Road widening and traffic congestion

Part 1 - Traffic Congestion

In the last three-part series we discussed about the cost of traffic congestion. Now, let's look closer at what most people have been clamoring about --road widening. To most people, increasing road space is the most logical move to combat traffic congestion. Increasing road space can mean many things --widening the road, usually by adding lanes, building new roads, or grade separation (putting up road lanes above or below existing lanes at ground level.

We have already tackled the matter of traffic congestion in the past, but it might be worth reviewing our notes. Firstly, traffic is not transportation. Traffic congestion is simply a condition brought about by too many vehicles on a limited road and is not synonymous to the deeper transportation problem --that of moving the most number of people to their daily work or school the fastest and easiest way possible. Traffic is a symptom that we have a transport problem…solving traffic will not solve the problem since we are only addressing the symptom. As we said last week, it's like giving paracetamol to a person with pneumonia --the "solution" will bring down the fever but won't cure the infection.

Many people, upon seeing a traffic jam, will immediately say "widen the roads!" They call it common sense, and most of us will agree that it seems the way to go. And for decades, the US, where we got a lot of our technology did this because of two phenomena --the growth of the car-centric society and the American dream of "living in the suburbs" (one-story spread housing requiring one or more cars per household. But time and time again, they failed, with each succeeding widening turning into more and more congestion until you have humongous highways and freeways still ending up into a monstrous jam.

This is counterintuitive. This defies common sense. Try googling "road widening congestion" and you get link after link with titles like "Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse" or "More highways make more traffic." There are contrary conventional opinions, of course, mostly by those planning new roads, but the "hindsight" wisdom of those who already did but failed cements the phenomenon which was already established by mathematical paradoxes in countless dissertations on "induced demand." We will try to investigate these paradoxical truths next week.

The basic reason for this "induced demand" phenomenon on widened roads is human behavior and man's tendency to travel as fast as he can. This is related to the "cost of traffic congestion" series we just wrote. But man doesn't always look at what is good for everybody but will find ways for what is good for himself. Unfortunately, this "crab mentality" always ends up slowing everybody down. The very proof of this is the insane phenomenon that when traffic congestion gets too crazy, more and more people buy new cars like there's no tomorrow, always ending up in an uncontrollable downspin.

Google "road widening congestion." You'll be surprised. (To be continued)