As we get into the discussion about what downtown Franklin should be like, we can consider the axiom of biology Jarrett Walker talks of in this article:
"Induced demand is the observed fact that if you make something easier to do, people will do it more. For example, if you create new capacity for cars in a place where travel demand is high, the result is more cars. If you build more capacity to “fix congestion”, you end up back near the same level of congestion you had before.After decades of observing this pattern, most people, including many road-building authorities, are still reluctant to face what this means. Part of the problem, surely, is that we’re presenting induced demand as an observed discovery, allowing us to perform quarrels over data, research methods etc.But induced demand isn’t just an observed fact. It’s also an axiom of biology, so we are as sure about it as we are of the facts of math. This means we don’t really need to be doing this experiment over and over, just as we don’t need to keep measuring circles to be sure of the value of pi."
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