Better use of road capacity - what happens to the traffic?

Measures like bus priority schemes, street-running rail systems, cycle lanes, wider footpaths, and pedestrian areas, can help to improve transportation efficiency and the urban environment, and are being considered in most cities. Such measures ar often opposed on the grounds that they will cause traffic chaos because they will involve reducing road capacity for cars. Forecasts of major disruptions are particularly common when traffic models or methods are used which assume that all traffic displaced from one street will simply divert to others. This article discusses a project to collect and assess evidence including major town center traffic schemes, bus priority measures, bridge and road closures due to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Study material was based on a range of methods, including road-based and cordon-based traffic counts, roadside interviews, repeated cross-sectional travel surveys, and panel surveys.