| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Cars, Cherry Trees, Chiswick and Carbon | |
| Posted by: | Mark Evans | |
| Date/Time: | 24/02/20 18:42:00 |
| The idea of traffic evaporation is a logical fallacy. It is basically saying that if you make traffic bad enough then people will give up driving. It may actually be the case that over the last ten years that increased congestion has helped the overall amount of journey miles to stay static by encouraging some people to consider alternatives but what evaporation there is hasn't been sufficient to reduce journey times. These have steadily increased over the last ten years in London. So the same number of miles is being travelled in a year but the journeys are taking longer so you have more cars on the road at any given time. The basic flaw in the theory of evaporation is that, if it were actually to work, then as traffic improved more people would switch back to motor vehicles, so its very success would undermine it. It's a nonsense theory that can't actually work in practice. The reality is that whatever TfL say about the number of vehicle trips that could be cycled the actual potential for switching is a fraction of what could be achieved by better public transport. The balance that needs to be struck with cycling is that does need to be encouraged but if it is allocated road space that so reduces capacity for motor vehicles that the increased journey times outweigh the reduction in journeys that have been switched to bikes there has been no net benefit overall. |