How would they "reduce or eliminate congestion"? Congestion is inherently caused by too many people trying to go to or through the same place at the same time. That's not possible without reducing the amount of people trying to travel during a given time period in a given place.
I imagine it could also make congestion more efficient. I believe a big factor to congestion is human behavior. We at least have good ideas about better ways to drive during congestion.. which humans rarely follow.
One way to prevent congestion would be to instead of paying for the distance traveled, you simply paid for the time the car is on the road, giving a financial incentive to send the car outside of rush hours. Would probably also cause people to use alternative routes rather than everyone trying to use the shortest one when is congested.
Traffic congestion is also a question of person density. If there were ways to increase people density per sq ft on those roads, with buses or, heck, some weird quadruple-stacked short-distance car transports, you can reduce traffic and commute loads as well.
>I would assume any congestion alleviated would be offset by induced demand by the people who now see less congestion and decide its worth it to jump on the road.
Proportional to the number of people forgoing trips because the congestion sucks. You'll never eliminate all congestion at peak hours but you can make "peak hours" into "peak hour" if you make things more efficient. A more efficient system can also withstand more traffic before things start backing up into each other and it all goes to hell with feedback loops.
Scenarios where individuals are planning their own movement (road traffic, foot traffic in a stadium, etc) can generally be modeled like a plumbing system carrying a highly viscous and compressible material. If you throw every trick in the book at it to make all the "features" (intersections, doorways) efficient you can reap a lot of benefits without actually widening bottlenecks.
I'm saying there are probably unexplored good solutions to that kind of congestion. Another I just thought of is the city motivating companies to make shifts not so centered around 9-5. Spread the rush with shifts of 8-4, 10-6, etc.
Congestion is an unsolvable problem. If there's congestion it just means that those people have a higher tolerance (or less alternatives) for sitting in traffic (or standing on a clusterfuck of a subway platform) than whatever your threshold is for deciding what is and isn't "congestion".
Consjestion isn't just about cars. You can generalize it to all forms of transit (MTA anyone?).
You can't "solve" congestion. At best you can add additional capacity (of the same type or a different type) in order to reduce the amount of time when congestion is at its worst. Instead of "rush hour" being from 3-7 increased capacity (of any type, people will naturally load balance by choosing the least worst option for their situation) could potentially make it only from 4-6 by allowing the same number of trips to happen in less time.
If you add capacity (of any type) and congestion is unchanged that is still a win because it means more trips are being taken which is an indication of more stuff getting done, more commerce, higher quality of life).
Everyone has a fantastic solution to the problem they perceive but it’s more complicated than that.
Ultimately people need to drive less, either because they live close to their jobs, because they use public transit or a bike, because they work from home or any other reason.
The problem is how to get people to do that. It certainly won’t be by easing congestion because that has the opposite effect. Short term gains because moving cars pollute less but long term loss because less congestion causes more traffic.
This seems like the same problem with traffic. If fewer people drove we'd have better throughput in our roadways, when the roadways get more efficient more people want to drive, and we have clogged roadways again.
If you want to limit congestion, price congestion.
Don't limit taxis, the right to drive people, the right to drive a car ending with a particular license plate number, or the amount of fuel available (all have been tried to reduce traffic) -- just make the roads themselves cost more when there are more cars on them, and make the roads cost less when there aren't.
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