The biggest myths about economics, debunked | Economics Explained 

Exactly, the point of Adam is not to demonize any car user, but to hold accountable any policy that gives priority of that type of person over the rest that uses public transportation and avoiding making a better one.

But these days there seems to be a push from politicians to end driving cars and people must only use public transport.

Excellent comment; it better get the most likes.

I would use my car less if I had better options. I would definitely be open to a smaller lower speed car, like an enclosed bike.

@@secrets.295 And like 99% of politicians, they are out of touch. Though I don’t really know if the ones you are describing even exist in large enough numbers. I shouldn’t have to get in my 2 ton steel box with rubber wheels to cross a 4 lane street and make my way to a restaurant or grocery store nearby. The alternative in my city as of right now is to walk like a mile down the road to a crosswalk that doesn’t even work or risk being fined like $500 for jaywalking. That’s ridiculous and unnecessary.

I have been stuck in traffic on my bicycle as well.

You are stuck in the state of being traffic

It's called Induced demand, where one option is the fastest but at the cost of alternatives. I suggest to use trains and busses or fewer lanes

meh

@@PovidisII induced demand is a lie

Adding very expansive public transit doesn't get rid of bottlenecks. New York City is a prime example. They have a very expansive transit system, yet bottlenecks still clog NYC.

@@computernerdtechman it doesn't get rid of them but it does reduce them. imagine if all of nyc's 2.4 million subway riders and 1.2 million bus riders got off of public transit and into cars. it would make the city unlivable.

@@ishathakor If there was no transit, there would be less people there. Duh. They wouldn’t all get cars. They should require passing 3rd grade to vote...

@@computernerdtechman wow. how much paint chips did you eat as a kid (or as an adult)???

@@newagain9964 Please check the battery in your carbon monoxide detector, because your speaking nonsense.

Some capitals in Australia actually started sprawling due to railways. Not nearly as far as today, but definitely further than one could walk than an hour

America is the same, but all the historic cities built before the car had public transit and were all gutted and replaced with parking and buisnesses with far larger parking lots, decreasing density firther and making public transit less and less favorable in a politicians mind- not impossible, just not politically favorable.

Most Australian cities developed predominantly after the invention and adoption of the automobile, so I'd argue that your cities were actually built correctly, with the automobile as the primary means of transporation in mind. While a balance between the two is obviously the desired outcome, as someone living in an European city with predominantly historical streets and urban planning made in the 1800s, I often dream of broad American-style motor lanes and proper parking spots, instead of navigating narrow one-way streets and narrowly avoid a fender bender each time I try to park. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.

​@@Blkhole02 parking in American cities is a nightmare dude. You can't escape that aspect of cars. It's far too expensive and/or not enough of it where you want to be.

Exactly, people are not the problem, poorly designed transport systems are That's why I think it is bad when EE throws shade at Adam Something with "Sorry, I am everything wrong with the world", suggesting Adam says that individual people are the problem for not taking bad public transit. Just shows that he doesn't understand urbanists

First half is too big brain for me lol

Brainwashed*. They’re a small loud minority.

Urban planners' inputs are necessary to combat the inefficient but profit motivated elements are current planning. However if the world operated in perfect accordance to how urban planners seem to want it would be economically disastrous and dystopian levels of boring.

@@slightlyirradiatedmuffin3257 I'm curious regarding your choice of words. How would a city designed following exclusively urban planning guidelines be boring? It's not a rhetorical question, I honestly wanna know

@@nahuelma97 I guess, if the city planning gives absolutely no regards to what the market is actually asking for, it will end up in disaster. People will just go live somewhere else and the the city will lose a lot in real estate value. His point was probably that keeping a balance is key to every thing.

Thanks for writing so I don't have to 😅

Presenting removing lanes as the solution is about as stupid as presenting an extra lane as a solution. Neither solves the core problem.

@@rikwisselink-bijker and it's not the mainstream urbanist argument, it's just one chosen for the video because some say so

I don't think "induced demand" is a good summary to represent the compelling bigger picture you painted. EE is doing the technically correct annoying academic thing where he examines the precise meanings of words and ideas without voicing any support for any course of action.

Very important.

more comments like this plz

or just build new cities with better infrastructure and less car centric idiocy.

​@@yummychips_ I'm sure razing cities, and then rebuilding them from the ground up will be great for the environment, and so cheap to do too. Then all you have to do is take people's cars and individual homes away, force them into public transport and apartment buildings, make even old people pedal their own bicycles, and everyone will love you. They'll build statues in your honor.

@@yummychips_ Car-centricity will be around as long as the people believing and embracing it are around. Solution? Wait for them to die and stop voting.

Super clear! This is what should have been in the video!

Seriously, I love cars, but what I like even more is being able to travel without putting wear and tear on my car, and for a fraction of what it would cost in gas and parking costs

You're free to walk. :D "I'm in the Land of the Free, but I don't get no free lunch? SMH."

@@shorewall this is- quite frankly- an idiotic take. Is it really too much in your tiny, primitive mind to ask that policymakers take a little of the money being spent on roads, and instead make it so that people can get from their home to work/school/the store/entertainment without either driving, or walking for an hour along unsafe roads that don't have sidewalks? Not to mention all of the people who have disabilities that mean they ARENT free to walk. Hopefully next time you make a comment you'll actually put an ounce of thought into it. I'm sure- despite my name calling- that you are actually intelligent enough to recognize the root issues here.

No good urban planner ever, even in recent years, has had a goal of eliminating cars entirely.

@@shorewall believe me I do plenty of that too, but we sure could use more sidewalks around here (if not multi-use pathways). Even walking in most places by me is considered dangerous due to the lack of pedestrian friendly pathing. Not asking for a free lunch, just a better return on the taxes I pay.

Even if every driver is aware to that fact, if the urban design is both unfriendly to pedestrians and public transport, it will not be enough to convince them to not have a need for a car to go from point A to point B. You wouldn't want to walk around a city with tiny or even absent sidewalks with hazards all around, or use public transport where passengers are packed like sardines in a can.

No, a good transit system means more people traveling. It does not mean less cars on the road. The people who rode the trains did so only because driving sucked. The moment traffic got better, they would've gone back.

​@@djinn666 Then you make driving more expensive than taking public transportation.

​@@djinn666 that's definitely untrue lol. I'd much rather take a train, bus, bike or walk than drive. Anecdote aside, cars are way more expensive than every other transportation method, except possibly planes. Why would I spend $/€10k+ a year on a car when I could spend 1k on train or bus passes. Also, guess who has to pay to repave those massive amounts of road? Tax payers. It cost less tax money to maintain rails than roads.

@@whiteerdydude If you're taking public transit because owning a car is too expensive, then you don't matter for congestion. You would not have driven regardless.

This is a key point! There was a recent infrastructure project in my area where they created a new on-ramp from one major highway to another. The only problem was, right after the on-ramp they immediately necked the highway down from 4 lanes to 3 lanes. As you can probably guess, traffic didn’t improve in this area

You don't need to widen everything, just some WD 40 and it will slide right in.

you can't widen everything, but that takes traffic away from neighborhoods. What do you do if the highway is congested? Your GPS will route you right through the 30kph streets in the neighborhoods, because it's faster. Traffic naturally finds a way. If you can make traffic flow faster, the amount of car hours on the road reduces drastically - with the same amount of km driven.

7:21

There are great tactics to solve these issues. For example here in Seattle area all highway onramps have a traffic light to slow slow down merging traffic during heavy highway traffic hours and there is on most also an HOV lane for 2+ people cars so they can skip the light to incentivize carpool or car sharing.

One thing I've noticed (in the US, anyway) is that people will use one bad experience or excuse to never ride public transit again, but the bad experiences from driving (awful traffic, near-accidents, blown tires from potholes, etc.) don't make the same people say "I'm never getting on the freeway again!" Some people have almost zero tolerance for any issues or inconveniences from mass transit, while a plethora of problems from driving doesn't elicit the same response.

​@@alechagen6291Wow, I never thought about that. I wonder why.

@@nomadben It’s because they’re used to it. Most Americans (and Australians, people from most places outside Europe really) haven’t grown up regularly taking PT and walking over the last couple of generations, so they are more familiar with the experience of driving. When they then venture into PT etc, they are comparing the experience through a base lens of what they feel transportation should feel like to them, which is how it feels to drive/be driven. The lack of familiarity means they are not comfortable, and the lack of comfort means they are more primed to notice anything threatening or generally uncomfortable. When shitty things happen when driving, on the other hand, they are still broadly associated in their mind with their baseline experience. So even though they give it frustrating, it is still just part of their norm, and thereby don’t have the added layers of psychological tension activated that they do when they’re doing something that isn’t their norm. So basically, we have an internet familiarity bias, and will tend to overlook/underestimate the negatives associated with an experience we find unfamiliar, and underestimate the effects of negative experiences that are still part of our norm

@@alechagen6291 Economically I would attribute it to sunk cost. There's an emotional and financial investment associated with driving because of car ownership or rental. There's much less of that in public transport as the cost is mostly covered by the collective.

​@@betteramulet50 that's an excellent way to explain it! I've been trying to think of how to describe this dynamic, but I think you nailed it.

unless there's something I'm missing, I don't think you mean exponentially, I think it's just a linear relationship. I think maybe you just meant like "a lot"? Otherwise, good comment.

@@Muzikman127 They're right, it's exponential. Even in an ideal world where you can infinitely add lanes to a freeway at some point (depending on drive behaviour) the added real world capacity for an extra lane is less than the first three lanes. On top of this the more entrances and exits you put in, the more you slow the actual freeway. If you have infinite space and just add another freeway at the optimum size, you're adding congestion around the entrance and exit points to the freeway, plus extra time on the road to get to the second freeway - and that assumes everyone uses perfect demand predicting navigation systems. Then at the destination you need wider roads and more parking which makes walking less viable, which makes people use cars to get between buildings at their destination, which is more cars on the road. Basically cars have a significant geometry problem.

​@@shraka Not really. Of course there are real world variables and boundaries to almoast every scenario. Still, mathematically speaking its not correct, because then nearly everything would be exponential, wich defeats the whole concept.

@@SuperNugget92 Umm… No? What I’m saying is you can grow a train line linearly. A single automated metro line can carry 90k pax / hr, or double track it for 180k (which is way more than you’d ever need on one corridor) or just add more if you need more. Meanwhile a freeway’s extra lanes are not linear - after about 4 they start to drop off the more you add. That’s what makes it exponential. To get even 50k pax / hr you’d need 36+ lanes and complex space consuming traffic corralling features. Also a 3 lane freeway is going to carry ~5400 pax / hr, while a 6 lane will carry under 10,000 - a train line can do both of those in the same foot print and realistically you’ll only need an extra set of tracks if you need a different destination, so in that way it’s also exponentially more.

@@shraka okay, consider my comment as withdrawn.

Spot-on. I grew up in South Dakota, where it's basically a requirement to have a vehicle to even participate in the job market. It wasn't until I moved outside of the US until I realized how incredibly unreasonable of an ask it is to do that for most people in the world.

You should always have the freedom to chose, there needs to be enough good public transportation for it to be viable to live without a car

I mean... Yeah? Its a really big country, personal transportation is gonna be a requirement. Large overly dense citys like NY are more strange than the normal distribution of people.

​@@GiRR007 There are many big cities in the US without any kind of public transportation system

@@Ivanfpcs Exactly, thus it makes even less sense for less populated areas if not even all large cities have it or need it.

Yes, home cost near work = home price away from work + cost to drive.

How could he talk about the economic impacts of personal automobiles w/o addressing the suburban sprawl Ponzi scheme?! Spreading infrastructure out to low density areas is the biggest economic problem of car-centric development. The tax return on that land use won’t be enough to meet our maintenance obligations soon.

Construction of the house created the demand, not construction of the highway. Construction of the highway in your example satisfied the demand the house created.

@@theBear89451 yeah plus places to live within the city are often apartments and townhouses while outside you can get yourself a bigger house with a garden for the same or less amount of money or more if it's really big or is in those affluent neighbourhoods

@@StLouis-yu9iz he probably didn't mention it, because it's a problem unique to the US. It doesn't apply to most places.

I agree with your assessment. I found the way that not just bikes described induced demand was oversimplified to the point where EEs criticism is valid. For example, interstate 85 through Atlanta is 14 lanes wide at some points and still has traffic issues. Reducing it to 9 lanes wouldn't help anything because it would not improve the ability to bike or walk through the area. Now if you increase a 2 lane road to a 4 lane road in a city, you may inadvertently make the area less walkable and as a result drive more people to use cars.

@@jeremymercer5655absolutely.

@@jeremymercer5655 "EEs criticism is valid." No it's not, he didn't even get the definition right or understand the basic concept of induced demand.

So basically cars are fundamentally better, but your city artificially makes public transit “better” by making driving inconvenient? Got it.

That makes sense in a densely populated nation that literally had to reclaim land from the ocean. It does not apply to all nations

In most cases of solo travel like commuting to work I would always prefer not to drive. So I can use my time better at doing other stuff and be more relaxed. Only when traveling with all the family members and moving around big stuff that makes use of car a necessity, in my case at least.

@@urbanistgod possibly better for anyone who can afford a car and drive it. Which _not everyone can_. And the existence of cars makes life worse for everyone who can't use one. Imo, better just not to have them in densely populated residential or commercial areas.

@@urbanistgod The high cost of parking is not arbitrary. Land costs money. Concrete costs money. There are opportunity costs for something else being there. If your parking is free, it's arbitrarily cheap.

Exactly this. Induced demand isn't a problem to be solved; it's the result of poorly designed infrastructure.

That is not easy. The trainstations have fixed lenghts and increase frequenzys would just increase costs. I dont think many more people would use more public transport if it arrives more often. Maybe on the countryside but for the countryside its not profitable to drive with many trains. In citys you have most waiting between 10-20 mins. At least in europe.

All modes of transportation have traffic. For mass public transit, it can and does occur both on the vehicles ( rail or bus ) and also at the stations. Any perception that mass public transit is traffic free is wrong.

Underlying equation is pretty simple though. People want to have comfortable personal means of transportation and drastically reduce overall transport effectiveness. When solving this problem urbanists are trying to make personal transport as uncomfortable as possible to increase effectiveness + they try to sugarcoat it so the people will believe that it's worth it. Not because they are evil (I swear, at least 20% of them aren't /s). Also barracks with 40 people per room are super effective in terms of construction, heating, light. It's easy to regulate. But most people would decline such accommodation if they can afford a better alternative. Busses are the same thing.

Then they should say that "public transport is a better efficient use of fixed budgets" than this induced demand nonsense.

He mentioned how they have trains to small population centers, but fails to understand that China usually builds the transportation infrastructure before master planning the area to house 5 million people. It's a difference in building philosophy. They think people should find it convenient to move there first.

@@D4PPZ456 You are right. In fact, there is one or two videos from RM Transit saying that China (or Asian countries) tend to build train stations to 'no where', only for the areas surrounding the train station to be filled with new estates for residents, businesses, industries, etc. I can say this is true for Singapore where in the 2000s we had train stations to 'no where' and not making money (since very few people are using these stations). Fast forward to 2023, these stations are now surrounded by new housing estates, commercial districts, malls, and/or parks.

Not to mention the video skirted over the carbon savings of trains vs. airplanes.

@@crash.override Depends on the source of electricty for the trains and the carbon costs to build the infrastructure. China is still building plenty of coal plants daily to keep up with demand.

@@crash.override Which is why china is making enormous coal power plants

I’ve travelled around the Netherlands - lovely city planning with clear distinctions between streets and roads. Great public transit networks with reasonable tickets and tons of station parking. Decent bicycle lanes throughout too, and Utrecht is a neat little place with the university and all. Apeldoorn is beautiful. Housing costs all over are a nightmare, living expenses are nuts and shopping is a pretty plain experience …but I do love Netherland’s cities for sure!!

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You're talking as if parking fees are the only payments that car owners have to pay. I don't know about where you live, but where I live things go like this: 1) Buying a car? You need to pay a 24% VAT, and a special car tax, which is largely based on CO2 emissions. This can easily double the price of a powerful car. 2) Want to use your car? You need to pay an annual road tax, which again is largely based on CO2 emissions. If your car burns diesel, you need to pay an additional diesel tax. 3) Want to keep driving? You need to pay a 24% VAT and gasoline tax on every liter of gasoline. Diesel is currently even more expensive than gasoline. 4) Want to keep your car near your home? If you live in the city, you need to pay for a street parking permit, which does not guarantee a parking spot, or a place in a parking building. 5) Want to stay safe? You need to pay for insurance, and in this country the premiums carry a 24% insurance premium tax. 6) Want your car to stay running? You need to pay for parts and servicing, which carries a, you guessed it, 24% VAT. The city may only get parking fees directly, but car owners pay a massive amount of other payments and taxes, and in this country actually subsidize pretty much every other type of transport, because the tax revenue collected from cars and driving far exceeds how much the government spends on roads, railways, and waterways combined. Because of all the taxes, car owners are also typically pretty wealthy, and any city should want to attract them.

@@Tuppoo94 And yet all of those fees are a less productive use of the land than putting a shop there or adding more housing. There is a reason that cities around the world are moving away from cars. They are less productive for the city that other things are. I am aware that cars cost a lot. Even at what they cost it is not enough. You can see that cities that have done more to cut back on cars are doing better.

If cities cut parking lots and structures in half alot of of high density housing can be built.

A Ford F-150 takes occupies 100 square feet. It's insane to me that you can essentially claim 100 square feet as private space in some of the most valuable space in our cities. Imagine if as a pedestrian I didn't let anybody come into my 100 ft^2 bubble. That's complete insanity

@Tuppoo94 if cities where built in a way that eliminated most of the needs for cars and trucks and people could work close to home mass transit would be much easier to setup and use

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Yes and also if you need to make space for your roads and parking spaces, then the city become less dense and the demand for transportation rises.

absoltely right. i wonder what else he got wrong over the years...

Agreed. I think that this issue is not explored as well as it could.

You’re just getting short run and long run demand mixed up with ‘induced’ demand.

@@coreyw427 except the demand wouldn't exist without the infrastructure.

My confidence in the channel has been dropping a lot in the last few months.

​@@guilhermetavares4705I've lost faith in this channel for more than a year now

@@emiliopenayo4738 mood

@@emiliopenayo4738 not trying to be rude, but why do you still watch it then?

/gen

But using a basket of alternatives, waters down your economies of scale.

@@penguinking4830 your economy of scale has decimated American cities.

There isnt really drama tho... Economics explained just doesnt really understand some points and agrees with the rest

​@tijmen-vm9lq No, Economics Explained makes a fair point. Removing road lanes will not reduce road congestion. It might actually make it worse, or redirect traffic to less efficient roads. The best way to reduce it is congestion pricing, and urbanists generally ignore that policy.

@@---uf2zl i know, but noone is saying to remove lanes to reduce traffic The "Induced demand" argument is used do show that adding more lanes doesnt lead to less traffic. I heard people call it induced traffic which better descibes what is meant by it. When you add a lane, after some years the road will go to capacity again as long as there is population growth. Thats the thing.

@@tijmen-vm9lq Some people really think we should remove lanes to remove traffic. It's dumb, but they exist.

​@@---uf2zl No, those people don't exist. The entire argument is that we should build more efficient infrastructure instead.

That applies if a lot of people live in the city centre. Where I am from, there are almost no homes in the city itself compared to the suburbs. There is accommodation in the city centre, mainly hotels. There are apartments, but compared to the number of homes outside the city centre, it’s a tiny proportion. People go into the city to work or go out to a bar or decent restaurant. Then they go home to the suburbs. Some suburbs are well served by public transport, but those are generally more affluent areas, closer to the city and the coast. Suburbs further away are forced to drive because they don’t have much option.

@@bennaustin6632 Suburbs being designed far away from things is itself a problem for necessitating car usage. I've never heard of a city that people only work in and visit but don't live in, lol, but either way, it's important to keep traffic flowing, which means more throughput. If you spread everything out to accommodate cars, you make things so far away from each other transportation options other than walking become even more necessary.

"Where people actually live" is something of a fallacy since population density throughout the United States varies widely, and there are people who have to commute more than 100 miles to reach the nearest city. They may not have a choice due to their jobs keeping them in remote areas (especially if those jobs are the kinds of undesirable work that keeps society moving from day to day). Not every destination can be served efficiently by public transport due to there simply not being enough potential customers in more remote areas - despite their need to travel to major population centers regularly.

​@@madelineariah See my previous reply.

Induced traffic better explains what it means. youre right. Economics explained just didnt understand that i think

There’s no “induced demand” for road capacity. It’s called latent demand.

But it’s not lower income people who are pushing for the destruction of roads or the closing of streets and highways. It’s well off yuppies who live in gentrified inner city enclaves.

@@MelGibsonFan You say that, but I doubt poor people who can't afford a car would rather live in a world where they need a car to participate.

@@MelGibsonFan I think Stuart says it well enough. The reason why people in upper class gentrified sections of cities claim this is because they see the inherent value in anything other than car infrastructure. In a lot of cases (specifically within cities) removing car traffic is more economically viable and just nicer to live in. While I personally haven't heard many people say to remove roads entirely, I do think that the response is so strong and occasionally extreme because of how backwards it is. I have the pleasure of living in the DC area, and all types of people use the metro and metrobuses to get around as a primary way of transport, we all benefit from it and in many cases it makes it possible to live within those places. It's not optimal for lower incomes now because we haven't designed it to be that way. Despite it being disproportionally beneficial to lower income as a service.

@@urbanistgod ty for the mini correction, i learned somethin new today

You can weed out imbecile's with this one starter. It shows the viewer could not watch for another five seconds to see what EE meant. I pity you

"not a complicated subject" then proceeds to completely failed to understand urban planning and mobility at a basic level.

As long as there are points in the road where cars are required to stop, there will always be traffic jams.

"outside of Europe"..? 🤔

Hm, you said cities outside europe are very US-Like. I wasnt aware of that! Thanks

@@movement2contact I just came back form Australia and that was my impression. It got me thinking - what are the good examples of city planning (i.e. it's not just cars and highways in and around cities). Besides Tokyo (and from my experience NYC wasn't too bad) I can't think of many examples that are outside of Europe (lots of bad ones in Europe as well, of course). Some time ago I was in Mexico City (a city of over 22 million people) and going around by car was more or less the only viable option for me as a tourist and getting around was awful. It was just non-stop traffic jams even very early in the morning.

@@movement2contact also, I’ve heard from Americans say that in the U.S. If you don’t have a car it’s because you cannot afford one. It is similar among older generations in Latvia (where I am from). Pribably mostly because in the Soviet times it was very hard to get a car and in the 90s it was indeed unaffordable. I lived in the Netherlands for a while and there it was so convenient to get around by bike or public transport and that a lot of people simple didn’t have a need to buy a car. Not because they couldn’t afford it.

What's throwing me of is trains and bikes are literally more space efficient. If you shrunk the size of all cars on a roadway right now by half then you would double the space between cars. I've never heard anyone say bulldoze roads. I have heard them say build rails instead. Or actually run timely and frequent service on the rails we have.

He finally proclaimed himself morally superior and now judges everyone else from that position. Typical for liberal economists...

@@iivin4233 This. There are reasons to tear down roads, but those are more extreme cases. The issue with induced demand is that more roads encourage more people to use those roads, so congestion never ends. Bulldozing a road means that traffic will spread the congestion to other roads elsewhere in the city. But that's missing the point of the problem. The problem is not the roads and the demand for them; the problem is the congestion itself, and how to alleviate it.

It really all comes down to tax efficiency. Most American cities are zoned in a way that provide poor tax performance per acre of land. This makes walking or riding a bike impractical, and makes public transportation unaffordable. American cities need to change how they zone land to be more tax efficient. This will increase density of businesses and populations which makes walking and biking more practical, and public transportation affordable without needing to sacrifice cars.

@@evancombs5159 It would help if city planners had a way to introduce infrastructure into existing cities. However, given most large cities in America were built across hundreds of years and most of the downtown (and most congested) areas were built in a time where motorized vehicles were only coming to the scene, doing that is next to impossible. The New York subway system was a near monumental task for construction crews back in the day, and with all the large buildings towering in most major cities, they have no way to add further freeways and overpasses. Underground roads COULD be a thing, but most everyone who's working on those projects (like Elon Musk and his Boring Company) get endless criticism and even scorn from the very people who want the problem solved via mandating public transportation. And on the note of underground roads, I do think that's one of the more efficient methods of solving the problem: Multi-layered roads. Having underground freeways that lead into above ground areas, have underground parking, and so on. Something to remove the problem of congestion on the surface streets and put it somewhere that doesn't also have public transportation, bikers, and people who are walking intermingling with cars.

He actually did mention that in 12:20.

shhh that's considered ideology around here. didn't you know that economists invented human nature?

*Only ever act in what they percieve to be their best interest. No one moves to inner city housing on purpose even for a shorter commute. Rich people pay millions for a tiny box for the clout and not because it is a sound investment. Do you have examples otherwise?

Well, guess that would be considered their best interest in this case: someone elses best interest is this person best interest, right?

@@mf-- Everytime I changed jobs I changed my apartment to be closer to the job. A Shorter commute is worth it (Also I don't own a car lol)

Lol, OK, you keep believing people on average are like this and build a society around it.... See what happens....

If even a portion of the hundreds of billions spent on massive road infrastructure had been put into rail/trams/bike lanes then public transport would be much better and fewer people would even want to use their car.

@@sirsurnamethefirstofhisnam7986 Public transport for a country as big as the US would be practically usless. Cars exist for a reason. They are basically the replacement of horses which were pretty much nessecary to live in america originally. So much so that in florida when a prisoner was freed it was mandated they be given 2 things, a gun and a horse. The US is too big for public transportation.

@@GiRR007 it's not a horse that connected America, it's a trains

@@warotm.590 No it was not trains that connected america... You realise horses were being used LONG before trains ever were right? Not to mention that even now the high way system connects the US more than trains now. Most of the travel throughout the us by people wasn't trains. And even still trains at the time weren't public transport, you had to pay for them like you pay for plane tickets. They were a luxery.

@@GiRR007 No the US is not too big for public transport, that is a silly myth. You can make cities that don't require a car, you can make trains that go places, it is a choice not too.

Very important comment, thank you

Exactly. The way he frames this is to suggest that induced demand is the problem to be solved. But that's not true, as induced demand is they symptom of the problem, which is congestion, and that congestion is caused by other factors, such as people being forced to drive to complete basic tasks instead of having a variety of options for a variety of scenarios.

Nailed it.

You make it sound like the presence of highways cause urban sprawl all on its own, and not NIMBY zoning laws, or push factor of mismanaged unsafe, overpriced cities forcing masses of people to buy houses 2hrs away from their jobs.

Thank you. I appreciate how you separate out that "Induced Demand" isn't solely a economic theory operating within the domain of urban planning. Instead, planners (within their discipline) understand induced demands as a set of government, community, and individual behaviors that lead to negative outcomes. Additionally, when the video talks about the benefits of highway, the increase in fuel economy can be offset by greater distances traveled.

Unlearning Economics also rebuked his video on UBI

He singled out the concept of demolishing roads which is a strange proposal I've never heard anyone make. I'd love to see what the free market did if we actually freed it of subsidies for roads, suburbs, and fossil fuels.

You can easily see that just by looking at the fact that New York for example has like 23 cars per 100 residents, whereas the average for urban areas of the US is 77 per 100. Of course New York is very dense and walkable city with excellent public transit which is also extremely rare in the US. You also see similarly low rates of car ownership in dense walkable cities with lots of convenient travel options across the world. Amsterdam is around 25 per 100 too as is central London although the number does rise significantly out in the suburbs in London's case. Of course it is also important to make sure to have dedicated infrastructure for trams and busses, if your transit vehicles get stuck in traffic they only add to the traffic jam rather than competing to displace some of those trips from the private cars that occupy more space per occupant. Get the transit vehicles out of there and they will take some of the majority of people that are not emotionally or physically dependent on driving with them.

​@@iivin4233 demolishing roads has been done, and has worked, same with making roads thinner. Roads have their own upkeep cost, so unless they're doing something for you, you'd be better off turning it into a shop or a house

@@iivin4233 You realize the European train industry is also heavily subsidized, right? Japan is the sole example of mass passenger train transport existing without ongoing subsidies. It's not a one sided equation where cars only rule because they are supported in the US - the opposite is also true for trains and Europe, despite much more favorable geography. And while roads might be subsidized, automobiles are arguably the most heavily regulated industry in the US, and not far behind in Europe, which drives the cost of them way up. The only vehicles receiving subsidies are electric ones.

you have no clue as to what induced demand claims to be.

The problem is that many (most) North American cities have been designed around having a car unlike say European or Asian ones and as such the population density of the cities is far lower with greater distances between places that people want to go to since residential areas are often zoned far from commercial areas and vice versa. We need more mixed zoning where you can walk to stores and businesses and your workplace can be nearby as well. Just saying that that there needs to be better public transit is not a solution since the very structural design of these cities makes really good public transit cost prohibitive in most of the cities other than the denser populated areas or cities like NYC. First we need to rethink how cities are designed and planned in the first place. Otherwise you get token transit to less densely populated areas of the city (like a few infrequently serviced bus routes) since it's not economically viable to service them with better transit since there just wouldn't be sufficient demand for riders in those areas. There just isn't the population density to support good transit unfortunately. The other problem is that people tend to want to live in detached houses with a decent amount of land for a yard, garden, etc. This leads to lower density and the creation of suburbs away from the city core. So you basically induce traffic since people need to use a car to get anywhere, while the density of the residential area is not enough to justify really good transit. It's a tough problem to solve. I definitely agree that we need cities to be more walkable, bikable, etc. however changing the way that North American cities are structured will take a lot of time, money, and political will as it will require a lot of structural changes to the cities. Not to say it isn't worthwhile, but it's not a simple problem to solve either.

​@@aruak321 Do you know how the US became a car centric country? its because the rich people at the time, knew that you can get more money selling millions of cars, than public transportation. Back in the day, Chicago used to be studied around the world for how well their train system was. So what did these rich people do? Buy out all Trams, and a lot of public transportation systems, and dismantled them. Straight up. Also, space isn't an issue, as we can take away a lot of lanes from highways as making more lanes, doesn't fix traffic. Also, guess what? there's also, underground.... Now, the problem with funding these projects is not hard at all. Its simple, although it will take some time, (but probably won't happen because the rich will obviously use their money to prevent changes like these.) The first thing, is to either make laws capping how much medical procedures and medication costs, or transition from a private to a public system. As clearly, all of these companies only wants profit, and making slaves. Now, from my perspective, the modern day slavery in the US, is putting them into debt, like with these overtly high prices for medical procedures and medication. From this, we will save trillions. This will save us over 2 trillion. (wait, i forgot to mention, but hospital companies spend most of their budgets, on Administration, whereas the rest of the developed world, doesn't) The other part, is obviously to defund the military. Like, there is no reason to have a high military budget. there's none. But do you know why its happening? Its to make profit. But who is making profit? Companies. Specifically, the ones who makes the weapons. Like the Afghan war budget. The cost of it was $2.26 trillion, and where did 70% of that cost went? To those companies, like the ones making fighter jets and ETC. But here's the thing. The Afghan war was cause by the American government. But it will take too long to explain, so I'm not going to. Then you talk about how people want to live in the suburbs. The solution is still public transportation. Like, a normal car at most will fit 5 people, but a bus can fit 40-80 people inside. And a bus is about, two cars long. (what im getting at, is public transportation is more space efficient). Not to mention trains. Can do the same as buses, and guess what? Uses less energy to move people, as there's less friction. *edit* You also say, that commercial areas are far from residential areas. Its simple. Mix them into each other, like every other developed country besides Canada.

@@Lumi_VR I think we're arguing for the same thing. I agree that we need more density but I'm saying that it is difficult to muster political will to do that when the public doesn't actually want that. Also a bus in a suburb sounds like a great solution in theory but in practice it's terrible and slow and will likely more than double your travel time since the bus has to stop frequently along the way and can't go any faster than that the cars around them unlike trains. So what could be a 30 min car drive ends up being an hour long trip by transit. There are a lot of people that would rather drive under that circumstance. Really you need decent rail transports, but unless you have sufficient population density, rail is not justifiable. Which brings us back to the density problem and people's desire to live in suburbs.

Yes I think it missed that in Anglosphere countries, it's not a level playing field, those travel 'choices' aren't a realism thing that is natural, and for economic reasons too it certainly doesn't have to be, which is one of the urbanism things More people able to choose is good for everyone, it doesn't matter if you like driving, you aren't a target

Exactly, he completely ignores this point. The demand only exists because there is no other alternative

Zoning does not prevent anyone from walking not driving nor bicycling nor hippity-hopping to whereever they want to go. I live in walking distance of everything I need, including 75,000 jobs. Zoning isn't stopping any of you from doing the same.

@@AllenGraetz its not stopping you from doing so because zoning isnt a problem in your area. in most american cities you often cant build anything other than a single family detached house with minimum setbacks and lot sizes in 80% of the city. Those areas dont have any jobs and people need to go to places zoned differently so they can do their jobs. Getting to those jobs by any means other than driving is usually a non option because of the distances and the lack of infrastructure to do anything other than drive.

Zoning in the US is fucked up. Suburbia and its consequences has been a disaster for American infrastructure.

So do you think “inducing” demand is something that only the government can do? I am understanding it that way, because they gather public funds via enforced taxes and then make supplier decisions based on that rather than having all these transportation options paid and thus allowing normal market forces to decide allocation. Basically the government can influence what ways supply (and thus corresponding demand) is realized without having to compete against competition in every dimension. And they have already crowded our potential private competition with existing options being good enough for private-funded alternatives to be profitable, but still leaving large quantities of demand untapped, but with them being the only real viable supplier for the marginal unrealized demand.

He addressed this in the video. The induced demand theory is a poor one for traffic congestion. Even the study people use to make claims expanding road doesnt solve the problem and instead utilize public transit like you just did was not cited within the actual study. Congestion is an underlying symptom of a disease. The disease is commuting for work in ever growing cities. Public transportation, expanding roads, bikes don't reduce congestion because they can't possibly keep up with demand. At best you will reduce it short term as the city continues to grow. WFH during COVID was a great experiment on what happens when people aren't commuting to work. The roads were clear and easy flowing.

@@Elementalism Transportation methods that are not cars generally have much, much higher throughput than cars so they absolutely can keep up with demand, or if they cant, they can still keep up with significantly more demand in much less space than a massive freeway. Reducing the number of trips taken is also a great idea, but a rather unrealistic one. Reducing the number of trips taken by car is much more realistic with a few infrastructure changes, and some possibly unpopular zoning changes to make healthy, mixed use zoning legal to allow for *better* (not necessarily higher) density. Make it easier and more pleasant for the suburbanite to walk or ride to get groceries, see the doctor, take their kids to school/sports/extracurriculars, to get to work, etc. and you can make more pleasant neighborhoods and less congested freeways.

@@Elementalism even with your reply, the answer isn’t expanding highways, it’s shifting transportation modes and land use patterns to enable people to live and work in reasonable proximity - which is the whole idea behind the terribly misunderstood concept of 15-minute cities! Part of that shift is being able to actually get somewhere meaningful without a car in the suburbs, which is simply impossible in too many areas of North America given the car-dependent development patterns of the past 80 years where kids can’t even walk to the local school because it’s too far away and there aren’t any sidewalks or other proper pedestrian infrastructure

Good point. In addition, it depends where you live! Obviously, you live somewhere and you drive somewhere else and it takes some period of time. More lanes are built, which results in a shorter period of time for your drive. However, because there are more lanes, someone "further out" than you recognize it is a faster route and begins to drive on your road, until equilibrium is again reached. More lanes lower the cost of driving and increases the value of property. But not your property, property further out. They are the main beneficiaries of the increased infrastructure investment. Putting in lanes is expensive and lanes only hold so much traffic. It feels like a hamster wheel, we run hard but don't make much progress.

You condensed my whole thought process into 4 lines of text. Well done! EE only showed one study on the subject of induced demand and didn't even look at the induced demand of other forms of transport. Not to mention how secondary effects can lead to more traffic when a new highway gets build

Economics is more fundamental than many other fields to the way society operates. You can write whatever you want, and maybe even one day get the chance to implement your ideas, but in the long run the economics of the situation will determine the outcome.

Urban planners are just sad communists with a cubicle looking for a corner office, and like real communists they want to do social experiments that affect everyone when they inevitably go wrong

​@@coreyw427 I agree. The economics of using horrendous amounts of public money on asphalt rather than cheaper alternatives will 'determine the outcome' (whatever that means). This however is completely unrelated to the topic of induced demand and it's supposed misuse in urban planning.

@@jan79306 No, it’s not. I’m saying in the long run, the true costs and benefits of a various approach will mean the better approaches will eventually win out. In fact, in many cases the asphalt approach is cheaper considering its benefits than the alternatives, which is why it has been so successful. Attempting to shove something worse, all things considered, down people’s throats will end in failure.

Did those studies look more hollistically, like the initial study should have done? for what you've described, it could just be that reducing lanes in the city crowds people back onto the highways.

@@rwall514 there are multiple studies of that kind, mostly in Europe. And yes, it might have moved traffic to the highway butbits unlikely as people going through cities arent normally just crossing them. But obviously we cant conclude that there is a corelation, its more of an observation made in cities that have decided to reduce lanes

He was clear in his disclaimer that he's biased. His goal was to try convincing the viewer that induced demand doesn't exist in regards to traffic. It makes sense he would avoid mentioning studies that disagreed with him as much as possible Obviously induced demand does exist, and the effect is well known to urban planners. He's not an urban planner though, and urban planners aren't the ones he's trying to convince

@@joelimbergamo639 The problem is that many (most) North American cities have been designed around having a car unlike say European or Asian ones and as such the population density of the cities is far lower with greater distances between places that people want to go to since residential areas are often zoned far from commercial areas and vice versa. We need more mixed zoning where you can walk to stores and businesses and your workplace can be nearby as well. So studies done in Europe may not be applicable to North American cities. Unfortunately the very structural design of these cities makes really good public transit cost prohibitive in most of the cities other than the denser populated areas or cities like NYC. First we need to rethink how cities are designed and planned in the first place. Otherwise you get token transit to less densely populated areas of the city (like a few infrequently serviced bus routes) since it's not economically viable to service them with better transit since there just wouldn't be sufficient demand for riders in those areas. There just isn't the population density to support good transit unfortunately. The other problem is that people tend to want to live in detached houses with a decent amount of land for a yard, garden, etc. This leads to lower density and the creation of suburbs away from the city core. So you basically induce traffic since people need to use a car to get anywhere, while the density of the residential area is not enough to justify really good transit. It's a tough problem to solve. I definitely agree that we need cities to be more walkable, bikable, etc. however changing the way that North American cities are structured will take a lot of time, money, and political will as it will require a lot of structural changes to the cities. Not to say it isn't worthwhile, but it's not a simple problem to solve either.

Because it doesn't fit his agenda

because this channel is ran by an hyper capitalist and pro-establishment shill.

Just curious, what country do you live in?

Even if it were to reduce auto traffic, it would be merely moving the traffic from one mode to another.

@@AllenGraetz in Chicago 60% of the city uses transit to commute. Considering we already have traffic problems, our road infrastructure wouldn't be able to handle that many drivers. It's much easier to add more scheduled train cars than to add more lanes (of course up to a point)

@@AllenGraetz one train car with 50 people in it takes 50 cars off the road. It’s simply orders of magnitude more efficient to move people by bus or train than in individual cars.

​@@AllenGraetz mass transit is more cost and resource efficient

@@sirsurnamethefirstofhisnam7986 that you think it's a 1:1 ratio of passenger per car demonstrates how little you've thought through the issues.

He lives in australia. our public transport is fine. not necessarily european levels, but nowhere near america bad. i cant remember which city he lives in, but melbourne had the best in my experience, specifically with the PTV. sydney and canberra were kinda a mess, and perth is decent if you want to get around either the city or semi-affluent neighbourhoods. the really rich areas seem to refuse to have good bus service and the poor areas dont get serviced as much, leaving huge gaps in the suburbs. transperth operates decent north south trains too. havent seen SA, Tas or Qld.

@@jonathanodude6660 Australian suburbs in major cities tend to have one thing many US suburbs do not, regional rail stations connecting them to the CBD. This doesn't eliminate driving, but a lot more people will go and park at the station and get the train in because it's usually quicker and cheaper, which does reduce congestion and reduces vehicle distance travelled. It's a decent compromise that does allow for US style suburbs while not exactly reducing car dependency (maybe a little with feeder busses), but reducing car journey length. Unfortunately building a regional rail line into an existing suburb is really hard, many of these rail lines were built a long time ago.

You sounded like a true Kiwi with your "disclaimer" totally un-necessary that statement was. Basically poor people who ride public transport or choose to bike suck. You are the problem.

Absolutely no one is arguing for removing cars, They simply want to move away from car-centric design to pedestrian design in order to accommodate more transit options.

@@Croz89 yeah that’s what I mean. To be fair, the train stations are just placed where people are, which is the bare minimum for a train station if you want a service that works. None of the Australian cities have anything on Europe or east Asia at all. Being a Londoner and having traveled to both Japan and nyc twice (some of the best cities in the world for train travel) there’s no real point comparing most of Australia to the bests, but it gets the job done, which is all that’s required. It’s much cheaper here than even places that have significantly lower incomes. I forgot to mention that even if the lines were built a long time ago (many weren’t), the stations are still being infilled and extended even today. There are major transit projects going in most major cities in Australia rn.

we already know the answer. vast majority of time (certainly in highly developed areas) it is public transportation.

And if those who want to bike can do so safely, it makes the drive better for those who want to drive. A win win!

Im not riding 5 miles in the sun with a 10* incline for 2 of them

@@randomuser5443 that’s a you problem

then move to a city, don't move to a suburb then complain that you can't bike everywhere.

Hah. You'd be wrong. About the café at least. So I used to work at a popular cafe located at a roadway intersection and what they did was prepare food ahead of time, and also in very large quantities before storing it under vacuum (sous vide more or less) to then reheat and serve. This is also often times employed in so called industrial kitchens where you're making food for hundreds, if not thousands of people at the same time using huge machines that contain hundreds of liters. This is among others used in places like hospitals, and military installations.

There are two other important factors as well. Staple good have very low or near zero elasticity of demand. Because there is a minimum demand number we can hit where we NEED the product no matter what price it is. Where demand only lowers once people start dying off because they cannot afford the product or not enough of the product exists. And oligopoly/monopoly markets disconnect price from the supply, demand, cost equations. So the consumer price of an item is no longer affected by demand or cost of the item.

Economies of scale work wonderfully with services - it's called Big Tech

What do you mean? If that were the case fast food chains never would have taken off. Starbucks is literally a café economy of scale. Standardisation of products and training makes them cheaper. Yes it is less significant than the belt buckle example but that doesn't mean there aren't economies of scale there.

Economy of scale works everywhere, it is just each industry has a different peak economy of scale.

korea doesnt have an increasing population its not relevant. I can give you the evidence of Montreal where they have removed lanes to build bike lanes in multiple streets and avenues and the traffic has more than doubled in many places.

Forcing people to use transportation that only takes people where planners want them to do when they want them to go. Nice.

Dont forget that car represent a real danger, are noisy and take up waaaaaaaaaaay too much space. Bonus they pollute a lot for what they do.

When there's only one option you don't actually have a choice, sigh. One day though

People drive because they don't have to pay for the externalities.

Thank you, that's the question, does it produce more benefit than it costs.

Induced demand is often a chicken and the egg scenario. Like they expand a freeway to make it capable of handling more traffic, then developers build a large shipping mall and office tower off the freeway. Then more people travel on the freeway to get to the new mall and office tower, and malls and office towers in the inner city struggle to be competitive and shut down. Now you have a huge amount of traffic on the freeway caused by the freeway itself existing while your inner city walkable commercial properties turn into slums.

The video seems to be making a chicken vs egg argument. It's true that the demand exists before the city often decides to make more road, but the building style makes that demand in the first place. When you build sprawling communities with no viable public transits, there is almost always more demand for roads than roads themselves. In other words, if you change nothing, that extra road you build will be filled up in short order, and you will always have traffic. The real answer is that people should live in walking or biking distance from where they work, so they won't become the traffic in the first place.

If the highway is congested, I'll just take the local roads - you know, where the bicyclists are. I still have my aircon, audiobooks, ventilated/heated leather seats and can talk to my clients on hands free. If the traffic can flow on the highway, I can enjoy my evening bicycle ride better. But people are always against each other and do everything to make other people's lifes more miserable, failing to see that they are doing it to themselves.

And the video glosses over that the core driver of demand in this case is population of the city. As population increases traffic demand will also increase inevitably over time. On top of transportation infrastructure decisions the city makes.

It's at 3,5k dislikes currently

6.5 dislikes to 24k likes

^ this is exactly how it works in the US. Highways get built and people start driving more in around them. Interstates were originally built to be connections between cities, but most of the traffic problems are where they are used as commuting corridors.

You enjoying your bike is nice, but don't FORCE the rest of us

@@seanthe100 What do you mean "FORCE" ?

I ride a motorbike, which has most of the same benefits at the cost of some flexibility in maneuvering and parking. But yeah two wheels is really the way to go, and I've heard having 10~20% of us switching to bikes could practically eliminate congestion on current road demands.

@@seanthe100 no one is forcing anyone - they still have roads in the Netherlands and you're still free to drive... In fact, it's better to drive there because 90% of people are walking/biking/tramming (because it's faster and more convenient) rather than clogging up the roads, so you can get where you want to go without traffic... 🤔

@@seanthe100 no one's forcing you to do anything. I'm just pointing out the benefits to riding a bike. It's 100 times better than being trapped in a steal box. But if your determined to stay stuck on traffic for hours then be my guest.

I mean, it comes to the core problem with this video. He confuses "induced demand" with "congestion." They're two separate issues. Congestion is a busy road, regardless of how the demand for that road was induced. "Induced demand" speaks to the idea that if you build more lanes of traffic, it will encourage people to use those lanes of traffic. This reduces congestion in the short-term, but not the long-term, largely for the reasons you discussed in your comment: people don't have another choice. The reason people talk about induced demand so much is because it's a very obvious non-solution; reducing congestion by expanding road sizes just doesn't work; it always goes back to being congested if the problems causing the congestion aren't resolved.

@@heychrisfox Yup, but in fairness, he's responding to Vox and similar framings that also confuse congestion for latent demand for induced demand; his point about the demand curve is one CityNerd made a ways back.

Instead of just Fascist Island. :D

I've been to singapore and it feels like an easily fixable traffic situation. I wonder why they don't commit to less cars and more cycle lanes, pedestrian crossings and legalize "jay-walking", known as "crossing the street" on most places I've heard that it is a good income stream for the government, but I don't live there so I can't comment on that

Well sure, but nobody is arguing against that. The video just said Induced Demand isn't a good argument for more public transport and then mentioned a bunch of actually good arguments for it. So I'm not sure what's up with all these comments saying they want a choice. Nobody is saying public transport is bad or shouldn't be used.

Robots and androids soon thankfully. Even for war. New tech is insane these and due to A.I. it’s accelerating!

​@@FacelessOnes Define soon. We're nowhere near having computers and robots that good that cheap that it's more cost effective to use them than troops. Don't get me wrong, developments over the past decade or so have been impressive, but that was in a bull market with lots of capital available and when computing power has been pretty cheap. Neither of those apply at the moment (recession/market disruptions due to COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian War, plus suppliers of the raw materials going offline) and with countries starting to onshore manufacturing, I don't thing that's going to change anytime soon. One day? Maybe, but not tomorrow, not for decades.

@Zaydan Alfariz Sorry, probably didn't make myself clear, but I was talking about the cost of ongoing maintenance, or the cost of ownership if you will (which includes hiring the techs to do said maintenance). It was a cost that wasn't explicit, though they kinda implied it under replacement costs. Unless you're talking about workers getting more efficient, which in that case it really doesn't matter since that only applies to the labor costs being used to make the things in question.

A highway of this manner is usualy cheaper to build and maintain while allowing for more varied use. The farmer and the trucker take the same road and provide significantly to that rural economy. HSR is rarely used to transport freight and the people who live in the middle of nowhere usualy do not commute long distances making the road more cost effective in the US and other large countries to link rural areas. HSR would be perfect for traveling up and down the coasts of the US but do not make much sense for the rest of the country, just like it doesnt make sense for all of China to get HSR.

​@@johnsmith-zj8vp People could have said the same thing when the interstates were first built: it doesn't make sense to build this freeway, there are too few users since everyone lives in the city. But once the interstates were built, suburbanization became convenient and 30 mile commutes became normal. HSR transit oriented development can create the same effect and enable 80 mile commutes, but with trains and in a way that is much more environmentally and fiscally responsible.

Strongtowns actually already has a mostly economic approach to the topic. Car-centric infrastructure and city development simply isn't financially sustainable. It's more like a ponzi scheme.

I'll be so so so so soooo looking forward to it

Adam has never really shown any interest in making collabs with opposing commentors. It's unlikely it'll happen, but I hope Adam makes a full response video to the second segment. He briefly touched upon it in his recent videos, but didn't say anything about EE's rebuttal to the concept of reverse induced demand.

Adam something is a plagiarist and his “urban” content is really just him copying pasting other people’s analyses. I don’t know why he even gets brought up as a serious “urbanist”.

Oops you broke the economic model..too many variables!

I endorse this statement

Yes, that's a key part that a lot of transportation "nerds" seem to miss. Fewer lanes don't solve traffic problems, but better transportation alternatives like trains and cycling paths do. The element of urban design is also very important.

Also keep in mind that public transport goes up a lot in quality and reliability as it becomes an overall higher priority. NJB has a great video on trains in Switzerland for example!

@@Daniel-mf9zx I’ve watched NJB’s swiss vid and it did got me envious with the train stuff. I wanna try that but of course I’d still like to have a car around even if my public transport is that good. Maybe a station wagon like a Benz E-class wagon 😂

@@steinarjonsson_ ". Fewer lanes don't solve traffic problems, but better transportation alternatives like trains and cycling paths do. " but we can't make that cycling path because there's a 65 lane road in the way. that's the point of us saying less lanes. because most streets don't have space for many lanes and alternatives

If you want your economy and population to grow you need roads, it's really that simple. China spent 1 trillion of high speed trains but they spent the same on roads too. You need everything. Not everyone is an office worker. I work for a company that every few months we need to move large items, the larger the roads the more items and faster we can move stuff which increases profitability. Now we can faster more more and transport more.

or maybe the population grew? Or the city became more attractive? Correlation doesn't equal causation. You don't drive on a road because it's there. You want to get somewhere and that is the cause of traffic.

It is addressed in the video. Lane expansion lags demand. Expanding 3 to 5 lanes was most likely 2 decades too late. So expanding to 5 lanes gave the appearance it did nothing or created more congestion. When in reality is just closed the gap at best in demand from years earlier and won't assist with new demand as the city grows.

It's because a lack of lanes is not what causes congestion, it's the bottlenecks, and adding lanes does *nothing* to alleviate those bottlenecks. Induced demand on top of this is what leads to increased congestion and travel time. It's not that 20% more lanes lead to 20% more traffic, as it's often misrepresented. Cars is simply not scalable at all, and as such a terrible solution for densely populated areas.

@@drscopeify Yes, you need roads for hauling and delivery of goods, that's entirely different from personal cars. The traffic generated from hauling and transportation of goods is nowhere near enough to need multi-lane roads. The expansion of lanes is exclusively due to excessive personal car traffic, which is ultimately a terrible, non-scalable mode of transportation in densely populated areas. The strain personal car usage causes on hauling and delivery of goods is very bad for the economy as it drives up transportation costs from trolleys being stuck in commuter traffic with people who should've been able to taken a more efficient mode of transportation.

Thats just bad health habit and probably a sign of bad education of lack of self respect. Or pure lazyness wich honestly should not be encourage or even accepted. :p

But such people would be more than willing to walk more than 5km during the game of golf or run a 10km or a marathon for a bragging rights....

@@ignatiushie4403 he doesn’t do both but I get your idea

some people just can not be helped

​@@blessedkarl5764 you're not "helping" US at all

I did the math for how much lithium stores we've got and how much we're mining of it each year... it's umm really not looking good. There's actually zero chance of electric cars replacing ice cars without asteroid mining or massively reducing our need for cars.

@@beskamir5977 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AHgAcbpsujI.html Cool Worlds has a good video on it

@@beskamir5977 Just because it isn't possible to make that many EVs doesn't mean the regulators will stop their efforts to making the ownership and manufacture of gas powered cars impossible. All the dudes who go to Davos will own cars, and take jet planes. All of the rich and politicians will have cars. I guess us working class people will just have to give up our cars due to ever tougher emissions standards and carbon taxes, and wind up getting robbed on busses and trains in high crime areas. I guess us blue collar people will have to get used to walking in the snow, rain, sleet, and high heat. Us working class people will just have to get used to "owning nothing and being happy".

​@@user-nu8in3ey8c you give off the vibes of someone who's never actually taken the bus but pretends to know all about what it's like to ride them Source: someone who rides the bus regularly

@@mothman7786 You give off the vibes of someone who has mostly been in good areas.

Yeah but you can spend 4 years getting a degree in just about anything these days lol.

is equal to a music appreciation degree. (both fake degree)

Pretty sure he has a Masters actually.

​@@ultrascreens5206 the breadth of human understanding gets wider every year, of course the breadth of academic disciplines would expand to match. Sure you can argue that based on your world view certain degrees dont add value to society, but its incorrect to argue they dont actually teach anything at all. You not understanding what they teach is not the same thing as them not teaching anything. Also weird take to say economics is a useless degree, virtually every human being is hugely affected by economics every day.

@@JD-ub5ic i didnt say it was useless though did I? Just pointed out that there are so many more degrees and people obtaining them that their value and worth is reduced. I know some dumbasses IRL that managed it. I also did it myself with minimal effort tbh

In a city like Tokyo where you have Train Line circle around the city and some cut across the city into the city center like a web. There are no demand for you to have a car at all. In 70-80s , Tokyo used to be look like Los Angeles today, full of car struck on the highways. This moment forced them to fund more on public transportation and in 30 years they be able to solved that problem once and for all. Today, if you want to have a car in Tokyo you need to prepared to have a packing lot for yourself before you can buy a car. So having a car became a choice instead of necessity hence ppl use train or bus instead for faster & cheap transportation.

Is there a study that says that most people do not like cars?

@@LtZetarn I live in a place with a great bus service and rail service. You really start to appreciate the convenience of it over owning a car after a while. Like, yeah, short term it does suck to wait for the bus in bad weather. But, like, everything is done for you on the bus, and if buses are plentiful you can get anywhere you want to go pretty quickly while you sit in a seat and relax. I understand the "I just want to sit in my own private car, turn on my music, and and have the freedom to go where I want when I want," but I think that if given the choice most people would rather sit down and read a book on their way to work, or listen to their music with headphones on, rather than having to worry about controlling their own vehicle and steering through traffic. Plus, it's so much more convenient to step outside of your home and wait a few minutes for the bus rather than start up your car. It's also so much cheaper.

Right? There’s SO MUCH evidence for induced demand.