this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
27 points (100.0% liked)

Fuck Cars

10854 readers
52 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I was thinking about induced demand, and I wondered why the argument as it's made against cars/the expansion of highways isn't also applied to things like busses. Does it not occur to the same extent?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 7 points 6 days ago

It does. It does with every mode of transport (except for really rare and really weird cases).

The difference is in terms of scalability. Public transit like trains and buses are a lot more scalable than cars. A city that entirely uses public transit would be a lot more cost and space efficient and would be a lot better for the environment compared to a city that entirely uses cars.

The "induced demand" argument is primarily used against the "just one more lane will fix the traffic bro" argument. The complete argument goes as follows: Building one more lane for a given road won't end up reducing private automobile traffic. In fact, it would induce demand for travelling using private automobiles, thus increasing the demand for road space, thus making the road reach capacity a lot quicker than expected. Is it technically possible to design a city around cars, such that all its inhabitants can drive to their destinations? Sure. The costs (financial, environmental, health, etc.) however are huge. We don't want to pay these costs. Most individuals are not aware of these costs and are misled into believing that these costs are a lot less than what they actually are.