![]() ![]() In the short term, however, the express lanes, especially because they include congestion tolls, have the potential to reduce traffic, Chatman said. “I think what policymakers may or not realize is that especially over time, people will change their routes and change their times of day and change their modes in order to use the new facility.” “If the same number of travelers would take the route before the change as they did after the change, congestion would definitely go down,” he said. That’s a big hurdle.”ĭaniel Chatman, a professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, said the theory behind “induced demand” is that once highways are expanded, more vehicles will show up because they believe that the additional lanes have reduced the congestion. “I think a quirk of human nature is people don’t like to pay for things that they used to have for free. “Getting pricing programs in place is really hard,” he said. Instead, he said that increasing toll pricing at peak hours, as is proposed for the 405 Express Lanes, could turn a traffic jam into free flow speeds by reducing the cars on the road by as little as 5%. “If the object of building roads is to reduce traffic congestion, then what the results suggest is that you’re going to fail,” he said. The Times has found that over three decades, more than 200,000 people nationally lost their homes because of federal road projects.Ī 2009 study found that increasing road capacity in metropolitan areas by 1% eventually results in an increase in cars on the road by 1%.īrown University economics professor Matthew Turner, who co-authored the study, said that widening highways or adding lanes isn’t an effective way to combat traffic. ![]()
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