Induced demand actually means that more people drive now because the people that didn't drive in the past / lived somewhere else because it was less convenient because of the traffic to commute by car or live somewhere else where they would have needed a car now decide to commute by car / actually move (yeah that also something we have observed) because the widening temporarily improved traffic. In the end traffic ends up the same if not worse. Induced demand isn't something the Internet has come up with. It's actually a real thing that has been studied and researched. We know it exists. It functions on the basic principle of: If you improve something and make it more convenient to use that something, more people will actually use it.

[–] Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

But the demand was always there. They wanted to move, they just didn't. So the lane didn't induce it. The choice of that word was intentional. It was to argue against more lanes. It is really unserved demand that they just ignored originally.