Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“more than 42,000 Americans die in collisions every year. Based on the above-mentioned research, AVs have dramatically lower bodily-injury rates. If governments slow approval of self-driving cars—or give local governments the ability to stop their use based on anecdotes and irrational fears—then we’ll likely have more deaths and injuries.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/17/the-slow-approval-of-self-driving-cars-is-costing-lives/
“Although only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, two-thirds of all crash deaths in the 101 largest metro areas occur there, according to a recent Transportation for America report. In some places, this disparity is widening: From 2016 to 2022, road fatalities in Austin, Texas, fell 20 percent on locally managed roads while soaring 98 percent on those the state oversees.”
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“Instead of fixing such roadways, state officials tend to keep them as they are, citing limited resources or a need to maintain traffic speeds. In doing so, they constrain the capacity of even the most comprehensive local reforms to respond to urgent problems like car crash deaths, which are far more widespread in the US than among peer countries, or unreliable bus service.
Unless state DOTs recognize that a successful urban road must do more than facilitate fast car trips, that problem will persist.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/384562/state-highways-dots-car-crashes-pedestrian
“These projections have a fatal blind spot: They fail to consider how humans respond to changing conditions like new vehicle lanes. When people see cars traveling freely over a recently expanded highway, they will recalibrate their travel decisions. Some will choose to drive at rush hour when they would have otherwise driven at a non-peak time, taken public transit, or perhaps not traveled at all. When a roadway is widened, Marshall said, “You might have less congestion at first, but it quickly goes away.”
Such behavioral adjustments will continue until traffic is as thick as it was before, when the roadway was narrower. The only difference is now there will be more cars stuck in traffic, emitting even more pollution.
This phenomenon is known as induced demand. In his book Fighting Traffic, historian Peter Norton notes that as early as the 1920s, a New York City engineer warned that new roadways “would be filled immediately by traffic which is now repressed because of congestion.” In the 1960s, the economist Anthony Downs wrote a seminal economics paper that codified the concept, which has been called the Iron Law of Congestion. As one researcher put it, “If you build it, they will drive.””
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/363013/wide-highways-climate-environment-pollution
“Because NEPA allows third parties to sue over allegedly inadequate environmental studies, it’s become a favorite tool of environmentalists, slow growth activists, and garden variety NIMBY (not in my backyard) trying to stop or delay infrastructure projects.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/05/teachers-union-sues-to-stop-new-york-congestion-pricing-plan/