Flere og bedre veier gir mer kø

Chris Turner minner oss på det lite intuitive fakta at jo mer veier man bygger i og inn til store byer, jo mer kø blir det: #

Traffic woes top the list of city-dweller complaints in elections at every level, and what better response could a politician give than to promise more roads, better roads, expressways, highways, express highways and superhighways and freeways and parkways? If you’ve got two cars and a single garage, what do you do, Joe Homeowner? You build a wider garage. Same deal with a road, right? It’s just common sense. #

It’s also dead wrong. #

Study after study for a generation now has demonstrated that more and wider highways just create more traffic. Years ago, New Urbanism founding father Andres Duany pointed out that for every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, you wound up with a 9 percent jump in traffic volume. A British study found that the main impact of an expensive showpiece bypass-building scheme was a 50 percent increase in total traffic. And here’s the main takeaway from a recent investigation that looked at road construction in 70 metro areas over 15 years: #

Metro areas that invested heavily in road capacity expansion fared no better in easing congestion than metro areas that did not. Trends in congestion show that areas that exhibited greater growth in lane capacity spent roughly $22 billion more on road construction than those that didn’t, yet ended up with slightly higher congestion costs per person, wasted fuel, and travel delay. #

This is a conclusion worth repeating: spending lots more on roads increased the toll exacted by congestion. Building more highways intensifies the urban traffic mess. #

Her er en video som forklarer hvordan fjerning av motorveier reduserer køproblemer, øker eiendomsverdiene rundt veiene og bedrer miljøet. #

Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal from Streetfilms on Vimeo. #

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