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Originally Posted by freeweed
False conclusion. Or at least built with incomplete data. I used to avoid Glenmore like the plague, but since GE5 I take it regularly. For the exact same trips I did before. This isn't induced demand, it's shifted demand from other roadways. Surely I'm not the only Calgarian this applies to.
You really have to look at traffic patterns as a whole to see if GE5 has actually induced demand. Because if 13,000 cars a day have been shifted from other routes, there's nothing "induced" whatsoever.
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Not that you don't have a point here, but trying to disprove a point in general using anecdotal information (something, I must point out, you do habitiually) is not sufficient either.
If we want to get technical, the broader term would be generated traffic, encompassing both shifted and induced demand. It is probably likely that more of the increase you see there is shifted, but it is impossible to discount that a portion of that is also induced (trips shifted from other modes, or trips now taken that weren't at all taken before.) Not that there were overly attractive alternatives to begin with in this case, in the long-run, this simply garauntees that future alternatives (if ever they were provided) are then harder to provide feasibly. Again, contributing to the nice little circle of supply and demand in road transportation.
And since we are considering the whole network: Didn't this all stem from a nice discussion on expanding Crowchild due to its ever increasing congestion? Since we are talking about a particular trip being made from the NW part of the city, and it is very likely that that isn't the only one, the question arises of how that driver gets from their to the GE5 in the first place... Crowchild trail is a rather safe assumption here. Strange, now it also requires a more urgent increased LOS.
Sure, we could do that. The most appropriate solution being something that at the very least that mirrors the GE5, but also with increasing the capacity of off-ramps (or their elimination...) further up ahead. I don't think a ball park of a cool billion here would be that far off. Or we could stop doing that and provide alternatives that then retain viability.
I'm thereby going to counter another point recently stated. That being that money should be spent on both roads and transit/alternatives. It is a broad statement but I'm going to go ahead and contend that if this includes road capacity increases of any significance through hard infrastructure anywhere in the inner (inner-middle) city, this is not a good idea. It is a further trap to making you have to spend more on both roads and alternatives, and a further addition to the nice little vicious circle.
Here is a little shocker - we can't have it all, and we already have more than enough expensive and subsidized/externality producing roads.
Let's not touch any long term effects here.
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No, but I highly doubt a planner who lives in the NE and drives to work every day has much of a clue of what the commuter experience on the NWLRT is like. I find it hard to believe any city planner has the time to drive every road, ride every train, walk every sidewalk in the city - which is why we end up with some pretty bizarre choices sometimes, and why a lot of the public distrusts "planners" as an entity. No one person (or small group of people) can know everything. Hence the need for public consultation.
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Very true. They can provide valuable insight into overlooked or unforeseen aspects of a plan or project. Yet, I don't think that should necessarily mean that the public's opinion necessarily needs to be acted on. The public, strangely enough, tends to act on individual interests and not that of society as a whole. Planning might be perceived as "social-engineering" or whatever happens to be the word of the day, until that individual is the one being negatively effected. (I guess in that regard, planners a little bit like the police.) Secondly, even if they aren't always acting on individual interest, it doesn't mean they fully understand the issue from a broad perspective. I don't want to explicitly say I'm right in the above case, but try, for example telling the people of Calgary that the way to reduce traffic issues in the long term is by
not increasing capacity...
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But I'm not so much trying to "disprove" anything here, rather make people actually think about what they're saying. Jumping to the conclusion of "induced demand!" every time road usage goes up is silly. It's on par with "it's colder today, therefore global warming is fake!".
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