Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!” Immediately after saying that, your friend hops in their car and drives across the parking lot to the Starbucks to which they could easily have walked.
Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
It’s notable that there’s vanishingly little evidence that more lanes is correlated with reduced trip times or less congestion for people in cars. I’m not even talking about things like induced demand – just that literally, sometimes turning a 4-lane into a 2-lane or a 6-lane into a 4-lane has minimal impact on trip times on that road. All the world of “road diets” usually makes driving better, not worse.
The more lanes there are, the more points of automobile conflict. Points of conflict are the seeds of congestion.