[The following was published in the February 25, 2024 edition of the Greenville News]
A colleague of mine here in Greenville talked about how expensive it would be to widen Woodruff Road, a massively oversized “stroad.”
I pointed out that it is an even bigger price tag than he suggests. This congestion “reduction” project (widening an already overly wide road) is a tragic, unaffordable, counterproductive, wasteful mistake that will damage retail and residential on and near Woodruff Road. Motor vehicle crashes with other motor vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists will increase substantially, as will air emissions and fuel consumption. It will reduce bicycling, walking, and transit trips, while increasing motor vehicle trips. It will result in far more development sprawling unaffordably into remote locations in the region. The region will suffer from more low-density strip development along the project corridor. That low-density, sprawling development will come nowhere near paying its own way (it is, therefore, a Ponzi Scheme), which will thereby contribute to financial woes for all levels of government, not to mention for households in the area.
We know with certainty (a century of experience throughout the nation confirms this) that reducing congestion by adding more capacity will – at best -- only reduce congestion for 3-5 years. After that, the Triple Convergence described so well by Anthony Downs will have artificially induced so many new car trips (trips that would not have ever occurred had we not added capacity) that we are left with is more congestion on a bigger road system. Adding capacity to reduce congestion, then, is equivalent to loosening your belt to solve obesity.
Or as I point out in my books and speeches, when we add capacity (i.e., widen) we are not durably eliminating congestion. We therefore have only two alternatives to choose from:
1. Spend millions (billions?) of public dollars to obtain the alternative of MORE congestion on a bigger roadway.
2. Don’t spend millions (billions?) to widen the road, and instead accept the inevitable congestion on a smaller road.
I prefer alternative two.
One person in this conversation responded by saying “people are moving to Greenville so we are forced to accommodate that.”
To which I suggested that if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
I pointed out two things for this person to consider:
1. Using your logic, which is the logic used by most everyone for the past century, roadways in New York City should be 500 lanes wide. After all, people have been moving to NYC (a city with far more people than Greenville) for the past century.
2. Your thinking is part of the thinking that brought down the Soviet Union. The Soviet blunder was that the "solution" to long bread lines was to make more free bread. By not understanding basic economics, the Soviet "solution" did nothing to end bread lines. Similarly, adding more free-to-use roadway capacity -- as we have seen over and over again for the past century in the US -- inevitably results in the "solution" of doing nothing to end congestion (except to give us an 8-lane congested road rather than a 4-lane congested road -- at a staggering public expense). Memo to Soviets and those favoring more roadway widening: if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Also, try paying attention in your Economics 101 class.
By the way, the "logic" of our "need" to widen roads to accommodate a growing Greenville is puzzling, given history in Greenville. After all, Main St was taken from 5 lanes to 3 several decades ago. Greenville has been growing in population for those many years, yet 3-lane Main Street (at a smaller size) is now significantly better than the previous 5-lane Main Street for nearly all metrics: crime, retail and residential and office health, crashes, homelessness, prostitution, abandonment/vacancies, tax revenue compared to public expenses, visual appearance, and civic pride.
I suspect Main Street would not be better if -- in 1980 -- we decided to continue widening Main Street due to the fact that "people are moving to Greenville."
Side note: studies consistently show that going from 5 lanes to 3 does not lead to traffic diverting to nearby roads. Like the removal of the 4-lane highway at Falls Park 40 years ago, the traffic did not "spill over" to nearby roadways (as many feared for both Main Street and the Falls highway bridge).
Those expected but not realized spillover trips did not emerge due to trip valuation economics, which are too involved for me to explain here.