So, that technique is actually an attempt to avoid a major problem in road development: you make a road, and now it’s easier to travel so people use it and it’s congested. So you make it bigger and traffic flows again, and so more people start using it and it gets congested. This keeps going until you have the freeways in Texas: 26 lanes of bad traffic.
Instead, one notion is to make the road wider only when it needs to be. It usually keeps traffic more mitigated for a few years before habits adjust.
The real fix is to start removing lanes from the highways. People will find other ways to get there and schedule travel as needed. Or they’ll move out of the suburbs so they can get to work, or, the most ridiculous notion, they’ll vote for the creation of the most basic of light rail systems.
Realistically they’ll bulldoze another 50 mile stretch of urban housing so people can drive easier for the 4 busy hours a day for the next few years, until we eventually entirely demolish the cities to make way for the roads that bring people into them.
The thing is we do have better options, but they’d need to spend money
We have a pretty good commuter rail service, so one option is to just let the highway get congested. Ideally improve rail service but we shouldn’t even need to
The real problem is bottlenecks. Let’s spend the money to fix some ramps and interchanges. We don’t need to worry about more lanes if the traffic moves
So, that technique is actually an attempt to avoid a major problem in road development: you make a road, and now it’s easier to travel so people use it and it’s congested. So you make it bigger and traffic flows again, and so more people start using it and it gets congested. This keeps going until you have the freeways in Texas: 26 lanes of bad traffic.
Instead, one notion is to make the road wider only when it needs to be. It usually keeps traffic more mitigated for a few years before habits adjust.
The real fix is to start removing lanes from the highways. People will find other ways to get there and schedule travel as needed. Or they’ll move out of the suburbs so they can get to work, or, the most ridiculous notion, they’ll vote for the creation of the most basic of light rail systems.
Realistically they’ll bulldoze another 50 mile stretch of urban housing so people can drive easier for the 4 busy hours a day for the next few years, until we eventually entirely demolish the cities to make way for the roads that bring people into them.
The thing is we do have better options, but they’d need to spend money