The study’s findings include:
- The number of vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) increases in direct proportion to the available lane-kilometers of roadways. The additional VKT traveled come from increased driving by current residents and businesses, and migration.
- Building new roads and widening existing ones only results in additional traffic that continues to rise until congestion returns to the previous level. Such attempts to “cure” congestion are thus both expensive and ineffective.
- Increasing the lane kilometers for one type of road does not significantly reduce congestion on others — for example, widening highways does little to reduce local congestion.
- Because roadways have “natural” levels of congestion to which they always return, mass transit projects will not reduce traffic.
If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent.
Congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion but as Andrew Gelman says:
“Sure, if your goal is to curb traffic congestion. But what sort of goal is that? Thinking like a microeconomist, my policy goal is to increase people’s utility.
Sure, traffic congestion is annoying, but there must be some advantages to driving on that crowded road or people wouldn’t be doing it, right? (Just to be clear: I’m serious here. This is not intended to be some sort of parody of economic reasoning. I do believe that people venture out in traffic for a reason.)
…My key point is that, yes, traffic congestion is annoying, but I don’t think it makes sense for “curbing traffic congestion” to be a primary policy goal.
A policy that leaves traffic congestion unchanged can still help out lots of people, inside and outside of cars.”
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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