Comment 62051

By Ryan (registered) - website
Posted April 11, 2011 at 15:04:56 in reply to Comment 62048

There are a couple of mitigating circumstances:

1. Most of the Aberdeen traffic is between the West Mountain and West Hamilton. They only take Beckett/Aberdeen/Longwood because it's slightly faster than taking Hwy 403.

2. The total volume of traffic is not static, but induced by the available lane capacity. Reduce the throughput capacity and some of the traffic literally disappears.

As Jane Jacobs observed:

Planners' models assume that closing a road causes the traffic using it to move elsewhere ... The study team ... found that computer models used by urban transportation planners yield incorrect answers ...

[W]hen a road is closed, an average of 20% of the traffic it carries seems to vanish. In some cases they studied, as much as 60% of the traffic vanished. ...

The report at hand is a logical extension to a 1994 finding that building new roads generates traffic. If that's the case, "then the closure of roads is bound to cause less traffic," according to London-based transport consultant Keith Buchan. ...

[T]raffic vanishes because commuting habits are so variable ... Flexibility helps people cope with road closures ... Experts ... suggest that government should stop worrying about causing vehicular congestion by pedestrianizing sites.

-- Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 2004, p. 75

Comment edited by administrator Ryan on 2011-04-11 15:05:41

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