Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy6
It is difficult to "build your way out of congestion" because the speed at which traffic flows reflects what people are willing to endure. Otherwise they wouldn't be out there. So when you build a new road, or expand capacity, generally traffic will increase until you hit that minimum level of speed (which looks like "congestion") once again, beyond which traffic will cease to increase because people continue to be unwilling to drive any slower. The thing your analysis misses is that having built the new capacity, many more people are able to travel at that minimum endurable speed. That's the advantage and why the new road is economically productive. It's not (usually) because it transports the same number of people significantly faster, but because it transports more people at the same speed.
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I agree, obviously you are going to move more people with more road - but it's a very poor, inefficient way of moving more people. If you ran LRT down the middle of Portage Avenue you would in effect double the volume of people that the street can move without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars expropriating land. Property values would also like go up around rapid transit, compared to if you converted it into a sixteen-lane freeway which would gut the area and cause values to collapse.