You Are The Traffic

TL;DR;

• When you say “traffic is worse than ever,” you’re describing your own mode choice in a system that mathematically can’t scale on private cars alone.
• A general-traffic lane might move ~3,000 people per hour; the same space as a bus lane can move 10× more people, and protected bike lanes can move more people per meter of width than car lanes.¹
• For at least 60–80 years, transport economists and planners have been documenting the same pattern: more road space for cars simply induces more driving (“fundamental law of road congestion”).Duranton & Turner 2011
• Classic reports like Traffic in Towns (1963) warned that unrestrained car growth would “choke” cities and degrade quality of life—exactly what we see today.Traffic in Towns
• The feeling that “it used to be better” is real, but the solution is not “more lanes just for me”; it’s more people in higher-capacity modes: buses, trains, bikes, and walking.

“You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”²

You are the traffic

Most of us talk about traffic as if it were weather.

“Traffic is terrible today.” “They need to fix the traffic on this road.”

But almost no one says:

“My decision to drive a one-or-two-ton metal box at rush hour, alone, is part of the reason this road doesn’t move.”

The TomTom navigation company put this bluntly on a 2010 billboard: “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” The line has been repeated in planning circles, transit campaigns, and even memes ever since.You Are Not Stuck in Traffic, You Are Traffic³

The slogan isn’t just a guilt trip; it’s a concise summary of how congestion actually works:

• Congestion is not a thing “out there.”
• It is the physical result of many individually reasonable choices colliding in limited space.
• Once enough people choose the same thing (solo car trips at the same time), the system hits a hard capacity limit.

And that’s where the scaling problem starts.

Why cars don’t scale with growing cities

Cars, buses, and bikes per meter of street

A city street is finite: a few meters of width, a certain number of signal cycles per hour, a fixed number of intersections.

How many people can different modes move through that space?

Here’s a simplified comparison using typical values from transport agencies and advocacy reports:How Congestion Pricing Will Improve Your LifeComparison of the Person Flow on Cycle Tracks vs Lanes for Motorized Vehicles¹

The exact numbers vary by city and design, but the pattern is robust:

• Cars are the lowest-capacity use of street space in terms of people moved.
• Buses and trains multiply capacity by packing more people per vehicle.
• Bikes multiply capacity by using less space per person; recent studies find that per meter of width, protected cycle tracks can move more people than adjacent car lanes in the same corridor.Comparison of the Person Flow on Cycle Tracks vs Lanes for Motorized Vehicles

When population grows—or even when the same population shifts from, say, 10% driving to 60% driving—sticking with private cars is like trying to scale a website by giving everyone a personal server.

It’s not a little inefficient. It’s structurally impossible.

The “fundamental law” of road congestion

If car lanes are such a bad way to move people, why do we keep adding them?

Because, in the short term, new car capacity feels great.

In the 1960s, economist Anthony Downs formulated what became known as the law of peak-hour expressway congestion: on urban expressways, peak traffic rises until it fills available capacity.The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway CongestionThe law of peak-hour expressway congestion (Traffic Quarterly, 1962)⁴

Half a century later, Duranton and Turner tested this with modern data in their paper The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion. Looking at U.S. cities, they found that vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) increase roughly one-for-one with added lane-kilometers of highways.The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion (PDF)The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities

Build 10% more highway capacity; you get about 10% more driving—and you’re right back to the same congestion, just with more cars, more emissions, and more dangerous traffic.

That’s not a policy debate. That’s an empirical regularity.

“Traffic is worse than ever”: the joke history keeps playing on us

We’ve been warning ourselves for at least 80 years

If you feel like “all this traffic came out of nowhere,” the record is… unkind.

• 1930s: The UK’s Salter Report (1933) was already wrestling with how to balance rail and motor traffic, warning that unchecked car growth would overload roads and undermine public transport.Traffic in Towns
• 1962: Downs formalized the idea that rush-hour congestion would always rise to fill expressway capacity.The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion
• 1963: The UK government commissioned Colin Buchanan’s Traffic in Towns, which opens with almost apocalyptic language about the “magnitude of the emergency” posed by growing car traffic in cities.Traffic in Towns - Buchanan Report siteThe Buchanan Report: Traffic in Towns (Hansard summary)

Buchanan’s team was crystal clear: give cars free rein in cities, and they will “choke movement” and “threaten the quality of urban life.” Their proposed responses—traffic containment, pedestrian precincts, environmental areas—read like an early blueprint for today’s “low-traffic neighborhoods” and traffic calming.The Buchanan Report: Traffic in Towns (UDG summary)

So when someone in 2025 says “they’ve ruined the roads, traffic used to flow fine,” there are only a few possibilities:

• They don’t remember, or never experienced, the previous round of congestion.
• They’re underestimating how much more car ownership and usage has grown.
• They’re ignoring that every generation has said some version of “traffic is worse than ever” as cars filled whatever space they were given.

From the perspective of the research record, the “wow, traffic got so bad suddenly” narrative is not just wrong—it’s almost comically predictable.

The illusion of the good old days

Why does the “it used to be better” story feel so true?

A few reasons:

1. Personal baselines
   Your memory of “before” is usually from a time when:

   • You personally drove less (e.g., as a kid).
   • The region had fewer people or fewer cars per household.
   • Your commute route was different, shorter, or at a different time.

2. Selective attention
   You’re acutely aware of the new bike lane or the bus lane that took “your” lane. You are less aware of:

   • The thousands more people who moved into the region.
   • The trips shifted from transit to cars after decades of disinvestment.
   • The hosted events, new shopping centers, and other generators of car trips.

3. We blame space, not behavior
   The street looks the same width. So when it feels slower, our brains reach for explanations like:

   • “They messed up the signals.”
   • “They took away my lane.”
   • “People drive worse now.”

   But in a system where car capacity is already maxed out, the real story is often:

   • More cars. Same space. Same laws of physics.

If you widen a bottlenecked freeway and five years later you’re stuck again, it doesn’t mean “something went wrong.” It means the outcome matched the fundamental law perfectly.

When populations grow, what actually scales?

If your metro area grows by 20%, you basically have three options:

1. More private cars

• Pros: high individual flexibility.
• Cons: demolish things for wider roads and parking, induce more driving, and still end up with congestion at peak.

2. More people per vehicle (buses, trains, car-pools)

• Pros: dramatically increases person-capacity per lane.
• Cons: requires political will to prioritize transit (bus lanes, signal priority, frequent service).

3. More people on high-efficiency modes (bikes, walking, micromobility)

• Pros: extremely space-efficient and energy-efficient; great for short trips that currently clog arterial roads.
• Cons: requires safety infrastructure and a culture shift so people feel comfortable using them.

The small structural joke of “you are the traffic” is that you don’t get to be outside the system:

• If you drive, you add to congestion.
• If you ride a bus, bike, or walk, you help free up capacity while taking advantage of higher-throughput modes.

And when you fight transit lanes or bike lanes because “they’ll make traffic worse,” you’re often literally fighting the very tools that could scale your city’s mobility.

Why “traffic is worse now” is a silly story—and what’s more honest to say

It’s not silly to be frustrated by congestion. Sitting in a jam is miserable, and it has real health and safety costs.

What is silly—once you know the history and the math—is the implication that:

• Congestion is mainly caused by “new” things like bike lanes or road diets; or
• We could have kept expanding car capacity forever without hitting physical and economic limits.

A more honest version of “traffic is worse now” might be:

“More of us are choosing to travel by private car at the same times, on streets that were never designed for this many vehicles. We’ve spent decades building for cars instead of people, and now the system is hitting its hard limits.”

Once you say that out loud, the path forward looks different:

• Stop pretending we can road-widen our way out of congestion.
• Remember that every solo car is “traffic,” not a victim of it.
• Invest in high-capacity, high-efficiency modes—not as a moral crusade, but as a simple scaling requirement.

Or, put even more bluntly:

If you want less traffic, you need fewer cars in the same space—or the same number of people using modes that pack better.

Everything else is just arguing with geometry.

FAQ

Q 1. Does building more roads ever reduce congestion? A. Sometimes, briefly. New capacity can reduce delays in the short term, but over a few years, extra lanes typically fill up with induced traffic until congestion returns to its previous level, as documented by Duranton and Turner in U.S. cities.

Q 2. Are buses and trains really that much more efficient than cars? A. Yes. A single bus lane can carry an order of magnitude more people per hour than a mixed car lane, and rail corridors can go even higher, which is why dense cities rely on transit to function at all without total gridlock.How Congestion Pricing Will Improve Your Life

Q 3. Do bike lanes “steal” capacity from drivers? A. Properly designed protected bike lanes usually increase total person-throughput per meter of street, because bikes take far less space per person than cars, especially at peak times.Comparison of the Person Flow on Cycle Tracks vs Lanes for Motorized Vehicles

Q 4. Is it hypocritical to drive and still want less traffic? A. Not at all, as long as you acknowledge that your own trips are part of the system and support policies—transit, biking, walking, pricing—that give people alternatives so not everyone has to drive.

Q 5. Hasn’t traffic always been bad? What’s new now? A. Complaints about congestion go back at least to the early motor era, but what’s new is the sheer number of cars, the higher share of trips done by car, and our awareness that decades of car-first planning have locked us into a costly, dangerous equilibrium.

Footnotes

Sources

1. Duranton, Gilles, and Matthew A. Turner. “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities.” American Economic Review 101, no. 6 (2011): 2616–52.
2. Downs, Anthony. “The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion.” Traffic Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1962): 393–409.
3. Buchanan, Colin. Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas. HMSO, 1963. Abridged edition available via Internet Archive.
4. Transportation Alternatives. “How Congestion Pricing Will Improve Your Life.” August 17, 2023.
5. Calquin, Y., et al. “Comparison of the Person Flow on Cycle Tracks vs Lanes for Motorized Vehicles.” Findings (2020).
6. Reid, Carlton. “You Are Not Stuck In Traffic, You Are Traffic.” Forbes, December 3, 2018.
7. Vox. “The ‘fundamental rule’ of traffic: building new roads just makes more drivers.” October 23, 2014.