All Traffic Models Are Wrong

Every U.S city has something called a regional travel demand model which is like a mathematical geometric network of the roadway environment. It uses assumptions about land use and assumptions about people's likelihood to drive or take transit but most of those assumptions are based on what's observed today and not necessarily what you want in the future. You end up with these model outputs that tell you hey if you don't go widen this freeway it's going to have level of service F or like a volume capacity ratio of like 2.3 or something like that. That's kind of when the level of madness that results in and the kind of investment decisions that we typically see today yeah.