Caused by commute sure is a funny way to say caused by lack of housing near jobs, like it's the roads' and rails' fault? :p
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'commute' seems like a decent proxy for all the various intentional decisions in urban planning and transit investment that got us into this mess
I strongly disagree, because that argument just becomes an attack on people's freedom of movement rather than an attack on the structural issues which led to long commutes being the least-worst option for many people.
This is evident in the way people immediately screech “induced demand!!!!1” the second anyone talks about widening a road, like the point of building _anything_ isn't for people to use it. Nobody ever says induced demand when we build houses and people want to live in them lol
If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street.
Destinations drive demand, not traffic lanes. A road can be so inadequate that the traffic makes it painful enough that might I decide to just stay home when I'd rather go somewhere, but the demand is obviously there either way. Infrastructure should enable us to do the things we want and get to the places we want to be.
I don't understand how people view making or keeping streets so shitty that many people can't or won't use them to get to where they want to go as a good thing.
> If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street.
Widening the road doesn't necessarily create demand (although it may, by making a given route more attractive to folks who would otherwise have worked/shopped/traveled elsewhere), but it does shift demand away from mass transit and towards individual vehicles.
I’d say it’s the roads and parking lots/spaces faults in a lot of way. Less rails’.
That makes no sense because the original issue is everyone living so far from work that they never make time to gather near work with coworkers because that time is spent commuting. How they get to and from has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Have you tried walking in Houston? Everything is so far apart on a block by block level (crossing the street) and people are flying down the roads while parking gobbles up real estate everywhere.