Here's why City Council should not spend $272m widening 19.6km of road this budget...

Building 8 arterial roads with a total length of 19.6km could cost the city $272 million. The annual operating costs are millions more each year.

At the April 15th City Council meeting we received an update on potential arterial growth projects. As I wrote in my Edmonton Journal op-ed, now is not the time to be building new roads.

Widening roads will not speed up traffic. The "ironclad law" of induced demand, often referred to as the Fundamental Law of Road Congestion, states that increasing roadway capacity (e.g., adding lanes) does not alleviate long-term traffic congestion, because the new capacity quickly attracts more drivers, filling the road back to its previous congested state. The phenomenon suggests that regardless of how many lanes are added, traffic will grow to meet that capacity.

It’s not just "new" drivers: Induced demand often represents latent demand—people who were already in the area but were not driving at that time, or were using other methods.

The same law works in reverse. When road capacity is reduced (e.g., removing a highway, road diets), the traffic does not permanently disappear to other routes; a large portion of it evaporates because people change their habits (reducing trips, using other methods).

Read the full article and the dozens of research studies on the folly of road expansions from CITY OBSERVATORY: https://cityobservatory.org/the-fundamental-global-law-of-road-congestion

Here’s a helpful video from CITYNERD specifically about INDUCED DEMAND: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ

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