Induced demand

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Induced demand, or latent demand, is the phenomenon that

after supply increases, more of a good is consumed. This is
entirely consistent with the economic theory of supply and
demand; however, this idea has become important in the debate
over the expansion of transportation systems, and is often used
as an argument against increasing roadway traffic capacity as a
cure for congestion. This phenomenon, called induced traffic, is
a contributing factor to urban sprawl. City planner Jeff Speck
has called induced demand "the great intellectual black hole in
city planning, the one professional certainty that everyone
thoughtful seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to
act upon."[1]

The inverse effect, or reduced demand, is also true (see below)

Contents
1 Effect in transportation systems Part of the Embarcadero Freewayin San
1.1 Price of road travel Francisco being torn down in 1991. The removal
1.1.1 Elasticity of transport demand of the freeway illustrates the inverse of induced
1.2 Sources of induced traffic demand, "reduced demand".
1.3 Induced demand and transport planning
1.4 Studies
2 Induced demand other than in traffic
3 Reduced demand (the inverse effect)
3.1 Studies
3.2 Real-world examples
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Effect in transportation systems

Latent demand has been recognised by road traffic professionals for many decades, and was initially referred to
as "traffic generation". In the simplest terms, latent demand is demand that exists, but, for any number of
reasons, most having to do with human psychology, is suppressed by the inability of the system to handle it.
Once additional capacity is added to the network, the demand that had been latent materializes as actual
usage.[2]

The effect was recognized as early as 1930, when an executive of a St. Louis, Missouri electric railway
company told a Transportation Survey Commission that widening streets simply produces more traffic, and
heavier congestion.[3] In New York, it was clearly seen in the highway-building program of Robert Moses, the
"master builder" of the New York City area. As described by Moses' biographer, Robert Caro, in The Power
Broker:

During the last two or three years before [the entrance of the United States into World War II], a
few planners had...begun to understand that, without a balanced system [of transportation], roads
would not only not alleviate transportation congestion but would aggravate it. Watching Moses
 open the Triborough Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, open the Bronx-
Whitestone Bridge to ease congestion on the Triborough Bridge and then watching traffic counts
on all three bridges mount until all three were as congested as one had been before, planners could
hardly avoid the conclusion that "traffic generation" was no longer a theory but a proven fact: the
more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and
congest them and this force the building of more highways which would generate more traffic
and become congested in their turn in an ever-widening spiral that contained the most awesome
implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas.[4]

The same effect had been seen earlier with the new parkways that Moses had built on Long Island in the 1930s
and 40s, where

...every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic, but the load on the
old parkways was not significantly relieved.[5]

Similarly, the building of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel failed to ease congestion on the Queens-Midtown
Tunnel and the three East River bridges, as Moses had expected it to.[6] By 1942, Moses could no longer ignore
the reality that his roads were not alleviating congestion in the way he expected them to, but his answer to the
problem was not to invest in mass transit, it was to build even more roads, in a vast program which would
expand or newly create 200 miles of roads, including additional bridges, such as the Throgs Neck Bridge and
the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.[7][8] J. J. Leeming, a British road-traffic engineer and county surveyor between
1924 and 1964, described the phenomenon in his 1969 book, Road Accidents: Prevent or Punish?:

Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to
travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the
old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new
road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for
shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed.[9]

Leeming went on to give an example of the observed effect following the opening of the Doncaster Bypass
section of the A1(M) in 1961. By 1998, Donald Chen quoted the British Transport Minister as saying "The fact
of the matter is that we cannot tackle our traffic problem by building more roads."[10] In Southern California, a
study by the Southern California Association of Governments in 1989 concluded that steps taken to alleviate
traffic congestion, such as adding lanes or turning freeways into double-decked roads, would have nothing but a
cosmetic effect on the problem.[8] Also, the University of California at Berkeley published a study of traffic in
30 California counties between 1973 and 1990 which showed that every 10 percent increase in roadway
capacity, traffic increased by 9 percent within four years time.[10] A 2004 meta-analysis, which took in dozens
of previously published studies, confirmed this: it found that:

...on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in
vehicle miles traveled, which climbs to 10 percent the entire new capacity in a few years.[11]

An aphorism among some traffic engineers is "Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like
trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt."[12]

According to city planner Jeff Speck, the "seminal" text on induced demand is the 1993 book The Elephant in
the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and Denial, written by Stanley I. Hart and Alvin L. Spivak.[1]

Price of road travel

A journey on a road can be considered as having an associated cost
or price (the generalised cost, g) which includes the out-of-pocket
cost (e.g. fuel costs and tolls) and the opportunity cost of the time
spent travelling, which is usually calculated as the product of travel
time and the value of travellers' time.

When road capacity is increased, initially there is more road space

per vehicle travelling than there was before, so congestion is
reduced, and therefore the time spent travelling is reduced
reducing the generalised cost of every journey (by affecting the
second "cost" mentioned in the previous paragraph). In fact, this is
one of the key justifications for construction of new road capacity
(the reduction in journey times).

A change in the cost (or price) of travel results in a change in the

When supply shifts from S1 to S2, the price
quantity consumed. This can be explained using the simple supply (explained below) drops from P1 to P2, and
and demand theory, illustrated below. quantity consumed increases from Q1 to Q2

Elasticity of transport demand

For roads or highways, the supply relates to capacity and the quantity consumed refers to vehicle-kilometres
travelled. The size of the increase in quantity consumed depends on the elasticity of demand.

A review of transport research suggests that the elasticity of traffic demand with respect to travel time is around
0.5 in the short term and 1.0 in the long term.[13] This indicates that a 1.0% saving in travel time will
generate an additional 0.5% increase in traffic within the first year. In the longer term, a 1.0% saving in travel
time will result in a 1.0% increase in traffic volume.

Sources of induced traffic

In the short term, increased travel on new road space can come from one of two sources: diverted travel and
induced traffic. Diverted travel occurs when people divert their trip from another road (change in route) or
retime their travel (change in timing). For example, people might travel to work earlier than they would
otherwise like, in order to avoid peak period congestion but if road capacity is expanded, peak congestion is
lower and they can travel at the time they prefer.

Induced traffic occurs when new automobile trips are generated. This can occur when people choose to travel
by car instead of public transport, or decide to travel when they otherwise would not have.[14]

Shortening travel times can also encourage longer trips as reduced travel costs encourage people to choose
farther destinations. Although this may not increase the number of trips, it increases vehicle-kilometres
travelled. In the long term, this effect alters land use patterns as people choose homes and workplace locations
farther away than they would have without the expanded road capacity. These development patterns encourage
automobile dependency which contributes to the high long-term demand elasticities of road expansion.[14]

Induced demand and transport planning

Although planners take into account future traffic growth when planning new roads (this often being an
apparently reasonable justification for new roads in itself that traffic growth will mean more road capacity is
required), this traffic growth is calculated from increases in car ownership and economic activity, and does not
take into account traffic induced by the presence of the new road; that is, it is assumed that traffic will grow,
regardless of whether a road is built or not.[14]
In the UK, the idea of induced traffic was used as a grounds for protests against government policy of road
construction in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, until it became accepted as a given by the government as a
result of their own Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA) study of 1994.[15]
However, despite the concept of induced traffic now being accepted, it is not always taken into consideration in
planning.

Studies

A comparison of congestion data from 1982 to 2011 by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute clearly
demonstrated that additional roadways reduced the rate of congestion increase. When increases in road capacity
were matched to the increase demand, growth in congestion was found to be much lower.[16] A 1998 meta-
analysis by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which utilized data from the Institute, stated that "Metro
areas which invested heavily in road capacity expansion fared no better in easing congestion than metro areas
that did not."[17]

On the other hand, one study by Robert Cervero, a professor of City and
Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, found that "over a
six- to eight-year period following freeway expansion, around twenty percent
of added capacity is 'preserved,' and around eighty percent gets absorbed or
depleted. Half of this absorption is due to external factors, like growing
population and income. The other half is due to induced-demand effects,
mostly higher speeds but also increased building activities. These represent
California experiences from 1980 to 1994. Whether they hold true elsewhere is
of course unknown."[18]

Induced demand other than in traffic

Vending machines are another example of induced demand. As more items of
A Coca-Cola vending machine
a certain product are available in the vending machine, consumers are more
likely to acquire them.[19][20]

Reduced demand (the inverse effect)

Just as increasing road capacity reduces the cost of travel and thus increases demand, the reverse is also true
decreasing road capacity increases the cost of travel, so demand is reduced. This observation, for which there is
much empirical evidence, has been called disappearing traffic,[2] also traffic evaporation or traffic
suppression, or, more generally, dissuaded demand. So the closure of a road or reduction in its capacity (e.g.
reducing the number of available lanes) will result in the adjustment of traveler behavior to compensate for
example, people might stop making particular trips, condense multiple trips into one, re-time their trips to a less
congested time, or switch to public transport, carpooling, walking, bicycling or smaller motor vehicles less
affected by road diets, such as motorcycles, depending upon the values of those trips or of the schedule delay
they experience.

Studies

In 1994, the UK advisory committee SACTRA carried out a major review of the effect of increasing road
capacity, and reported that the evidence suggested such increases often resulted in substantial increases in the
volume of traffic.[15] Following this, London Transport and the Department of the Environment, Transport and
the Regions commissioned a study to see if the reverse also occurred, namely that when road capacity was
reduced, there would be a reduction in traffic. This follow-up study was carried out by Sally Cairns, Carmen
Hass-Klau and Phil Goodwin, with an Annex by Ryuichi Kitamura, Toshiyuki Yamamoto and Satoshi Fujii,
and published as a book in 1998.[21] A third study was carried out by Sally Cairns, Steve Atkins and Phil
Goodwin, and published in the journal Municipal Engineer in 2002.[22]
The 1998 study referred to about 150 sources of evidence, of which the most important were about 60 case
studies in the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, the US, Canada,
Tasmania and Japan. They included major town centre traffic schemes to make pedestrian areas closed to
traffic, bus priority measures (especially bus lanes), bridge and road closures for maintenance, and closures due
to natural disasters, mostly earthquakes. The 2002 study added some extra case studies, including some
involving cycle lanes. The Annex by Kitamura and his colleagues reported a detailed study of the effects of the
Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in Japan.

Taking the results as a whole, there was an average reduction of 41% of the traffic flows on the roads whose
capacity had been reduced, of which rather less than half could be detected as reappearing on alternative routes.
Thus, on average, about 25% of the traffic disappeared. Analysis of surveys and traffic counts indicated that the
disappearance was accounted for by between 15 and 20 different behavioural responses, including changing to
other modes of transport, changing to other destinations, a reduction in the frequency of trips, and car-sharing.
There was a large variation around these average results, with the biggest effects seen in large-scale
pedestrianisation in German town centres, and the smallest seen in small-scale temporary closures with good
alternative routes, and small reductions in capacity in uncongested streets. In a few cases, there was actually an
increase in the volume of traffic, notably in towns which had closed some town centre roads at the same time as
opening a new by-pass.

Cairns et al. concluded that:

...the findings reinforce the overall conclusion of the original studynamely, that well-designed
and well-implemented schemes to reallocate roadspace away from general traffic can help to
improve conditions for pedestrians, cyclists or public transport users, without significantly
increasing congestion or other related problems.[22]

The European Union have produced a manual titled "Reclaiming city streets for people"[23] that presents case
studies and methodologies for traffic evaporation in urban areas.

Real-world examples

An early example of the reduced demand effect was described by Jane Jacobs in her classic 1961 book The
Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs and others convinced New York City to close the street that
split Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park in two, and also not to widen the surrounding streets to
service the extra capacity they were expected to carry because of the closing of the street. The city's traffic
engineers expected the result to be chaos, but, in fact, the extra traffic never appeared, as drivers instead
avoided the area entirely.[2]

Two widely known examples of reduced demand occurred in San Francisco, California and in Manhattan, New
York City, where, respectively, the Embarcadero Freeway and the lower portion of the elevated West Side
Highway were torn down after sections of them collapsed. Concerns were expressed that the traffic which had
used these highways would overwhelm local streets, but, in fact, the traffic, instead of being displaced, for the
most part disappeared entirely.[24] A New York State Department of Transportation study showed that 93% of
the traffic which had used the West Side Highway was not displaced, but simply vanished.[25]

After these examples, other highways, including portions of Harbor Drive in Portland, Oregon, the Park East
Freeway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Central Freeway in San Francisco, and the Cheonggyecheon Freeway in
Seoul, South Korea were torn down, with the same effect observed.[24]

The argument is also made to convert roads previously open to vehicular traffic into pedestrian areas, with a
positive impact on the environment and congestion, as in the example of the central area of Florence, Italy. In
New York City, after Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan for congestion pricing in Manhattan was rejected by the
New York State Assembly, portions of Broadway at Times Square, Herald Square and Madison Square were
converted into pedestrian plazas, and traffic lanes in other areas taken out of service in favor of protected bike
 lanes, reducing the convenience of using
Broadway as a through-route. As a result,
traffic on Broadway was reduced, and the speed
of traffic in the area lessened. Another measure
instituted was the replacement of through-lanes
on some of Manhattan's north-south avenues
with dedicated left-turn lanes and protected
bike lanes, reducing the avenues' carrying
capacity. The Bloomberg administration was
able to put these changes into effect as they did
not require approval from the state
legislature.[26]
A pedestrian plaza on Broadway atMadison Square; the Empire State
Despite the success of the Broadway pedestrian
Building is in the background; Broadway is reduced at this spot to a
single lane (on the right) plazas in Manhattan, in general, pedestrian
malls, in which all traffic is removed from
shopping streets, have not been successful,
leading to the conclusion that only particular areas such as in college towns and resorts, which already have
sufficient population density or pedestrian traffic can successfully pursue this path. Of the approximately 200
pedestrian malls created from the 1970s on, only about 30 remained as of 2012, and many of these were in
poorer areas of their cities. The exceptions, including the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California
and 16th Street in Denver, Colorado, are indicators that conversion of shopping streets to pedestrian malls can
be successful, although the proper preconditions must exist. Some of the failed pedestrian malls have improved
by allowing limited automobile traffic to return.[26]

As with automobile traffic, reducing public transit services will reduce to some extent the use of those facilities,
where trips again may be abandoned or switched to private transport.

See also

Braess paradox Positive feedback

DownsThomson paradox Say's Law
Effects of the car on societies Schedule delay
Externality Supplier-induced demand
Hedonic treadmill Traffic flow
Jevons paradox Tragedy of the commons
LewisMogridge Position

References
Notes

1. Speck, p.80
2. Vanderbilt, Tom (2008) Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) New York;
Knopf. pp.154-156. ISBN 978-0-307-26478-7
3. Report of the Transportation Survey Commission of the City of St. Louis (1930), p.109, cited in Fogelson,
Robert M. (2001) Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press. p.66. ISBN 0-300-09062-5
4. Caro, p.897
5. Caro, p.515
6. Caro, p.911
7. Caro, pp.96-97
 8. Duany et al., p.88
9. Leeming, J. J. (1969). Road Accidents: Prevent or Punish?. Cassell. ISBN 0304932132.
10. Chen, Donald D. T. (March 1998) "If You Build It, They Will Come ... Why We Can't Build Ourselves
Out of Congestion" Surface Transportation Policy Project Progress; quoted in Duany et al., p.89
11. Salzman, Randy (December 19, 2010) "Build More Highways, Get More Traffic" The Daily Progress,
quoted in Speck, p.82
12. Duany et al., p.89
13. Goodwin, P. B. (1996). "Empirical evidence on induced traffic: A review and synthesis". Transportation.
23: 3554. doi:10.1007/BF00166218 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF00166218).
14. Litman, T. L. (2011). "Generated Traffic and Induced Travel: Implications for Transport Planning" (htt
p://www.vtpi.org/gentraf.pdf) (PDF).
15. Wood, Derek & Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (1994). Trunk Roads and the
Generation of Traffic (http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/trunk-roads-traffic-report.pdf)
(PDF). London: HMSO. p. 242. ISBN 0-11-551613-1.
16. Texas A&M Transportation Institute. "2012 Urban Mobility Report" (http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/repor
t/). Retrieved May 14, 2013.
17. quoted in Speck, p.83
18. Cervero, Robert (Spring 2003). "Are Induced-Travel Studies Inducing Bad Investments?" (http://www.uc
tc.net/access/22/Access%2022%20-%2004%20-%20Induced%20Travel%20Studies.pdf) (PDF).
University of California Transportation Center. Retrieved April 5, 2017.
19. Phillips, Robert Lewis (2005-08-05). Pricing and Revenue Optimization (https://books.google.nl/books?i
d=InuQPrC6GtQC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22induced+demand%22+%22vending+machines%22
&source=bl&ots=9J4JOVMlUy&sig=6srKlGB9t38tGHkjnze9kEOPTbo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEw
j-oJed-oXVAhUBmbQKHW3ACysQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22induced%20demand%22%20%22
vending%20machines%22&f=false). Stanford University Press. p. 48. ISBN 9780804746984.
20. Aydinliyim, Tolga; Pangburn, Michael S.; Rabinovich, Elliot (2015-07-07). "Online Inventory
Disclosure: The Impact of How Consumers Perceive Information" (https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2498
154). Rochester, ew York.
21. Cairns, Sally; Hass-Klau, Carmen & Goodwin, Phil (1998). Traffic Impact of Highway Capacity
Reductions: Assessment of the Evidence. London: Landor Publishing. p. 261. ISBN 1-899650-10-5.
22. Cairns, Sally; Atkins, Stephen & Goodwin, Phil (2002). "Disappearing traffic? The story so far" (http://c
ontextsensitivesolutions.org/content/reading/disappearing-traffic/resources/disappearing-traffic/).
Municipal Engineer. 151 (1): 1322.
23. "Reclaiming city streets for people: Chaos or quality of life?" (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/pubs/pdf/
streets_people.pdf) European Commission
24. Speck, pp.94-95
25. Duany et al., p.90
26. Speck, pp.97-99

Bibliography

Caro, Robert (1974) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York New York: Vintage.
ISBN 0-394-72024-5
Duany, Andres; Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth; and Speck, Jeff (2000) Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl
and the Decline of the American Dream New York: North Point Press. ISBN 0-86547-606-3
Speck, Jeff (2012) Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time New York:
North Point Press. ISBN 978-0-86547-772-8

Further reading

Hart, Stanley I. and Spivak, Alvin L (1993). The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and
Denial; Impacts on the Economy and Environment. Pasadena, California: New Paradigm Books. ISBN
0932727646.

External links
 Giles Duranton, Matthew A. Turner (2010), The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from
US cities, University of Toronto
UK Department for Transport guidance on modelling induced demand
A statistical analysis of induced travel effects in the US mid-Atlantic region (Fulton et al.), Journal of
Transportation and Statistics, April 2004 (PDF)
Todd Litman (2001), Generated Traffic; Implications for Transport Planning, ITE Journal, Vol. 71, No.
4, Institute of Transportation Engineers (www.ite.org), April, 2001, pp. 3847.

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