> Clearly "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit"...
You: Cars are never a solution because they can't go faster than 15 MPH. You really need horses for this.
Me: Cars can go faster than 15 MPH in many cases. Horses can't be used to transport industrial boilers and such.
You: Clearly you missed the part about the horses.
> No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses.
You have a two lane road that needs to be a four lane road to handle the amount of traffic it would have without congestion.
If more than half of the traffic that would occur without congestion is trucks, you physically cannot relieve the congestion with mass transit, because relieving the congestion would require removing more than 100% of the non-truck traffic.
> Moving more traffic to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it.
This the other stupidity with induced demand. It's not induced, it's suppressed by congestion, which means that any alternative means of relieving the congestion will also restore the demand.
Suppose you actually built mass transit and removed the equivalent of one lane worth of traffic from the road. Now you still need to add the other lane because the reduction in traffic congestion restored demand for the road and offset what was removed by the improved mass transit.
You: Cars are never a solution because they can't go faster than 15 MPH. You really need horses for this.
Me: Cars can go faster than 15 MPH in many cases. Horses can't be used to transport industrial boilers and such.
You: Clearly you missed the part about the horses.
> No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses.
You have a two lane road that needs to be a four lane road to handle the amount of traffic it would have without congestion.
If more than half of the traffic that would occur without congestion is trucks, you physically cannot relieve the congestion with mass transit, because relieving the congestion would require removing more than 100% of the non-truck traffic.
> Moving more traffic to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it.
This the other stupidity with induced demand. It's not induced, it's suppressed by congestion, which means that any alternative means of relieving the congestion will also restore the demand.
Suppose you actually built mass transit and removed the equivalent of one lane worth of traffic from the road. Now you still need to add the other lane because the reduction in traffic congestion restored demand for the road and offset what was removed by the improved mass transit.