How to make your problems worse: Lessons from traffic planning in NYC

In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes the issue of traffic in cities, discussing how this is not a situation unique to cars. In fact, cars are a marked improvement over the previous traffic-haulers, which were horses. The problem of cars in cities is that they are not being used more effectively than horses, and so are causing similar problems.

A few years ago, I read (or rather, listened to) a book by Robert Caro called The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Moses held some public offices—importantly, none were elected—that allowed him to ruthlessly build his vision of New York City. This vision involved bonanzas of expressways, bridges, tunnels, and roads. He was continually trying to solve the traffic problem, but the more roads he built, the more cars came, and the worse the traffic got.

Jacobs breaks this down magificently in her book and makes it into a very simple issue. If you make it more convenient for cars to be in a city, then more cars will come into the city. If you make it less convenient for cars to come into a city, then less cars will come into a city. There is no set number of cars that must be entering the city at a given time. Rather, the number is dynamic based on how many people, given other priorities and needs and choices, will put up with driving through whatever the city presents them.

The city planners were optimizing for automobile convenience, not for long-term traffic reduction. If they were optimizing for long-term traffic reduction, they would have put up more barriers to cars instead of paving the city for them.

I feel like there is a moral here somewhere for other walks of life: Are your solutions to your problems making your problems more convenient? If so, then your problems are going to get worse.