Will the number of cars on GT5 prologue increase?

What interesting measures are being taken in various parts of the world to sustain the increasing number of vehicles on the road?

• Transportation is a core component of our society. The building blocks of transportation include core infrastructure (e.g. roads, rails), the carrier (e.g. cars, trains, aircrafts), supporting infrastructure (e.g. IT systems, signal, etc) and governing norms (rules and regulations). Oh yes – the operators and end users are key too. A large proportion of transportation is via Vehicles on Roads. For this discussion, transportation is for distances that are reasonably covered using cars (let's ignore interstate travel). Please excuse my ignorance (that’s why I am here at Quora), but the number of “new” roads being built is substantially lesser than what used to happen say around 50/100 years back (no statistically evidence quoted here). Roads in general may be widened but the capacity to widen a road is limited to the real estate available. Agreed, roads are being built. Agreed, roads are being expanded. However, the proportion of the number of vehicles (cars, busses, trucks, etc – in general 4 wheelers) has been drastically increasing over the last couple of years (Again, just a hunch). A simple factor may well be the increase in population increasing the necessity of more vehicles on pre built infrastructure. The challenge of sustaining the increasing number of vehicles on road can vary on locations that can be broken down to the following “generalized” geographical characters *: Developed country/less populous areas Developed country/high populous areas: e.g. cities like Tokyo, Singapore, NewYork, etc Developing country/high populous areas: e.g. cities like Chennai, Shanghai Developing country/less Populous areas *The cities listed may not accurately define the characteristics, but the key differentiation is the availability of real estate and the capability of utilizing the infrastructure to expand/build roads causing minimal stress to the population.   Over the last couple of years in Melbourne Australia, the focus in the CBD appears to be to reduce the number of vehicles by converting a few strips to Tram only roads, and needless to say high parking fares! More and more people commute to the CBD on trains to avoid the traffic. Outside the CBD circumference, it is getting more and more packed, and again getting stuck in traffic during peak hours is draining. If we look at a few incidents traffic jam news that made the headlines: 3-minute test roadblock causes 5km jam in Sharjah http://www.emirates247.com/news/uae-experiment-3-minute-roadblock-causes-5km-jam-2013-12-22-1.532071?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it The China National Highway 110 Traffic jam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Highway_110_traffic_jam The 84-Mile Japanese Traffic Jam http://articles.latimes.com/1990-08-21/news/mn-1302_1_longest-traffic-jam The list goes on… (agreed some were due to weather conditions). However, the underlying problem is that the number of vehicles outnumbers the original capacity the roads were built for.   If we look at regulations, wearing a seatbelt wasn’t mandatory a couple of years ago but it is now in certain parts of the world – in an effort to prevent safety incidents. More safety incidents – because “higher” performing cars are being built (agreed, with features to help reduce safety incidents) but the underlying factor is that there is this human sitting behind the wheel who now tends to be easily distracted by smart phones. Anyways, that was off track. A very common approach to “manage” traffic appears to be limiting the number of vehicles entering a densely populated area (e.g. city) either by placing rules to limit entry or providing alternates. Without doubt, approaches to maintain sustainable traffic  requires a holistic approach. Below 2 videos I found interesting on youtube: Is building more cities the only option? What other interesting approaches are being taken to manage a sustainable road sense?

• Answer:

  This is a big issue, and the approach being used varies a great deal depending on the spending power and ideology of the people who run things. I'm going to focus most of my answers here on London, since it's the city about which I know the most. London has a great deal of traffic, and many of its roads are significantly congested at peak hours. In addition, it's a very old city, and its roads are mostly based on medieval cattle trails, which makes it very hard to optimise. Transport for London, the organisation responsible for all transportation in London (except some of the railways), has operated a wide range of measures to keep things under control in London. Modal shift Rather than trying to accommodate increased vehicle numbers, the big focus the last couple of decades has been on getting people out of cars and into other modes of transport. For a long time it was about getting people onto the tube, but now it's getting so busy that they're trying to move people onto other modes - busses, trams, the DLR, cycling, walking, or river transport. The reasoning behind this is simple. This is the amount of space that 72 people take when travelling by car, bus or bicycle. Cars are not an efficient way of getting people around. The more people we can get onto other modes, the more space we'll have to work with. To this end, there's a range of management techniques we're using to encourage modal shift. Congestion charging The Congestion charge was introduced in London in 2003. It's a daily charge for entering central London during the day on weekdays - its intention is both to reduce congestion and to cut emissions in London, which is why electric and other very low emission vehicles are exempted. People who live inside the zone also get a 90% discount on the charge. The main point of it is to discourage frivolous journeys into the centre of London, and encourage people who don't need to drive to find another way of getting into the city. Active traffic management Active traffic management, or ATM, involves using signals to guide people onto less busy roads, relieving the pressure on the main arterial routes. This will become even more important when we start deploying the next technique: Cycle focussed street design Redesigning certain streets to prioritise them toward cycle traffic, by removing traffic lanes to create segregated cycle routes, early starts and advanced stoplines for cyclists. Of course, the simple truth about transport systems is that they have a lot of competing priorities - if you improve the situation for cyclists, you have to take something away from someone else. It's expected that vehicle congestion will increase in these areas, and the objective will be to minimise that. But a lot of people in London want to cycle, and by removing safety and convenience barriers we can move them over to a more efficient and more environmentally friendly transport mode. As well as encouraging modal shift, we're also trying to get vehicles through junctions more efficiently in a number of other ways. Lane rental and roadworks monitoring London is a busy city, with a lot of utilities, and roadworks are a common occurrence. We're trying to make this more efficient, through a number of initiatives. Firstly, the lane rental initiative imposes charges for closing busy roads during busy times. The charges vary - digging up a side road will cost you a lot less than shutting down Oxford Street - and on most roads the charges only apply during peak hours, so in most cases it's possible to work around the rental times and avoid paying the charges, which motivates the companies doing the works to: Work during less busy times, and Finish as quickly as possible. In addition, during important works we're trialling video analytics systems to determine if the companies are letting works overrun into busy periods, and charge them accordingly. More efficient pedestrian crossings We're trialling a whole range of technologies to help pedestrians cross safely and efficiently, while at the same time minimising wasted traffic time. The pedestrian countdown timer lets people know how much time they have to cross, allowing them to make an informed decision and avoid delaying traffic. Advanced pedestrian detectors count the number of people waiting at a crossing, and determine the amount of invitation time they need to get onto the road. If people cross before the pedestrian phase arrives, they can cancel the demand to avoid stopping traffic unnecessarily. There are a number of other techniques, and in a few years we're likely to see more advanced Intelligent Traffic Systems techniques start to take the fore. These are just a few examples of things we've been doing to relieve the pressure on our road networks.