Agreed, it was a low-effort rebuttal to a low-effort post, and I feel bad for contributing to the noise floor on here by taking the bait.
The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work."
Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.
The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work."
Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.