For decades, state and federal highway agencies have justified massive projects with traffic forecast models. But a closer look reveals a troubling pattern of exaggeration, manipulation and outright falsification in these models.
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Biking advocates often argue that cities should add bike infrastructure because it'll reduce congestion. Reality is harder to predict. Here's why you should shift away from reducing congestion arguments and what you could focus on instead.
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If offered the choice between paid and free parking, many people would probably choose the latter. But free parking may be creating more problems than it’s worth.
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There is currently a mandate in the new Ohio budget bill that an interchange must be built between Brunswick and Strongsville. But odds are, it’s only going to make traffic problems in the area worse.
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Adding an interstate exit will not fix congestion issues for this highway in Ohio. Here’s why.
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MassDOT has proposed an expensive plan to reduce congestion in Fairhaven, MA…by causing congestion?
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The New Jersey Turnpike Authority plans to spend $4.7 billion updating and widening an eight-mile section of the turnpike, in the hopes of relieving congestion. Here’s why it’s not going to help.
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America’s first experiment with charging a toll to enter a congested urban area is going to begin in New York City next year.
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Part of why we can't agree on constructive solutions to traffic congestion is that our basic mental model of what causes traffic is wrong. But what if we made a slight update to that model?
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These observations from a morning detour demonstrate why small neighborhood side streets are better than big, wide highways, even when it comes to moving traffic.
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We’ve spent trillions fighting congestion so that it’s easy to drive everywhere. But we’re fighting a losing battle, and simultaneously losing our ability to walk anywhere.
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Our national transportation obsession has been about maximizing the amount that you can drive. We now need to focus on minimizing the amount you are forced to drive.
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It goes by many names — the Jevons Paradox, Braess Paradox, Marchetti’s Constant or Downs’ Triple Convergence — but the science is clear: expanding freeway capacity makes traffic worse.
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Cities all over the world are adapting to give small businesses the best chance to survive the COVID-19 crisis. Will your town or city do the same?
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Shifting traffic patterns are backing up decades of data: the way to fix our highways isn’t expanding capacity but rather managing demand.
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The way we design our cities guarantees a flood of congestion. And then we pour billions of dollars into highway expansion, only to worsen the problem we created in the first place.
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What kind of problem is traffic? Is it a mathematical or programming problem, a physics problem, an engineering problem, an economics problem, or a cultural, behavioral, or political one? The right answer: “Yes.”
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No, you’re not stuck in congestion because your city’s infrastructure is “inadequate” to handle growth.
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There are a ton of good reasons to invest in transit. Making life easier for drivers isn’t one.
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Not for the first time, the Car-pocalypse failed to materialize around Seattle’s new SR-99 tunnel. This is further proof we’ve been underestimating commuters’ ability to adjust to transportation changes. Have we also been overestimating how much they value these multibillion-dollar megaprojects in the first place?
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