Induced epiphany

Stop trafficking "problem solve-y" thinking

I just had a great drive to work.

I’ve actually been pretty busy with my “real” work recently (hence this newsletter spilling out from me somewhat late!), so I genuinely appreciated those smooth slip lanes, well-phased traffic lights, grade-separated busways, and sensible traffic calming measures¹, assuring pedestrians they didn’t need to scramble, like preditor-stalked herds of grazing animals, through too-small gaps between impatiently-driven fast-moving death-machines.

Which is all to say, stuff functions well when it’s just used correctly.

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I think most people, when they have a good commuter run, imagine it’s because of a dramatic number of cars not being on the road—a full half the population working from home or not dropping precious Little Johnny off at the school gates or whatever. But actually, the difference between a good run and an awful one is often made from just a couple of percent fewer vehicles.

Most of our major roads are built to funnel a lot of cars—traffic engineers have had decades of practice and measurement—but add just 2 or 3% more than the road was designed for, and that smooth streaming mass of glass and metal turns into a car park of rage and wasted time.

We are all familiar with those very worst commutes, where some tanker truck has flipped and flooded five highway lanes with flammable liquid, at the precise moment the end-of-day school bell sounds across the city and signals the start of summer holidays. But those truly horrible days are actually exceedingly rare—in reality, the difference between a perfect and a congested city run might average an extra 10-15 minutes over a typical 20-unimpeded-minute journey… Chances are you spend more time each day staring into space waiting for the kettle to boil, or scrolling past the posts of people you “keep meaning to unfollow” on Instagram.

This is because roads are designed to move cars.

Frickin’ Tuesdays! Source

Human beings in cars often don’t see it that way. In the heart of a traffic jam, it’s easy to assume it’s clogged up because the roads are badly designed, and it doesn’t occur that simply removing a few vehicles would mean the road design would actually be perfectly functional.

That’s why there’s always some ning-nong dangerously (and inefficiently) whipping across congested lanes in their oversized truck, in order to save themselves 8 seconds. That comes from thinking about roading as a dysfunctional system that needs to be “hacked”—with extra lanes or maneuvers—rather than a right-sized but wrongly-utilised space.

On top of that, sitting in traffic, we have a truly deranged perception of time. Any extra minute of hold-up is benchmarked against a fantasy world where, were it not for the “inadequate roading infrastructure”, we’d have a straight 100km/h shot directly from our home to the office.

And so, those of us who live in and around cities do a lot of complaining about the state of our roads. We get uppity about adding more lanes; we project spittle across council meeting rooms about street parking being converted to cycleways; we demand speed humps be removed; and insist on speed limits being increased in all directions. It’s all stuff that’s hypnotically appealing to the deluded car commuter: “If there was only more space or speed for me, I’d be more productive, healthier, and happier!”

What we do very little thinking about is how our perception of this stuff as a “problem to solve” might part of the actual problem.

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If you’re the kind of person who reads me, chances are you’re familiar with the term ‘Induced Demand’. This is the principle (used by city planners too embarrassed to directly quote Kevin Costner movies) where “if you build it [they] will come”².

In roading terms, it’s the idea that building One More Lane for cars will make taking the car a better option because our car trips will be safer and faster… Initially. And then, everyone will catch on and you’ll end up not just back where you started with traffic congestion but, in many cases, in a worse place.

The reason for this particular contradiction in induced demand is an extra lane for private vehicles doesn’t just make commuting by private vehicle more appealing, it also eats up space and funding and mind-share which could have been used to improve, for example, public transport.

So, public transport likely gets worse and less attractive to use, despite great public transport delivering THE SAME BENEFIT to private vehicle commuters (less congestion), while also delivering lower-cost transport, reduced roading maintenance costs, and lower climate emissions.

Which sort of brings me nearer to my actual point.

There’s a bunch of other objectively consistently-proven concepts, much like ‘induced demand’, that we would all benefit from just accepting as reality, yet still face massive resistance because, in the past few decades, we’ve increasingly (had to) put up mental blocks around anything that doesn’t appear to be explicitly “for me”:

Poverty causes crime and other anti-social behaviour; increased diversity improves communities; making places accessible to people outside our narrow definition of ‘normal’ makes them more accessible for everyone; taxing wealth is more effective than taxing income...

These are things we should have widespread consensus on, but a large number of us are too proud to admit we’ve been conned into believing their antithesis. Or, we somehow still genuinely believe, against all odds, we might personally benefit from keeping them as flaccid aspirations.

The simple epiphany I had during that good commute was the particular roads I was travelling on were absolutely fine. There were loads of cars on them, all moving well—thousands of people getting to where they wanted to go, without wasted space or wasted time. If every day went roughly like that, no one would ever complain about traffic. The trick then is having people realise that fact.

Once you realise there’s nothing really wrong with something, and it’s just the way it is being ‘used’ that’s the issue, then you can stop looking at it as a problem to fix, and start looking at it as a reality to adapt for.

That might be something as simple as agreeing that each additional “net” commuter³ shouldn’t strain a functioning road: That is, the more people or freight that we need to move down that road, the more we have to encourage car-pools, buses, trains, cycling, commuting at different times, or building walkable neighbourhoods; or providing kids access to any of those things rather than dropping them off at the school gate every day. So, we don’t need more private car lanes.

It’s basically thinking about a road as a space we share, rather than an individual convenience.

How we might do that in practice is very open to interpretation, but it could be any combination of making personal car commuting less appealing or making other modes of commuting or lifestyles more appealing. The point is, if you accept the roads are already well suited for 99% of private vehicle use, then the aim of new transport infrastructure should be to maintain what’s already there at peak-efficiency, rather than keep delivering more individualised solutions.

Not building more roads is obviously not an entirely novel idea—the Welsh government announced a policy of no new major road building for private vehicles back in 2021, although their stated goal was to reduce pollution.

However, I don’t want you to think of this as stock-standard social liberalism: Doing better by just leaning into ‘progressive thinking’—like solar panels, 15-minute cities⁴, or Black transfemale CEOs. It’s much more basic than that. Because, as good as any of those things might be on their face, they also all still represent problems needing to be ‘solved’ rather than realities we just need to ‘change our minds about’. No matter how progressive your thinking, if you are problem-solving you’re still kind-of playing the same brinkmanship game that the One More Lane folk play. For example, if the problem is fossil fuel energy use, one solution might be solar panels…Only, what I’m suggesting is just fucking turn off the lights and TV when you leave the room!

What is important to understand is this isn’t especially about climate change or productivity or asphalt use or health; it’s about the insight to know when to stop stuffing our faces with fried chicken and ice cream when we’re already full, and go for a stroll in the park instead.

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Humans are naturally competitive beings. But we’ve now taken that tendency and built a society where our desire for ‘more’ no longer signals us when we have ‘enough’. Even now, when it’s plainly obvious we’re living in a world with finite edges to the biosphere.

We’ve gotten so used to just demanding “more!” when something inconveniences us that we rarely have our minds open to the possibility that—quite often—things are really fine, if they are just used sensibly.

Good politics might be solving intractable problems, but great politics is solving intractable minds. One of the biggest challenges for our politicians then, as global populations ripple and surge under the accelerating impacts of climate change, is to just stop trying to sell us ‘fixes’ and start finding ways to induce epiphany.

-T

1. My father worked as a civil engineer throughout my childhood so this sort of stuff was dinner-table conversation.

2. Also referred to more widely in general technological expansion, as the Jevons Paradox after William Stanley Jevons (1865)

3. A ‘net’ commuter would be calculated from either a mode-shifting existing commuter, or new commuter population.

4. Unfortunately, ‘15 minute cities’ is largely (mis)understood now as a technical solution to planning a city, involving physical infrastructure—that’s the social liberal context I’m presenting it as here. For your reference though, the actual 15-minute city concept should really be thought about simply as a framework for thinking about human-scale cities, rather than any specific features, infrastructure, or regulation.