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Why More Roads Create More Traffic: The Jazz Age Version

The “induced travel” argument has a long history. This comes from Alvan Macauley, president of the Packard Motor Car Company, in a 1925 pamphlet titled City Planning and Automobile Traffic Problems:

“Since the advent of the automobile, however, the amount of traffic carried by a main thoroughfare seems to be dependent largely upon how many the thoroughfare can carry. Increasing the width of roadway and making possible an additional lane of travel each way will in many cases find the added capacity entirely taken up within a few months, either by diversion from other less favorable routes or by actual increase in the use of cars by those living in and passing through the city in question.

Just how this problem can be solved and what provision should be made for future increase in traffic it is difficult to state definitely, and to this extent a count of present traffic might seem to be void of direct results or even of value.“

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Cars, Drivers, Traffic Engineering, Traffic History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Why More Roads Create More Traffic: The Jazz Age Version”

  1. David Hembrow Says:
    October 4th, 2008 at 1:41 am

    A few weeks back, I found an example of much the same thing from the 1950s.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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