In the latest feature from our ‘At What Cost’ series, we look at how a lack of transport infrastructure and investment is condemning millions to a life of inequality and hardship.
when the new road is actually built, the commute will be about 35 minutes.
Of course, even if it does work out that will only be temporary. Once the new route is also congested it will still be an hour commute. And the better the new route performs, the faster it will attract development and become congested.
But when your choice is effectively to drive or not go, we shouldn’t be surprised that people who need to go will overwhelmingly choose to drive.
I actually hear that all the time from people that make that assumption, but it’s coming from an assumption that the population density is high enough that a new road will inevitably become congested.
Knowing this area as I do, I don’t believe it will. Basically there’s a road that has two lanes each way for most of its length, but a section of about 6 miles was left as single lane for some reason, so it gets horribly congested around the junctions. The new road basically connects the two dualled sections, with the junctions replaced with flyovers and slip lanes.
The rest of this road doesn’t get congested, and it has been dual carriageway for decades without any congestion issues. I can go 60 miles eastwards in an hour (just not to a town or city with a university that offers the degree I need for my career) and hit absolutely no traffic. There’s just a very serious bottleneck to the west on an otherwise very nice, efficient road.
That said, the whole area has a perfectly good railway that would be very usable if there were enough trains, and enough buses to make the train stations accessible.
Certainly there are lots of cases of plain-bad road designs causing unnecessary bottlenecks. And at least as you have described it, this sounds like a bottleneck. Congestion can either be blamed by plain old demand or by such bottlenecks. From a traffic engineer’s view, demand-based congestion is a good thing because it means the road is highly utilized and working as intended. And bottleneck-based congestion is just negligence.
That said, increasing road capacity is a one-way ratchet in exactly the way you have just described. This gradual widening of roads just continues moving congestion around the network to other places until, the engineers will say, it’s diluted enough that no one notices it anymore. At some point, a road was widened or a new spur connected or other forms of growth happened that made this 2-lane section inadequate when it once was probably more than enough. And fixing this road WILL make the place you live suddenly more appealing to, for example, a commuter student who couldn’t previously tolerate the long commute. Long-term, it will inspire car-dependent growth. A new choke-point will emerge. Either that or the region simply stops growing – which is a different kind of death sentence with the way modern society is structured. You can play whack-a-mole with the choke-points or you can invest in an actual solution like, as you correctly pointed out, adding the train service
Adding that train service does the same thing, by the way. It inspires growth towards train-dependent development. The difference being that trains mostly become more economical with scale while cars mostly become less economical with scale. Induced demand is a law of nature, at least so long as the population and economy are growing. Which we have to assume until leaders are willing to swallow how apocalypticly-dangerous it is to found all societies on the debt/growth cycle rather than sustainability.
In fairness, this is the only dual carriageway we have on the entire peninsula, so it’s basically the main artery road not only for people, but for goods (which also goes back to some of the issues with the railways). This definitely is not an area with a massive amount of unneeded road building - it’s more the case that bottlenecks like the one described are left to fester for 30 years before someone convinces the government to allocate some funding for it. That said, the roads we have are fine for the local population density - there isn’t a lot of people here most of the year and traffic flows just fine. If we could… you know, get rid of all the tourists that more than doubles the region’s population during the summer, it would be a long time before any further road changes would be needed.
On the plus side, those same tourists also stop the region growing: they bought 40% of the houses so they can use them for 2 weeks a year or rent them out to other tourists. An awful lot of problems would go away if tourism came to an end as an industry. People insist we need it for the local economy, but I think it actually stifles the region’s potential. Tourism just traps people in insecure low-paid work in hospitality and in ridiculously expensive housing. I feel like tourism is another symptom of the growth and consumption based society: the whole concept that you absolutely need to basically go and “consume” some other place for a couple weeks a year, regardless of the impact it has on the local services, infrastructure, and people, seems inherently exploitative and ultimately not sustainable. But of course, we can’t do anything about it because it’s “stopping people from doing things they enjoy” or whatever.
Of course, even if it does work out that will only be temporary. Once the new route is also congested it will still be an hour commute. And the better the new route performs, the faster it will attract development and become congested.
But when your choice is effectively to drive or not go, we shouldn’t be surprised that people who need to go will overwhelmingly choose to drive.
I actually hear that all the time from people that make that assumption, but it’s coming from an assumption that the population density is high enough that a new road will inevitably become congested.
Knowing this area as I do, I don’t believe it will. Basically there’s a road that has two lanes each way for most of its length, but a section of about 6 miles was left as single lane for some reason, so it gets horribly congested around the junctions. The new road basically connects the two dualled sections, with the junctions replaced with flyovers and slip lanes.
The rest of this road doesn’t get congested, and it has been dual carriageway for decades without any congestion issues. I can go 60 miles eastwards in an hour (just not to a town or city with a university that offers the degree I need for my career) and hit absolutely no traffic. There’s just a very serious bottleneck to the west on an otherwise very nice, efficient road.
That said, the whole area has a perfectly good railway that would be very usable if there were enough trains, and enough buses to make the train stations accessible.
Certainly there are lots of cases of plain-bad road designs causing unnecessary bottlenecks. And at least as you have described it, this sounds like a bottleneck. Congestion can either be blamed by plain old demand or by such bottlenecks. From a traffic engineer’s view, demand-based congestion is a good thing because it means the road is highly utilized and working as intended. And bottleneck-based congestion is just negligence.
That said, increasing road capacity is a one-way ratchet in exactly the way you have just described. This gradual widening of roads just continues moving congestion around the network to other places until, the engineers will say, it’s diluted enough that no one notices it anymore. At some point, a road was widened or a new spur connected or other forms of growth happened that made this 2-lane section inadequate when it once was probably more than enough. And fixing this road WILL make the place you live suddenly more appealing to, for example, a commuter student who couldn’t previously tolerate the long commute. Long-term, it will inspire car-dependent growth. A new choke-point will emerge. Either that or the region simply stops growing – which is a different kind of death sentence with the way modern society is structured. You can play whack-a-mole with the choke-points or you can invest in an actual solution like, as you correctly pointed out, adding the train service
Adding that train service does the same thing, by the way. It inspires growth towards train-dependent development. The difference being that trains mostly become more economical with scale while cars mostly become less economical with scale. Induced demand is a law of nature, at least so long as the population and economy are growing. Which we have to assume until leaders are willing to swallow how apocalypticly-dangerous it is to found all societies on the debt/growth cycle rather than sustainability.
In fairness, this is the only dual carriageway we have on the entire peninsula, so it’s basically the main artery road not only for people, but for goods (which also goes back to some of the issues with the railways). This definitely is not an area with a massive amount of unneeded road building - it’s more the case that bottlenecks like the one described are left to fester for 30 years before someone convinces the government to allocate some funding for it. That said, the roads we have are fine for the local population density - there isn’t a lot of people here most of the year and traffic flows just fine. If we could… you know, get rid of all the tourists that more than doubles the region’s population during the summer, it would be a long time before any further road changes would be needed.
On the plus side, those same tourists also stop the region growing: they bought 40% of the houses so they can use them for 2 weeks a year or rent them out to other tourists. An awful lot of problems would go away if tourism came to an end as an industry. People insist we need it for the local economy, but I think it actually stifles the region’s potential. Tourism just traps people in insecure low-paid work in hospitality and in ridiculously expensive housing. I feel like tourism is another symptom of the growth and consumption based society: the whole concept that you absolutely need to basically go and “consume” some other place for a couple weeks a year, regardless of the impact it has on the local services, infrastructure, and people, seems inherently exploitative and ultimately not sustainable. But of course, we can’t do anything about it because it’s “stopping people from doing things they enjoy” or whatever.