Just because your problem is one of strained capacity, don’t assume increasing capacity is the answer
Last month, New York all but banned private cars from 14th Street, a major thoroughfare in Manhattan, in an effort to let buses travel faster. The city’s permanently aggrieved car lobby – loud when leaning pointlessly on their horns, equally loud when complaining they’re hard done by – predicted chaos. They warned that the traffic would be displaced to narrower nearby streets, thereby just shifting the problem, or making it worse. It hasn’t happened yet, though. The reason is a reverse version of “induced demand” , the phenomenon whereby making roads wider, in an effort to ease congestion, attracts more traffic, eliminating the benefits. (There’s a 26-lane highway outside Houston, Texas, probably the world’s widest road, where evening commute times increased by 55% in the years following an expansion.) So, when capacity is reduced, as on 14th Street, it follows that demand will fall.
The logic here isn’t hard to see – provide more of something, or charge less for it, and people will use more of it – but it’s easy to overlook how many areas of life it affects. One well-known example is electricity usage, where the Jevons paradox explains how making appliances more energy efficient can backfire by stimulating demand. It’s massively cheaper, and kinder to the environment, to keep a bottle of milk cool in 2019 than it was in 1940, but the result isn’t that we use less electricity on refrigeration: it’s that people buy bigger fridges, or multiple fridges, and that more people lower down the global income ladder have fridges to begin with. This brings many benefits, but lower energy consumption isn’t among them.
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