this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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I always wondered that.
Is it traffic engineers who suggest adding another lane? Or is it stupid people who can't read data and demands it?
Both. 1980s Era civil/traffic engineers in NA were all trained for car=future=build road. Nowadays most traffic engineering/city planning schools teach multimodal transportation as The Way, but decades of car washing our cities has resulted in an almost total collapse of public support for anything except another lane. Luckily, most people sub-30 are aware of this and are slowly becoming politically active. Public opinion will shift slowly over the next decade or two and eventually the traffic engineers will be allowed to do the right thing.
I'm reading the Robert Caro biography of Robert Moses - the New York highway builder. By 1950 newspapers were saying "building these highways is a terrible idea, we need mass transit to move all the people that need to be moved unless you paved the entire city so no one could live here"
My university's traffic engineering curriculum was still pretty car-centric as of the late 2000s, and that's at a top-tier school so I assume most others were even more backwards.
Wanna make a difference? Get some of these stickers and slap em up everywhere. I've still got a few left over to put places.
https://parkingreform.org/products/sticker-10-pack
Go to your city "public opinion" sessions on zoning and highway design. One of our new circumferential highways has the first inverted diamond because some radical urbanists sandbagged the public hearing. Showing up to these things can make a big impact.
Usually the stupid people where I live