Whoopsie! Sydney’s road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.
For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney’s Central Business District.
It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it’s turned into a giant car park:
"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.
"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.
“Those travel delays have now blown out.”
So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?
‘Dude! Just one more lane!’
From the article:
"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.
“That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks.”
#roads #traffic #cars @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #motorways #fuckcars
More lanes won’t help, but what the hell are those pinch points? 3 lanes down to 1? Did they never drive in a car?
The American Dream circa 1962 is alive and well in Australia
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@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism There is a specific CATEGORY of threat to humanity’s operations, that needs systematic countering:
The counter-intuitive.
Things like “add more roads, they’ll de-congest” are *natural* assumptions, and *wrong*.
But there are many counter-intuitive things,
and it is *incompetent* to pretend that every manager, authority, whatever, everywhere, is going to somehow, magically, independently discover that they are counter-intuitive & need to be managed *backwards* to one’s unconscious “reasoning”.It’s like trying to get somebody to understand countersteering…
Until they *understand* that you’re literally riding the bike on the *side* of the tire, it can’t make any sense.
Counter-intuitive functions need to be catalog’d, organized, and systematically defeated by school-kids, or in job-training, or ANYthing.
The costs of *not* doing-so are compounding too much.
-–
Perhaps a Required Lessons for each domain, & each job within that domain…
SOMEthing, though, and we need it yesterday.
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It’s like trying to get somebody to understand countersteering.
Yep.
Until they understand that you’re literally riding the bike on the side of the tire, it can’t make any sense
Wait, what? Countersteering is about manipulating the contact patch relative to the center of gravity. The side of the tire has relatively no relevance.
@sping From my perspective as a bicyclist, it is the key to understanding counter-steering:
When one is riding the center of the tire, one is in normal steering.
However, when one is riding the *side* of the tire, then counter-steering is happening, and one is *climbing* on the side-ish part of the tire.
That matches the experience.
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Experience is misleading and not only is what you describe not countersteering, it’s also not how bicycles steer. The primary input is the angle of turn of the handlebars. The complication is that on a balanced vehicle like a bicycle you can’t just point the wheel where you want to go or you’d just fall over to the outside of the turn. So, before you steer where you wan to go, you have to point it in the opposite direction to initiate a lean.
Many people get quite heated, insisting they do not do this on a bicycle, and believe all sorts of other things. But the fact is this is what everyone does and it’s the only way to steer a bicycle, it’s just that it’s quite possible to ride without realizing this is what you’re doing.
@sping I only found counter-steering worked when on road-tires, & leaned waaay over, and from what I’ve seen of Fortnine, he countersteers waaay leaned over, too.
The turn of the handlebars only is primary when you’re upright, not when you’re as-near-horizontal-as-you-can-get.
*shruggeth*
It’s been many years since I bothered with road-bikes, and arguing it is pointless, obviously: what I’m talking about you aren’t describing.
Cheers.
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@sping I now know that there are *2* different, distinct, phenomena, both called “counter steering”, that have nothing to do with each-other.
What you describe is what some call counter steering.
What I’m talking about is when you are in the lean, if you lean the bike a bit more, while steering a few degrees *out* from the turning you are doing, while “climbing through the turn on the sidewall”, the bike goes 'round like it’s on rails, while keeping its center-of-gravity low.
That is what *I*, and some others, mean when talking about “counter steering”.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with what one does with the steering when the bike is upright.
And it wasn’t the Fornine vid I was remembering, so I’ve no idea who it was who also means what I mean.
What a shoddy mess that is: the same label for distinct different phenomena, that are similar.
That is the wrong way of making language “work”.
Cheers.
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Why don’t they just move people’s houses closer to where they work, or vice versa?
You mean mixing businesses and residential units in the same walkable neighborhood like we’ve done for thousands of years? That would never work! We must maximize commuting distances in order to reduce traffic and commuting times.
You really need to put a sarcasm tag on that. I almost got whiplash.
My city is doing the same thing. They let developers build out exclaves around the city and then ask the city to annex it. There seems to be no limit to how stupid the city council is about this. The latest one is on a hill with no water, police, fire, or school services that got annexed. Now the city has to build out everything. The ROI to the city is in the range of centuries based on the tax revenues. Add in that it’s 100% commercial district free and now we’ve added an eternal car snake on a tiny two lane road into town.
We’ve gotta start building some mixed use density or all of this infrastructure is going to collapse.
@ajsadauskas induced demand is a stupid concept. If adding options increases traffic that means your.city is not serving residents. The point of a city is all the places people can get in them, if you have no place to go then move to Montana or someplace else with noplace to go. Note that I didn’t say add more lanes, lanes are not very cost effective’
The reason adding one more lane is wrong is by the time slowdowns occure people are already packing cars in 6 times more dense than is safe and so you need not one more lane but 6 times as many lanes. That is expensive no matter how you look at it. (And probably requires layers of bridges and tunnels)
The point is, if you spend the money on other modes of transport you can serve those residents without the negative externalities that come along with more traffic.
you need not one more lane but 6 times as many lanes
@fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism @ajsadauskas That is about the right level of freeway for a city (entire MSA) of about a million people. I believe that the picture is for a city population of 7 million.
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@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
Seems more like it, I would expect induced demand to be more prominent on the longer time scales.In particular, I recall a simple graph example where you’d have two parallel roads with some traffic on them. And then you create a link between them, aiming to improve the situation. However, the link gets jammed and the overall situation gets worse
@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
Not even that; the additional lanes already exist, they’re just signposted so confusingly that people are avoiding them and instead crowding onto what’s now intended to be a local road@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
To be clear—The tunnel sign-posted as “City, Port Botany ✈️ [toll]” goes to Anzac Bridge, toll-free. If you’re used to taking Victoria Road to Anzac Bridge, you should take the tunnel.
I think H.O.V. lanes are necessary, and the passenger limit should be such that traffic moves quickly in them They will require separate ramps from everyone else.
