So that title looks a little technical or academic or something. Definitely not artistic or musical. And you would be right. It’s not. It is, however, something I’ve been thinking about after some of the reading I’ve done over the last couple of years. If you’d like to know more about it see my earlier blog post about what I’ve been reading and watching lately.
I think I first came across the phrase ‘induced demand’ when I was reading one of the books on urban planning. I’d guess the phrase is typically used with regard to the phenomenon of widening roads and making traffic even worse than it was before. They have done studies that show if you widen a congested road when it is complete the traffic increases to the point that not only has all the excess capacity been utilized the entire road then becomes over utilized. So, say a road can handle 100 cars in 5 minutes, but you want to make it easier or quicker to get all 100 cars through so you increase the capacity of the road so it can handle 200 cars. You do this thinking that at 200 cars the commute time on that stretch of road will decrease so instead of taking the 10 minutes to get someplace caused by the traffic, it will take the 5 minutes that was expected. Except, that’s not what happens. Once you add the extra capacity, instead of that road handling the original 100 cars in 5 minutes or even the 200 cars in 5 minutes, the usage will actually be more like 300 or so cars trying to use the same road. When this happens the engineers then say something like ‘see. I told you we needed a bigger road.’
So now that we have a base idea of induced demand let’s look at how messed up that is and how it happens in other areas of our lives. Because this is what really hit me when I was doing all that reading and as I’ve watched a couple of those YouTube channels I noted before.
What happens with induced demand on our roads is that now that the road has increased capacity more people will use that route because they think it will be faster, instead of their previous route that they used that spread out or dispersed the traffic over a wider area. Now the same volume that 5 square kilometers could handle is funneled into .5 square kilometers. As an example. I don’t know how real these numbers are. It’s kind of like if you have to leave a stadium through just one door or if they open all the doors to let people out.
Some will talk about those extra cars and car trips as pent-up demand and that is true to an extent. But I would argue, as some of the planners, authors and creators have, that it would be better to build sidewalks, trains, trams, bus routes, true bike lanes, and to bring the destinations of those drives closer to the residential neighborhoods or even office space neighborhoods so that people don’t need to get in the car to pick up a liter of milk and a loaf of bread.
And this is where induced demand starts to get insidious while looking like efficiency.
If it takes me 20 minutes to drive my car to the supermarket to get a loaf of bread or a liter of milk, then I’m more likely to buy more while I’m at the store so I don’t have to make that trip too often because it’s a pain. I’ll buy stuff that I maybe need but not really. Because, just in case. Now I have food that is more likely to go to waste because I bought produce beyond the capacity of one person (me) to eat in the timeframe I need to for it to be at its freshest and at its best level of ripeness. And now I’ve wasted my money on something that ends up in a landfill without ever being used, eaten, etc.
And that is all because some fool decided to widen the road instead of giving me a safe way to get to the nearest place to buy food on a regular basis without wasting huge amounts of time.
Let’s look at induced demand in relation to food from a different reference. The refrigerator. There is no standard size for a refrigerator. I found this out a couple of years ago when I bought a new one that barely fits in the space allotted. It wasn’t that I wanted or needed a big refrigerator, it was the best price for the features. But it is a bit big. And we are told that refrigerators work best and are most efficient when full. So, to operate my refrigerator at its optimal level I need to fill it with food. I’m one person. And the food I tend to keep in the refrigerator is perishables. Things that will go bad faster if I leave them on the counter. Or so we are told. They still go bad. They go bad faster than say a bag of flour, or a bag of beans, or a bag of rice, or you get the idea. If I fill my refrigerator with enough perishables to make it operate at its most efficient, then I have more food than I can eat before it spoils, even in a refrigerator, and has to be thrown out. Induced demand, again. And waste.
The thing about induced demand is that we don’t even realize that is what is happening and how it is being used to convince us to buy more stuff. If we had, by default, smaller refrigerators, and easier to access food markets, then we might be able to cut food waste. Seriously. If, when I finish working for the day, I could walk to the nearest food market, safely and in a reasonable amount of time, or even bike, then I might buy a couple of pieces of fruit for breakfast for the next couple of days and some veggies to go with dinner for the night. I could get produce that was reasonably fresh and would be less likely to have to throw it out.
Induced demand is wasteful. And yes, I just realized that as I wrote this.
I’m not some paragon of virtue when it comes to this. Really. I’ve only recently come to see what has been happening and I certainly have and still do succumb to the thinking that it encourages. And as I’ve started to see it, I see it happening in more and more areas of my/our lives. It’s frustrating.
Let’s talk about this some more because these are just a couple of examples of induced demand, and it is more prevalent than in just traffic and refrigerators.