this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024

211 points (97.3% liked)

News

22595 readers

4053 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

211

New York Spends Biden Cash on Highways Over Public Transit (nysfocus.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Finally NY is adding the lanes necessary to reduce congestion!

top 21 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 65 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Two ways to spend a hundred million dollars in infrastructure money:

Spend it widening a motorway, so now instead of 1,000 cars per minute, it can now handle 1,200 cars per minute. Spend another million dollars a year maintaining it because people try to drive one and a half times the speed limit, tearing up the road in their two-tonne pickup trucks
Double the service frequency of several bus and metro lines adding capacity for thousands of passengers per minute and significantly reducing public transportation wait times, making it a more attractive option, leading to higher ridership and more fare $$$

Tough choice!!

[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Braess's paradox

Dietrich Braess, a mathematician at Ruhr University, Germany, noticed the flow in a road network could be impeded by adding a new road, when he was working on traffic modelling. His idea was that if each driver is making the optimal self-interested decision as to which route is quickest, a shortcut could be chosen too often for drivers to have the shortest travel times possible. More formally, the idea behind Braess's discovery is that the Nash equilibrium may not equate with the best overall flow through a network

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

1968

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"The paradox was first discovered by Arthur Pigou in 1920". 🤔

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's even worse, dontcha think?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Definitely! I guess that the result defies I intuition, so it's hard to make it widely known and accepted, but after 100 years urban planners should all understand it!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Yeah, it doesn't take much analysis to realize that highway throughput must be balanced by offramp throughput, which must be balanced by the throughput of any streets the offramp feeds, right down to the throughput of each of the destination entrances. If an offramp can handle 20 cars per minute but the highway is feeding it 21 cars per minute, it's going to back up and slow the highway until it can only feed that offramp less than 20 cars per minute (because it needs to clear the backlog in addition to handle new cars wanting to exit).

And when you have capacity slowing traffic, then you get turbulence from people trying to optimise their lane selection to get through the heavier traffic quicker. This adds up until traffic ends up stopped for no apparent reason because you get to the front of it and there's no accident or anything, your just get through the bottleneck.

Oh unless there is an accident as a result of people trying to get through quicker, and then you see the cases where you drive by the accident and think things should get better but they don't because the real bottleneck is still ahead.

[–] Varyk 47 points 6 months ago

Oh, that's disappointing.

Like giving a diabetic candy because their blood sugar is too high.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Except adding lanes doesn't alleviate congestion. As if induced demand is some mysterious secret.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

TBF New York City has only known this for NINETY FUCKING YEARS.

[–] Reverendender 43 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's almost like the idiocy is systemic somehow

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

There's money to be made.