induced demand isn't just a traffic thing. literally our entire society is built on induced demand. they make products first, and then market them, and some people buy them, and they throw what they didn't sell away (and with most products, the consumer eventually also throws what they purchased away. so most or all of it gets thrown away eventually)
whether you buy something or not has no bearing on the product. it got made. they just want you to buy it to cut their losses. but you can't just 'vote with your dollar' against the endless flood of trash products because they were already manufactured, irregardless of if anyone actually wanted it.
since we’re talking about induced demand, i remember reading a thing recently (probably on strong towns) where someone pointed out that pedestrian, bike, train, bus, etc, infrastructure are things that also get induced demand, not just cars. if you build “one more lane” in a train network due to congestion, then more people will use the train until it’s just as congested as it was before. induced demand is just a fancy way of describing a thing where if you have more of something then more people use it, and so it’s not always bad! induced demand at a train station is something that is good because it’s good when more people get around by train.
this is all kind of a ramble but the main point is that induced demand isn’t inherently bad or good, we all1 get to decide what kind of demand we want to induce and we can use that for good
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collectively, not like individually. don’t beat yourself up when the oregon DoT expands a highway again for no reason
