Governments don't even think about road expenditure. They habitually sign off on the spending because they think that's what they're expected to do. They've been doing it for so long that it doesn't even register to them that it might be a bad idea. A major mentality change is required to scrutinise road maintenance and expansion to an even greater degree that public transport projects are scrutinised. We no longer have car manufacturing in this country, so the remaining car lobby should be ignored at every stage. We've already lost the jobs in automotive and they're not coming back, so we don't need to protect them.

Really like how slick and to the point your videos are but I think the ending kind of downplays and shortens how important human friendly cities are though. It's great that more people are finally understanding that more lanes means a worse city. That point about induced demand working for non-car infrastructure is really important to make people understand that people won't use other forms of transport until it's properly available.

It's also worth mentioning: Inducing car traffic makes things worse for everyone. More traffic, more noise, slower journeys, more wasted fuel, more frustration. Inducing public transport usage can make things better- the transit agency might run the route more frequently, do speed improvements along a route, add more parallel routes or upgrade the route to a higher mode of transport which speeds up journey times and improves customer satisfaction.

It is a known fact that car based urban sprawl, city councils/governments do not receive a good rate/tax return on what they spend on urban infrastructure. Medium to high density urbanisation generates better rate/tax return for city councils/governments. It is time to go back to the turn of the 20th century and do a modern take by adopting public transport orientated urban planning and design using the 500mtr either side of a public transport route catchment concept back up with walking and cycling.

The b-roll you showed about all the cars on the massive interchange at 5:20 really hammers home the point about how catastrophically inefficient the car is. A single train has a higher capacity than all the cars we saw in that shot. Our culture has been so brainwashed by bad ideas and we have to change our way of thinking if we want to still have a functional society in the future.

Another reason not to build roads is the extremely high cost of building them in urban areas particularly when they have to be built as tunnels. Massachusetts built an 8 to 10 lane underground freeway and another 4 to 6 lane underground freeway at a cost of US$14-1/2 billion. That amount of money could have yielded up to 55 miles of light rail and subway at 1990-2005 US dollar values.

I find your argument about public transit and bike lanes have the same issue of induced demand to be a bit odd… because of how much more efficient they are than cars, public transit and expanding bike infrastructure can way more easily reach the limit of induced demand than expanding roadways can.

meanwhile Brisbane can only get bi-articulated buses branded as 'Metro' because real tram or metro apparently cost too much.

This video was much better than the title suggests. I've watched so many NJB etc. urbanist videos I thought this could just be a re-hash, but I liked how at the end you talked about induced demand across all modes and so what should we do about that.

Food for thought on the cost of highway upgrades, typically the staged upgrades themselves are not that expensive compared to the overall cost of upgrading the full corridor, which can make it less clear how much money we actually pour into these road corridors. I think this is important to call out because when we build something like the Metro Tunnel or CRR, it's a single lump sum $5-$10 billion price tag, but when you look at a corridor like the Pacific Mwy from the Gateway interchange in Brisbane through to the state border, it's a collection of projects costing anywhere from a couple hundred million to half a billion individually, but rarely considered collectively despite all being in service to the same corridor. So we're often presented with 'the $500 million M1 merge project' rather then the '$5 billion we spent on the 6 projects along the M1 corridor over the past decade'. It makes PT projects seem far more expensive in comparison when the actual cost is pretty much on par if you look at the bigger picture.

A great synopsis however I would hesitate to use US based studies as evidence due the much different nature of transport systems, with the US having very limited rail systems that don’t tend to have much of an urban loop as well as being less population dense on average, not to mention the general lack of non-car transportation

so building train lines is the answer to road traffic. because there will Be no road traffic because it allows policies to reduce demand.

I remember when people were up in arms against the building of Wesconnex. Now they're enjoying this development.

The day we have to worry about induced cycling demand I think we'll be living in an urbanist utopia lol. A standard two lane street converted to all cycling would have a max throughput of like 40,000 people per hour that would be like having a 16 lane freeway for half the streets or more.

I’m not against improving or widening road infrastructure, but I’m against favoring motor vehicles over other modes of transport. Motor vehicles are favored in money and space spend on it and they aren’t paying their fair share. Their costs are dumped on everyone else. There must be a fair equilibrium in this and the environmental aspect must be weighed in as well. Besides that I’m in favor of putting highways underground instead of letting them be a sort of obstructing object, an eyesore in a city. It’ll cost more initially, but the costs can be shared if there is also a subway, train or BRT tunnel adjacent to it. And the new space on the surface can be used for new housing, office and shopping developments. It is time motor vehicles are paying their fair share for a more livable future. It is that simple.

Highways are still pretty important for local logistics and transportation, and urbanists seem to forget that some pretty fast, reliable buses can run on highways. The issue is how highway heavy urban areas have become dependent on an ever growing highway network. A few new transit lines and some walkable communities here any there really can't solve the issue when you're dealing with such unthinkably massive sprawl as Sydney and Melbourne that show no signs of stalling or receding within the next 20 years. Say you densify and connect the core areas around Sydney, Chatswood, and Parramatta, you're still going to have to deal with commuters coming in as far as Wollongong, as Australian cities have a level of sprawl that would make Huston Texas blush. So basically, both Sydney and Melbourne need to double their rail network in terms of length and service while densifying as much as possible in order to sort out the mess that is Australian sprawl.

I vote for denser urban design. Owning a car is taxing on my finances, time, mental, and physical health - not to mention environmental health. I also get a lot more pussy in a dense urban setting than a suburban one where you have to drive 30 minutes just to pick up groceries. I am not a fan of cars at all and have no problem with the induced demand of public transit.

I actually view induced demand for public transport and cycling as a positive. We should want more people to be using those modes. The fact that we can induce more people to use them means that we can remove more people from cars more easily and efficiently, especially if rather than allowing that freed road space to be used by cars we use it for things like cycling lanes and tram lanes.

There always needs to be a mix of roads and public transport. Don't think you are making a valid comparison of the $ spend though. For example the Sydney Westconnex project has largely been sold to a private corporation in exchange for a toll concession. So although the project work overall might have cost $21b that's not the net cost to the taxpayer - it's much lower as they recoup the sale proceeds. Compare that to the public transport projects which HAVE all been government funded - e.g. the Sydney Metro lines. A lot of people falsely compare the two and claim the government has spent $21b on WestConnex and say $20b on Metro. And they then say the WestConnex money should have been spent on public transport instead. But that isn't true. They've probably spent only $2-3b of taxpayer money on WestConnex overall and $20b of taxpayer money on Metro. No-one is ever suggesting that the public transport projects be sold off in the same way the road projects have (although again you get people falsely claiming that has happened when in fact all of the Metro infrastructure remains publicly owned and all fare revenue goes to the government too, there is just a private contract to operate the service).

Easy way around the problem is congestion taxes ie zone cities and put a tax on vehicle entering each zone in some sort of a toll. If you don't really need to go into that area you're less likely to if you're going to get charged for it, this would then free up some traffic alternative could also make it cars ending in odds one day evens the next could go into certain zones you would increase car pooling and lesson traffic

Another important factor as why more roads don't work, is because freeways eventually end into city streets. Doesn't matter how wide you make a expressway or how many you build, the is a limit to how many cars can move around a city before grid locking. You don't get that same effect with mass transit and pedestrians.

Kinda like trying to fix a leak by making the hole bigger if you ask me!

need a whole rethink of our planning but thats never going to happen. we just expand, need more housing, developers just knock down a lot of bush, build a subdivision with only single family homes in culdesacs, repeat year after year until Dubbo becomes a part of Western Sydney connected by a shit tonne of roads.

hi from the other side of the planet! We are working on urban activism in Russia. And you know, we're saying exactly the same thing! although we live in different hemispheres!)))

came from yt recommend SUBBED

Australian cities have a significant percentage of suburban sprawl, which makes a public transport dominant system highly expensive to build and operate if it were to meet capacity and level of service requirements that rivals that of the car. It was a key reason that much of the older public transport infrastructure was decommissioned. Most people don't realise that public transport in most Australian cities are heavily subsidised, where the government contributes the majority of your typical public transport fare. The suburban sprawl also means that induced demand for cycling is not as linear as car/public transport, due to longer distance bike trips being very unappealing, despite the quality of the infrastructure.

fun fact London used to have to biggest tram system in Europe but now there are only trams in Croydon

Cool video. I just found your channel. Could you include “induced demand” as keywords ?

I think westconnex is needed because of the stupidity of accessing the airport from the west or inner west. If is was half decent, then its wouldn't be needed. But yes need a dominant spend of public transit

i think we should build biplanes :P

Hmmmm It took 38 years for Sydney's population to increase from 3 million to 4 million (1970-2008). It took 14 years for that population to go from 4 million to 5 million (2009-2022), and that would have been 12 years were it not for the pandemic immigration pause. Since 2022 another 2 or 300 thousand people have moved to Sydney, and thus trend will continue. Sure, roads have natural limitations, but we can't magically ignore the extra 1.3 million people that have been imported into the Sydney basin over the last 15 years. ie if Sydney had its current road network, including a completed WestConnex thingy, but with a pre-2008 population (which would be the case sans immigration), you'd find that the traffic would be a lot more bearable. In a big city you need both an efficient freeway and PT network, and Sydney has been lacking both.

The freer and easier the road, the more people will use it. FACT.

Building more motorways within the cities is indeed "fixing our cities". Why would anyone suggest not?? For anyone who actually drives a vehicle in, say, Sydney, the vast road projects of recent years have made equally vast improvements in travel times. True, it is not as if traffic congestion has been eliminated but that is neither possible nor the objective. Remember also that our federal governments and parties, on all sides, have pursued population growth through immigration without limit or overall plan. If said vast road improvements had not been effected, it would by already just about impossible to drive around Sydney in reasonable times, for most of the day. Seriously, Australia's population has increased by almost 40% since the turn of the century. That absolutely demands and requires large scale metropolitan road improvements, and the fact there is still congestion is hardly evidence that 'building highways doesn't fix out cities'! BTW, catching trains and buses is fine for a/ commuting and b/ people who carry nothing with them, are not in a hurry and not engaged in commerce. They are NOT a substitute for roads.

Public transport and cycling infrastructure are the solutions. I do have a car but it's used solely for long distance country drives. Stuff that's not accessible by train.

Mooses keep blocking 🚫 the freeway

Montreal is # 1 in the world for sustainability , the most european in North ameirca # 4th for biking infrastructure, closing steets for pedestrians , narrowing streets for one lane care and aider sidewalk, MOntreal is a UNESCO city of design at ... Toronto is the oppsosite , no urban plans, USA car culture , sprawling 130 km away to include new city in order to get the title of the largest city in CAnada . Toronto has the top most high crime cities in Canada( Statisric CAnada ), homless, drugs , polllution and now an asian city ( India )

Where are these huge freeway expansions that everyone is talking about?

8:25 what (metro) rail line can move 60.000 people per hour? (non-sardine-packed)

An advanced city is not one where the poor own cars, it's one where the rich ride public transportation.

Don't be a Mr.Gadgetbahn like Elon Musk who is an anti-railway human being, build your own reliable ideas for the people💡.

Just out of interest: are you an urban planner by profession?

There is a very important part of our transportation history that is always left out of the story. Yes, we once had transit and walking-based transportation systems, but that was paired with very real overcrowded housing conditions. This is never given proper recognition. This is not to say cars are the solution going forward, but we do NOT want to go back to the past. We have never had a transit-based system alongside quality housing. So the future is not the past, but something else that we will have to discover as we go forward, with just the right blend of walking, transit, and yes, cars.

Well if you see in the first image.. can see one side of the motorway flowing and the other barely any cars.. Should just design to adjust lanes accordingly to cater for volume at peak.. Add motorbike lanes too. Forget pedestrian and cycling .. they are bullshit.. not practical at all for people who live far out and only good for a minority which is pointless. Also there is only really one major motorway from either direction.... the M2 for example direct to CBD.. why is there only one like that.. of course will get clogged.. The train to the Melbourne CBD is not reliable, flexible, too slow and the expenses add up as well. Also shown in last 3 years which people seem to have forgotten already that its a perfect spreader of disease..as cramped next to randoms.. which that in itself is not great.. being in a car.. not even a factor. If were to make more appealing..Trains could possibly run express from outer suburbs.. skipping inner ones.. for example Craigieburn to Essendon then miss the inner city suburbs (getting to full speed) till hit CBD stations (North Melbourne).. this alone could save massive time on the commute.. The goal should be 20-30 mins at most from outer to city... would make train far more appealing. Perhaps can develop excellent outer parking areas (FREE parking) within suburbs near CBD and have excellent transport from them. Disperse them so people have multi options to go to so dont just drive into one area like the CBD. PS Bring back Fairey Rotodyne style transport but with Modern tech.

hi from the other side of the planet! We are working on urban activism in Russia. And you know, we're saying exactly the same thing! although we live in different hemispheres!)))