The ACTUAL Solution to Traffic - A Response to CGP Grey

Hello everyone. This video is a response to CGP Grey's painful take on traffic.

Now, I don't have an issue with CGP Grey or his content in general, but I do believe that his video entitled "The Simple Solution to Traffic" is wildly misinformed and propagates some very harmful solutions, both to people and to our built environment. I've put a link to his video in the description, so you can check it out yourself and make sure that I don't misrepresent any of his ideas.

So let's get to it, shall we? In the video, CGP Grey begins by laying out the main problem with traffic, in his opinion: coordination. Stuck at an intersection, you always watch unfold the fundamental problem of traffic. On green, the first car accelerates, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next. And then you only catch the red. Had the cars accelerated simultaneously, you would have made it through. Coordination, not cars, is the problem because we are monkey drivers with slow reaction times and short attention spans.

He posits that traffic could be vastly improved if all cars could accelerate and decelerate at the same time, as if they were connected to each other. Oh man, so far this sounds dangerous, like a train. CGP Grey then proposes the first practical solution: just don't tailgate; stay in the middle. That should fix the problem, right? Of course not, and CGP Grey acknowledges this, so props to him. That's the simple solution to traffic: getting humans to change their behavior, perhaps by sharing this video to show how and why traffic happens, why tailgaters are trouble, and how we can work together to make the roads better for all.

The end. Except, yeah, wishing upon a star that people are better than they are is a terrible solution. Every time, CGP Grey then posits that we need a structurally systematized solution. Wow, you mean public transport, which is exactly what self-driving cars are? Oh, and this right here is the main point I'll be arguing against—that self-driving cars are a solution or even the solution to our traffic problems.

So, within the framework of self-driving cars, CGP Grey proposes that once all cars become self-driving, we can finally get rid of intersections, and so traffic will flow evenly, and nobody will have to sit in a traffic jam. Now, that being said, my question to you, CGP Grey, is how, in the name of Christ, will a pedestrian cross this? And this right here is my central issue with this video.

Really, it looks and sounds like it has been made by someone who, if they want to go running, takes their SUV from their copy-paste suburban home to the strip mall 10 kilometers away and then takes the escalator at the gym stairs so that they can run on a treadmill for half an hour. It's a terminally core-brained mindset, as if CGP Grey cannot imagine his life without motorization.

This becomes increasingly evident when he goes on to say a solid lane of self-driving cars vastly increases throughput. Neat! So if until now 20,000 cars passed under your window every day, it's now going to be 60,000. Yay! CGP then suggests that we should ban humans from the road. I'm assuming that this video is talking about urban areas where clogged intersections are a real problem and interchanges aren't an option.

By banning humans from the road, CGP Grey, of course, means ban humans from driving. But ironically, this would actually ban humans from the roads physically, in the sense that we wouldn't even be allowed to cross it at grade anymore. "Off the road, peasant! You're messing up our perfect techno-future car flow! How dare you disrupt traffic with your existence in this settlement where people live?"

If this dystopian—night, I mean, traffic solution—would become a reality, we would need to invest in a lot of costly underground and overground passages. You know, the things every city is desperately trying to get rid of because they're horrible. They're awkward to climb and not accessible for low-mobility groups unless you're willing to shell out tons of money for elevators. And it's not just a problem for wheelchair-bound and older people. Imagine spraining your ankle at work or something and then having to climb 10 flights of stairs just to get to the grocery store.

Turning urban areas into obstacle courses for pedestrians only benefits drivers and makes everyone else miserable. It's peak 1960s city planning, and CGP Grey's video is from 2016, which is impressive. Separating cars from people inside cities for a better traffic flow leads to all kinds of negative outcomes, and I know because this has been tried before. This is a picture of the area in front of Prague main station from back in the day. As you can see, it's this archaic low-capacity, very low-efficiency, very non-epic design.

But thankfully, some future visionaries got their hands on it and turned it into a high-capacity, very high-efficiency, fast, great, separate transit solution. And it also became one of the worst places inside the entire city. Beneath this 8-lane urban freeway, there is a network of underpasses that are awkward to get to, but at night they offer a free mugging experience if you are into that sort of thing.

But hey, in the name of fixing traffic, who wouldn't want to walk down a dark concrete hallway leaking of feces with heavy traffic rumbling above? Underpasses and overpasses are meant to cement the dominance of cars in our living spaces and nothing else. The only group they benefit inside urban areas is drivers. Some people say they are actually good for pedestrians, though, because they are safer. But they are only "safe" because the roads are dangerous, and that's because of individual motor traffic, aka cars, and nothing else.

You know, cars are literally the worst kind of transportation you can have, even electric cars. And that's because, outside of pollution, the biggest problem is geometry. One car will fit inside a city; one million won't. Not unless you bulldoze entire neighborhoods to make way for urban freeways and tear down half the inner city to build parking lots. No matter how well you coordinate your cars, they will still back up if they don't fit inside the city.

Rolling around in two tons of metal and plastic per 1.5 or so people is simply not sustainable, period. This is where the story begins and ends. There is no getting around this issue: it's either a car-friendly city or a livable city. You can only pick one. Also, one thing that CGP Grey ignores completely is just how vulnerable a network of self-driving cars is to sabotage. Imagine if, on a road like this, someone hacked into the control system of just three or four cars and then sent a command to make a sharp turn into the oncoming lane.

The result would be a massive pileup and a significant death toll. And even if most other cars could stop in time, the road would still be blocked for hours. Do this at some key intersections at the same time at rush hour, and you'll paralyze an entire city. Do this in multiple cities and logistics routes at the same time, and you'll paralyze an entire economy.

And if you think this is some kind of science fiction speculation, you would be wrong. This is already happening! Just a few weeks before making this video, there was a hacker attack on the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S., causing massive fuel shortages and general panic. But what if we developed some very highly advanced countermeasures? What if we create an encryption so good that it would take a hundred years to crack using the IBM mainframe?

That encryption will work until the first quantum computer comes along, able to break it in a few minutes. Imagine a geopolitical rival like China secretly developing a high-performance quantum computer and then letting it loose on the West. Imagine massive deadly pileups, not just in a few places, but at every intersection of every city of every developed country on Earth.

Or if you don't want to go that large scale, imagine taking over just a few cars and ramming them into the president's motorcade in an assassination attempt, or taking over a 40-ton tanker truck and running it into some government building or a central hospital or into a pillar of some strategically important bridge or something. We don't yet realize the enormous risks that self-driving cars will pose. They will be just another I.T. system and, as such, hackable.

We are reaching a point where we need to reconsider whether pure tech solutions are a good idea. Like how this man found out during a Google service outage. He writes, "I'm sitting here in the dark in my toddler's room because the light is controlled by Google Home. Rethinking a lot right now." Self-driving cars are not the solution to traffic. They can be very useful in many cases, but they are not some silver bullet.

So what’s the actual solution to traffic? Plain and simple: instead of the mindless promotion of self-driving cars, we should start planning cities in a way that you won't actually need a car for your day-to-day existence.

I've lived in European cities for my whole life, and I've never needed a car to get around—only for rare occasions, maybe like hauling furniture or something. In the meantime, we should continue taking back our cities from cars, street by street, square meter by square meter. We should focus on building walkable neighborhoods, get rid of giant strip malls at the edges of cities that encourage car use, demolish urban freeways, and rearrange the suburbs to increase their density and walkability.

Measures like this will limit urban sprawl, making public transit much more viable and efficient. It will be a virtuous circle that will make all our lives better. And if you happen to belong to the top 1%, meaning these measures would make your life somewhat less comfortable—tough! This is the simple solution to fix traffic: not trying to make a broken system a bit more efficient through sheer tech, but getting rid of it in favor of something better.

Because even if every single car becomes self-driving, and we somehow make it 100% sabotage-proof, and every single road starts operating in this hyper-efficient mode, all that would have the same effect as adding more lanes, i.e., increasing capacity.

It's called induced demand, CGP, and I think you should look into it before making a video about how to fix traffic. Because no one has ever fixed traffic by adding more capacity, and self-driving cars will not be an exception either.

Thank you for watching! Please like and subscribe, and don't forget to check out my Patreon if you think this kind of content is worth your money! I'll be seeing you next time.