Can Eliminating Roads Eliminate Traffic?
- Posted by: Siobhan O'Connor
- on July 6, 2009 at 4:08 pm
This is one of those brain benders that can make total sense (no road equals no cars equals no traffic) and none at all (no road equals cars diverted equals more traffic). Thankfully, our friends at Infrastructurist did some reporting to see how these experiments have actually panned out in a few places, complete with before and after pictures like the ones above, from Seoul.
They look at roads eliminated in Portland, Oregon, Seoul, and San Francisco, and guess what? In all instances, the outcome was pretty great. Of course, they add that “this evidence doesn’t suggest that all road expansions are unnecessary, or that all highways should be removed. … But the lesson is clear: If a major road is making a city a less livable…everyone benefits when politicians have the vision and guts to tear it down.”
Amen!
DISCUSSION: 5 Comments
This is sort of the inverse corollary to what’s known as the the Induced-Traffic Hypothesis which states that the more roads you build, the more traffic you will have.
This is awesome.
I’m always tempted to think that you have to have dense neighborhoods in place already for stuff like this to be feasible. But that’s not entirely right. The causality goes both ways. Dense, mixed-zone neighborhoods make it easier to replace freeways with walkways and have a smooth transition. But also, replacing freeways with walkways can itself create dense neighborhoods by supplying a market for local shops, employment, etc. And I tend to kind of overlook that latter part, I think.
At any rate, this is awesome.
this would be beautiful.i’ve recently moved to a bigger city and would love to see this happen.less noise, less emissions, healthier happier people
it’s nice to dream i supppose 
Yey for Braess Paradox! And Dietrich Braess is actually still alive and well and churning out more good math: http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Dietrich.Braess/ftp.html
What you’re basically saying is ‘make public transport the easier option, and people will do it’. If you frame it that way, it makes sense. Unfortunately I think a lot of governments/ councils gleefully approach it with a ‘let’s make driving harder’ approach, without the corollary improvement in public transport. London had the genius scheme of restricting the number of parking spaces in new residential developments, but the need to travel and the availability of public transport didn’t change, so the only beneficiaries were land owners who could then charge $50k for a parking space. I would rather we focused on making public transport easier and better before removing road capacity.