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.
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.
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.
do you actually think just adding lanes will infinitely increase the capacity of roads?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah… That’s how these things work ya know. A 4 lane road has higher capacity than a 2 lane road assuming there arent any choke points.
yeah uh, i think you’ll find that you need junctions, which create chokepoints?
even with highways you get chokepoints at the ramps, and they are extremely absurdly costly.
just 1 more lane bro