PSA: Deboonking the Traffic Soyboys Part 12 – Just One More Train Bro

It’s been a few days since I wrote about the Traffic Troons. When we last left off I was dunking on their idiotic explanations for why expanding road capacity doesn’t work because there exists infinite demand for road transportation. If you want a more in depth explanation of this fallacy, go here. But Not Just Bikes released a fairly new video that makes this claim explicitly.

(Starting at 2:30)

Anyway, it’s funny to see that already in 1954 the roads weren’t big enough to fit all the cars. We now refer to this as “induced demand,” where building more roads and highways generates more trips by car, requiring even more roads and wider highways in a never ending cycle, or at least until the city goes bankrupt.

You hear that you fuckin’ cARbRAinS? You can’t just build more roads, because then more people are able to drive, and it’s bad when more people can drive. But also, there is infinite demand for road transportation, so you can literally never satisfy the increased demand in the long term. That’s why all these rural roads and highways pictured below are chock full of cars. They just constantly have cars on them because of the never-ending cycle of “induced demand.”

You see people are automatons who have one goal in life: to drive on roads. That’s why there’s literally no such thing as a quiet road, or a road expansion that didn’t fill up with exactly the same amount of congestion. That just literally never happens.

Look at this two lane highway. See how it’s totally full of cars?

Or what about this winding, rural road. Absolutely chock full of disgusting motor vehicle traffic.

Same here. Clearly, building more roads leads to proportionally more cars. Another road, utterly filled to the brim with cars.

Remember, the sole determiner of whether someone gets into their car and drives somewhere is if there exists road capacity to support this. We’re all living in a simulation, and don’t have a finite number of specific things that we want to do with our day involving our cars. This truth is self-evident, which is why we need no empirical evidence for it and you’re stupid for not believing in it.

Despite this, road planners everywhere keep falling for the hoax that expanding roads allows for less congestion and more total traffic. This is just utterly false. For proof, look at these two lane highways below, choking to death with cars.

I mean it’s just cars as far as the eye can see.

Okay, maybe these two lane roads have no congestion. However, they would if we expanded them to four lanes. Then there would be crippling levels of congestion. This sounds counter-intuitive, which is how you know it’s correct and you are a smart person for believing it because muh induced demand. 

That’s why we see the Trans-Canada highway, pictured below, with constant bumper to bumper traffic. After all, they expanded it from two lanes to four decades ago, so there’s been plenty of time for “induced demand,” to shove infinity automobiles on it.

Okay, maybe not. But you know what? The problem is that we didn’t expand the road enough. Luckily, they did exactly that in Myanmar with a literal 20 lane road in an ultra low density area. As a result we can see how congested the road is. Utterly undriveable.

Here’s a crazy thought. Maybe, if you go and expand a quiet, two lane rural road to be twenty lanes, people do not just stop doing whatever they were doing during their day and go and drive around for a while out of an innate obligation to use existing road capacity. No one stops eating dinner halfway through to drive around to nowhere, or pauses the movie and tells the girlfriend “sorry babe, there’s roads not being used up right now.” Nor does anyone own 10 cars instead of one if the road gets expanded 10x.

Simply assuming that an increase in road capacity will ever be filled, let alone in some arbitrary period of time, is incredibly stupid. Just like with Malcolm Gladwell, you’re not really supposed to think about the dumb things that the Urbanites say. But occasionally even the braindead followers will start asking some questions. After all, why must infinite demand be taken as granted for roads, but not pedestrians, bikes, trains, or any other means of transportation the Urbanites have a fetish for?

The KiwiFarms thread on the Traffic Troons found an example of an Indian in Mumbai complaining overcrowding on the trains. I went and tried to find this post, only to see that it had been holocausted by the OP.

Fortunately many of the comments have yet to be oven’d by the trannissaries. As of time of writing, the very top comment is from user Cynical_Cabinet:

Invest in public transit. This line should be running 3x as many trains.

Imagine if all these people were in cars instead. The entire city would be a traffic jam 24/7.

The first reply to him is from tilman2015:

Exactly this.

Increasing train lengths and going to in-cab signaling massively increases capacity on existing lines.

Also, adding additional lines increases capacity and also improves journey times for everyone.

Don’t you see you stupid dumb dumbs. These Pajeets have clearly never thought about simply adding capacity by lengthening the trains, or adding more trains more frequently. Once again the (p)reddit geniuses solve the problem with facts and logic. 

User ScaraTB is the next reply in the thread, and has something of a different opinion.

Not possible. Those trains are running at the lowest possible headway, and are 16 cars long, any longer would need longer platforms. You cant add double decker trains here because the tunnels in Mumbai are so low that certain pantographs also don’t fit! The only real way of solving this would be to add parallel transit, which is being done at a very, very slow pace, because there is no land for building rail yards. This is a complicated situation and I hate lazy answers like this. Transit is the best option by far here, but we simply need more of it, and its not as easy to build it out in THE most dense city in the world.

Noooooo. You can always just add more trains because reasons. You can’t tell me that my heckin’ trainerinos have a hard limit on their maximum capacity. What if we just destroy some neighbourhoods in Mumbai and add train station and lines there. This is bad when cars do it but good when trains do it because reasons.

I screencapped this comment chain so you can see how upvoted the respective posts are. The more reality-based the solution, the more the predditors seethe.

The groomers continue adding one genius solution after another. You see, if you can’t increase the existing length of the cars because the train stations have finite length, you can just add more parallel tracks and have simultaneous loading of different trains. All you need is just one more lane line bro.

Its quad tracked already, just google Mumbai local train tracks and you’ll see why its impossible to expand it further.

– User ScaraTB again.

A bunch of redditors having an uninformed opinion? No, that can’t be true. It must be that the “solutions” they came up with off the top of their heads are correct and everyone else is dumb.

User trash_panda_life is not the only one to point out the irony of the situation.

Many of these comments, such as the blue one above, got holocausted by either the trannissaries or the users themselves. I believe the KiwiFarms poster found the deleted comments using reveddit. The point is they were getting trolled even more than what I could screencap when I went through the thread ctrl+f’ing “one more”.

JuST oNE MoRe trAiN BrO.

Fun fact, all of these posts have different usernames. But they are actually all the same person, Emma Watson, who says that she likes cars because they are “comfy, Aryan, and let me store the Basketball-Americans that I kill in the trunk.”

As you might have anticipated, OP begins getting downvoted into oblivion by the tranny retards on reddit, despite him clarifying on numerous occasions that he is in favour of public transit. Let’s expand the comment that (p)reddit shielded our eyes from due to overwhelming downboats and see what he said that was so offensive.

I like how they admit that 25k people/km^2 might be too much density. Remember, it’s all about muh heckin’ densityerino until you run into the hard limits of a train system. Then density bad, but trains still good. Cars always bad.

Bro just make the trains good bro. You should have thought of just making it good before you posted bro.

Just one more line bro. Can’t believe you didn’t think of that bro. Just one more track bro. I promise it’ll fix crowding bro. You’re just being a dumbass because you never thought of adding more track bro. Why am I so much smarter than you bro.

Just add more – wait what the fuck? Make the trains come every 30 seconds?! He actually said that!

I love how you’ll occasionally get these people in the Urbanite Bugcreature E-Community who have obviously never ridden on any form of public transportation in their lives. Imagine trying to implement this idiot’s “solution,” where you demand that everyone load and unload onto the train in less than 30 seconds, or else there either will be a horrific accident and everyone will die, or you’ll get the same congestion that you get on roads during rush hour where everything grinds to a halt.

Normal Person: We built more train capacity and it’s all used up. There’s no feasible way to build more.

Redditor: The answer is build more. Can’t believe you didn’t think of that, bro. Just one more lane line bro.

For the record, it’s good that they built the extra capacity, so that the other Indians can get better jobs and do whatever else they want. More transportation should be assumed to be a good thing unless there is uncontroversial evidence that it is not. Also, I highly doubt that an increase in rail transport capability is the main driver of internal Indian migration to Mumbai. If they hadn’t built more rail, then they would have an even worse problem with the public transit.

Normal Person: How do we make the train experience better?

Redditor: GeT a LoAD of ThiS cARbRaiN.

manaven_pathak finally snaps and lashes back at the trainwashed idiots. Transcript below.

Stop spamming that cars are not the solution to this. I NEVER SAID THEY ARE. I COMPLETELY SUPPORT PUBLIC TRANSPORT, but to convince people to use them, its has to be of reasonable quality unlike whats in these images. That’s what I meant. I didn’t say cars are superior to this, road trafic is also horrible in mumbai.

Its just that people who can afford cars prefer siting in traffic for 2 hours in their AC cars instead of standing in such trains for 45 minutes for the same distance.

This sub is very western centric and just seems to a be stupid hive mind just like carbrains, downvoting any argument I present. This situation is much more complex than “add more lines”, since that has been done in the past with little change. But these reddit smarts are refusing to acknowledge that.

I am genuinely asking how to improve public transport and these mfs are spamming the same “cars aren’t better”.

I’ll include one last screencap of the OP responding to one last reddit genius. It’s not even worth transcribing, just more reddit retards assuming everyone else is a dumb dumb and hasn’t thought of any obvious solutions like adding more track, or double decker trains.

It starts off with:

“more trains, more lines, more of everything.”

Gosh, that sounds so familiar for some reason.

User Xanny continues pointing out that you should just build one more lane line.

If you can actually totally saturate a rail line with 2 minute frequency full platform trains and still have this kind of congestion you need more lines.

And again with user Significant-Ad-341.

Jaime, can we use that same joke that I just made again?

Why am I picking on NotJustBikes. It’s not like he’s the only snarky midwit who does this bit.

Do you know what would fix traffic? Trains!

– Alan Fisher, a retard.

Let’s check in with these traffic fixing trains.

I don’t want any of my audience to lightswitch brain on this. Infinite demand for transportation doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist for for automobiles, but it also doesn’t exist for trains or buses. You can absolutely, 100% build your way out of congestion. Check out this 20 lane highway in Myanmar. Look how it filled up with congestion because cars spawned into the gameserver and drove around to random destinations in order to use the existing road capacity.

Oh wait, that never happened, and Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear points out the obvious starting at 38 seconds in.

This may look stupid and pointless, but actually it really isn’t. The problem with most cities is that the growth comes and the city simply can’t accommodate it. London, Rome, Paris, Bangkok, everywhere. That is not going to happen here.

Actually Jeremy, in this case it was stupid and pointless. Or at least, it was extremely over-ambitious. They build a mega highway in an almost unpopulated area, and they never got even a tiny percentage of the traffic that they wanted.

The idea that “if you build it, they will come,” is just flat out not true.

This highway could have easily been one lane each way and satisfied the existing traffic demand. Maybe it would be a bit congested every now and then, but expanding it to twenty lanes clearly did not keep the same level of congestion. That’s why people can sit down and have picnics on the road.

Myanmar massively overbuilt their way out of congestion, and did the real life example of my thought experiment where you build a 20 lane road between two tiny rural towns. They could have just built a two lane road to satisfy the real demand, which again, is not infinite. Having said that, the general idea of building more road than you need immediately is not a bad one. It would be very reasonable for them to have built a four lane road here, maybe even a six lane road. As Clarkson says in the video, it’s very difficult to expand existing road capacity once you have a city built around the road, because then you might have to destroy numerous skyscrapers and other buildings just to do it.

But you know what else is difficult? “Just” building more rail lines, and for exactly the same reason. I get that the Traffic Troons are obnoxious pseudo-intellectuals who are dead wrong when they say that you can’t just build your way out of traffic. But they’re right when they say that the solution to latent demand for rail travel is just to build more lines. But then they’re wrong again when they snarkily suggest that you “just” build more lines, without bothering to go look at a map of Mumbai and figure out which apartment buildings are going to be demolished and how many hundreds of thousands of people are going to be made homeless.

This particular snarky midwit accidentally explains why you can’t “just” build more rail lines with a nice picture.

Exactly you get it. If we stay consistent and keep just adding one more lane, like we’ve been doing and saying since cars have been invented, eventually from Los Angeles to New York there will be no traffic. There will also be no towns or cities but still.

And also, why stop there? Let’s liberate the rest of the World, starting with Paris.

He ends with this photoshopped final shot of Paris to “prove” his point.

Cool now let’s take a look at Mumbai.

Wikipedia calls it the biggest Megacity in the world, something I can easily believe. The entire metro sprawls over an enormous area of 4,355 km^2, and has an average density of just under 5k/km^2. The inner core has an area of 603.4 km^2, with a density of over 21k/km^2. These numbers are from 2011, and the city is still growing. What this means for the Metro area is that you have an enormous population of people who potentially need to travel very far. Luckily the Urbanites have a solution at hand!

Just one more line bro, I swear it’ll fix rail traffic bro. We just need to put one more line here. We just gotta put it… somewhere.

You hear that carbrains? Just use eminent domain to tear down apartment building after apartment building, making hundreds of thousands if not millions of people homeless. This is bad, terrible, and no good when it’s done for road infrastructure, but awesome when you do it for rail infrastructure for some reason.

I got the screencap from the video above so you can see for yourself. Try to imagine how many homeless people a 50km line across Mumbai would create. But hey, it’s no problem. You can just do that because fuck normal people me likey trains.

But for the record, I like trains just fine for the things they are actually good at. These people bloviate constantly about how “efficient” trains are, by some arbitrary definition of the word efficient. Then they blather on and on about how that makes them better. By this “logic” I could say that we should take passenger airliners everywhere. After all, they fly in a straight line to their destination at 900 kmph, so of course you should use one of these to pick up the groceries. Think of the time savings!

If you ignore questions of cost and practicality you can make broad, sweeping proclamations for any particular method of transportation out there. Every method of transport that we still use has its upside, even horses, and if you ignore or snarkily handwave away the downsides you can make any argument for anything.

There is no question that if you have an enormous amount of stuff, whether that be coal or people, located in a geographically small area that will be transported to another area where it is extremely close to its final intended destination, and the land is very flat, then sure, build trains.

For rich cities, which ours are increasingly not and Mumbai never was, you have the option of extensive and expensive subway projects where you tunnel underneath the city. In this case it makes no sense to put anything inside that enclosed space other than a train running on electric power. Similarly, you have the population density required for very large buses to become productive. Anyone telling you that trains and buses are not a part of the passenger transport solution for high density cities is simply wrong.

But anyone telling you that “muh density” doesn’t have enormous, inescapable downsides with ever increasing transportation demands is lying. And if they tell you that building one more lane is futile, but building one more line is a valid solution, then they are a clown.