i disagree, by that logic we should still have just the old island highway two lane all the way to nanaimo? why expand any road if capacity is pointless. the fact that this is even a discussion is indicative of our problem. a more serious city with leadership that had a clue would have acknowledged the situation decades ago and would be working together to solve our congestion. cities build roads. thats pretty much their raison d'etre
I direct you to Joel Cohen's classic, "The Counterintuitive in Conflict and Cooperation" - a short essay that illustrates, with grade school math, that increasing the "capacity" of a network can make getting through it more difficult (page 5 of the pdf if you want to skip the good stuff). Cohen points out a few other simple systems that have mind-bogglingly unexpected results when toyed with. Real traffic situations (and more representative models) are more complex, but encounter identical issues. The converse, that removing a section of a network can speed things up, has been observed in the real world also - a construction project in New York City comes to mind, I can't remember the details, but I'm sure CoreyBurger would know a few more examples off the top of his head. Corey?
Expanding road capacity blindly, building roads, does not automagically improve things.
Grade school math.
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* This must be like the fifth time I've referenced this article in the past decade on the forum. Or maybe the twentieth.
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