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Whoopsie! Sydney's road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway. (aus.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Whoopsie! Sydney's road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.

For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney's Central Business District.

It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it's turned into a giant car park:

"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.

"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.

"Those travel delays have now blown out."

So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?

'Dude! Just one more lane!'

From the article:

"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.

"That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/how-planners-got-rozelle-traffic-modelling-horribly-wrong-20231129-p5ensa.html

#roads #traffic #cars @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #motorways #fuckcars

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While the money sold have been spent on public transport, it's a bit fucking premature to put this down to induced demand - the tangled mess has been operating for what - like 3 business days? People are getting confused and doing silly bullshit. It's a problem, but it's not induced demand.

Induced demand is a thing, and it'll almost certainly be relevant here - there's no need to lie about it - give it a minute to settle first. This is the benefit of being correct - there's no need to be dishonest.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I came here to point this out and love the way you stated it. Confusion, hesitation and unnecessary lane changes are what create traffic. There has never been a major highway development in history that didn’t cause at least some short term issues. We should give city planners a bit more credit than that

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, volume of cars is what creates traffic.

Edit: you'd think that in a fuck cars community, of all places, we'd all be able to agree on this basic principle. We're apparently infested with six idiot trolls who think cars don't cause traffic and that induced demand isn't real.

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

The volume of cars is a scale factor that determines the impact of traffic causing behaviors and conditions for free flowing highways (no traffic lights, stop signs, etc.). Following too closely and improper lane changing are two specific behaviors that actually create slow downs. There are numerous models that simulate this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, yes, I'm well aware of how it works (I'm a former traffic engineer IRL). Although it's true the behaviors trigger the slowdowns, it's the traffic volume that creates the conditions where switching to the congested flow regime becomes possible.

In other words, if high traffic volumes aren't present, those behaviors don't have that consequence, and moreover, if high traffic volumes are present, the free-flow regime is such an unstable equilibrium that some kind of event (even one as minor as a driver briefly tapping their brakes) triggering a shift away from it and to the congested regime is inevitable. It's the volume that's the essential condition, not the behavior.

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

@WaxedWookie @ajsadauskas Are you sure the post is dishonest? Maybe it's just a simple mistake or a misunderstanding. 'You're a liar' seems a bit much.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Are you sure the post is just a mistake or misunderstanding? Maybe it's just dishonest. 'You're ignorant or stupid' seems a bit much.

I'd be more willing to accept innocent ignorance in the replies - I assume that if someone is posting a new thread about a situation that includes a judgement on the cause of that situation, they at least have a passing familiarity of the thing they're publically passing judgement on.

They're very obviously wrong in a way that discredits the good ideas put forward by the participants in this sub - if they retract their post, I'll happily retract mine.

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

@WaxedWookie Is it really "obviously wrong"? I lived a few kilometres from all those roads when they were being built - ANZAC Bridge, City West Link, Cross City Tunnel etc.. Induced demand (as I understand it) has been a long-term thing. Previous new road debuts have not been as fraught as the Rozelle Interchange.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Induced demand is (like I said) definitely a thing, and will almost certainly be a meaningful factor here, but to point to massive delays a couple of days after opening the most complex underground road network in the world, where loads of people are stopping after taking wrong turns (e.g. the side you access the Anzac bridge has switched) is obviously not induced demand.

Let the immediate adjustment period cool off, then take a look at it - I'm sure the induced demand will be there. There's no need to point to teething issues immediately after opening and call that induced demand - it discredits the very concept.

I lived a few hundred meters from it, and currently live a few km from it - not that I think it's relevant to this discussion.

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

@WaxedWookie @AvonVilla I fundamentally disagree that induced demand isn't at play here.

That's because this spaghetti intersection isn't a standalone project. It's part of WestConnex.

For *years* before it opened, the state government promised that WestConnex would deliver faster travel times from Western Sydney to the CBD. They promised faster travel times from the southern suburbs to the city. This was going to end traffic congestion on Parramatta Road once and for all.

This is directly off the WestConnex website:

"The New M4, opened in July 2019. The WestConnex M4, including the 5.5km New M4 Tunnels, connects Haberfield to Parramatta and the M4. Motorists on this section of WestConnex are saving an average of 35 minutes on their westbound peak time journey compared to Parramatta Road.

"The M8, opened in July 2020. The 9km twin tunnels connects the M5 at Kingsgrove to a new interchange at St Peters, with 6ha of new open space, built on a remediated former landfill site. The tunnels cut up to 30 minutes off a trip between Liverpool and the southern CBD."

https://www.westconnex.com.au/explore-westconnex/about-westconnex/

Here's a direct quote from Gladys in 2018:

"If you're coming from Liverpool you'll save about half an hour, if you're coming from [Oatley area] you'll save about 15 minutes.

"When this project has finished, not only will you have less traffic on local roads, because traffic will be underground, but you're also going to be given open space you didn't have before."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/world-s-worst-park-westconnex-s-new-st-peters-spaghetti-junction-20180814-p4zxel.html

And people made decisions about where they would live and how they would travel based on WestConnex.

That instead of being stuck on Parramatta Road, they'd get a nice quick commute down the M4 to the city. Or that they'd be able to take the M5 through the new M8 motorway tunnel to the city.

And a lot of that traffic is now heading straight to the Anzac Bridge:

"Before the Rozelle interchange opened, seven lanes merged into four on the Anzac Bridge. Now, 10 lanes are merged into four with the extra lanes from the spaghetti junction."

"“It is a forever problem because the system is funnelling too many people into a road that is too small. They assumed the Anzac Bridge could support more cars than was physically possible," [Sydney transport expert Mathew Hounsell] said.

"“Trying to shovel a motorway into the middle of a city was never going to work. The previous government and the roads department stuffed it up. They didn’t want to listen to anyone who would tell them it was not going to work.

"The former Coalition government stated repeatedly that traffic flows on Victoria Road would be reduced by 50 per cent when the interchange opened, a “claim that is laughable now” [Inner West Council mayor Darcy Byrne] said."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/it-s-a-forever-problem-experts-say-rozelle-hell-is-here-to-stay-20231130-p5eo2o.html

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

@WaxedWookie @AvonVilla When the prime minister, the state premier, and the transport Minister all hype up an infrastructure project by promising less traffic to the city, many people will make transport decisions accordingly.

That's the big picture here.

Here's an example of the hype the federal and state governments were building for *years* around WestConnex and the Rozelle Interchange:

"Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the $16.8 billion project was cutting travel times and supporting thousands of families with work as Sydney and Australia were reopening from COVID lockdowns.

"“This breakthrough isn’t just for a tunnel, but it’s a breakthrough for getting people home sooner and safer and helping workers to move around,” the Prime Minister said.

"“As well as the 9,000 jobs this project has been delivering, the tunnel is going to make it easier for people across Sydney to pick up work and jobs that just wouldn’t have been possible before with traffic.

"“As we reopen Sydney and Australia, projects like this bypass and our record $110 billion infrastructure investment are going to give our economy even more of a boost.”

"New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said the third stage of WestConnex is now another step closer to forming a western bypass of the Sydney CBD.

"“This project will change the lives of thousands of people, bypassing dozens of sets of traffic lights and allowing an uninterrupted drive from the Blue Mountains to Rozelle,” the Premier said.

"“As part of the New South Wales Government’s record $108.5 billion investment pipeline, WestConnex is already easing congestion, creating jobs and connecting communities, right across our city.

"“Our Government has its eye to the future and this breakthrough will complete a ‘missing link’ between the new M4 Tunnels at Haberfield and the M8 at St Peters.”

"Federal Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts Paul Fletcher said the Commonwealth Government had co-funded WestConnex from the outset with a grant of $1.5 billion and a concessional loan of $2 billion.

"“This is a major milestone in what is one of the most significant road infrastructure projects in the country, which is already delivering major benefits for Sydney commuters by reducing travel times, easing congestion and improving safety,” Minister Fletcher said.

"“When opened to traffic in 2023, the M4-M4 Link Tunnels and Rozelle Interchange will complete the WestConnex project, providing improved links between key employment hubs and local communities.”

"NSW Minister for Transport and Roads Rob Stokes said 22 of the 33 kilometres of WestConnex would be underground, including the 7.5 kilometres that make up the M4-M5 Link Tunnels.

...

"“The M4-M5 Link Tunnels will remove tens of thousands of vehicles from surrounding streets, including Parramatta Road, and will help slash up to 40 minutes from an average peak journey between Parramatta and the Sydney Airport.”"

https://www.acciona.com.au/updates/news/westconnex-m4-m5-link-tunnels-the-final-breakthrough/?_adin=02021864894

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

@ajsadauskas @WaxedWookie Those maniacs are like a religious cult. In Scummo's case, perhaps literally. Turning Sydney into a car-plagued hellscape has been a decades long project, and Westconnex is the horrendous crowning glory.

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

Brevity isn't your strong suit. I'll keep this simple.

I assume you wouldn't argue that the current delays will sustain for the foreseeable future. The induction drivers won't disappear for the foreseeable future. With those 2 things being true, how could you say these delays are induced demand rather than temporary teething issues with opening?

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

@WaxedWookie @AvonVilla
Because it's the same story we have seen 1000 times all over the world for 70 Years. You have to look at the problem holistically. Simply thinking about cars and roads, in isolation to the whole city, how people behave, how we live and work, is a recipe for failure. I think this explains the issue well enough.

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

I've been clear I think induced demand will be an issue here. There's no dispute on that, but you're refusing to bite the bullet on whether these more extreme teething issues (which I'm asserting aren't induced demand) will stay.

If you say the delays will stay, I'm confident you'll be proven wrong in fairly short order - the traffic will ease, proving it's not induced demand. The scale of the induceed demand can be fairly measured at that point.

If you don't think the delays will stay when the induction factors remain unchanged, you have to concede this isn't induced demand - it's short term teething, which is my position.

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

@WaxedWookie @MrLee I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I think traffic is likely to remain awful during peak hours on the Anzac Bridge and Victoria Rd. (It's likely to ease up temporarily over the Christmas break, but will worsen again after Australia Day.)

Even before WestConnex, the Anzac Bridge already wasn't exactly great during peak hour from all the traffic heading through Drummoyne along Victoria Road.

The new WestConnex motorways have made that worse.

If you're on the M4 extension, how do you get to the CBD? Either you take the Parramatta Rd turnoff at Ashfield, or you go through the spaghetti intersection to the Anzac Bridge.

If you're heading from the airport on the new M8, how do you get to the CBD? You go through the spaghetti intersection to the Anzac Bridge.

And if you're on the M5, how do you get to the CBD? Well, you can take Southern Cross Drive under the airport to the Eastern Distributor, or you take the M8 to the spaghetti intersection to the Anzac Bridge.

During the morning and evening peak, a lot of commuters want to travel to or from the city at the same time. And that traffic is being funnelled from the M4, M5 and M8 on to the Anzac Bridge, and then to the CBD offramps.

The claim was that these new WestConnex motorways were going to take traffic off other roads. So for example the M4 was going to take traffic off Parramatta Road.

What it's ended up doing is inducing more traffic demand, and that additional demand is being dumped on to the Anzac Bridge.

Parramatta Road is still terrible during peak hour, and there's now even more cars travelling along the M4.

People have also made housing and long-term travel decisions based on the claims that WestConnex would make car travel quicker to the CBD from western and southern Sydney.

Are there people driving slowly while they figure out which lane to take through the spaghetti intersection? Yes there are.

But. The bigger issue is that the new WestConnex motorways have induced additional traffic demand, and a lot of it is trying to cross the Anzac Bridge.

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

It's been reported that the travel times are already dropping by 10%+ in the few days since opening... That sure points to these delays being mostly due to teething that's beginning to ease already.

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

@WaxedWookie It was also deliberately opened at the end of the year because there's less traffic demand:

"But the government and motorway operator Transurban – who have a contract to run WestConnex until 2060 – say the traffic peak won’t come until February."

So the real test won't be how it performs on a Friday or weekend. It's how it will do once everyone's back at work in February.

Again, the underlying issue seems to be extra traffic that wouldn't be there if the M4/M5/M8 motorway extensions hadn't opened.

There's a lot of traffic being funnelled on to a bridge that was already at capacity.

"Since the project opened on 19 November, morning drivers have headed into the city and found three lanes on two of the main arterial roads abruptly merging into one. Feeder streets from nearby suburbs were jammed, with movement slowing to barely one block an hour at the worst of the crunch times."

The Inner West Council is claiming that department officials were concerned behind closed doors in the months before the interchange opened:

"Darcy Byrne, the mayor of Inner West Council, oversees a region that has endured a decade of dusty and noisy construction. He says Transport for New South Wales officials 'were very concerned' in briefings three months ago about how WestConnex was going to perform.

"'We have warned for a very long time [that] when you tried to funnel such a greatly expanded amount of traffic into the same number of lanes at the Anzac Bridge at Victoria Road, it was going to be a tsunami of traffic chaos,' he said."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/02/a-tsunami-of-traffic-chaos-the-new-sydney-motorway-prompting-calls-for-a-royal-commission

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

I guess we can just revisit this in February then. If the time to get through the mess remains around 90 minutes, we'll call that one for induced demand. I think a meaningful reduction from that mark toward the actual baseline with induced demand is going to prove otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago

More lanes won't help, but what the hell are those pinch points? 3 lanes down to 1? Did they never drive in a car?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

The American Dream circa 1962 is alive and well in Australia

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why don’t they just move people’s houses closer to where they work, or vice versa?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You mean mixing businesses and residential units in the same walkable neighborhood like we've done for thousands of years? That would never work! We must maximize commuting distances in order to reduce traffic and commuting times.

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

You really need to put a sarcasm tag on that. I almost got whiplash.

My city is doing the same thing. They let developers build out exclaves around the city and then ask the city to annex it. There seems to be no limit to how stupid the city council is about this. The latest one is on a hill with no water, police, fire, or school services that got annexed. Now the city has to build out everything. The ROI to the city is in the range of centuries based on the tax revenues. Add in that it's 100% commercial district free and now we've added an eternal car snake on a tiny two lane road into town.

We've gotta start building some mixed use density or all of this infrastructure is going to collapse.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism but it's literally never worked anywhere before, so it must work this time!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism There is a specific CATEGORY of threat to humanity's operations, that needs systematic countering:

The counter-intuitive.

Things like "add more roads, they'll de-congest" are *natural* assumptions, and *wrong*.

But there are many counter-intuitive things,
and it is *incompetent* to pretend that every manager, authority, whatever, everywhere, is going to somehow, magically, independently discover that they are counter-intuitive & need to be managed *backwards* to one's unconscious "reasoning".

It's like trying to get somebody to understand countersteering...

Until they *understand* that you're literally riding the bike on the *side* of the tire, it can't make any sense.

Counter-intuitive functions need to be catalog'd, organized, and systematically defeated by school-kids, or in job-training, or ANYthing.

The costs of *not* doing-so are compounding too much.

---

Perhaps a Required Lessons for each domain, & each job within that domain...

SOMEthing, though, and we need it yesterday.

_ /\ _

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s like trying to get somebody to understand countersteering.

Yep.

Until they understand that you’re literally riding the bike on the side of the tire, it can’t make any sense

Wait, what? Countersteering is about manipulating the contact patch relative to the center of gravity. The side of the tire has relatively no relevance.

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

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]

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

I think H.O.V. lanes are necessary, and the passenger limit should be such that traffic moves quickly in them They will require separate ramps from everyone else.

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

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism

I think it's more a case of this whole interchange has been built for western harbour tunnel. ie the more lanes are coming...in 5 years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
Seems more like it, I would expect induced demand to be more prominent on the longer time scales.

In particular, I recall a simple graph example where you'd have two parallel roads with some traffic on them. And then you create a link between them, aiming to improve the situation. However, the link gets jammed and the overall situation gets worse

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

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]

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

@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
Not even that; the additional lanes already exist, they're just signposted so confusingly that people are avoiding them and instead crowding onto what's now intended to be a local road

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

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]

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

@jedsetter @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism
To be clear—

The tunnel sign-posted as "City, Port Botany ✈️ [toll]" goes to Anzac Bridge, toll-free. If you're used to taking Victoria Road to Anzac Bridge, you should take the tunnel.

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

Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]