If We Build Them...

Sept. 23, 2016

Traverse City wants to create a new neighborhood just west of Boardman Lake. That will require a new road.

The road, a scant six blocks long, will wend its way from Eighth Street to Fourteenth Street. The current cost estimates range from $2 million to $2.7 million.

We’re told the available land is a good place for more housing, that it might spur commercial or retail investment, and that the new road will ease congestion on both Eighth and Cass streets. Two out of three ain’t bad.

The city could use more residential units, and the site in question seems appropriate for that purpose. We’re not aware of any endangered species that call the area home, development there would not appreciably detract from the character of the neighborhood or the city, and nobody is talking about shoving a high-rise flush against a sidewalk.

Whatever is built there will mean residents or employees or customers — or all three — will need to get in there and out. The little road will be necessary and welcome (as long as its construction does no harm to our beloved McGough’s; some things simply aren’t open for debate).

What it will not do is relieve traffic congestion. We repeatedly will be told it will, and we might even hear about how many hours of time and productivity we’ll save by not sitting in traffic. Research, unfortunately, points in the opposite direction.

It turns out traffic is a bit like water in that it happily fills any available pathway.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), puzzled as to how their labyrinth of new roads and freeways was not reducing traffic, undertook a most massive study, which included 40 years of data involving billions of vehicle miles.

Their conclusion, released in 2014, was that new road capacity reduced congestion nowhere and actually increased it almost everywhere.

Well, sure. California has had booming population growth, and more people means more cars. But the research confirmed earlier work conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and University of Toronto traffic engineers.

The study by the University of Pennsylvania was especially salient since researches looked at smaller communities, too. They compared increased road capacity — new roads and the widening of existing roads — with traffic patterns and congestion. They discovered that traffic almost always increases at the same rate as road capacity: Build 10 percent more road capacity, and 10 percent more traffic will come.

This phenomenon appears to be consistent, whether in the booming population growth areas in the South and West or the shrinking Rust Belt states, and in communities large and small.

There is an economic principle at play here known as induced demand, or in this case, induced traffic. It’s the notion that increasing supply will, in some instances, necessarily increase demand.

More simply put, the research indicates more roads will translate to more drivers and more cars, which will increase to fill the available road capacity. If we build the roads, the cars will come.

Research also tells us that new roads spur new development on and around those roads, which increases traffic flow. A new road on the west side of Boardman Lake will spur development, provide additional housing opportunities, and perhaps prompt new business opportunities. But it won’t relieve traffic.

Of course, any time there’s a discussion about new or widening roads, the Hartman/Hammond bypass comes back to life. It would reduce all kinds of congestion, we’re told, and keep all those big trucks out of town. If that’s the sole logic for building it, we might as well save our money.

That would seem to be especially true of truck traffic. Looking at a map you’ll notice Traverse City isn’t exactly a shortcut to anywhere. No trucker is going to just swing through town for the fun of it on the way to someplace else.

Those trucks bring us all our stuff. All of it. Those heading elsewhere need not come here in the first place, so a bypass would be irrelevant to them. Those coming into town will bypass the bypass.

While much of the bypass route cannot be developed because of the same environmental concerns that might prevent it ever being built, the start and finish points can and will be developed, including new residential areas nearby. New traffic will fill the new road.

Most of the trucks will still have to snake their way into and through town.

Some new roads, even a little six-block long road, make sense because they serve a legitimate purpose while filling a legitimate need.

But the science tells us, and it’s overwhelmingly one-sided, those assuming that a new road along the lake or outside of town will relieve traffic congestion will be disappointed. New roads create more traffic, not less.