Study: Induced Demand Works for Bikes and Transit, too
Left wing doublethink is that induced demand for roads means you shouldn't build roads because there's no point, but induced demand for bikes and public transit are good and means you should promote them even more. They just hate cars and roads
London congestion charge rises to £11.50 a day - "Sue Terpilowski, the group's London Policy Chairman, said: "Congestion has risen back to pre-2003 levels and it is clear that the scheme is not fit for purpose."
From 2014. Left wing logic: there was no point introducing the congestion charge since traffic returned to pre-congestion charge levels
Toronto traffic doesn’t just seem worse, it is worse – and data shows these major bottlenecks are to blame - The Globe and Mail - "While people living in the Greater Toronto Area have long complained about gridlock, data compiled for The Globe and Mail by traffic analytics firm INRIX shows that the problem is truly getting worse, with traffic surpassing pre-pandemic levels and skyrocketing since the peak of COVID lockdowns, despite traffic volumes remaining relatively flat. Instead, bottlenecks have converged around major construction projects, suggesting that road capacity rather than demand is a bigger part of the problem... A July study commissioned by the Toronto Region Board of Trade showed that 42 per cent of GTA and Hamilton residents said they avoid shopping, going out for entertainment and events because of congestion while 38 per cent refrained from dining out. Giles Gherson, the board’s chief executive officer, said the study also revealed that more than half of residents considered relocating outside the region because of traffic. The same study pegged the price of congestion in Toronto at $11-billion in lost productivity and opportunity cost per year. As Mr. Gherson sees it, traffic is fundamentally undermining Toronto’s business competitiveness."
If the myths left wingers believe about induced demand are right, reducing roads shouldn't worsen congestion (that is also the implied logic when they claim bike lanes, bus rapid transit lanes etc won't worsen traffic). Yet...
Induced Demand Debunked - "Which type of infrastructure should government invest in: transit almost nobody will use, or lanes everybody will use? Induced demand is a false argument. Nobody says “don’t build a new airport terminal or runway – it will just fill up with new flights” or “don’t build a new port terminal – it will just fill up with ships” (🙄 eye roll)"
What does "induced demand" really amount to? - "One of my resolutions for the new year is to encourage people in the pro-housing community to spend less time engaging with the bizarre arguments of Marxist geographers and other hard-left NIMBYs and more time addressing normie concerns about a world of housing abundance. And the biggest, most important thing on that list is traffic... the overall volume of traffic would increase if our neighborhood was upzoned... the downside of more traffic is actually relatively small compared to the benefits of a more economically dynamic city. People don’t like traffic jams, but they don’t like high taxes or high levels of homelessness either. But the traffic issue is worth tackling on its own terms both because it’s a problem in the cities we already have and because fear of traffic is a major impediment to building the cities we should have. The New York Times recently did a big feature grounded in induced demand theory headlined “Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?” which skirted around the kind of obvious answer that we do it because it lets more people drive to more places. In other words, I think the idea of induced demand is just somewhat less paradoxical than people make it out to be. Consider the traffic impact of a mass transit project rather than highway widening... “Ambitious Mass Transit Projects Don’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing Them?” New York City has by far the biggest and most robust mass transit system in the country, but that hasn’t ended road congestion. And yet I think it’s obvious that a high-ridership extension of the Purple Line wouldn’t be a policy failure even if, via the induced demand mechanism, it didn’t end up impacting traffic congestion. The success would be that more people get to go more places. Some of those extra people would be metro riders and some would be drivers, but the point is that region-wide mobility would be improved. By the same token, the existence of serious traffic congestion problems in New York doesn’t show that the New York City Subway, NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the LIRR are all pointless. They’re vital to the existence of the region — without them, the whole metro area would be smaller and poorer."
Opinion: Induced Travel Demand Induces Media Attention - "While the theory of induced demand is sound, leaving the impression that induced demand will fully absorb the capacity of new roadway investments or that new demand is somehow bad is very misleading. Most new demand on expanded roads comes from new population, new employment and economic activity (some or all of which may have been attracted by enhanced transportation infrastructure), traffic rerouted from neighborhood streets or congested roads, or travel that has shifted in time to the benefit of the traveling public now that more capacity is available to undertake activities during desired travel times. Second, today’s induced demand is likely well below historically estimated levels. Measures of induced demand—and there are many with different definitions and data sources—are based on old empirical data from the last century or very early this century, when travel per person was growing at a few percentage points per year as household incomes, labor force participation, auto availability, and economic activity grew. Since approximately 2005, U.S. vehicle travel per person has not grown and the amount of travel on roads with newly increased capacity attributable to additional or longer induced trips is likely modest. The National Household Travel Survey documents declining trip rates as telework, e-commerce, and other communications substitution opportunities further dampen travel demand growth pressures, particularly for urban households. If travel expanded to fill all capacity, we would not have any low-volume highways. More importantly, characterizing induced travel as bad or wasted is a misrepresentation of the value that people derive from engaging in travel. It’s not just wealthy folks making superfluous trips. Residents having access to better jobs or businesses with better selection and lower prices isn’t bad. Businesses having access to a bigger labor pool and potential customer and supplier bases because people can travel farther in a tolerable amount of time isn’t bad. Making supply chains work better isn’t bad. Getting emergency vehicles where they need to go faster isn’t bad. Pulling cut-through traffic out of neighborhoods to travel on a safer highway facility isn’t bad. Having more direct and less congested—and thus environmentally greener—trips isn’t bad. Enabling parents to get home and share a meal with the family isn’t bad. Using transportation infrastructure to shape development or improve economic competitiveness isn’t bad. Being able to engage in social interactions and recreational activities isn’t bad, and contributes positively to physical and mental health... Multiple congressional legislative cycles, successive executive administrations, all states, and hundreds of local and regional transportation agencies have mission statements and goals for their transportation programs that aspire to improve mobility for people and goods. Mobility is widely recognized as critical to economic competitiveness, productivity, upward mobility, and quality of life. Recognizing the importance of mobility, cities are now making extraordinary efforts to ensure mobility for all segments of the population... Congestion is an onerous time tax that does not discriminate. It undermines mobility for rich and poor, able-bodied and impaired, and travelers of all races and ethnicities. It impacts people, businesses, and public services. The impacts of failing to provide needed capacity are not restricted to affluent folks making unnecessary trips; in fact, low-income workers can be severely impacted by congestion delays and travel time unreliability. Overplaying induced demand arguments as a pretext for discouraging roadway expansion or presuming travel demand can be accommodated by investing in alternative modes can be disingenuous and ill-informed. The presumption that directing resources to transit, bike, or pedestrian options can meet the mobility needs of all people and goods seldom works out as a real solution that is financially sustainable, environmentally superior, or offers comparable mobility, accessibility, or other benefits... The premise that new roadway capacity induces traffic, if applied consistently within transportation systems analysis, means that any initiative that attracts travelers to an alternative mode or otherwise reduces roadway travel simultaneously induces replacement travel due to the now available roadway capacity. For example, the analysis of a new transit project would need to debit the energy, emissions, noise, safety, and other benefits attributed to transit by the impacts of the induced roadway traffic. An objective analysis of transportation requires consistent treatment of induced travel across modes and projects. This requires a rich understanding of induced demand, including the impact of context-specific variables and how they may influence induced demand for a specific set of demographic, economic, geographic, and other conditions. Much of the reporting on induced demand gives the impression that the transportation planning community is oblivious to this phenomenon or is comprised of road-building zealots. Newer activity-based transportation models are designed such that activity generation (trip generation) is sensitive to travel times. Consequently, improvements in travel speed will contribute to predictions of increased trip-making and travel distance. Even without the newest models, scenario testing and careful analysis of changes in demographics, mode choices, and flow volumes and patterns can give insight into the nature of demand on new facilities. Planners must also consider that new roadway infrastructure planned or built today is destined to spend most of its useful life supporting the conveyance of electrically propelled and sustainably powered vehicles. Perhaps more importantly, roadway infrastructure built now can be configured and equipped with technologies to support the operation of freight vehicles, priced lanes, public transit services, automated vehicle lanes, or various combinations of vehicles to enable the productive use of the roadway. As planners explore the need for new capacity, they need to value mobility just as they try to understand and mitigate its impacts. Mobility should not come at any cost, but neither should its value be discounted."
Like, not one photo, video or documentary or anything, I had to visit the city just to be jumpscared by it : r/lotrmemes - [On Egypt] "It's a nation of scammers, very off-putting. And I've been in many poorer countries, so it's not that. Examples: Kids pick up rocks off the ground and try to sell them. Nobody buys. Kids proceed to throw the rocks at the tourist bus. Cops force themselves into a photo and then demand money for it. Airport security says the bathroom is closed and basically forces you to one far from others where you're kept hostage until you pay for the "service". No place is safe from the scamming, not even the resorts, they get in through the beach to give you an unsolicited massage or harass women in the water. Been there twice, beautiful history but fuck that place."
MAZE on X - "March, 2016. Hillary laughs at the thought of Trump beating her. Almost a decade later and she’s still can’t even turn on replies on her social media posts"
3 Ways to Find a Partner You Click With If You Have Dating App Fatigue - "Today's dating apps are marketed to help you find a compatible partner. According to a psychology researcher, it's practically useless for actually finding one, no matter how similar your interests, lifestyles, or political views are. "It's mostly a waste of time," Dr. Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of "Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection," told Business Insider. While it can feel productive to filter out prospective partners, Eastwick said attraction is "going to be more or less a dart throw" when you actually meet the person on the other end. It's because many of us look at compatibility the wrong way, he said, focusing on broad personality traits like "adventurous" or "funny." That thinking often leads us astray because there's no way to know whether the person, with our laundry list of dream qualities, will actually make us feel supported in the way we need. "Compatibility is a construction process rather than an initial attraction process," Eastwick said. Rather than falling into relationships that fit us perfectly, the happiest couples find someone they really like, focus on their similarities, and build a compatible relationship over time. "It's a very complicated thing to do," he added...
If you're on the fence, commit to three dates...
Statistically, the chances that you'll feel an immediate spark on that first date are slim. According to his own research, Eastwick said most people in long-term relationships felt "middling" in their first impressions of their partners...
Join groups for slow-burn connections
Count the green flags, not the red"
Do Hinge, Tinder Work? What Dating Apps Get Wrong About Compatibility - Bloomberg - "Dating apps are particularly ill-equipped to account for these intangibles. In today’s love market, the apps are by far the most common way two singles meet. But they prioritize obvious good looks and, often, gender stereotypes. On Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and Grindr, users can screen for attributes and “dealbreakers.” What you think you want is paramount, just as it was in those early survey-driven studies. On the apps this is particularly pronounced for women. While men swipe right on about 50% of their prospects, women cull 95% of their pool from first impressions, making them almost twice as picky online as they would be in real life. None of this is natural. Human mating involves a longer process of evaluation than that of other pair-bonded species, like, say, prairie voles. Humans evolved to find love in person, to feel that ineffable, infuriatingly rare “chemistry” when they connect. This applies to friends as well as lovers, which helps explain why many lasting partnerships grow out of friendships. If you’ve ever wondered why dating in New York is a nightmare, whereas your friends in rural Wyoming always seem to have nice boyfriends, the answer is evolution. Early humans were somewhat restricted transportation-wise, and evolved to find love in much smaller groups than today’s modern cities — with far fewer available options. “Limited sets of choices heighten the stakes — both the risks and the rewards — by taking hypothetical perfection off the table and forcing people to take a second or third look at a person,” Eastwick writes. Dating apps have been positive in many ways. They increase access to singles outside your class and have increased safety for communities where finding love was historically more perilous. But they also create an illusion of infinite, often paralyzing, possibility. When a potentially better mate is always a swipe away, humans experience choice overload... To seek love the way evolution intended, Eastwick romanticizes the pre-smartphone world, where you could get to know a potential match over time in a lower-stakes environment. He reminisces about an era when initial socializing between mates often happened in group settings rather than in “a tiny two-person bubble.” It’s a construct of modern dating that early interactions between two strangers tend to happen in isolation, versus a mutual friend’s dinner party. Most daters would agree. Eastwick’s research comes at an interesting time, when more and more singles are rebelling against the apps, finding them dissatisfying, shallow and fundamentally overwhelming. Although just 1% of heterosexual Americans say dating apps are the best way to find a partner, they overtook mutual friends as the most common way couples meet around 2013. The trouble is that the alternatives are unclear. Eastwick urges a return to mining social networks for potential dates, but the dominance of apps has eroded the role of these connections in the communal labor of making introductions. It’s easier to ask a single friend if they’re “on the apps” than to ask the guy in accounting if you can set him up with your roommate. Long a social activity, the onus of dating is now squarely on the singleton — one reason apps can charge such high rates for their services. It’s also far easier to casually dismiss a stranger on an app than someone in your social orbit."
KTLA on X - "Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has withdrawn from a televised L.A. mayoral candidate forum scheduled for May 13, according to a statement released Friday by the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles and the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs."
Covfefe Anon on X - "Given enough time every member of the "smart, technocratic" party reinvents the strategy of "don't ever speak to anyone outside the bubble" to avoid getting utterly humiliated"
Her refusing to participate is proof of misogynoir!
New York Post on X - "LA mayoral debate in tatters as Nithya Raman joins Karen Bass in suddenly pulling out at last minute"
Seneca Scott on X - "Soggies cannot debate because their arguments collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. They depend on the media to manufacture consent for destructive policies, while using emotional blackmail and mob intimidation to silence dissent. Every disagreement becomes heresy. Every critic becomes immoral. Every failure is repackaged as virtue. And when the illusion finally begins to crack, when people stop applauding and start asking questions, they simply refuse to show up at all."
abby govindan on X - "i dont mind mosquitos sucking my blood (i have plenty to go around) what annoys me is the need to inject the itch juice into my skin....like im already feeding you why are you being such a bitch. imagine if i slapped my mom every time she made me dinner."
Matt on X - "It's not itch juice, it's regular juice! It's just a little anticoagulant, but your body evolved an itchy reaction to it because a few bad apples were spreading malaria and whatever. Anyway if you're itchy take it up with your ancestors. Sincerely, the mosquitos."
Humor Huddle - "The account was from the Edinburgh Evening News of August 18, 1978...
While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clerimston, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr. Robert Clear. “He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,” said Mr. Thirsty. ‘Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do any more than frighten him off but, unhappily for us all, he died.”...
Dwarfing all known records for matrimonial homicide, Mr. Peter Scott of Southsea made seven attempts to kill his wife without her once noticing that anything was wrong. In 1980 he took out an insurance policy on his good lady which would bring him £250,000 in the event of her accidental death. Soon afterwards, he placed a lethal dose of mercury in her strawberry flan, but it all rolled out. Not wishin: to waste this deadly substance he next stuffed tier mackerel with the entire contents of the bottle. This time she ate it, but with no side effects whatsoever. Warming to the task, he then took his better half on holiday to Yugoslavia. Recommending the panoramic views, he invited her to sit on the edge of a cliff. She declined to do so, prompted by what she later described as some ‘sixth sense.’ The same occurred only weeks later when he urged her to savour the view from Beachy Head. When his spouse was in bed with chicken-pox he started a fire outside her bedroom door, but some interfering busybody put it out. Undeterred, he started another fire and burnt down the entire flat. The wife of his bosom escaped uninjured. Another time he asked her to stand in the middle of the road so that he could drive towards her and check if his brakes were working. At no time did Mrs. Scott feel that the magic had gone out of their marriage. Since it appeared nothing short of a small nuclear bomb would have alerted this good woman to her husband’s intentions, he eventually gave up and confessed everything to the police. After the case a detective said Mrs. Scott had been “absolutely shattered” when told of her husband’s plot to kill her. “She had not twigged it at all and was dumbstruck.”"
Danish women to face conscription by lottery - "Danish women now face being called up for 11 months of military service when they turn 18, after a change in the law came into effect. Under new rules passed by Denmark's parliament, women are to join teenage males in a lottery system that could require them to undertake a period of conscription. The change was brought in as Nato countries boost defence spending amid heightened security concerns in Europe. Up to now, women were allowed to participate in military service when they turned 18, but on a voluntary basis... The change will also see the period of conscription for teenagers rise from four months to 11 months. About 4,700 Danish men and women undertook a short period of military service in 2024 – about 24% of them being female volunteers. The new rules on conscription are expected to see the overall number doing military service annually rise to 6,500 by 2033. Denmark is following the example of neighbouring Sweden and Norway, which both brought in conscription for women in recent years."
Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’ - The Atlantic - "Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.” Across many studies, people’s stated preferences don’t align well with the traits that incite their fondness for someone in real life. In a 2020 study, the UC Davis psychologist Paul Eastwick and his colleagues asked participants to list some ideal characteristics they wanted in a partner, and then sent them on a blind date. The researchers later asked the participants how closely the person they went out with had reflected both their own ideals and a list of someone else’s. People turned out to be just as romantically interested in a date who met the other person’s must-haves as they were in a date who met all of their own... This is where apps can fall short in terms of quality matchmaking. As Eastwick writes in his new book, Bonded by Evolution, compatibility can’t be determined by a dating profile; it has to be “curated, cultivated, and constructed”—usually as the relationship unfolds. Even some “deal-breakers” may not end up breaking the deal. In one study by Joel, researchers told subjects that a hypothetical romantic partner had a trait that they said they wanted to avoid—poor hygiene, say, or anger issues—and many people said that they would continue to date the prospect anyway. Joel said that this inclination would likely be even stronger “in the context of a real relationship, where there’s feelings involved.” That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.) Physical attraction matters, too—far more than most people realize, according to the researchers I spoke with... If two people in a relationship are lucky, infatuation will set in: an obsessionlike mental state in which you find yourself thinking about the person a lot, noticing them, and wanting to be physically close to them. Once that initial spark ignites, motivated reasoning—essentially, seeing what you want to see—takes over. Joel theorized that people are prone to a “progression bias” in relationships: They are more inclined to encourage a relationship to continue than they are to dissolve it. Merely spending time together makes people become more invested in making a relationship work. “Once you like someone,” Joel said, “you want to see the best in them.”... This kind of self-delusion is a good thing. Everyone, to some extent, grades their romantic partner on a curve, and relationships in which partners are especially inclined to do this may be particularly strong. In one study that Eastwick cites in his book, the longest-lasting relationships were the ones in which people justified their partner’s faults with “yes, but” statements such as “She is messy, but I wouldn’t ask her to give up her free-spirited ways for anything.” The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence... All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely... The better way to find love, Eastwick suggested, is to get to know romantic prospects in person, over time. “Compatibility,” he said, “is about what you’re able to create together.” He recommended building deep friendship networks—both because those friends can introduce you to singles they know and because some of them might become romantic partners. But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay)."
The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete Here’s what’s next. - The Atlantic - "The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass. The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way. The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves. Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page. What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today?... After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”... Software is a dynamic medium; paper isn’t. When you think in those terms it does seem strange that research like Strogatz’s, the study of dynamical systems, is so often being shared on paper, without the benefit of his little swirling dots—because it’s the swirling dots that helped him to see what he saw, and that might help the reader see it too. This is, of course, the whole problem of scientific communication in a nutshell: Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper. Maybe we can do better."
This reads like an ad for Wolfram Mathematica
