I don't see how the intersection affects road-widening calculations at all. Doubling the lanes will double the throughput, to 1200 cars per hour. We weren't expecting widening the road to also eliminate red lights.
The lane widening and whatnot basically acts as a cache for the bottleneck intersection (or other feature).
A good example is getting the small % of left turning traffic out of a lane where much of the traffic wants to go straight and there is much oncoming traffic. When there's a break, you've got a car cached right there. When there's not you can push any left turning traffic into the cache for later. Massive improvement, even if all the out flows from the light are the same throughput.
At high speeds, bicycles also have to spread out. Add the bike trailers mentioned, and it seems even more unlikely.
There have been more academic studies. e.g. https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/5_Zhou-Xu-Wang-and-Shen... estimates 2512 bicycles per hour per meter of road width, or 7536 bikes per hour on a 3-meter (10 feet) wide lane. That's only 4.2x car throughput, versus those kids who managed 5.5x.
You are right about the trailers, but at least where I ride, they are not common-case for carrying things, lots more cargo bikes instead, and those are "better" than trailers -- it's possible to ride two cargo bikes side-by-side even in a US protected lane (specifically on Garden Street in Cambridge, MA), though this of course assumes competent riders.
Due to the effects described in the article, entering a road that's close to congested imposes negative externalities due to the delay on everyone behind you, even higher if you are pushing the road below optimal throughput. Push that externality into the price, and suddenly drivers will change their behavior in the desired fashion:
1. People will move their travel to less expensive times. Even if no other change occurs than people waiting for prices to fall, the roads operate at much higher throughput due to never getting into the region of diminishing throughput.
2. People will carpool/vanpool/mass transit- no need for any special treatment for transit, a bus with 50+ people can simply outbid most cars on the road for space, even accounting for the difference in road space taken by the bus. With the economic incentive in place, you'd even expect private buses/etc to pop up spontaneously. Right now, its rarely worth it to pool/bus- it adds extra time for you, but the benefit to the road you never see. With proper pricing, its still faster to take a car, but a lot more expensive- and the carpool/bus/etc is still probably faster than driving would be with congested roads.
3. Similarly, the high prices will incentivize alternatives such as biking, subways, etc, and give very good information on exactly what routes are in high demand when, estimates of how much an improvement would be worth, etc.
But say this does happen a lot-this means rich people pay enormous road use fees, which can then be used for road maintenance, construction, and improvement, as well as other transit infrastructure!
So, the rich willingly subsidize infrastructure for everyone? Seems like a win-win!
You'd set the congestion charge, by law (at least on public roads), to the minimum required for efficient road use- not the revenue maximizing price, which would likely be much higher due to monopoly.
Why do people insist on this tired unimaginative trope. We have the past and present to look at. We know how these things work.
The rules will be crafted, the commas in the laws placed, the contracts handed out, to support those who supported the endeavor. If the plumber's trade group agrees to support it their vans will be exempt. If Palantir supports it, the RFP will be written to make it nigh on impossible to not buy their stuff. No matter how flagrant the badness of the system, if the tech industry makes even a cent, the comment section full of techies will engage in olympic level mental gymnastics and not just do bending over backwards but doing full on backflips to justify the goodness of the system. If the bus drivers have such a comment section they'll do it too.
This is how things were. This is how they are. This is how they will be. Well, right up until the point where the rest of society gets sick of our shit and leaves us in a big communal hole or gives us a free shower or whatever happens to the fashionable way to do that thing is at that point in the future...
But I suppose maybe you're right and they'll throw a few pennies of tax cuts at it if they just need a little upper middle class support to drag it across the finish line.
London in particular uses congestion pricing money to fund more buses and ridership exploded as a result
What traffic-reducing policy would you suggest such that all people are affected equally?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•5h ago
That's funny. That means that the interstates are optimized for speed, not throughput. I believe it, it's just counter-intuitive.
Noumenon72•4h ago