re: It's not just you: The Katy Freeway is scientifically awful

All of these induced demand morons seem to think cars just appear out of the aether to fill those lanes, but they were all driven from somewhere.

When you add lanes to an efficient system like a controlled access highway, motorists move there from the less efficient surface streets. Thus, resulting in significantly less congestion on surface streets.

Additional lanes do not allow the cars on a freeway to move faster. They allow MORE cars to be moved in the same timeframe. If rush hour traffic creeps along at 20 mph for 5 miles. It will move 50% more cars at 6 lanes than it did at 4.

Think of it this way: you have two hoses each with the same velocity of water. A wider hose will dispense more water than a narrowed hose so long as the velocity remains constant. Now, typically, water pressure deals with fluid equations, meaning temperature, volume, and pressure are linked, so it’s difficult to maintain pressure with increasing volume without changing temperature, but you get what I mean.

Plus, a system can only flow as quickly as it can through its narrowest point. 22 lanes don’t matter if all of that traffic has to condense down to 4. Unless there’s 80% fewer cars on that 4 lane stretch compared to the wider stretch, you’ve still got a bottleneck.

Induced demand is just social Marxist bullshyt peddled by con artists who want to embezzle transportation money that would otherwise be spent on highway construction.