Yeah nimbyisn isnt just blocking homes. Its rampant for every project. High speed rail in california has spent billions and years fighting nimbys. Every factory, every buisness, every job often faces nimbyism to try and keep out economic growth because the area will be slightly buiser lmao.
As I understand it, the problem building high speed rail in California isn't that people are trying to stop it, but rather that everybody who has the power to throw up roadblocks realizes that they can use it to extract something from the state.
Not endorsing here but it's not like that's not over entirely nothing. Our car-centric infrastructure means anywhere that is busy is basically impossible to navigate, which... I mean nearly every other G20 nation has a much more diverse transportation system than us, and car focused infrastructure is by far the most inefficient way to move people. It's why I'm still a remote worker despite loving my job, coworkers, and the office: I don't want to deal with commuting in a major metro. Numerous others who work where I do regularly clock commutes in the 30 minute range to travel 10 miles. It's absurd.
And it's not JUST inconvenient, it's costly. Living in a place with more people and more traffic means you pay higher insurance premiums and spend more on fuel, unless you have an EV of course.
Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying, especially with the shit way the United States goes about building, it isn't a position completely without merit.
NIMBYism ensures that cars will be the only way to access any areas, because any public transit projects which would reduce traffic get blocked. Roads are the lowest common denominator so they happen.
There’s no reason 280 and 101 can’t also have corresponding high speed rail lines to cut commute times from San Jose to SF down from 2 hours to a fraction of that.
At the risk of being That Guy, traffic on high-demand corridors is not caused by building too much or too little or the wrong things; it is caused by lack of congestion pricing. If you don't have that, then you'll have congestion anywhere people want to be, regardless of whether you build lots of roads or build lots of trains or don't build at all. Building roads or trains might (or might not) still be a good thing to do, in the sense of creating more economic value by increasing throughput and so making more marginal trips viable, but that induced demand means the roads will still be congested. Whereas if you have congestion pricing you can just decide how much congestion you want to tolerate and set it at whatever level achieves that.
The problem with the 'induced demand' paradigm is that it leads to cities not investing in infrastructure, and often designing the city to be hard to enter or exit, and impossible to bypass. This is one instance where there are many examples of the 'slippery slope' coming to pass.
If we want people to take mass transit, we should make it better, instead of making everything else terrible.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. "Induced demand" isn't a policy paradigm; it's just the observation that if you make it easier for more people to get somewhere, then more people will go there. Without congestion pricing, the only equilibrium (until you exhaust all demand, which isn't going to happen in hot metro areas) is the one where the roads are congested enough to deter the next marginal person from using them. With congestion pricing, you can choose a different equilibrium without the deadweight loss of people stuck in traffic. The question of how much to invest in infrastructure, and what kinds, can then be addressed separately in whatever way makes sense given local conditions.
Everyone that I’ve ever heard mention ‘induced demand’ with respect to roads does so while advocating against the construction of additional infrastructure capacity for passenger vehicles (cars). This correlation is consistent enough that it does indicate some sort of ‘induced demand paradigm’.
I agree that ‘congestion pricing’ does impact traffic, but it does so by changing the cost function, and granting the city government additional revenue from (usually poorer) people who it is not accountable to.
Yes, it's definitely the case that a lot of mass transit advocates are confused about this and talk about induced demand in an unproductive way.
New York City's congestion pricing scheme was approved at the state level, so it's not true that people living outside the city didn't get a say—though people from New Jersey didn't, and can reasonably complain.
It's theoretically possible that congestion pricing could be welfare-reducing if peak demand is inelastic enough. If this were happening, then (1) traffic wouldn't fall much unless the price were raised to extremely high levels, and (2) frequent commuters would be ones most harmed by the policy and would be its most fervent opponents. In New York, we see the opposite: traffic has fallen sharply and frequent commuters are the policy's biggest fans (https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pri...). Similar things have been seen internationally in other cities; people often initially resist having to pay for something they're used to getting for free, but once it's in place, it's durable and popular because people don't want to go back to traffic jams.
Whether congestion pricing is welfare-positive really depends on your utility function. I think rich commuters probably like it, and poorer people who need to drive for work probably hate it. My concerns are more related to political accountability, political incentives, and discrimination against non-voters, all of which exist here.
You have the cause backward. Induced demand is the observation that because people cannot get someplace they already want to go they are going something else instead.
The whole point of a city is all the things you can do. If you don't want to go someplace then what are you doing in a city - there are plenty of nice cheap places to live in very rural areas where you can sit in your house going nowhere. Thus cities need to build infrastructure to such that there is no induced demand and the people there can do what they want.
Note that I didn't specify what they build. Most cities should be building metro systems not roads.
Induced demand is only a problem for transportation methods like driving that aren’t scalable. With a metro, you just add more trains and more frequent departure times. Of course such an “ambitious” plan requires political will and less veto power for current residents.
Congestion pricing isn't sufficient for the majority of American cities. If you have a major city with few to no inter-city transit options except cars, all the congestion pricing in the world won't shift transit modalities in the short to medium term because alternatives simply don't exist, at least until you price out the lower wage earners entirely and drop aggregate demand. You need to build out public transit options first to provide alternatives that people can take to mitigate the pressures of congestion pricing, but that takes us back to the original point.
Indeed, everything's always easier when there's a greater wealth of transportation resources available and people have more options. Ideally there should be enough road and/or train capacity to get everyone where they want to go.
If that's not the case, then congestion pricing works by putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can. This is, in fact, a good thing to do; if not everyone who wants to use the roads can do so at once, because there aren't enough roads, then it's most efficient to give the space to those who most need it by willingness to pay. (Regressive distributional impacts of this can be addressed with the revenue that congestion pricing raises, e.g., by cutting consumption taxes.) Making people sit in traffic does no good at all and is just wasteful.
But if you want not just to eliminate that waste, but to actually increase people's mobility, then you need to build enough roads or trains. Whether that's worth the cost depends, as always, on local conditions.
(To be clear, the goal from this perspective is not to "shift transit modalities"; it's to get people where they're going without making them waste time in traffic. Sometimes that means getting more of them onto trains, and sometimes it doesn't.)
> everything's always easier when there's a greater wealth of transportation resources
It’s not just easier. If there are no other options, it doesn’t matter what congestion toll you put. The only option is car.
> putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can
Sure, but for most people the demand for transportation before and after normal working hours is inelastic. A smart policy takes that into account and doesn’t inconvenience people for going to/from work.
The real effect of congestion charges when there isn't good other options is whoever enacts them is voted out of office and anything they might have done to give people other options is scrapped as well. NYC can get away with them in the dense parts because there are enough options that the people who vote there mostly use transit and so they don't pay the price anyway and thus don't care.
California might also take note that the same induced demand argument works for housing. Currently the reverse is happening, as California fails to meet demand (and costs skyrocket) the state failing to grow like it could.
> Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying
In my city, the same people who are against housing also oppose transit. They don't want the city to grow, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. If you tell them we can build transit and create walkable neighborhoods, and growth can be a positive rather than a negative, they hate that idea just as much as if we grow and it's a gridlocked disaster. Maybe even more so.
