unfamiliar, and underestimate the effects of negative experiences that are still part of our norm

[@lc9245]

@@alechagen6291 Economically I would attribute it to sunk cost. There's an emotional and financial investment associated with driving because of car ownership or rental. There's much less of that in public transport as the cost is mostly covered by the collective.

[@alechagen6291]

​@@betteramulet50 that's an excellent way to explain it! I've been trying to think of how to describe this dynamic, but I think you nailed it.

[@scottmccullough8030]

I was under the impression that the induced demand came from development, not route or model shift, though that is not in the study you referenced. The idea is people will choose to build/live further from economic centers if the transportation costs are low enough. So a free way expansion will help traffic for 1-X years until the development in the area has maxed out capacity and then traffic will revert to pervious levels. Additionally the utilization of of lanes seems to go down after 3 or 4 lanes as load balancing across all the lanes is difficult.

[@MrGeneration83]

Yes and also if you need to make space for your roads and parking spaces, then the city become less dense and the demand for transportation rises.

[@danel1922]

absoltely right. i wonder what else he got wrong over the years...

[@Dan-dy8zp]

Agreed. I think that this issue is not explored as well as it could.

[@coreyw427]

You’re just getting short run and long run demand mixed up with ‘induced’ demand.

[@scottmccullough8030]

@@coreyw427 except the demand wouldn't exist without the infrastructure.

[@andreifilip6364]

I gotta say, I love the energy of saying someone is wrong because their argument is made on assumptions and then making other assumptions to prove you're right :)) ngl, the amount of bias-fueled inconsistencies in this vid made my confidence in the channel fall a bit. Seeing as you mentioned AdamSomething, I'd like to see you guys organize a debate on the subject, or with NotJustBikes or CityBeautiful and see where the arguments lead, because while the 2 concepts are indeed more complex than most people assume, their actual USAGE in the public space is pretty spot on.

[@guilhermetavares4705]

My confidence in the channel has been dropping a lot in the last few months.

[@emiliopenayo4738]

​@@guilhermetavares4705I've lost faith in this channel for more than a year now

[@xshme]

@@emiliopenayo4738 mood

[@JamieJosef]

@@emiliopenayo4738 not trying to be rude, but why do you still watch it then?

[@JamieJosef]

/gen

[@hiddescherphof6064]

don't forget the amount of space needed for the intentional congestion known as 'parking'. For reference, train stations in the Netherlands process in the range from 20-50K (regular city) to 150-200K (where major routes meet) people per workday. Assuming the latter has mostly people going through who wouldn't have to park, without stations regular cities would have to accomodate for another ~20.000 cars to be parked, taking up at least 200.000 m^2. Meanwhile, Utrecht Centraal (largest transfer hub) has some 25.000 m^2, including parking space for over 12000 bikes.

[@dumdumbrown4225]

I’ve travelled around the Netherlands - lovely city planning with clear distinctions between streets and roads. Great public transit networks with reasonable tickets and tons of station parking. Decent bicycle lanes throughout too, and Utrecht is a neat little place with the university and all. Apeldoorn is beautiful. Housing costs all over are a nightmare, living expenses are nuts and shopping is a pretty plain experience …but I do love Netherland’s cities for sure!!

[@SverreMunthe]

I don't think China thinks about the return per km built, but rather how many people can be employed, their international reputation, or whatever.

[@D4PPZ456]

He mentioned how they have trains to small population centers, but fails to understand that China usually builds the transportation infrastructure before master planning the area to house 5 million people. It's a difference in building philosophy. They think people should find it convenient to move there first.

[@drgn2580]

@@D4PPZ456 You are right. In fact, there is one or two videos from RM Transit saying that China (or Asian countries) tend to build train stations to 'no where', only for the areas surrounding the train station to be filled with new estates for residents, businesses, industries, etc. I can say this is true for Singapore where in the 2000s we had train stations to 'no where' and not making money (since very few people are using these stations). Fast forward to 2023, these stations are now surrounded by new housing estates, commercial districts, malls, and/or parks.

[@crash.override]

Not to mention the video skirted over the carbon savings of trains vs. airplanes.

[@Elementalism]

@@crash.override Depends on the source of electricty for the trains and the carbon costs to build the infrastructure. China is still building plenty of coal plants daily to keep up with demand.

[@randomuser5443]

@@crash.override Which is why china is making enormous coal power plants

[@thefingerling167]

One thing I think you left out here is how less people driving actually is better for the people who still drive. I do take the bus for my commute and if me and my fellow bus riders were to take cars, there would be 40 more cars on the road that the bus takes. That would make traffic, and thus, the people who drives' commute worse.

[@willmartin1502]

You're not stuck in traffic you are traffic

[@answerman9933]

I have been stuck in traffic on my bicycle as well.

[@beavatatlan]

You are stuck in the state of being traffic

[@PovidisII]

It's called Induced demand, where one option is the fastest but at the cost of alternatives. I suggest to use trains and busses or fewer lanes

[@AllenGraetz]

meh

[@norrthstar5891]

@@PovidisII induced demand is a lie

[@Immudzen]

I think the biggest problem I have with roads is all the space they take up. The more you build car dependent infrastructure the further apart everything gets because you need more roads and more parking. This ends up in a vicious cycle. Mass transit, walking, and biking don't work very well because the system is so decentralized. It also makes living in these places miserable. Cars just don't belong in cities. If you really want to you could take one to a city but then walk, ride, or use transit from there. From the economics cities have found out they need to charge a LOT more for parking because a lot of their land is devoted to cars and they make very little money off that land. Basically cars don't pay enough to cover the cost of the infrastructure they need. If people had to pay what it actually costs to use those things then most would not use them. The same is also true of suburbs.

[@Tuppoo94]

You're talking as if parking fees are the only payments that car owners have to pay. I don't know about where you live, but where I live things go like this: 1) Buying a car? You need to pay a 24% VAT, and a special car tax, which is largely based on CO2 emissions. This can easily double the price of a powerful car. 2) Want to use your car? You need to pay an annual road tax, which again is largely based on CO2 emissions. If your car burns diesel, you need to pay an additional diesel tax. 3) Want to keep driving? You need to pay a 24% VAT and gasoline tax on every liter of gasoline. Diesel is currently even more expensive than gasoline. 4) Want to keep your car near your home? If you live in the city, you need to pay for a street parking permit, which does not guarantee a parking spot, or a place in a parking building. 5) Want to stay safe? You need to pay for insurance, and in this country the premiums carry a 24% insurance premium tax. 6) Want your car to stay running? You need to pay for parts and servicing, which carries a, you guessed it, 24% VAT. The city may only get parking fees directly, but car owners pay a massive amount of other payments and taxes, and in this country actually subsidize pretty much every other type of transport, because the tax revenue collected from cars and driving far exceeds how much the government spends on roads, railways, and waterways combined. Because of all the taxes, car owners are also typically pretty wealthy, and any city should want to attract them.

[@Immudzen]

@@Tuppoo94 And yet all of those fees are a less productive use of the land than putting a shop there or adding more housing. There is a reason that cities around the world are moving away from cars. They are less productive for the city that other things are. I am aware that cars cost a lot. Even at what they cost it is not enough. You can see that cities that have done more to cut back on cars are doing better.

[@jonathanjones3126]

If cities cut parking lots and structures in half alot of of high density housing can be built.

[@scottfrazer4669]

A Ford F-150 takes occupies 100 square feet. It's insane to me that you can essentially claim 100 square feet as private space in some of the most valuable space in our cities. Imagine if as a pedestrian I didn't let anybody come into my 100 ft^2 bubble. That's complete insanity

[@jonathanjones3126]

@Tuppoo94 if cities where built in a way that eliminated most of the needs for cars and trucks and people could work close to home mass transit would be much easier to setup and use

[@TalleyrandsPuppet]

You missed the target completely on induced demand. The demand rises because people rely on the temporarily reduced traffic on new highways to make decisions about where they live, work, and other travel destinations. The net improvement from the new road is worse than zero because now people are more spread out, have abandoned existing infrastructure, and of course are more polluting and car dependent.

[@gamelord12]

Strange that of the benefits you listed to public transit (and also biking), you left out how much higher throughput it is for the same amount of space, which is another reason it's super important to have in places where people actually live, like city centers. But yeah, I've long since heard Induced Demand is a misnomer, and people are trying to correct it to Induced Traffic.

[@bennaustin6632]

That applies if a lot of people live in the city centre. Where I am from, there are almost no homes in the city itself compared to the suburbs. There is accommodation in the city centre, mainly hotels. There are apartments, but compared to the number of homes outside the city centre, it’s a tiny proportion. People go into the city to work or go out to a bar or decent restaurant. Then they go home to the suburbs. Some suburbs are well served by public transport, but those are generally more affluent areas, closer to the city and the coast. Suburbs further away are forced to drive because they don’t have much option.

[@gamelord12]

@@bennaustin6632 Suburbs being designed far away from things is itself a problem for necessitating car usage. I've never heard of a city that people only work in and visit but don't live in, lol, but either way, it's important to keep traffic flowing, which means more throughput. If you spread everything out to accommodate cars, you make things so far away from each other transportation options other than walking become even more necessary.

[@madelineariah]

"Where people actually live" is something of a fallacy since population density throughout the United States varies widely, and there are people who have to commute more than 100 miles to reach the nearest city. They may not have a choice due to their jobs keeping them in remote areas (especially if those jobs are the kinds of undesirable work that keeps society moving from day to day). Not every destination can be served efficiently by public transport due to there simply not being enough potential customers in more remote areas - despite their need to travel to major population centers regularly.

[@gamelord12]

​@@madelineariah See my previous reply.

[@nahuelma97]

I love how most of the comments here are about the second half of the video. The urban planning community is strong 😂😂

[@loogabarooga2812]

First half is too big brain for me lol

[@urbanistgod]

Brainwashed*. They’re a small loud minority.

[@slightlyirradiatedmuffin3257]

Urban planners' inputs are necessary to combat the inefficient but profit motivated elements are current planning. However if the world operated in perfect accordance to how urban planners seem to want it would be economically disastrous and dystopian levels of boring.

[@nahuelma97]

@@slightlyirradiatedmuffin3257 I'm curious regarding your choice of words. How would a city designed following exclusively urban planning guidelines be boring? It's not a rhetorical question, I honestly wanna know

[@lajya01]

@@nahuelma97 I guess, if the city planning gives absolutely no regards to what the market is actually asking for, it will end up in disaster. People will just go live somewhere else and the the city will lose a lot in real estate value. His point was probably that keeping a balance is key to every thing.

[@CliveBirse]

At the very least, I now grasp the concept of leverage. Creating wealth and financial freedom isn't as tough as many people believe. Building wealth and remaining financially stable indefinitely is a lot easier with the appropriate information. Participating in financial programs and products is the only true approach to make a high income and remain affluent indefinitely.

[@mariaguerrero08]

Starting early is simply the best way of getting ahead to build wealth , investing remains a priority . I learnt from my last year's experience , I am able to build a suitable life because I invested early ahead this time .

[@mikegarvey17]

Since the outbreak of 2020, which had a significant impact on the market, I've been running all of my investment decisions through an investment coach because their entire philosophy is centered around using a high-profit oriented blueprint while simultaneously going long and short, as well as reducing risk exposure as a hedge against inevitable downtrends. Underperforming is almost impossible when combined with their access to strange data and analysis.

[@ThomasChai05]

@@mikegarvey17 Mind if I ask you to recommend this particular coach you using their service?

[@mikegarvey17]

Credits to *Camille Alicia Garcia* , she maintains an online presence. Just make a simple search for her name online.

[@diane.moore-]

Thanks for sharing. I curiously searched for her full name and her website popped up after scrolling a bit. I looked through her credentials and did my due diligence before contacting her. Once again many thanks.

[@beesknees2446]

While I do understand the argument of why the theory of Induced Demand isn’t about any sort of correlation to causation- I do not think that the consensus is that we should be getting rid of roads. I think that we need to provide more options for transportation in america because of the economic and environmental after affects that come when the absurd maintenance costs of massive interstate highways and ‘stroads’. It’s less about making driving more convenient, but to design cities in a way where they’re more livable at lower incomes.

[@urbanistgod]

There’s no “induced demand” for road capacity. It’s called latent demand.

[@MelGibsonFan]

But it’s not lower income people who are pushing for the destruction of roads or the closing of streets and highways. It’s well off yuppies who live in gentrified inner city enclaves.

[@stuartwithers8755]

@@MelGibsonFan You say that, but I doubt poor people who can't afford a car would rather live in a world where they need a car to participate.

[@beesknees2446]

@@MelGibsonFan I think Stuart says it well enough. The reason why people in upper class gentrified sections of cities claim this is because they see the inherent value in anything other than car infrastructure. In a lot of cases (specifically within cities) removing car traffic is more economically viable and just nicer to live in. While I personally haven't heard many people say to remove roads entirely, I do think that the response is so strong and occasionally extreme because of how backwards it is. I have the pleasure of living in the DC area, and all types of people use the metro and metrobuses to get around as a primary way of transport, we all benefit from it and in many cases it makes it possible to live within those places. It's not optimal for lower incomes now because we haven't designed it to be that way. Despite it being disproportionally beneficial to lower income as a service.

[@beesknees2446]

@@urbanistgod ty for the mini correction, i learned somethin new today

[@jan79306]

I love it when economists make claims thinking they know better than other fields, then make a model that works in their heads that is so basic it is useless but it's still a 'model' therefore valid, without any knowledge of the field they attempt to criticise and consequently unable to account for critical factors. Unlearning economics has a good video about the topic, called the toxicity of economics or something like that. But idk, I'm just an engineer writing a masters on urban planning so I clearly know nothing. 😂 Lovely stuff, keep up the good work. Seriously though, keep to Econ, that will keep the videos good and save you some shame.

[@Alltoc]

You condensed my whole thought process into 4 lines of text. Well done! EE only showed one study on the subject of induced demand and didn't even look at the induced demand of other forms of transport. Not to mention how secondary effects can lead to more traffic when a new highway gets build

[@coreyw427]

Economics is more fundamental than many other fields to the way society operates. You can write whatever you want, and maybe even one day get the chance to implement your ideas, but in the long run the economics of the situation will determine the outcome.

[@coreyw427]

Urban planners are just sad communists with a cubicle looking for a corner office, and like real communists they want to do social experiments that affect everyone when they inevitably go wrong

[@jan79306]

​@@coreyw427 I agree. The economics of using horrendous amounts of public money on asphalt rather than cheaper alternatives will 'determine the outcome' (whatever that means). This however is completely unrelated to the topic of induced demand and it's supposed misuse in urban planning.

[@coreyw427]

@@jan79306 No, it’s not. I’m saying in the long run, the true costs and benefits of a various approach will mean the better approaches will eventually win out. In fact, in many cases the asphalt approach is cheaper considering its benefits than the alternatives, which is why it has been so successful. Attempting to shove something worse, all things considered, down people’s throats will end in failure.

[@graceocean8323]

It was a very bad decision to remove the Glass-Steagall Act in the late 1990s, which led to the spectacular failure of huge banks during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. To prevent another disaster, Dodd-Frank and this statute both need to be reestablished right away. What happened with SVB is only the beginning of what will happen if nothing is done to address the current situation.

[@mcginnnavraj4201]

In my opinion, SVB was attempting to restructure their bond portfolio, which involved selling their low-yielding bonds despite the potential loss, and compensating for it by buying higher-interest-rate bonds on the open market.

[@hannahdonald9071]

@@mcginnnavraj4201 Only a good FA will be enough to guide you through the current market volatility. I've been speaking with an advisor for a while now, primarily because I don't have the necessary expertise or stamina to handle these recurrent market conditions. The fact that I made over $220K during this downturn proved that there is more to the market than the typical person is aware of. The greatest course of action right now is to have an investing consultant, especially for people who are nearing retirement.

[@trazzpalmer3199]

@@hannahdonald9071 We’re only just an information away from amassing wealth, I know a lot of folks that made fortunes from the Dotcom crash as well as the 08’ crash and I’ve been looking into similar opportunities in this present market, could this coach that guides you help?

[@hannahdonald9071]

My Financial Advisor is JEANNE LYNN WOLF. I found her on a CNBC interview where she was featured and reached out to her afterwards. She has since provide entry and exit points on the securities I focus on. You can run a quick online research with her name if you care for supervision. I basically follow her market moves and haven’t regretted doing so.

[@tampabayrodeo2474]

Right now, I'm literally hanging on by a straw, so your advice couldn't have come at a better time! I'll look her up on the internet and then give her a call.

[@nathang4682]

I will admit my bias as he did, I very much support public transport and building safe bike infrastructure. I have always been a little skeptical of induced demand because it doesn't really make that much sense. However if the goal of creating additional highway lanes is to reduce congestion, it has been proven over and over again that you get diminishing returns on additional lanes and it is not worth the astronomical cost of construction as travel times do not improve.

[@AllenGraetz]

Thank you, that's the question, does it produce more benefit than it costs.

[@5353Jumper]

Induced demand is often a chicken and the egg scenario. Like they expand a freeway to make it capable of handling more traffic, then developers build a large shipping mall and office tower off the freeway. Then more people travel on the freeway to get to the new mall and office tower, and malls and office towers in the inner city struggle to be competitive and shut down. Now you have a huge amount of traffic on the freeway caused by the freeway itself existing while your inner city walkable commercial properties turn into slums.

[@D4PPZ456]

The video seems to be making a chicken vs egg argument. It's true that the demand exists before the city often decides to make more road, but the building style makes that demand in the first place. When you build sprawling communities with no viable public transits, there is almost always more demand for roads than roads themselves. In other words, if you change nothing, that extra road you build will be filled up in short order, and you will always have traffic. The real answer is that people should live in walking or biking distance from where they work, so they won't become the traffic in the first place.

[@svr5423]

If the highway is congested, I'll just take the local roads - you know, where the bicyclists are. I still have my aircon, audiobooks, ventilated/heated leather seats and can talk to my clients on hands free. If the traffic can flow on the highway, I can enjoy my evening bicycle ride better. But people are always against each other and do everything to make other people's lifes more miserable, failing to see that they are doing it to themselves.

[@5353Jumper]

And the video glosses over that the core driver of demand in this case is population of the city. As population increases traffic demand will also increase inevitably over time. On top of transportation infrastructure decisions the city makes.

[@williamdixon4936]

Pro public transit guy here. Thank you for choosing this topic, the more information and perspectives on infrastructure, the better. There are tons of other questions I have about this topic, like what are the costs involved for the public supporting car infrastructure vs public and pedestrian transit. Also regarding urban areas, the urbanization camp makes a powerful argument on the opportunity cost of city land use for parking. Also the effect of public transport allowing building of high, dense and efficient residential units, which becomes more costly if the city is designed for cars. There's a lot to dig in to their arguments, and I'd love to hear your perspectives from an economic stand point. Can public policy move consumer behaviour to this style of urbanization? I notice when playing city builder games, its always cheaper to have dense residential areas where many people can use the same service lines, than to allow sprawl and distribute services.

[@PalmtreeWpg]

Fair comment about moving the supply curve rather than creating new demand, however it's always been the opportunity costs I understood to be what underpinned the 'induced demand' idea. There is a scarcity of transportation resources, and if you devote the greater share of them towards new roads rather than public/active transportation, it's not just that you've made driving more attractive, but you've not spent that same dollar on investments that could have made alternatives more viable.

[@austin.valentine]

So do you think “inducing” demand is something that only the government can do? I am understanding it that way, because they gather public funds via enforced taxes and then make supplier decisions based on that rather than having all these transportation options paid and thus allowing normal market forces to decide allocation. Basically the government can influence what ways supply (and thus corresponding demand) is realized without having to compete against competition in every dimension. And they have already crowded our potential private competition with existing options being good enough for private-funded alternatives to be profitable, but still leaving large quantities of demand untapped, but with them being the only real viable supplier for the marginal unrealized demand.

[@someonesomebody9952]

Maybe a better research on understanding road congestion is to compare road congestion between providing alternative routes (bikes, trains) or adding more road lanes

[@iivin4233]

What's throwing me of is trains and bikes are literally more space efficient. If you shrunk the size of all cars on a roadway right now by half then you would double the space between cars. I've never heard anyone say bulldoze roads. I have heard them say build rails instead. Or actually run timely and frequent service on the rails we have.

[@PtrkHrnk]

He finally proclaimed himself morally superior and now judges everyone else from that position. Typical for liberal economists...

[@heychrisfox]

@@iivin4233 This. There are reasons to tear down roads, but those are more extreme cases. The issue with induced demand is that more roads encourage more people to use those roads, so congestion never ends. Bulldozing a road means that traffic will spread the congestion to other roads elsewhere in the city. But that's missing the point of the problem. The problem is not the roads and the demand for them; the problem is the congestion itself, and how to alleviate it.

[@evancombs5159]

It really all comes down to tax efficiency. Most American cities are zoned in a way that provide poor tax performance per acre of land. This makes walking or riding a bike impractical, and makes public transportation unaffordable. American cities need to change how they zone land to be more tax efficient. This will increase density of businesses and populations which makes walking and biking more practical, and public transportation affordable without needing to sacrifice cars.

[@vallahdsacretor4839]

@@evancombs5159 It would help if city planners had a way to introduce infrastructure into existing cities. However, given most large cities in America were built across hundreds of years and most of the downtown (and most congested) areas were built in a time where motorized vehicles were only coming to the scene, doing that is next to impossible. The New York subway system was a near monumental task for construction crews back in the day, and with all the large buildings towering in most major cities, they have no way to add further freeways and overpasses. Underground roads COULD be a thing, but most everyone who's working on those projects (like Elon Musk and his Boring Company) get endless criticism and even scorn from the very people who want the problem solved via mandating public transportation. And on the note of underground roads, I do think that's one of the more efficient methods of solving the problem: Multi-layered roads. Having underground freeways that lead into above ground areas, have underground parking, and so on. Something to remove the problem of congestion on the surface streets and put it somewhere that doesn't also have public transportation, bikers, and people who are walking intermingling with cars.

[@ultrajaywalker]

Induced demand is badly named but it describes a real phenomenon - that driving increases as you build out infrastructure for cars. Also, it might be argued that you induce demand by allowing/incentivising/encouraging car-centric development which can be interpreted as shifting the demand curve - but that depends on your idea of what the cause of demand for cars is. If it is some inherent quality that is fixed then it doesn't shift. I don't believe that that's the case but it's an entirely different argument that is probably worth discussing in another context 🧑‍🍳

[@iivin4233]

He singled out the concept of demolishing roads which is a strange proposal I've never heard anyone make. I'd love to see what the free market did if we actually freed it of subsidies for roads, suburbs, and fossil fuels.

[@seraphina985]

You can easily see that just by looking at the fact that New York for example has like 23 cars per 100 residents, whereas the average for urban areas of the US is 77 per 100. Of course New York is very dense and walkable city with excellent public transit which is also extremely rare in the US. You also see similarly low rates of car ownership in dense walkable cities with lots of convenient travel options across the world. Amsterdam is around 25 per 100 too as is central London although the number does rise significantly out in the suburbs in London's case. Of course it is also important to make sure to have dedicated infrastructure for trams and busses, if your transit vehicles get stuck in traffic they only add to the traffic jam rather than competing to displace some of those trips from the private cars that occupy more space per occupant. Get the transit vehicles out of there and they will take some of the majority of people that are not emotionally or physically dependent on driving with them.

[@lomiification]

​@@iivin4233 demolishing roads has been done, and has worked, same with making roads thinner. Roads have their own upkeep cost, so unless they're doing something for you, you'd be better off turning it into a shop or a house

[@IFRYRCE]

@@iivin4233 You realize the European train industry is also heavily subsidized, right? Japan is the sole example of mass passenger train transport existing without ongoing subsidies. It's not a one sided equation where cars only rule because they are supported in the US - the opposite is also true for trains and Europe, despite much more favorable geography. And while roads might be subsidized, automobiles are arguably the most heavily regulated industry in the US, and not far behind in Europe, which drives the cost of them way up. The only vehicles receiving subsidies are electric ones.

[@AllenGraetz]

you have no clue as to what induced demand claims to be.

[@jeffreythomson3789]

Ah yes, you just KNOW you're going to get a thoughtful, nuanced exploration of a topic when the video starts by painting an entire field of study as "not a complicated subject". Great stuff.

[@belisariusthemagnificent504]

You can weed out imbecile's with this one starter. It shows the viewer could not watch for another five seconds to see what EE meant. I pity you

[@The_k81]

"not a complicated subject" then proceeds to completely failed to understand urban planning and mobility at a basic level.

[@biggerdoofus]

If this is what online drama between economics and urban planning channels looks like, I'd like some more of it.

[@---uf2zl]

​@tijmen-vm9lq No, Economics Explained makes a fair point. Removing road lanes will not reduce road congestion. It might actually make it worse, or redirect traffic to less efficient roads. The best way to reduce it is congestion pricing, and urbanists generally ignore that policy.

[@---uf2zl]

@tijmen-vm9lq Some people really think we should remove lanes to remove traffic. It's dumb, but they exist.

[@linusmlgtips2123]

​@@---uf2zl No, those people don't exist. The entire argument is that we should build more efficient infrastructure instead.

[@ishathakor]

not really, ee didn't understand the urbanist perspective for investing more in public transit, walking, and cycling, and less in car infrastructure. i would honestly say ee didn't fully understand induced demand either. investing in car infrastructure (more highways, more parking lots, etc) both makes driving more appealing and makes every other form of transport less appealing. there are plenty of people who don't like to drive at all for whatever reason but do it because it's the best/most convenient/safest/only option they have. and the more you spend on car infrastructure, the worse this problem will get (because city governments don't have unlimited money and any money spent on expanding highways even more is not going to be spent on other modes of transport). practically speaking i'd say induced demand works for every mode of transport. if you make more sidewalks, more people will walk.

[@vickiesona3682]

​@---uf2zl yes because if we add in more walkable lane and more public transit lane, it will because car will alway cause traffic

[@neglitex]

I think it's sometimes hard for people outside of Europe to understand that people who choose not to buy a car don't do it just because they can't afford it, but rather they prefer not to spend their time in traffic jams. Because cities in most countries outside of Europe are very U.S. like - a small downtown with a bunch of high-rise office buildings and large suburbs. At the end of the day people want a quick and reliable way to get around and given how much space cars take I find it hard to imagine how you can affordably build infrastructure that can get tens or hundreds of thousands (or even millions of people in large cities) around without traffic jams.

[@qty1315]

As long as there are points in the road where cars are required to stop, there will always be traffic jams.

[@movement2contact]

"outside of Europe"..? 🤔

[@halleffect5439]

Hm, you said cities outside europe are very US-Like. I wasnt aware of that! Thanks

[@neglitex]

@@movement2contact I just came back form Australia and that was my impression. It got me thinking - what are the good examples of city planning (i.e. it's not just cars and highways in and around cities). Besides Tokyo (and from my experience NYC wasn't too bad) I can't think of many examples that are outside of Europe (lots of bad ones in Europe as well, of course). Some time ago I was in Mexico City (a city of over 22 million people) and going around by car was more or less the only viable option for me as a tourist and getting around was awful. It was just non-stop traffic jams even very early in the morning.

[@neglitex]

@@movement2contact also, I’ve heard from Americans say that in the U.S. If you don’t have a car it’s because you cannot afford one. It is similar among older generations in Latvia (where I am from). Pribably mostly because in the Soviet times it was very hard to get a car and in the 90s it was indeed unaffordable. I lived in the Netherlands for a while and there it was so convenient to get around by bike or public transport and that a lot of people simple didn’t have a need to buy a car. Not because they couldn’t afford it.

[@felipesernatoro9244]

Public transport doesn't reduce traffic? excuse me what? if let's say 10 people who going to work take the metro instead of driving, that's 10 fewer cars on the road, how is that not reducing traffic?.

[@andi8343]

I think it’s kind of funny that on 10:30 the argument is that there is a choice there. Zoning in the us basically does not even allow for walking or cycling to work in any reasonable amount of time. People tend to have to work. Most people drive near an hour to their workplace, so where is the choice? They’ll drive no matter what.

[@betula2137]

Yes I think it missed that in Anglosphere countries, it's not a level playing field, those travel 'choices' aren't a realism thing that is natural, and for economic reasons too it certainly doesn't have to be, which is one of the urbanism things More people able to choose is good for everyone, it doesn't matter if you like driving, you aren't a target

[@riccardoportelli4065]

Exactly, he completely ignores this point. The demand only exists because there is no other alternative

[@AllenGraetz]

Zoning does not prevent anyone from walking not driving nor bicycling nor hippity-hopping to whereever they want to go. I live in walking distance of everything I need, including 75,000 jobs. Zoning isn't stopping any of you from doing the same.

[@Farazormal1]

@@AllenGraetz its not stopping you from doing so because zoning isnt a problem in your area. in most american cities you often cant build anything other than a single family detached house with minimum setbacks and lot sizes in 80% of the city. Those areas dont have any jobs and people need to go to places zoned differently so they can do their jobs. Getting to those jobs by any means other than driving is usually a non option because of the distances and the lack of infrastructure to do anything other than drive.

[@Hifuutorian]

Zoning in the US is fucked up. Suburbia and its consequences has been a disaster for American infrastructure.

[@applicablerobot]

No no no no no. Go watch Alan Fisher's video refuting this. A city's design has a fixed capacity of vehicles per hour, adding a bigger supply "pipe" (larger highway) to access the city wont change anything because the city cant actually handle more vehciles per hour. Thus traffic just gets worse becayse more people are trying to consume a fixed resource

[@Lumi_VR]

The solution to traffic, is having the city be more walkable, and has good public transportation. Prime examples of this is Singapore and Japan. Now I have been to Singapore, and traffic there is streamline, but from the hotel i stayed at, everything we needed was within a 20 minute walkable distance, and guess what? we walked most of the time. Although we were walking outside in the heat, it felt so liberating to not need to drive a car everywhere. Also, if we were to become a net zero carbon country, more public transportation, and more walkability is needed.

[@aruak321]

The problem is that many (most) North American cities have been designed around having a car unlike say European or Asian ones and as such the population density of the cities is far lower with greater distances between places that people want to go to since residential areas are often zoned far from commercial areas and vice versa. We need more mixed zoning where you can walk to stores and businesses and your workplace can be nearby as well. Just saying that that there needs to be better public transit is not a solution since the very structural design of these cities makes really good public transit cost prohibitive in most of the cities other than the denser populated areas or cities like NYC. First we need to rethink how cities are designed and planned in the first place. Otherwise you get token transit to less densely populated areas of the city (like a few infrequently serviced bus routes) since it's not economically viable to service them with better transit since there just wouldn't be sufficient demand for riders in those areas. There just isn't the population density to support good transit unfortunately. The other problem is that people tend to want to live in detached houses with a decent amount of land for a yard, garden, etc. This leads to lower density and the creation of suburbs away from the city core. So you basically induce traffic since people need to use a car to get anywhere, while the density of the residential area is not enough to justify really good transit. It's a tough problem to solve. I definitely agree that we need cities to be more walkable, bikable, etc. however changing the way that North American cities are structured will take a lot of time, money, and political will as it will require a lot of structural changes to the cities. Not to say it isn't worthwhile, but it's not a simple problem to solve either.

[@Lumi_VR]

​@@aruak321 Do you know how the US became a car centric country? its because the rich people at the time, knew that you can get more money selling millions of cars, than public transportation. Back in the day, Chicago used to be studied around the world for how well their train system was. So what did these rich people do? Buy out all Trams, and a lot of public transportation systems, and dismantled them. Straight up. Also, space isn't an issue, as we can take away a lot of lanes from highways as making more lanes, doesn't fix traffic. Also, guess what? there's also, underground.... Now, the problem with funding these projects is not hard at all. Its simple, although it will take some time, (but probably won't happen because the rich will obviously use their money to prevent changes like these.) The first thing, is to either make laws capping how much medical procedures and medication costs, or transition from a private to a public system. As clearly, all of these companies only wants profit, and making slaves. Now, from my perspective, the modern day slavery in the US, is putting them into debt, like with these overtly high prices for medical procedures and medication. From this, we will save trillions. This will save us over 2 trillion. (wait, i forgot to mention, but hospital companies spend most of their budgets, on Administration, whereas the rest of the developed world, doesn't) The other part, is obviously to defund the military. Like, there is no reason to have a high military budget. there's none. But do you know why its happening? Its to make profit. But who is making profit? Companies. Specifically, the ones who makes the weapons. Like the Afghan war budget. The cost of it was $2.26 trillion, and where did 70% of that cost went? To those companies, like the ones making fighter jets and ETC. But here's the thing. The Afghan war was cause by the American government. But it will take too long to explain, so I'm not going to. Then you talk about how people want to live in the suburbs. The solution is still public transportation. Like, a normal car at most will fit 5 people, but a bus can fit 40-80 people inside. And a bus is about, two cars long. (what im getting at, is public transportation is more space efficient). Not to mention trains. Can do the same as buses, and guess what? Uses less energy to move people, as there's less friction. *edit* You also say, that commercial areas are far from residential areas. Its simple. Mix them into each other, like every other developed country besides Canada.

[@aruak321]

@@Lumi_VR I think we're arguing for the same thing. I agree that we need more density but I'm saying that it is difficult to muster political will to do that when the public doesn't actually want that. Also a bus in a suburb sounds like a great solution in theory but in practice it's terrible and slow and will likely more than double your travel time since the bus has to stop frequently along the way and can't go any faster than that the cars around them unlike trains. So what could be a 30 min car drive ends up being an hour long trip by transit. There are a lot of people that would rather drive under that circumstance. Really you need decent rail transports, but unless you have sufficient population density, rail is not justifiable. Which brings us back to the density problem and people's desire to live in suburbs.

[@Targetshopper4000]

I feel like this was a misunderstanding of induced demand. increasing the number of lanes on a stretch of road doesn't increase demand on all roads everywhere, but does increase demand on that stretch of road. People who would normally take local roads and side streets because its faster will now switch to that main road, until it slows down again.

[@george4821]

He actually did mention that in 12:20.

[@tapersaud]

This video misses the mark so much that I question the information in your other videos, Netherlands most unequal economy in the world for example 😂

[@NoJusticeMTG]

Unlearning Economics also rebuked his video on UBI

[@rjbiii]

If you only build car infrastructure, then demand for transportation is going to be focused on that. If other modes of transportation were treated more equally, then there would be less demand for car infrastructure.

[@penguinking4830]

But using a basket of alternatives, waters down your economies of scale.

[@rjbiii]

@@penguinking4830 your economy of scale has decimated American cities.

[@johannesfischer4722]

> 7 car lanes and no alternatives = what people really want/freedom > 4 car lanes, 2 streetcar and 2 bike lanes = forcing everybody on public transportation make it make sense

[@nesthocker97]

Induced demand is studied and proofed more broadly as you said. You asumed that the extra cars on a widened road come only from other routes. But the extra cars could also come from people who would have driven at different times, people who would have used different modes of transportation and people who wouldn't have traveled in the first place. You're also not acknowledge that a widened road could attract development, which could increase demand. But all of that doesn't matter, because in real life we have bottlenecks in traffic, so that traffic on widened roads enevitably becomes congested after a certain amount of widening. And you also misrepresented the problems with chinese highspeed rail. Other than that, great video. More of this content please

[@supernatural2968]

you definitely deserve the right to drive your car wherever and whenever, people like me just want to make sure that the option of NOT driving a car exists and is actually viable

[@yvesgingras1475]

Dont forget that car represent a real danger, are noisy and take up waaaaaaaaaaay too much space. Bonus they pollute a lot for what they do.

[@lostwave1748]

When there's only one option you don't actually have a choice, sigh. One day though

[@zen1647]

People drive because they don't have to pay for the externalities.

[@riotgeardepot7534]

About 6,000 results on GScholar for "induced demand traffic', but let's narrowly attack the original research as a proxy for the broader modern denotation.

[@shivtim]

Right? There’s SO MUCH evidence for induced demand.

[@smelly551]

I'm interested to see the data after this video, will you get a net loss in subscribers? Will this be your most disliked video? the interpretation of induced demand kinda left out the other half of the equation of inducing demand for more economically efficient alternatives like building a subway, or even the density limits on highway construction, or even how cities can't really balance a budget when its so reliant on cars.

[@CreativeExcusesGaming]

Even if building larger roadways only shifts demand, the problem is still the same. Increasing roadway size and throughput for cars in major cities generally does not reduce congestion because a lower opportunity cost allows more people to drive further until eventually, there is equilibrium again where the opportunity cost becomes too high. The solution then is the same: lower the opportunity cost of other, more space efficient transportation methods like public transit or bike riding, and fewer people will drive. The argument against bigger freeways is that it does nothing to shift demand to other transportation modes so it doesnt actually solve the problem

[@Elementalism]

He addressed this in the video. The induced demand theory is a poor one for traffic congestion. Even the study people use to make claims expanding road doesnt solve the problem and instead utilize public transit like you just did was not cited within the actual study. Congestion is an underlying symptom of a disease. The disease is commuting for work in ever growing cities. Public transportation, expanding roads, bikes don't reduce congestion because they can't possibly keep up with demand. At best you will reduce it short term as the city continues to grow. WFH during COVID was a great experiment on what happens when people aren't commuting to work. The roads were clear and easy flowing.

[@CreativeExcusesGaming]

@@Elementalism Transportation methods that are not cars generally have much, much higher throughput than cars so they absolutely can keep up with demand, or if they cant, they can still keep up with significantly more demand in much less space than a massive freeway. Reducing the number of trips taken is also a great idea, but a rather unrealistic one. Reducing the number of trips taken by car is much more realistic with a few infrastructure changes, and some possibly unpopular zoning changes to make healthy, mixed use zoning legal to allow for *better* (not necessarily higher) density. Make it easier and more pleasant for the suburbanite to walk or ride to get groceries, see the doctor, take their kids to school/sports/extracurriculars, to get to work, etc. and you can make more pleasant neighborhoods and less congested freeways.

[@MUrules2014]

@@Elementalism even with your reply, the answer isn’t expanding highways, it’s shifting transportation modes and land use patterns to enable people to live and work in reasonable proximity - which is the whole idea behind the terribly misunderstood concept of 15-minute cities! Part of that shift is being able to actually get somewhere meaningful without a car in the suburbs, which is simply impossible in too many areas of North America given the car-dependent development patterns of the past 80 years where kids can’t even walk to the local school because it’s too far away and there aren’t any sidewalks or other proper pedestrian infrastructure

[@rlxdoc]

Good point. In addition, it depends where you live! Obviously, you live somewhere and you drive somewhere else and it takes some period of time. More lanes are built, which results in a shorter period of time for your drive. However, because there are more lanes, someone "further out" than you recognize it is a faster route and begins to drive on your road, until equilibrium is again reached. More lanes lower the cost of driving and increases the value of property. But not your property, property further out. They are the main beneficiaries of the increased infrastructure investment. Putting in lanes is expensive and lanes only hold so much traffic. It feels like a hamster wheel, we run hard but don't make much progress.

[@SCTproductionsJ5]

The biggest lie I find is the idea that people *only* ever act in their best interest, rather than being able to actually think of someone else ahead of themselves.

[@schadowizationproductions6205]

shhh that's considered ideology around here. didn't you know that economists invented human nature?

[@mf--]

*Only ever act in what they percieve to be their best interest. No one moves to inner city housing on purpose even for a shorter commute. Rich people pay millions for a tiny box for the clout and not because it is a sound investment. Do you have examples otherwise?

[@LuccaPCesar]

Well, guess that would be considered their best interest in this case: someone elses best interest is this person best interest, right?

[@terrorist_nousagi8747]

@@mf-- Everytime I changed jobs I changed my apartment to be closer to the job. A Shorter commute is worth it (Also I don't own a car lol)

[@Tential1]

Lol, OK, you keep believing people on average are like this and build a society around it.... See what happens....

[@yanDeriction]

the HSR criticism misses the forest for the trees. "long dumb connections" also describes interstates in the middle of nowhere that get 1000 cars per day. the reason this is ok is because of strategic advantages and capacity that simply would not exist relying on air or slow roads. HSR also opens the possibility of eliminating car/ bus use when the gov shifts to austerity, which can have huge deflationary (good) effects on resource use as people move onto the lines

[@johnsmith-zj8vp]

A highway of this manner is usualy cheaper to build and maintain while allowing for more varied use. The farmer and the trucker take the same road and provide significantly to that rural economy. HSR is rarely used to transport freight and the people who live in the middle of nowhere usualy do not commute long distances making the road more cost effective in the US and other large countries to link rural areas. HSR would be perfect for traveling up and down the coasts of the US but do not make much sense for the rest of the country, just like it doesnt make sense for all of China to get HSR.

[@yanDeriction]

​@@johnsmith-zj8vp People could have said the same thing when the interstates were first built: it doesn't make sense to build this freeway, there are too few users since everyone lives in the city. But once the interstates were built, suburbanization became convenient and 30 mile commutes became normal. HSR transit oriented development can create the same effect and enable 80 mile commutes, but with trains and in a way that is much more environmentally and fiscally responsible.

[@ignatiushie4403]

In Singapore, Certificate of Entitlement (COE) as a tool for the government to control the population of vehicles was implemented in 1990. Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) was introduced in 1998. On the other hand, Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) had been expanded from just 6km in 1987 to 231km now. While those measures had been somewhat successful in managing congestions here, traffic jams along motorways and major roads are still observed during rush hours. I just can’t imagine if those measures weren’t implemented. It would have been a gridlock island.

[@shorewall]

Instead of just Fascist Island. :D

[@Alltoc]

I've been to singapore and it feels like an easily fixable traffic situation. I wonder why they don't commit to less cars and more cycle lanes, pedestrian crossings and legalize "jay-walking", known as "crossing the street" on most places I've heard that it is a good income stream for the government, but I don't live there so I can't comment on that

[@freshtapcoke]

“Eliminating cancer is simple” “But keeping people alive while doing it is complicated!”

[@papanga1197]

I am one with you in the car statement 😂 but I do still agree with NotJustBikes and all those fellow creators because as I remember them saying, better public transpo will get people who don’t want to drive out of the road and I will enjoy my quicker drive hehe Edit: Im also a transportation engineering student so I understand the fine-line struggle of being an “urbanist” and a “car enthusiast” so in real life, I choose my words VERYY carefully 😂😂

[@lordInquisitor]

I endorse this statement

[@steinarjonsson_]

Yes, that's a key part that a lot of transportation "nerds" seem to miss. Fewer lanes don't solve traffic problems, but better transportation alternatives like trains and cycling paths do. The element of urban design is also very important.

[@Daniel-mf9zx]

Also keep in mind that public transport goes up a lot in quality and reliability as it becomes an overall higher priority. NJB has a great video on trains in Switzerland for example!

[@papanga1197]

@@Daniel-mf9zx I’ve watched NJB’s swiss vid and it did got me envious with the train stuff. I wanna try that but of course I’d still like to have a car around even if my public transport is that good. Maybe a station wagon like a Benz E-class wagon 😂

[@crazydinosaur8945]

@@steinarjonsson_ ". Fewer lanes don't solve traffic problems, but better transportation alternatives like trains and cycling paths do. " but we can't make that cycling path because there's a 65 lane road in the way. that's the point of us saying less lanes. because most streets don't have space for many lanes and alternatives

[@blaster5112]

What about the effect of new roads versus other types of infrastructure, or even new lanes versus other types of infrastructure? At what economy of scale is one investment better than the other?

[@belindathompson267]

Oops you broke the economic model..too many variables!

[@ansh7335]

US interstate system has made and continues to make a loss of more than $ 900 billion. Public services are not supposed to make a profit.

[@munyansebastien7127]

What an exploit! Talking about induced traffic without ever mentioning urban sprawl, which, in large part, is a direct consequence of highway building.

[@alexanderbaines-buffery7563]

Please can I ask: why didn't you discuss land use ?

[@vtgare]

Because it doesn't fit his agenda

[@newagain9964]

because this channel is ran by an hyper capitalist and pro-establishment shill.

[@ilyasb4792]

You should've also reminded that economies of scale typically don't work in a services. Because the production of services relies more on labour which is a variable cost. A café for exemple can't have economies of scale. It may be able to negotiate cheaper prices with the suppliers but it's marginal.

[@Jo-Heike]

Hah. You'd be wrong. About the café at least. So I used to work at a popular cafe located at a roadway intersection and what they did was prepare food ahead of time, and also in very large quantities before storing it under vacuum (sous vide more or less) to then reheat and serve. This is also often times employed in so called industrial kitchens where you're making food for hundreds, if not thousands of people at the same time using huge machines that contain hundreds of liters. This is among others used in places like hospitals, and military installations.

[@5353Jumper]

There are two other important factors as well. Staple good have very low or near zero elasticity of demand. Because there is a minimum demand number we can hit where we NEED the product no matter what price it is. Where demand only lowers once people start dying off because they cannot afford the product or not enough of the product exists. And oligopoly/monopoly markets disconnect price from the supply, demand, cost equations. So the consumer price of an item is no longer affected by demand or cost of the item.

[@lomiification]

Economies of scale work wonderfully with services - it's called Big Tech

[@Jay_Johnson]

What do you mean? If that were the case fast food chains never would have taken off. Starbucks is literally a café economy of scale. Standardisation of products and training makes them cheaper. Yes it is less significant than the belt buckle example but that doesn't mean there aren't economies of scale there.

[@evancombs5159]

Economy of scale works everywhere, it is just each industry has a different peak economy of scale.

[@joshuaperry8729]

Honestly people bash bikes but I don't have to wait for anyone or anything on my bike. It takes me 15 minutes to ride to and from work. No waiting on anything no stuck in traffic. It's great plus keeps me active. If only more people could discover this.

[@seanthe100]

You enjoying your bike is nice, but don't FORCE the rest of us

[@randoguy7488]

@@seanthe100 What do you mean "FORCE" ?

[@doujinflip]

I ride a motorbike, which has most of the same benefits at the cost of some flexibility in maneuvering and parking. But yeah two wheels is really the way to go, and I've heard having 10~20% of us switching to bikes could practically eliminate congestion on current road demands.

[@matthewhook3375]

@@seanthe100 no one is forcing anyone - they still have roads in the Netherlands and you're still free to drive... In fact, it's better to drive there because 90% of people are walking/biking/tramming (because it's faster and more convenient) rather than clogging up the roads, so you can get where you want to go without traffic... 🤔

[@joshuaperry8729]

@@seanthe100 no one's forcing you to do anything. I'm just pointing out the benefits to riding a bike. It's 100 times better than being trapped in a steal box. But if your determined to stay stuck on traffic for hours then be my guest.

[@admiralprestoncole]

And Alan Fisher has officially released a video against the hot garbage presented in this video.

[@georgiewalker5826]

If you have rubbish public transport in your area, you cannot blame people for taking or wanting to use cars

[@sirsurnamethefirstofhisnam7986]

If even a portion of the hundreds of billions spent on massive road infrastructure had been put into rail/trams/bike lanes then public transport would be much better and fewer people would even want to use their car.

[@GiRR007]

@@sirsurnamethefirstofhisnam7986 Public transport for a country as big as the US would be practically usless. Cars exist for a reason. They are basically the replacement of horses which were pretty much nessecary to live in america originally. So much so that in florida when a prisoner was freed it was mandated they be given 2 things, a gun and a horse. The US is too big for public transportation.

[@warotm.590]

@@GiRR007 it's not a horse that connected America, it's a trains

[@GiRR007]

@@warotm.590 No it was not trains that connected america... You realise horses were being used LONG before trains ever were right? Not to mention that even now the high way system connects the US more than trains now. Most of the travel throughout the us by people wasn't trains. And even still trains at the time weren't public transport, you had to pay for them like you pay for plane tickets. They were a luxery.

[@smelly551]

@@GiRR007 No the US is not too big for public transport, that is a silly myth. You can make cities that don't require a car, you can make trains that go places, it is a choice not too.

[@gregh9762]

About the disclaimer: this is what I also believe, back when the option was driving in congested road or cramped in sardine tin, I chose comfort every single time. Bus as I moved to a better integrated country, owning and running a car as foreigner (/immigrant) became slightly complicated, I had no choice beside public transport, learnt to plan forward, avoid certain route in certain hour. Door-door isn't a huge issue within city limits and its satellite township because walking in most of these areas is actually enjoyable. And because there are people around it felt safe and especially for me it felt "normal". So driving now is when I want to enjoy it, a trip for example. I also found that cycling in colder climate is way better, I don't mind the cold as long as it's not wet.

[@jonathanodude6660]

He lives in australia. our public transport is fine. not necessarily european levels, but nowhere near america bad. i cant remember which city he lives in, but melbourne had the best in my experience, specifically with the PTV. sydney and canberra were kinda a mess, and perth is decent if you want to get around either the city or semi-affluent neighbourhoods. the really rich areas seem to refuse to have good bus service and the poor areas dont get serviced as much, leaving huge gaps in the suburbs. transperth operates decent north south trains too. havent seen SA, Tas or Qld.

[@Croz89]

@@jonathanodude6660 Australian suburbs in major cities tend to have one thing many US suburbs do not, regional rail stations connecting them to the CBD. This doesn't eliminate driving, but a lot more people will go and park at the station and get the train in because it's usually quicker and cheaper, which does reduce congestion and reduces vehicle distance travelled. It's a decent compromise that does allow for US style suburbs while not exactly reducing car dependency (maybe a little with feeder busses), but reducing car journey length. Unfortunately building a regional rail line into an existing suburb is really hard, many of these rail lines were built a long time ago.

[@springbok29er]

You sounded like a true Kiwi with your "disclaimer" totally un-necessary that statement was. Basically poor people who ride public transport or choose to bike suck. You are the problem.

[@TheModeler99]

Absolutely no one is arguing for removing cars, They simply want to move away from car-centric design to pedestrian design in order to accommodate more transit options.

[@jonathanodude6660]

@@Croz89 yeah that’s what I mean. To be fair, the train stations are just placed where people are, which is the bare minimum for a train station if you want a service that works. None of the Australian cities have anything on Europe or east Asia at all. Being a Londoner and having traveled to both Japan and nyc twice (some of the best cities in the world for train travel) there’s no real point comparing most of Australia to the bests, but it gets the job done, which is all that’s required. It’s much cheaper here than even places that have significantly lower incomes. I forgot to mention that even if the lines were built a long time ago (many weren’t), the stations are still being infilled and extended even today. There are major transit projects going in most major cities in Australia rn.

[@loganmedia1142]

My criterion for public transport is that it run often enough that wait times are negligible and it is never crowded. I'm not interested in having to stand in a packed train for 40 minutes or wait ten minutes for the next bus if I happen to miss one. The latter is especially important since public transport invariably requires multiple legs to get anywhere. As much as I hate traffic and the expense of owning a car it gives me the convenience of being able to leave when I'm ready and travel directly to wherever I need to go.

[@paulhamrick3943]

Just curious, what country do you live in?

[@YourBlackLocal]

Literally none of these people say to remove highways… Their argument is against building new ones and providing faster or similar times alternatives to roadways. Which you mention at 10:50 Induced demand is used to argue that building a new one will just lead to more traffic not that you should literally remove pre-existing highways. Can’t think of a single video that’s ever argued that.

[@YourBlackLocal]

@@AllenGraetz Again, you can’t just ignore the specifics of things and make generalisations about whether or not people are saying to remove highways just because, they like public transit. Not to mention that if you actually read the article, they are talking about reconfiguring it. Which technically means getting rid of the freeway because it’d be considered something else. They’re not actually removing the ability to drive there.

[@ambition112]

Summarize by Tammy AI 0:52: 💰 Economies of scale can reduce unit cost, but it's not always the case. 0:00: 💰 Economies of scale can make things cheaper, but only up to a point. 6:33: 🚗 The induced demand theory suggests that increasing road capacity leads to more road usage, but this may not be entirely true. 10:15: 🚗 Expanding roadways does not necessarily induce demand for driving. 13:24: 🚗 Investing in infrastructure for efficient transportation is crucial

[@gljames24]

The thing I always considered was the fact that even with induced demand that you would eventually reach a point where there aren't enough cars to fill the roadways. The problem being that you would essentially have to cover everything in roadway. Realistically we should be looking at what both highest comfort and most efficient use of space.

[@newagain9964]

we already know the answer. vast majority of time (certainly in highly developed areas) it is public transportation.

[@dark_winter8238]

America has dumb highways connecting a bunch of small towns which is a lot more costly then the rail system.

[@wungus-bongo]

EE once again demonstrating his 3.0 gpa undergrad level of economics understanding

[@smileyeagle1021]

One thing I would have liked to see you address that I've seen a lot of people extrapolate from the idea of induced demand is that extra freeway lanes induce demand for suburban sprawl. It does seem to make sense that it would induce some demand to sprawl further out, especially if you are building a freeway in an area that previously didn't have one.

[@xanthoptica]

^ this is exactly how it works in the US. Highways get built and people start driving more in around them. Interstates were originally built to be connections between cities, but most of the traffic problems are where they are used as commuting corridors.

[@107thFruit]

Expanding the highways is a ludicrous idea because the bottlenecks in many high population areas are the exits where the most jobs are. You go from a 6 lane highway to MAYBE a 3 lane exit ramp, to a 1 lane street with several stop lights. As a comparison you can have a 100Gb/s connection from a server to a switch, but if you try to transfer something to the internet from the server you're going to be limited by the speed of the egress ISP service (~1Gb/s). In networking if a queue fills up we have the option to drop packets, but you cant delete cars off the highway unfortunately...

[@Hatsuzuki808]

A few additional comments about induced demand: 1: It's possible to create new demand, by allowing people to make trips they would otherwise not have been able to make (latent demand) 2: Diminishing marginal returns: 1 -> 2 lanes is a 100% increase in capacity, 2 -> 3 lanes is 50%, 3 -> 4 is 33%, etc. Adding an additional lane to an already congested wide arterial doesn't look like it does much because you're usually going from "over capacity" to, at best, slightly below capacity, at least until everyone changes their routing to the new faster road and makes it no faster than any parallel route (user equilibrium) 2a: You absolutely can outbuild even the worst congestion, if you really wanted to, but you get back to that exponential problem. If you want to make a congested road free-flowing again, you need to make a large *percentage* change in capacity. Double-decking a freeway, for example (5-lanes -> 10 lanes, for that +100% capacity again). 3: Long term, poor land use decisions are a killer (e.g. low density sprawl, bedroom communities), and the more things sprawl out, the more capacity is needed to handle people commuting. Unfortunately, Departments of Transportation have little if any ability to control zoning, which means they're stuck slapping band-aids on crises they are powerless to address at their root.

[@allu717]

Giving people the option of public transport that is faster than using a car absolutely decreases the usage of roads, I don't understand how it wouldn't?

[@thedabblingwarlock]

There's few other things that were missed in the economies of scale section. Maintenance costs, which if you're using expensive machinery is going to be cheaper than replacing a machine every time it breaks down, and efficiencies gained by having a long running production line. The first batch of something someone makes is going to be more expensive than the second and so on until the person has gotten as fast and efficient as they're going to get. On more complex goods, workers will figure out a better way to assemble the goods, increasing efficiency as they work out the kinks in the production process. I'm no economist, but I think those two things are just as important as the rest, though you did kinda touch on the maintenance costs with replacement costs.

[@FacelessOnes]

Robots and androids soon thankfully. Even for war. New tech is insane these and due to A.I. it’s accelerating!

[@thedabblingwarlock]

​@@FacelessOnes Define soon. We're nowhere near having computers and robots that good that cheap that it's more cost effective to use them than troops. Don't get me wrong, developments over the past decade or so have been impressive, but that was in a bull market with lots of capital available and when computing power has been pretty cheap. Neither of those apply at the moment (recession/market disruptions due to COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian War, plus suppliers of the raw materials going offline) and with countries starting to onshore manufacturing, I don't thing that's going to change anytime soon. One day? Maybe, but not tomorrow, not for decades.

[@thedabblingwarlock]

@Zaydan Alfariz Sorry, probably didn't make myself clear, but I was talking about the cost of ongoing maintenance, or the cost of ownership if you will (which includes hiring the techs to do said maintenance). It was a cost that wasn't explicit, though they kinda implied it under replacement costs. Unless you're talking about workers getting more efficient, which in that case it really doesn't matter since that only applies to the labor costs being used to make the things in question.

[@benlu]

The point is not that you can't drive, it's that you can have a reasonable bike journey

[@joefothergill6303]

And if those who want to bike can do so safely, it makes the drive better for those who want to drive. A win win!

[@randomuser5443]

Im not riding 5 miles in the sun with a 10* incline for 2 of them

[@DefenestrateYourself]

@@randomuser5443 that’s a you problem

[@jarvisjackson4833]

then move to a city, don't move to a suburb then complain that you can't bike everywhere.

[@euler4273]

What just doesn't make sense about this video is that you are criticizing China for building railways. But you aren't applying the same standards to other countries that built ever larger highways instead. Highways don't get cheaper either the more you build. And they very frequently connect areas in which few people live. They cost huge sums of money to build and maintain. That is why even very rich countries that only rely on cars for transport end with such bad roads, because the maintenance costs are simply too large. So why the double standard? Seems you're very biased on this topic.

[@DirkPeters3]

Why not make a combined series between EE and Adam Something (and maybe others) to analyze issues like that from more than one viewpoint? And perhaps even suggest solutions where possible.

[@stephanweinberger]

Strongtowns actually already has a mostly economic approach to the topic. Car-centric infrastructure and city development simply isn't financially sustainable. It's more like a ponzi scheme.

[@雅楽川圭典]

I'll be so so so so soooo looking forward to it

[@george4821]

Adam has never really shown any interest in making collabs with opposing commentors. It's unlikely it'll happen, but I hope Adam makes a full response video to the second segment. He briefly touched upon it in his recent videos, but didn't say anything about EE's rebuttal to the concept of reverse induced demand.

[@MelGibsonFan]

Adam something is a plagiarist and his “urban” content is really just him copying pasting other people’s analyses. I don’t know why he even gets brought up as a serious “urbanist”.

[@trystongilbert1837]

It would be nice to have a choice though. In most US cities such as mine the infrastructure is rather hostile to pedestrians. Not a bike lane or sidewalk in sight for miles. Everything is built in service to car owners

[@zed7060]

Well sure, but nobody is arguing against that. The video just said Induced Demand isn't a good argument for more public transport and then mentioned a bunch of actually good arguments for it. So I'm not sure what's up with all these comments saying they want a choice. Nobody is saying public transport is bad or shouldn't be used.

[@Selisu1]

There was another study in Korea where they removed a bridge that everyone used, and traffic overall went down. I can also give an anecdotal analysis from Geneva Switzerland. They have been removing lanes for a couple of decades now. This had a positive feedback in the scale sense. Fewer drivers meant more fares for the same, or roughly same fixed costs for the public transport. Geneva is also limited in how it can expand, so it led to higher density, which meant more fares and shorter routes. Then as more people rode, you added trains, so rather than waiting 30 min for the next train/bus, you were waiting 5 min. When you can take 10 min on the train or 30 min driving, and the train goes where you want to go, while the roads don't; which do you choose? I don't consider this economic theory. I just consider it extremely well done public planning.

[@user-rd5nc1nb9f]

korea doesnt have an increasing population its not relevant. I can give you the evidence of Montreal where they have removed lanes to build bike lanes in multiple streets and avenues and the traffic has more than doubled in many places.

[@toomanymarys7355]

Forcing people to use transportation that only takes people where planners want them to do when they want them to go. Nice.

[@joeedh]

When I was a teenager the traffic on Highway 50 in Sacramento, CA was far worse than it is today. It's rare for me to encounter the kind of traffic I regularly suffered through as a teenager. Why? They added more lanes. More recently a two-lane segment of a road was expanded to four. Traffic backups along that road have not returned. It used to be that just driving from my hometown of El Dorado Hills 22 miles along 50 to the neighboring town of Folsom was a pain. Then they added more lanes along that segment of 50. Driving to downtown Sac anywhere near rush hour almost always involved stop and go traffic. Today I can drive during the worst of rush hour to Sac without hitting any stop and go segments.

[@taddockery302]

That's right! The good arguments against road widening are all based on process engineering and traffic engineering; we just need as catchy a term to misinterpret as "induced demand". The thing is, in America at least, quite apart from Interstates, there is absolutely induced demand for car travel. In most places zoning means narrow sidewalks, no bike lanes, no transit, and typical trips in excess of a mile. When a trip is generated, it is very nearly forced into a car simply because the time cost of everything else is artificially inflated, sometimes to infinity. Even when you luck out and live within a five minute walk of a grocery store (and I cannot stress how uncommon this is here if you don't live in an East Coast City, or Chicago), as I do (I do not live in an East Coast City, or Chicago), you may find that winter snow removal is not done from sidewalks, and that plows for the cars push snow into street crossings where it freezes into icewalls, further inducing car use for everything as even short distance walks are made impossible for people without two strong legs. No, seriously, I live on a four lane road that's operating at about 30% of the capacity of a two lane road and hear constantly from the supposedly progressive city about how there's no room for bike lanes. It's just... when policy tries to make you drive when you don't want to, I don't know what else to call it but induced demand.

[@heychrisfox]

I mean, it comes to the core problem with this video. He confuses "induced demand" with "congestion." They're two separate issues. Congestion is a busy road, regardless of how the demand for that road was induced. "Induced demand" speaks to the idea that if you build more lanes of traffic, it will encourage people to use those lanes of traffic. This reduces congestion in the short-term, but not the long-term, largely for the reasons you discussed in your comment: people don't have another choice. The reason people talk about induced demand so much is because it's a very obvious non-solution; reducing congestion by expanding road sizes just doesn't work; it always goes back to being congested if the problems causing the congestion aren't resolved.

[@taddockery302]

@@heychrisfox Yup, but in fairness, he's responding to Vox and similar framings that also confuse congestion for latent demand for induced demand; his point about the demand curve is one CityNerd made a ways back.

[@metalhead6604]

The fact that you say crammed in a metal box filled with BO means you don't have good public transport. I live in NL, and I almost always have a place to sit on the trains.

[@tempo5366]

People do pay for roads directly (through taxes on gas/cars or tolls) or indirectly with regular taxes. In Germany for example, there is roughly 10 meters of road for every citizen, which has to be replaced at some point. This doesn’t just consume large parts of our taxes, it also leads to massive construction zones everywhere. It’s the same in other western countries: our car infrastructure is breaking apart because we probably build too much of it already.

[@guilhermetavares4705]

Just observe what happens in Brazil. The federal government has a more limited budget than the U.S. government and needs large investments to expand and renew highways. What happened? Almost all the major highways in the country are toll roads and private concessions.

[@shraka]

Man, economists really be so confidently wrong about things they don't know anything about, or even things they do - supposedly - know.

[@NapiRockAndRoll]

In the US, majority of the people not "choosing to drive a car", because the alternative public transportation infrastructure was demolished in the last decades. The freedom is NOT to have an opportunity to go everywhere with a car, but have a chance to go everywhere WITHOUT a car.

[@danielboey14]

I can see that EE is still trying very hard to convince its viewers that China's high speed rail project was a massive mistake. It must really hurt your eyes to see how successful it is.

[@Vilverin]

The world is full of counterfactuals to this perspective on induced demand. There is not a single city above a certain size in the entire world that is car-centric, yet doesn't have a ton of traffic. No matter how much money was invested into road infrastructure. And the only cities where most people could afford to drive if they wanted, yet are relatively traffic-free are those where relative road capacity is low but where walking, biking, and transit are the better options. Even someone with a lot of bias (which you admit you have) should be able to search for real-world evidence in support of their oversimplified theory (and realize there is none). Among many issues, you ignored long-term elasticity of demand (and only talk about short-term effects).

[@bazoo513]

0:38 - Except that it is _very_ rarely "meritocracy". Being born rich is not a "merit". One can count on fingers without resorting to toes examples where a new CEO actually turned a failing company around, while cases where the CEO drove a company into ground and was _rewarded_ for that "merit" are numerous.

[@samr.england613]

Never mind that the rich kids get to have $600 dollar a day tutors to prep them for entry to the best schools. Yeah, "Meritocracy" is a lie, I agree.

[@mirceskiandrej]

Can't wait for Adam to make the video sarcastically quoting your "elasticity of demand" several times in his characteristic accent :)

[@stevencooper4422]

He's such a douche lol

[@MelGibsonFan]

Can’t wait for Adam Something to plagiarize more content.

[@rubes3927]

The part about loving your car hit the nail on the head for me 🙌🏼😂

[@euler4273]

It's not about economics, it's simple logic and maths. Cars take up way more space per person. If you don't give people any other option than driving a car, everyone will drive a car. If you disincentivise driving, more people will choose other forms of transportation, which are much more efficient, much less damaging to the environment, and most importantly in this context, don't take up as much space. If you keep building highways, you effectively disincentivise everything other than driving a car, which means more people will be using a very space inefficient form of transportation. If you don't build ever wider highways, and instead improve train and bike infrastructure, more people are going to use those, so fewer people will drive a car. It's that simple. Criticizing the economic argument of a peer reviewed paper is entirely the wrong approach to answering this question.

[@blucksy7229]

can't remember who but someone made a pretty good video on the induced demand issue. Most people want to take the best transit option that is available to them. Why this is an issue with cars and highways is the fact that adding more people to a highway is only a negative to drivers as it costs them more for maintenance while more users on public transport can lead to changes such as more frequent or faster trains

[@jedit7847]

Big fan of your content, as well as all the urbanist content on KZbin (Adam, NotJustBikes). I'm struggling to reconcile this though. Why are tolls the only answer to reducing congestion? Surely alternatives (substitutions in economist lingo) like public transport play a part in reducing demand (congestion)? You said earlier in the video that people will choose the most efficient option, so if public transport gets people to their destination faster, they will choose that option. So if road tolls are the sole answer without viable public transport, people would still pay the increased cost and drive? Seems a bit too naive of a blanket statement to discount public transport completely. The reality is probably a mixture of tolls + public transport. Without viable public transport, you get the issue outer Sydney is facing right now, where people without viable public transport are facing increasing tolls and have convinced the state governments to subsidize their tolls. So the very effect of reducing demand through increased costs has been curtailed. Tolls also tend to be a regressive tax on the poor who live on the fringes of cities without viable public transport, who are forced to drive. I get your point that technically it's not induced demand because the demand curve is not shifted to the right but rather the equilibrium changes on the existing curve; but not everyone is an economist. Take it from a plain English, layman way: more lanes make journeys faster than alternatives therefore more people choose to drive, clogging up the new lane. From a layman perspective, that extra lane has induced extra demand. Is that not true? I feel like this is just semantics: practically the solution to congestion is curtailing demand, through tolls and viable public transport, not increasing the supply of new lanes. The reality is, you can never fit 5 million people in big steel boxes all on roads at once. That, hopefully we can all agree on.

[@matthewhook3375]

I wish I could like this comment 100 times. Attempting to curb congestion by increasing tolls/vehicle taxes/fuel duty without providing viable alternative transit is just a "beatings will continue until morale improves" situation. Carrot and stick approach needed - provide viable transit that is cheaper, quicker and more convenient and most people will use it. Stick (increased tolls) to encourage the stragglers to make the change.

[@rocketman1058]

*owning a car isn't a fix cost. It's a fix yearly cost.

[@rocketman1058]

And that's only the tip of the iceberg of errors in the author's thinking about induced demand

[@petyamiteva2382]

You are missing the fact that expanding highways and roads in general leads to bigger distances because you also have to add parking spaces, the roads themselves, etc. so more people have no other choice but to drive, therefore increasing traffic. Biking and walking only work within human-scale distances. In a sprawling city that is larger than the state of New Jersey (I’m looking at you, Houston!) it is hard to be a bike person or a walking person.

[@souravjaiswal-jr4bj]

Your economics of scale will have a better real life example of Batteries required for EVs. Everything you said perfectly fits what is happening in that space now.

[@beskamir5977]

I did the math for how much lithium stores we've got and how much we're mining of it each year... it's umm really not looking good. There's actually zero chance of electric cars replacing ice cars without asteroid mining or massively reducing our need for cars.

[@TheArilin]

@@beskamir5977 kzbin.info/www/bejne/d3nKcpaYpdiooKs Cool Worlds has a good video on it

[@user-nu8in3ey8c]

@@beskamir5977 Just because it isn't possible to make that many EVs doesn't mean the regulators will stop their efforts to making the ownership and manufacture of gas powered cars impossible. All the dudes who go to Davos will own cars, and take jet planes. All of the rich and politicians will have cars. I guess us working class people will just have to give up our cars due to ever tougher emissions standards and carbon taxes, and wind up getting robbed on busses and trains in high crime areas. I guess us blue collar people will have to get used to walking in the snow, rain, sleet, and high heat. Us working class people will just have to get used to "owning nothing and being happy".

[@mothman7786]

​@@user-nu8in3ey8c you give off the vibes of someone who's never actually taken the bus but pretends to know all about what it's like to ride them Source: someone who rides the bus regularly

[@user-nu8in3ey8c]

@@mothman7786 You give off the vibes of someone who has mostly been in good areas.

[@northatlantic2723]

I had no idea where you were going with this, based on the title. Very good video, and very well explained, as always! It's amusing how the comments get all hung up about the transportation issue, rather than the economic concept of induced demand that it was supposed to illustrate. After all, this is Economics Explained, not Wendover ;-)

[@joshuaturner4602]

So what I will say for induced demand is that, its probably more accurate to call it "Suppressed demand" when you expand a road way, congestion eases and then slowly creeps back up, that increase in congestion wasnt caused by people going out to buy cars to drive on that road, it was caused by people who were not driving on that road because of a variety of reasons suddenly seeing that driving is viable now and opting to drive instead. This is why they use the argument to be in favor of replacing a couple of highway lanes with a railroad, narrowing the highway will further suppress demand for roads, while making a fast train that will get you from point A to point B more quickly than driving will increase demand for trains (or reduce the suppression on the demand for trains). It is the combination of making driving worse while making a more efficient alternative better that can be used to shift demand. You are of course still free to drive in this case its just that you will likely be stuck in traffic for significantly longer.

[@richardcheese1010]

I wish KZbin didnt remove the dislike counter

[@zachryder3150]

It's at 3,5k dislikes currently

[@ahsanurr4219]

6.5 dislikes to 24k likes