Social Effects
Reducing travel times relative to city or town streets, modern highways with limited access and grade separation create increased opportunities for people to travel for business, trade or pleasure and also provide trade routes for goods. Modern highways reduce commute and other travel time but additional road capacity can also create new induced traffic demand. If not accurately predicted at the planning stage, this extra traffic may lead to the new road becoming congested sooner than anticipated. More roads add on to car-dependence, which can mean that a new road brings only short-term mitigation of traffic congestion.
Where highways are created through existing communities, there can be reduced community cohesion and more difficult local access. Consequently property values have decreased in many cutoff neighborhoods, leading to decreased housing quality over time.
Read more about this topic: Highway
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