Congested roads and the economy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/06/2023 (858 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the proposed Kenaston expansion, Mayor Scott Gillingham recently expressed concern for the “misinformation about this project shared online and in editorial pages over the past few weeks” (Province commits half of $1.4M cost for Route 90 expansion design study, June 1).

I wholeheartedly share his concern.

Which is why, when I read Wendell Cox’s latest contribution to these pages (Winnipeg, roads and the economy, June 10), I was compelled to do my part to dispel the misinformation contained in it.

Cox begins by downplaying the significance of induced demand, the theory that expansions to road capacity quickly fill up to become as congested, or more, than they were before the expansion. Whether you “believe” in it or not, the simple fact is that the city’s own traffic projections show that congestion on Kenaston will become 15 per cent worse after the expansion than it is today. And this will happen long before we’ve even retired the debt to pay for it. It’s not some “interests seeking to stop highway construction.” The city’s traffic engineers, using their own data, are quite literally proposing to spend over $1 billion to make congestion worse.

And while alleviating congestion to provide low-income people with more access to jobs by car seems like a worthy goal, we must remember that many people with low incomes often struggle to afford $3 for bus fare, much less the $8,600 per year that CAA reports as the average annual cost of owning and operating a used Honda Civic in Manitoba. Any efforts to mitigate poverty by providing better access to jobs have to start with prioritizing the modes of transportation that are free to the user, like walking and biking, and not the one that costs more than a third of a minimum wage earner’s income.

But, as usual, it’s the argument that expanding roads to slay congestion being good for the economy that is the least supported by the facts, especially since the global cities with the worst congestion read like a veritable who’s who of the world’s most economically productive places. Cities like Tokyo, London, New York, Paris and Mexico City lead the world in municipal GDP despite consistently ranking as having the world’s worst congestion.

Could it be that congestion is not, as we’ve been led to believe, an impediment to a city’s economic success, but rather, a byproduct of it?

To understand that, we must take a moment to consider what causes congestion in the first place: cars stopping. That may seem obvious, but a car stopping, or even just slowing down, causes a cascading effect in the vehicles behind it, resulting in congestion. If no one ever stops, there can never be any congestion. It’s why, at peak periods, traffic engineers do things like disallow parking and certain left turns: to prevent stopping.

But people stop so they can earn and spend money, the very definition of the measure of economic activity. Private-sector investments in the construction of homes, businesses and offices are the visual proof of that activity. But what are homes, businesses and offices if not just more reasons to stop?

The more the economy grows in a place, the more reasons to stop are built in that place. The more reasons to stop there are, the more people do, and the more congestion you get. Congestion is the result of economic success.

Widening roads to alleviate congestion in such places usually means the destruction of those previous private-sector investments through expropriation, in order to replace them with pavement that needs to be maintained forever, a public-sector liability. The new round of economic growth now needs to make up for the lost ground in addition to the cost of the new investment. Unfortunately, the only scenario where repeating that is sustainable is one of infinite exponential growth. You know, like a Ponzi scheme.

A smart investment policy would instead build on the prior public and private investments that already exist along Kenaston, reallocating some of the roadspace we’ve already invested in to other, more efficient, modes of transportation, like transit, walking and biking, allowing more people to earn and spend in the same amount of space, for less cost. It won’t alleviate congestion. But if congestion is a by-product of economic success, why would we want to?

Conversely, if building more and more lanes of car capacity was the key to economic success, surely our city would be rich by now. Plus, why would we limit ourselves to six or eight lanes on Kenaston? If wider roads are so good for us, why not build 10 lanes, or 100, or a million? We’d have nearly unlimited mobility in our cars with no congestion. Of course, there wouldn’t be any reason left to stop, because we’ll have paved over all indication of economic activity.

Michel Durand-Wood lives in Elmwood and has been writing about municipal issues since 2018.