Quote:
Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
What's so hard to accept about Induced Demand being a real factor in things?
When downtown was bustling, people would always be trying to find shortcuts and other methods to get in and out. Some who didn't want to deal with the commute time and gridlock would take transit instead.
Now, add a downtown penetrator, parkades, & other car infrastructure and you induce demand for people who now decide that driving to downtown is easy and they quickly swamp the freeway as more people find out about it. You have induced a higher demand for driving by giving people a more compelling reason to drive.
The opposite happens with reduced demand, where if you remove a major artery, the cost and difficulty of transport by personal car increases, and therefore you reduce the demand for car traffic as people will choose alternative means like transit or cycling. In fact, with the closures of Memorial, Centre Street Bridge, and the 5th avenue flyover in the past year from covid, filming, construction, I have chosen to cycle a lot more because of those.
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A bigger aspect of induced demand is home construction. If a commute gets shorter, an area becomes more desirable, and more homes will be built there. In the case of a roadway, the more users, the slower it gets.
So you essentially have a period of incentivizing far flung development until your road is congested again.