In a traffic jam your car may only be idling but you’re making zero mph. Acceleration/braking both hurt efficiency, but that’s all stop and go traffic is.
In MA, one of the projects in the “Bridge” section are the bridges to Cape Cod. They are a bottleneck partly for very narrow lanes. I believe the replacement project is for the same number of lanes plus a bike lane but modern standards will remove the bottleneck. Anyhow, during summer, it’s very common for Friday after work to have 40+ mile traffic jams. Spending extra hours in stop and go traffic to make the same trip clearly hurts efficiency and air pollution of over just getting there.
Before anyone chimes in with it will just increase traffic - this is already constrained by the number of rentals available and limits on development on the Cape. There would be no place for more tourists to go
Widening a bridge will increase traffic. 1 car households will turn into 2 or 3 car households as people decide to drive instead of taking the train or walking.
Development limits are meaningless. Traffic is not caused by population, but by car usage. Tokyo is the biggest city in the world, but it has almost no traffic.
Barnstable County has 230k people living in it. It is not physically possible to build a bridge that will move tens of thousands of cars during rush hour. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, peak car traffic will always be constained by the roads, not the population.
In a traffic jam your car may only be idling but you’re making zero mph. Acceleration/braking both hurt efficiency, but that’s all stop and go traffic is.
In MA, one of the projects in the “Bridge” section are the bridges to Cape Cod. They are a bottleneck partly for very narrow lanes. I believe the replacement project is for the same number of lanes plus a bike lane but modern standards will remove the bottleneck. Anyhow, during summer, it’s very common for Friday after work to have 40+ mile traffic jams. Spending extra hours in stop and go traffic to make the same trip clearly hurts efficiency and air pollution of over just getting there.
Before anyone chimes in with it will just increase traffic - this is already constrained by the number of rentals available and limits on development on the Cape. There would be no place for more tourists to go
Widening a bridge will increase traffic. 1 car households will turn into 2 or 3 car households as people decide to drive instead of taking the train or walking.
Development limits are meaningless. Traffic is not caused by population, but by car usage. Tokyo is the biggest city in the world, but it has almost no traffic.
Barnstable County has 230k people living in it. It is not physically possible to build a bridge that will move tens of thousands of cars during rush hour. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, peak car traffic will always be constained by the roads, not the population.