this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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"Alexandria, Egypt has become the latest city to solve traffic. Check out their brand new 10 lane highway on the beachfront." @CarsRuinedCity (i.imgur.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Found here: https://twitter.com/CarsRuinedCity/status/1677005785862406144?t=Xolo43mUk4GnegFQE19q3g&s=19

Caption: Photo collage of a beach in Alexandria, Egypt, showing a progression in 3 images:

  1. Alexandria "Problem" - empty beach + walking street + 6 lane road with medium traffic + dense mid-rise buildings (likely housing)
  2. Alexandria "Solution" - empty beach (doesn't seem to matter) + narrower walkway or sidewalk + 10 lane brand new and empty road + tiny sidewalk + the same buildings
  3. Alexandria "Results" - crowded beach + crowded beach walkway + traffic jam on the 10 lane road
top 25 comments
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just one more lane bro I swear we're gonna fix traffic

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Come on bro just one more there’s just not enough room for people to pass bro merging makes things tough bro just one more lane please

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's hard to stop once you start doing lanes man.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

95% of city planners quit before adding the final lane that fixes traffic

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Playing factorio has given me a deeper appreciation of how much adding lanes doesn't help traffic.

Adding an extra conveyor belt to your factory line won't help you process materials any faster. You have to add more processing elements, widening the belt lines does absolutely nothing!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The real problem here is that Egyptian cities are grotesquely overpopulated. Cairo is the poster child for urban hell.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wonder how bad the noise level is on that beach. Must have to shout to be heard "IT'S REALLY RELAXING HERE!" "What?!"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There's a few good mini-documentaries on YouTube starting from 1950s America through to now and how the USA is a robust, evidence-rich, long-term case study of why this is bad infrastructure. It's basically a modern no-brainer now. Thanks to the US we know not to do this. US cities are now slowly trying to undo decades of deep-rooted bad infrastructure choices based around reliance on big road networks.

Surprise, surprise, car manufacturers were a big player in influencing the initial decision 🤣

Having lived in metro areas that have worked on alternative transport solutions, I can tell you it's sooo much better and easier to live with. And I love cars—own three. But they're just not the convenient option quite often.

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

Could you please share the link or the name of the documentary?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would suggest starting with the Strong Towns playlist from Not Just Bikes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa

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

I’d love for my car to be the inconvenient option but we’re just miles and miles away from that. Sure I could take the metro, it’d cost me more and I’d still need the car to drive to the metro station. Add an hour or so to what any given journey would have taken by car, throw in a handful of sweaty, rude and aggressive co-travelers and you have the answer as to why I drive everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, but thats exactly the problem. We know stuff like that is bad, but American cities were built so fundamentally flawed, that we cannot fix the car dependency without completely rebuilding them, which is obviously not an option

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I love it when other countries copy the worst parts of America

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

I don't understand how the middle and right pictures compare. There are ten total lanes in the middle picture, but only six in the right picture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The right-side pic only shows one direction. There's a middle separator and another set of lanes in the other direction (not visible). I think this is the area: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2207203,29.9301834,3a,75y,224.65h,97.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sAF1QipMJJwta1iFu8TyB9UUb6xVX6fjj30Ph2Z0UGKs!2e10!7i5760!8i2880?entry=ttu feel free to look around, I'm not sure how up to date the photos are.

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

I like to explain this phenomenon as the free cake effect.

Say you set up a food stand with a sign "free cake". It doesn’t matter how many cakes you baked, people will keep showing up until all the cake is gone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

and the science gets done and you make a neat gun for the people who are

still alive

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

This is one of those arguments that never made sense to me. People like to say that adding lanes just creates more traffic, but what is the proposed mechanism? Does anyone suppose that people who didn't want to go somewhere suddenly remembered that the highway added more lanes, and then decided to go for a cruise?

It suggests to me that the demand for transit far exceeds capacity, or that this traffic would otherwise have just taken a different route. Probably some of both.

That's not an argument to just build 15 lane highways everywhere, just that the common form of the supply creates demand argument seems implausible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The idea behind induced demand is the easier and more convenient/cheaper you make a method of transit the more people will use it. So if you make driving easier by building a super highway people will default to that whole if you build put a rail network that gets peole to where they need to go they'll take that. Transit being crowded in some ways is a good thing as it shows the route you've got is good but could prbsky do with a capacity upgrade. Of course roads being crowded is bad due to massive space inefficiencies and environmental issues.

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

Good God I can't wait to move to a country that has public transit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Where are you thinking? I visited London recently and while the underground is cool and efficient, it has quite a depressing atmosphere. I'm wondering how it can be done better

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm actually thinking China. May not be the best country, but it's easy to get a visa and it's leagues better than the US.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Try Berlin. It's barrier free. All those bloody barriers you gotta stick your ticket through suck and lead to big traffic jams. Everyone basically has to pay for the upkeep of those things too. Seems like it would be expensive and I definitely hate the shuffle you get in when it's busy.

Berlin also has it's problems though. Just different ones.