How to improve a city by removing roads

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Improve the city. The fundamental law of road congestion

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Improve the city. The fundamental law of road congestion

Apparently the title of this article may seem totally contradictory to the rational thought that all urbanites can have … Remove roads! It means absolute chaos, the decline of urbanism.

Although not all cities are the same, nor do their inhabitants have the same way of traveling or understanding the urban environment, there are a series of key points that possibly change our way of thinking or, at least, of reconsidering and having another point of view.

There is a more than interesting article (From HERE) that talks about five cities - New York, Milwaukee, Seoul, Portland and San Francisco - in which at a decisive moment it was decided to demolish one of its main roads entrance to the downtown area for different reasons.

After disposal of the vial, it was not decided to replace it with another roadto, more was chosen to satisfy the needs of citizens with a great a great boulevard, parks, garden areas, etc.

Apparently the elimination of main roads can seem like it would cause total chaos… And where are all the cars circulating now?

The result of this new experience for drivers is that traffic demand redistributed itself by the following routes:

The volume of cars in roads fell drastically.
A large number of drivers chose to use public transport.
Another number of drivers used other access routes.
Some drivers opted for several the time they travel.

Another consequence that happened is that the Property values near new recreation areas increased in value.

In reality what has happened is called Induced demand (We could define the term asaction of organizing, encouraging and guiding the population towards the use of a service). This means that as the supply of a valuable good (such as roads) increases, that good before the population will be used by more cars, and vice versa if we apply the opposite (From Induced demand we can learn more).

In other words: More roads in cities = more cars on the road

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The Basic Law of road congestion

In 2009, two economists from the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania published a study called the Fundamental Law of road congestion (The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion) from which we can identify points of interest:

If the number of roads in cities or on their boulevards is increased:

The number of vehicles that transit in the city is increased.
The average number of kilometers that the vehicles travel is increased.
The entry of new residents into cities is increasing.

We conclude that an increase in the provision of roads in a city is unlikely to reduce congestion in a city. although they do not stop incessantly telling us that we have to have new roads, highways and highways to improve the quality of the inhabitants of a city.

Another very interesting topic is thatwhen road capacity is reduced, drivers start to 'disappear'. People choose to live closer to where they work. Public transport is chosen and used more. People go to the office at different times and people make all kinds of different decisions in response to this change of route, just as they do when there are new roads to use.

Obviously we cannot dedicate ourselves to eliminating the roads of the cities, but we can have a different vision of what happens when we widen the roads or remove them, and be aware that the solution to the congestion of many cities is not to build roads.

Links of interest: