Induced demand, another bit of greatly exaggerated "urban" (planning) "legend", from actual "observed" travel behavior and decision making in highly congested urban environments. "Cities and Auto Dependency", makes this kind of case at a "macro" level related to land use but Jeff's causality and relationship to individual decision making is tenuous. This is especially true in the LA Basin... Where I just see so many folks out just "waiting" for those spaces to "open up" so they can experience the Fahrvergnügen on the 210...…

Observed changes in travel demand, where there has been marginal capacity expansion, don't seem to show much of that per capita "before and after" VMT increase ("white noise" and/ or "negligible" in effects claimed, compared to other much more "significant" factors, such as changes in trip time "uncertainty" or "variability").

High levels of congestion definitely does result in "trip" abeyance, due to the fact that "time", at lest in this realm of physics, is constrained, as congestion cost increases opportunity costs which goes up with distance traveled. We see little evidence, that with and LA like wide area distribution of available jobs, goods, and services, or from the kind of incremental improvement we could actually expect to see systemwide, from the truck bypass would be extremely unlikely to have any likely effect on "induced" demand

Induced demand is a new "holy writ" like reducing "VMT" in today's planning for consummate "evil" incarnate (the demand for personal mobility is "a priori" somehow a "bad" thing). And what is the "metric" supposed to measure, and why? Is it total VMT, or per capita VMT (which has actually fallen considerably, as a function of density), is it the rate of VMT growth relative to population growth (which has fallen over my career)? What does the "metric" really measure? It is not necessarily a good surrogate for CO2 as technology changes, in the case I make, is utter environmental and economic nonsense.

Now, I have to read some nonsense someone sent me on these useless "take a lane" rapid bus lanes, on suburban BRT routes, which produced more traffic congestion, but no travel or operating time savings for the buses, which is yet another "faith based" transportation planning "flavor of the week" and "patent medicine" "cure all" for all of LA Metro's bus speed woes....

Math matters... These are some interesting hypothetical propositions, but are there "proofs" we can see, maybe before spending millions of taxpayer dollars? I hate to be so hard on poor folks like bus guy, but the decision making parameters we seem to be using on some of these things... really need to use better math and science, and rely less on what we (and/or pandering politicians) "wish" were, or "believe" might be, "true", a lot less...

Meanwhile, I'd really like to see more great drone footage of 4014 "on the move" from Mr. Carter, or some nice smoking Alco footage from Hutch...