I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day.
Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.
Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.
That is only indirectly true. I know of rural roads in the middle of nowhere that wouldn't get any more traffic from adding more lanes. It is only true in the city because there is unmet demand to get places at in some amount of time, and so adding lanes allows some of that unmet demand to become met demand.
Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the lane.
Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5 minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build another track for the train, but that is a huge number of people (ie a good number would find their life improved by a track on a slightly different route that)
> So I would bet the same is true of public transit.
It is very true but the point of adding capacity (to any form of transit) isn't to reduce congestion at peak hours (that congestion is bounded by what people will tolerate) it's to allow more trips to happen with equivalent congestion thereby increasing the total number of trips and/or decreasing the duration of the congestion.
Right, so you reduce crowding by shortening trips, not by adding service. Ideally we do both and get lots of people using public transit for short trips.
Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn’t need to compete with public transit for speed—transit is immensely slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.
This is actually a very American misconception of public transportation. If you're in an area with excellent public tranportation (London, Barcelona, Montreal), it's actually much faster (I've traveled to these places and tried it).
Even in SF, there's some places where public transportation is faster. But in very very limited situations because SF transportation is horrible. But an express Caltrain is often much faster than driving MTV-SF if there's any traffic. With all the (super delayed unfortunately) infrastructure projects going on (new SF subway being installed, Caltrain electrification), things will hopefully get better...
This is not universally true. My BART commute is faster than driving. Both office and home are walkable from a train station and the frequency at my station is pretty good.
Transit is much faster than driving if it wants to be. Airplanes normally reach 1000km/h (if you are rich you can do the same but very few are this rich). Even if we limit to ground based transport, most drivers on the autobahn self-limit themselves to around 130km/h, trains routinely go 250km/h (only a few routes, but the ability is there to do it safely).
Not unless your starting point and ending point are very close to a subway station and you don’t have to make any transfers. I use to commute from 88th and broadway to 45th and Lex. It was a bit over 30 minutes by subway, more like 25 minutes driving. In the evening, if I was leaving work late, it was like a 20 minute cab ride.
Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.