There's a meme that goes around among people who advocate for active transportation.

There are a few variations on it, but it has a photo of a freeway packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, all at a standstill, with the words "just one more lane," written over top. It's a funny way for active transportation-minded folks to poke fun at a prevailing notion but also refers to a real paradox that was discovered more than 100 years ago.

Braess's Paradox states that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down the overall traffic flow through it. This means that if every driver takes the path that looks most favourable to them, they will end up clogging the very road that was widened to speed up the flow of traffic.

If we're all choosing the path of least resistance, it ends up creating more resistance.

In transportation planning, this is called "induced demand," which describes as "the idea that increasing roadway capacity encourages more people to drive, thus failing to improve congestion.  

"In rapidly growing areas where roads were not designed for the current population, there may be a great deal of latent demand for new road capacity, which causes a flood of new drivers to immediately take to the freeway once the new lanes are open, quickly clogging them up again," it says.

City planner and author Jeff Speck called induced demand a "great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that every thoughtful person seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon."

Now, onto my second point.

Comox Valley residents are all doubtlessly aware that traffic has been pretty bad over the past few weeks. The sewer conveyance project, which is necessary, is to blame, as all traffic going into Comox is funnelled across the 5th Street Bridge and up Ryan Road. I have already heard complaints about this project, some saying that more traffic lanes should be added to accommodate the increased population in the Valley and the increased traffic across the bridge.

At first glance, this makes sense. But I have a counterpoint to that argument.

I think we have an opportunity here to capitalize on a problem and make a meaningful, sustainable and equitable change to how we get around in the Valley.

This bridge work will continue for a while. The project is supposed to last until May. That's two more months of a five-minute commute taking far longer. Or it could be something else.

What if for the next few months, we do an experiment? What if we all choose to try something other than driving a car downtown for everything? What if we ride a bike to the grocery store? Or take the bus to the Farmer's Market? Or carpool with a co-worker to commute? Or park in Simms Creek Park for the day and walk the rest of the way to work?

Instead of demanding that we don't spend money on a pedestrian bridge across the river, we could try walking and see that it would benefit us to have that infrastructure. Instead of demanding we spend more money on more traffic lanes (which are far more expensive than the bridge would be, by the way), we try something that doesn't take up as much space as one person in a car does.

If I were the City of Courtenay and/or the regional district, I would have used this opportunity to encourage parking at Simms Park. I would have hosted a GoByBikeWeek-style event to show how it is possible to have less congestion downtown. I would have also reached out to local businesses in the affected area in partnership to encourage alternative transportation options.

This bottleneck shows where the weaknesses are in our transportation system. There would be no traffic jams without the traffic, and one more lane won't fix the problem.

These next two months could go a couple of ways. We could all sit in traffic, complaining, but not being willing to change our behaviour, or we could try something new and see that it works a lot better. It probably will, and it might be what we need to come unstuck.