I think there was at least one case where the city went broke maintaining roads and everyone left. That was a success.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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That was my every childhood game of SimCity.
My back was to put in rail everywhere with zero roads. People constantly complained about wanting roads, but there was never any congestion. And the desire for roads never seemed to affect anything.
Having been on a small town board, the truth is roads are funded at the state level (may vary by state) with funds distributed to the county governments, who maintain the county highways. The towns and cities get some amount from the county and more from the state to be used for anything highway related.
If this were not the case, and all else being equal many rural towns would go under. Private transportation is currently being subsidized at rates sometimes much higher than the property tax income the towns bring in. It's unsustainable and barely working like everything else, it's like long term vision is irrelevant and only short term gains are even considered....
CityNerd did a video explaining why this happens. It's because city planners and traffic engineers assume that the same proportion of people will drive in the future, just that there will be more of them. So if you assume everyone's still going to drive you have to build more lanes because everyone will drive.
90% of city planners quit one lane before fixing traffic forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeFw0I-igI
North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.
Building roads does decrease congestion. Just don't place them randomly. Use simulations and modern traffic engineering. Do you think that inaction build the Netherlands?
The netherlands did a lot more than just build roads. They built bike lanes, transit, walkability and made it legal for density to exist in their city, all things that north american cities resist as if it were the plague.
resist like plague
Maybe bad example, given we're talking about americans.
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Bike lanes are a part of fucking road building. So is transit infrastructure.
Bike lanes and transit is part of street building. The netherlands respect road hierarchy much more than north American standards do. America is also severely lacking rail infrastructure like intercity trains and cross country trains. Are you about to say that train building is part of road building too?
America cannot exclussively build roads to get out of their congestion nightmare, especially given the current standard for american roads which is basically every lane is built like a highway with the only difference being the speed limit number on the sign.
It seems very important to you to just talk about the US.
I live in the Philadelphia area and they're about to cut public transportation service by 45%. It's beyond insane what kind of catastrophe this is going to cause. Unfortunately public transportation here is heavily dependent on state funding and the GOP-controlled state legislature is in full fuck-the-blue-cities mode.
Removing roads decreases congestion: Braess' paradox
Roads for private cars are generally overbuilt and run directly into Braess' paradox. E.g. Five years after Sepulveda Pass widening, travel times on the 405 keep getting worse.
You notice it particularily when one road segment is built out, but the fewer lanes on other segments still keep the effective traffic flow rate constant (or lower due to all the merging and yielding that's now required). Min-cut max-flow theorem, my beloved.
Its almost as if roads have a low capacity due to how much space each car takes up, often for just 1 person. The solution to congestion is alternatives to driving. Everything else is just a band-aid unless you significantly restrict growth and through traffic.
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This post is about the lack of scientific evidence for your theory. Care to supply some?
Case studies are not scientific evidence, they're well-documented anecdotes that suggest the need for scientific study.
Case studies are scientific evidence. They are just not strong scientific evidence.
Assume the same conditions as of the famously quoted Braess' paradox (you do know the sources of what you are claiming, don't you?).
Consider then a subgraph consisting of three path-connected points A, B and C that is also a subtree of a larger more complicated graph representing the entire connected road network. Assume also for simplicity that the three points are equidistant and that A and C are connected through B only and that B is their only connection to the larger network.
Adding a road from A to C would now reduce congestion on the subtree, and cannot increase it on the larger graph due to the tree structure. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader, i.e. you.
TL;DR Wasted my time replying to a sea lion.
Maybe, but now people will go "oh driving is easier so I'll drive" and now there are more cars in the system, and thus more traffic. If you instead also make rail easy, some of them will go "oh I'll just take the subway" and not drive.
Cars suck for many more reasons other than Braess' paradox, even as it indeed adds to the sucking where applied. Being anti-car should be about more than just misrepresenting facts though, especially when science is in our favor.
We cannot argue that the car brains deny facts and then do the same in return. That undermines the whole argument.
Ever heard of induced demand?
Sure, you argued against the claim that roads can decrease congestion, the negation of which is the claim that it always increases congestion. Since I only need a single example to prove you wrong I can claim it to be irrelevant to the counter example provided.
Sometimes removing roads actually helps congestion
That's equivalent to only well placed roads removing congestion.
Sure an extra lane can relieve congestion, for a bit then 10 years later you're back to where you started or worse.
This is mostly due to the fact that American cities grow sprawl and not density. So basically unless there's a population collapse adding another lane is a temporary solution.
That's why they are basically always adding new lanes, they can't keep up with the demand. So instead of continually trying to keep up with demand it's time to work on reducing demand
Building roads is not an extra lane and an extra bus bike or tram lane has surely relieved congestion. Same for an extra lane for queueing in niche cases. Added a random feature at a random spot will not yield desired results.
Seems a bit pedantic, but sure.
New roads are unlikely to fix issues in many places. Small to medium sized town building a new connector would be helpful. Not so helpful for anything large or metro sprawl. Those places mostly limit themselves to adding additional lanes with little result
Fixing one bottleneck to find another bottleneck 3 years later is not an argument that bottlenecks should not be fixed
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Exactly this post is just extremely uninformed - but since we're in "fuck cars" I'm assuming things don't have to actually be true to fly here. Just anti-cars.
I've yet to see a study where additional lanes reduced congestion long term (3+ years), yet there have been many studies proving more lanes cause induced demand, which increases congestion
If we are just limiting the scope to three years than I assume building another lane causes more congestion short term anyway. Construction of new lanes slows down speed limits due to construction laws and construction eventually has to shut down the lane over at some point.
I should have clarified 3+ years after construction is completed.
I should've realized that TBH.
Either way, the point is the same, more lanes do not help.
When Malmö built the outer ring the congestion on the inner ring decreased substantially. This is common knowledge with the hundreds of thousands of people who live and drive cars here but you can at least find a sentence about it here as well: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yttre_Ringv%C3%A4gen
I'm guessing you 1) live in the US and 2) don't drive a car.
Build a new road is not equal to adding lanes to existing roads as the original meme implies.
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Doubles as the shelf where she keeps her fucks.
Robert Moses needs to be more (in)famous as the pioneer of this kind of bullshit. The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a must-read book for anybody that wants to know how the US got so fucked up.
It works exactly as intended, to drive sales of cars.
Yup. They're just going to add tolls to some of the lanes and make you pay more to use what you already paid for anyway.
Congestion pricing, on the other hand: observably a good policy.
I call them bribery lanes.
Just one more study bro
Well, they're adding one more lane right now here for busses only...
I think Veritadism just put out a video explaining some paradox about this topic.
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