[Shazam]

Originally Posted by GGG

So talking about induced demand and transportation the basics are that each individual will have some sort of threshold for commute time, property cost, and space required. As a city grows this reaches equilibrium for a particular city and road density slowly increases and commutes get longer, then density increases and property values rise.

When you do a major road or transit project all of a sudden a certain area becomes more palatable because it now wins the cost/commute/space equation. So in that direction there is more demand for new construction and sub-divisions and density. So any gains made by improving roads are filled in by growth and in a little while your commute times stabilize back to where they were before.

The benefits of the new road are used by adding more cars because the cost of that route was lower.

So in general anything that reduces commute time or cost will induce demand until the infrastructure is filled back to where it is in balance with the rest of the city. Essentially more roads don’t make traffic better they just allow your city to grow.

So bike lanes end up working a little differently but in some ways the same. If the reason people don’t bike is it takes too long then adding biking infrastructure doesn’t really help so you don’t get the same affect. Because better biking infrastructure doesn’t really improve speed.

However if Safety is the reason people aren’t biking then by providing safer infrastructure you reduce the perceived cost of biking work and therefore increase demand for it. Not quite the same but in some scenarios bike lanes will increase the number of bikers.

Ah, government thinking at its worst. Clumsy naïve pseudo-economic analysis.