Friday Video: Widening Roads Is A Dumb Waste of Money

But Traffic Engineers LOVE IT.

Between 1993 and 2017, in the top 100 urban areas, the population grew by 32%. We decided to tackle traffic by expanding freeway lane miles even faster—42%.

But traffic got worse!

Traffic delays are up 144%.

That’s because there isn’t a fixed amount of demand for driving. I call this the “lump of traffic fallacy” - a joke only an economics nerd can appreciate. Demand for driving at a given time of day changes very easily based on its convenience.

For decades, experts have known that new highway lanes actually create more demand for driving, rather than sating existing demand and fixing traffic. But traffic engineers have continued to make dishonest demands that we expand roads to fix traffic. Worse, DOT marketers make the even more dishonest claim that this will help with pollution.

Upton Sinclair famously quipped: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Here is a short video that Voxsplains why:

Interestingly, WSDOT Engineers appear to have juiced projections to justify the 520 expansion—if you click on the video below, it will take you to the relevant 50 second segment.

And yet, the fight is on for a billions of dollars massive expansion of I-5 cross the Columbia River. Which just makes me