With the development of technology, we have seen that cars have become incredibly widespread since the 90s. In particular, the fact that this technology has made room for new business opportunities has increased the importance of personal transportation vehicles over time. In this context, motor vehicles, which only the rich can ride, can now be found suitable for almost every budget, of course, throughout the world rather than our country.
Although vehicles have become so accessible over time, it has made life easier for individuals, but it has brought the concept of traffic into our lives, which everyone is angry about. Especially for this situation, which is the bleeding wound of big cities, we see that additional lanes are opened in some countries. So is this an effective solution?
Let’s proceed with simple logic. What happens if we double the number of seats on congested buses?
Although the load of the entire bus will lighten at first, the vehicle will soon become cramped again. Because the number of people getting on the bus is not fixed. For this reason, the more space you create, the more people will attract and return you to the original state. In other words, there will be crowds of people on the bus again and all the seats will be full. You just increased the number of people.
This situation is known as induced demand:
If you give people more resources, they will undoubtedly use it. We can liken this to the fact that two computers with 8 GB and 16 GB of RAM do the same, while the one with 16 GB of RAM can use more memory. In other words, the extra opportunity does not remain as a plus, it is used instead.
This is also the case in traffic:
If you have a congested 3-lane road, adding a fourth lane to it will relieve traffic at first, but later on, more people will choose that road and that road will be congested again. Normally, when the road widens, traffic should be opened. But in this scenario, the traffic congestion remained the same despite the widening of the road. In other words, vehicles that did not exist in the first place have arrived.
They didn’t choose that road in the first place, because it was a cramped road, as we remember:
But now the news that that road has been widened and that an additional lane has been added has spread everywhere. Therefore, people decided to use this road, which they normally do not prefer, thinking that the traffic problem was solved. Therefore, thousands of vehicles were added to the road and the initial congestion was returned. The only difference is that this time we have more vehicles.
Even if you take this road that you have expanded to 4 lanes and make it 8 lanes, this traffic will come back:
As we said, providing more resources to people does not lighten the burden, on the contrary, it causes more use of that resource. You can see this better by looking at the 26-lane Katy highway in Texas, which cost billions of dollars in 2008.
The concept of artificial demand we talked about can also be used in reverse:
In countries such as South Korea and France, highways were downsized. In fact, Korea removed the Cheonggye highway and regenerated natural areas instead, so the city of Seoul breathed. From the same perspective, this was supposed to further compress the already existing traffic. However, contrary to expectations, this caused fewer people to prefer highways, and therefore less congested traffic.
This does not mean that we should reduce our wide highways to one lane at once. This will have chaotic consequences. Instead, there are different alternatives that will ease the traffic.
The first of these is ‘paid parking spaces’
We could not find any data showing how this situation is in our country, but a significant part of the vehicles in crowded city centers around the world have to constantly wander because they cannot find a place to park. So, is it the lack of parking space that causes these vehicles to circulate all the time? No, of course. The main reason is the abuse of free parking spaces and the fact that people leave their cars there for days.
Toll highways and toll parking spaces help to avoid this traffic problem. Because, considering the money, people both think about whether there is an alternative way to go, and they have no difficulty in finding a place to park.
The solutions of the names who do research on this issue seem to be more effective:
In the research by Matthew Turner and Gilles Duranton, US highways were examined. As a result of the research, it was seen that the more the road capacity of the city is increased, the more the density on it increases. This is another proof that traffic will fill the roads opened with new lanes again.
The researchers’ solution is that congested highways during rush hour charge a fee. This means that only those who really need it will use these roads, while others who are not in a hurry will turn to alternative inner-city roads.
What are your thoughts on this?
Sources: Vox, Chron, Wired, Condé Nast Traveler
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