It does increase the capacity of roads. Two lanes holds twice as many cars as one lane. Four lanes hold twice as many cars as two lanes.
You’re probably thinking of induced demand, but that’s related to traffic congestion and not capacity. More lanes ultimately means more cars are getting places, but any individual car will see that congestion is just as bad as it used to be.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
yeah see what’s happening here is that you’re completely ignoring junctions: even in the ideal case of a completely straight road you still need junctions to get on and off the road, which will put a hard limit on throughput.
This is why traffic in america is miserable, the traffic engineers fail to recognize that you can’t just put businesses right next to roads as that will cause stupendous amounts of choking every time someone wants to pop in for some mcdonalds.
3 lanes in each direction is about the most you’ll ever need, which is what you’ll tend to see on big highways in europe. And really most of the time you’ll do just fine with 2 lanes.
SwampYankee@mander.xyz 8 months ago
Yeah, fuckin’ Americans, putting their McDonald’s right next to roads… I mean, just look at this. What a disgrace.
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Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
yeah uh, you do realize stockholm is infamous for having shit traffic, right? Precisely because it took a lot of the road design from the US.
Your example only proves my point.
SwampYankee@mander.xyz 8 months ago
I’m just struggling to imagine where you would put a business except for next to a road, regardless of whether there are cars on that road or not.
stankmut@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I actually had a whole paragraph about junctions being a limit and then deleted it since i didn’t feel like it added to my point. I also was going to add a point about how much space the lanes take up and that even if more lanes added capacity, it didn’t necessarily mean they were the right option.