Once upon a time, New York City's top urban planning strongman, Robert Moses, built highways and bridges across and into New York City, aiming to stop traffic congestion.
And more of them. And more. Moses is why New York City has the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Link, Interstate 278, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and many other passageways. He built them all, and then he built some more.
And as every journalism student, having read Robert Caro's The Power Broker, would know, Moses was astonished. Instead of less traffic coming into Manhattan from the outer boroughs and beyond -- there was more. Manhattan became more traffic-congested than ever as a result, and lots of neighborhoods were ruined, too, divided and corrupted by the roaring overhead highways.
This curiously corresponds exactly to what we are seeing at the border right now -- a new migrant surge, coming in the wake of Joe Biden's expansion of what he claims are new, expanded, legal pathways for illegal immigrants to get into the country solely on their claims to asylum.
According to the Border Report:
McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) – Rio Grande Valley Sector Border Patrol agents report recently encountering five large groups of 648 migrants on the South Texas border, a massive uptick since the lifting of Title 42.
...
But well, now they are. The old border surges are back, ready for the television cameras again, just as Joe Biden and his minions have gotten done crowing about how Biden solved the border crisis.
Observers of city planning have a word for this: The Congestion Paradox, brought on by what's known as "induced demand." When you build more roads, you get more, not less, traffic.
According to a very good unnamed writer at The Generalist Academy:
Moses built many bridges and roads with the goal of alleviating congestion in New York. However, every time a new bridge was built, traffic did not improve. Instead, people who normally wouldn’t drive switched from public transport to cars. People who wouldn’t normally make the trip decided that now it was worth it. More roads = more traffic.
Now, the fact that people were observing this back in the 1940s doesn’t change the fact that people keep insisting that more roads will solve traffic problems. And I understand why: it makes intuitive sense. It’s just mostly wrong. The technical term for this is “induced demand” – as in, by building roads you’re inducing more demand for roads.
The Wikipedia entry on Induced Demand has many important technical economic details for why this always happens, brought on by short-term and long-term variables.
But the conclusion is this:
A 2004 meta-analysis, which took in dozens of previously published studies, confirmed this. It found that:
...on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in vehicle miles travelled, which climbs to 10 percent – the entire new capacity – in a few years.
An aphorism among some traffic engineers is "Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt."
Its roughly correspond to the old economic adage that if you tax something less, you get more of it, and if you tax something more, you get less of it.
It's the same dynamic with roads -- and now immigration pathways -- because human nature is always going to be human nature.
Joe Biden has repeated the Moses mistake in spades by increasing "legal" pathways for entry into the U.S. from people who shun ordinary immigration procedures. Unlike Pete Buttigieg, whose "racist highways" claims were clearly bowdlerized from Caro's book, Biden doesn't read these kinds of books. He doesn't even care, because what he does want is more illegal immigrants coming into the country, and this serves his aim perfectly.
He's instituted pathway after pathway for them, starting with something called CBPOne, a mobile app for getting appointments for entry into the U.S. from countries such as Haiti and Venezuela if someone already has a relative in the country to serve as sponsor. If you are that first person, bravo, all your relatives can now come into the country. If you are not, you've got the border to cross in order to open that pathway to the rest of your family, village, or tribe. Recent reports say the acceptance rate for these applicants is 100%.
Biden's also set up migrant service centers, through Central America and now even Colombia, to provide even more pathways for migrants to get in. The migrants accepted from this pathway are reportedly bussed into the states under cover of darkness, in buses paid for by the federal government. Those migrants get in, too.
He's also sued the state of Texas, which has set up inflatable border barriers along the Rio Grande to stop migrant traffic, apparently for the migrants' own safety. Because a few unwise migrants have attempted to ignore these barriers and got themselves killed in the harsh currents of the river, Texas's governor is now being branded a human rights violator in the loopy newspeak coming from the Bidens, and the Bidenites of course are suing him.
More passages, more migrants. And these aren't the only new passages Biden's set up, catch-and-release is still very much in operation, too, as well as other means of getting in.
Now after a quiet period dating from these new pathways to immigration into the states, the border surges are back.
Moses at least, could be reliably have been said to have made a mistake in calculating that new passageways would create less trafffic.
Joe Biden has no such excuse -- the information is out there and has been there for years, while his own transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has clearly read the book.
I remember this detail well from my own journalism-school reading (we had to read this book during the preceding summer) and I think it's still required reading.
Biden bragged loudly about opening more legal pathways for migrants to get in, and now the verdict is in -- we are getting those pathways -- along with a second border surge as a result of those pathways, owing to the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world would like to get into the U.S. and see their chance now. The increased pathways not only filled up quickly and left the illegal immigration totals the same as before, they freed up the border for even more illegal entrants, just as all of Moses's highways filled up the more he constructed additional ones. That is bound to at raise the illegal immigration into the U.S. beyond even its current records, even as cities affected, at the border and in the blue-city destinations, are at breaking points.
It's coming. It's reached the 10% point, as described in the Wikipedia passage. The Big Guy always was about ten percent, and this emerging event is just another demonstration of it.