He linked Strong Towns yet his father still believes that adding lanes reduces traffic. How can this be?
Gah fucking "induced demand." Yeah no shit adding lanes doesn't remove traffic. It's because most highway infrastructure in cities was built 50 years ago to service a much smaller population. It's like how people talk about how Lake Mead is dropping because the population of California was like 10x smaller when the Hoover Dam was built. Though these cities have expanded massively and their populations have exploded, especially on the West coast, the highway networks themselves are pretty much the same now as they were back in the 50s and 60s. Adding lanes to an existing highway isn't going to fix the fundamental problem of having a highway network that is now servicing a far greater population than it was built for.
The highway 401 in Ontario, Canada, is a great example of this.
Despite the massive expansion of the greater Toronto area in the last 50 years, the city is still only serviced by the 401 as its only major expressway. The 407 is also an option, but it's a toll road, and apparently a very expensive one at that. Why their government would make that a toll road is beyond me. You'd think it would be better for their economy to have it be free. But yeah, stretches of the 401 are seeing 4x, 5x, even 7x more people using it on stretches than back when it was built. A lot of this isn't just regular commuters, but also a large volume of heavy truck traffic since the 401 is the only major expressway on the North side of lake Ontario.
Due to Great Lakes geography and US/Canada border weirdness, basically all shipping traffic from Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Montreal, Ottawa, and Sudbury all have to pass along that one stretch of highway and clog up the highway even more. Really, the crux of the issue is that the province of Ontario hasn't invested enough in building new highways and has instead just expanded already existing ones. Do you really think adding one or two new lanes will help when some stretches of highway are carrying 5x more traffic than they were built for? But obviously if there's 5x more traffic you're not gonna add 5x more lanes and build one of those monstrous Chinese highways. The solution would have been to keep up with the expansion that you knew was gonna happen and have more expressways built to cope with the extra traffic.
So, yes, r/fuckcars. You're unironically correct that "just one more lane" is wrong. It's just that the solution is more and better highways, not no cars at all.
