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The congestion charge in London was originally set at £5 when the program was first introduced on February 17, 2003. Ken Livingstone, the Major of London, said this at the time…
After his re-election in 2004, he promptly raised the congestion charge to £8 for private vehicles and £7 for commercial traffic. He then supported raising the charge to £10 by 2008. Currently, the congestion charge sits at £11.50 a day.
Then they need to keep raising the congestion charge on private vehicles, until it has the desired effect.
I don't know many people that could afford 20 pounds a day to drive into the city.
Edit: Or maybe they don't need to raise the price.
According to this vehicle traffic in the congestion zone has been reduced by 30%.
Then they need to keep raising the congestion charge on private vehicles, until it has the desired effect.
I don't know many people that could afford 20 pounds a day to drive into the city.
Edit: Or maybe they don't need to raise the price.
According to this vehicle traffic in the congestion zone has been reduced by 30%.
It doesn't seem to bother you when a politician misleads and deceives the taxpayers as long as they are pushing an agenda that you support. Just remember that it cuts both ways.
And the pressure to migrate to suburbs would not be motivated by the requirements for automobile ownership. Nor would there be traffic congestion, with 80% less automobiles, trucks and buses on the road.
People migrated to suburbs because cities were terrible places to live in. They were crowded, polluted, limited housing. Suburbs exist well before highways. There always been traffic congestion. The only problem is that highways did not reduce traffic congestion overall. No one bother to find out how will this affect the adjacent streets that intersect with the highways.
Everyone thinks transit is the ultimate solution. Everyone does not live near a transit station. Transit does not stop at every building or neighborhood. Everyone can't live close to their jobs. Some people still have to drive to the nearest station and they don't have unlimited parking. Transit takes a small percentage of drivers off the road. Relying on transit alone will not make a different. Someone else on the highway will simply take their place and the cycle repeats itself. Everyone don't find transit to be any use to them no matter what. Everyone has different preferences and they need to be acknowledge.
The problem with widening roads is that the construction take too long. Traffic is growing while they are wasting 5-7 years to study, fund and build the road. The traffic is already there. The data collected initially is outdated by the time construction is completed. No one bothers to update the data or anticipate growth when it comes to roads. As for transit, planners tend to underestimate the cost Then they come up with some baseless claim to convince others that this is a good idea when it's doomed from the start.
Right, it's not "induced demand". It's "pent-up demand". If your roads are already at LOS F and you spend 20 years building one extra lane (cut down from three because the environment, costs, or whatever), your new lane will be (surprise) at LOS F when you open it. If your area is desirable, your demand will grow whether or not you build the supply. Unless, of course, you make traffic so horrible it actually reduces the desirability of your area.
The same demented logic applies to every form of transportation if it also applies to roads - I'm sick to death of this double standard here. If you all induced demand harpers truly believed in your theory then you would oppose any improvement or expansion of any form of transportation. In fact anything beyond roads one lane in each direction anywhere and a single rail line per city will never work to relieve congestion - as a matter of fact, taking the theory to its logical conclusion, we could reduce congestion and improve traffic still further if no roads or railways were ever built at all!
There's no double standard going on.
Induced demand is a problem for our roadways because we have spent and continue to spend a lot of money building roadways and have seemed to reach a point (for many areas) where the marginal cost has exceeded the marginal value of an extra mile of lane. And this says nothing of the ongoing cost of existing roadways or how society shoulders that burden. Nor does this suggest that roads or cars are "bad"; roads and cars are tools which operate best is some contexts but not others.
So it is important that we, as a society, talk about making better use of existing roadways and about moving to higher density transit systems. If, and when, the MV > MC for those systems, it will be time for a similar conversation.
Which is the solution urbanists ignore. If traffic is bad enough people will reroute.
That's not a solution. That's the default option, but it's not a solution insofar as it improves the situation. Yes, we need some metric to price this resource--dollars, time, hassle, etc. But that doesn't suggest that we need to blight an area in the process.
That's not a solution. That's the default option, but it's not a solution insofar as it improves the situation. Yes, we need some metric to price this resource--dollars, time, hassle, etc. But that doesn't suggest that we need to blight an area in the process.
Why does rerouting blight an area? Traffic that is not heading downtown or to that congested area simply avoids it and most cities have much more land area that just the downtown section.
Why does rerouting blight an area? Traffic that is not heading downtown or to that congested area simply avoids it and most cities have much more land area that just the downtown section.
Let's take two steps back for a moment.
Nybbler said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by nybbler
Unless, of course, you make traffic so horrible it actually reduces the desirability of your area.
ie, you make traffic so appalling that it, effectively, blights an area.
You quoted Nybbler and said that was a
Quote:
Originally Posted by chirack
solution urbanists ignore.
I wasn't responding to the idea of rerouting traffic. That happens normally if an alternative route becomes no worse for time than the conventional route. I was responding to the false and entirely different idea that reducing the desirability of an area was an effective solution. The two--rerouting traffic and area desirability--are separate concepts. The former is how people deal with the "cost", in this case measured in time, of getting between A and B; the latter is a discussion of demand for getting to an area, without statement of the "cost" that demand causes.
Rerouting happens anyway and the urbanists' solution is nearly always to punish drivers via "traffic calming" devices, never to improve the clogged artery so it isn't clogged. As for "no double standard", a double standard is being applied when you just decree that "there are enough lane-miles" when the plain fact of current demand far exceeding the supply of lane-miles suggests there is not enough to accommodate what the public wants to do on these roads. That assessment represents a bias against drivers in favor of riders, pedestrians, and bicyclists; and given how transportation is currently managed in this economy it also represents a political choice based upon a subjective judgment of value. I have no problem with such choices and indeed I consciously do just that myself, but I do have a problem with people pontificating for it as if it's something other than that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nybbler
Right, it's not "induced demand". It's "pent-up demand". If your roads are already at LOS F and you spend 20 years building one extra lane (cut down from three because the environment, costs, or whatever), your new lane will be (surprise) at LOS F when you open it.
Indeed, and then that is used as an argument that "more roads won't work" when the proximate cause of congestion getting worse is the very opposition to new roads environmentalists, penny-pinchers, and NIMBYs hold to on the premise of "more roads won't work" . What really annoys me is how no major city in modern times has even tried to eliminate congestion in even the smallest area, which means that any theory remains less tested than we'd all like; the closest any American city has come to testing the "yes we can eliminate congestion" theory is (via dumb luck) Kansas City, which has the most freeway lane-miles per capita of any city in North America, which also happen to rank among the least-congested urban freeways .
As an aside Kansas City isn't known as a freeway city, but that's because of the size of the city itself. Los Angeles has a famously large freeway network, but as large as it is the city itself is even larger, giving it one of the lowest lane-miles per-capita on the continent. LA would have to triple its lane-miles to get to Kansas City's relative size; that, of course, is widely considered impractical, but the equivalent coverage by subway or rail would be even more so. Megacities, which include LA, by virtue of their sheer size pose immense challenges to any mode of transportation, and these figures nicely demonstrate it.
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. What really annoys me is how no major city in modern times has even tried to eliminate congestion in even the smallest area, which means that any theory remains less tested than we'd all like; the closest any American city has come to testing the "yes we can eliminate congestion" theory is (via dumb luck) Kansas City, which has the most freeway lane-miles per capita of any city in North America, which also happen to rank among the least-congested urban freeways 
.
