Single correct option
Passage: Urban planners have long assumed that adding lanes to a congested highway will relieve traffic. Decades of data instead reveal a pattern economists call induced demand: new road capacity lowers the effective cost of driving, drawing in trips that previously went unmade — by car, by route, or by time of day — until the new lanes are as congested as the old ones were. The counter-intuitive implication is that widening roads to fight congestion is, by itself, a largely self-defeating strategy, since the very relief it promises is what invites the additional traffic that erases it.
Which of the following best summarises the passage?
Which of the following best summarises the passage?
- A. Traffic congestion is impossible to solve through any combination of infrastructure investment and policy.
- B. Widening highways tends to fail as a standalone solution to congestion, because added capacity attracts new trips that fill it back up.
- C. Urban planners have ignored economic research on congestion for many decades without any valid reason.
- D. Induced demand proves that no city should ever build new roads under any circumstances.
Show answer and solution
Answer: (B) Widening highways tends to fail as a standalone solution to congestion, because added capacity attracts new trips that fill it back up.
The passage's key claim is causal and specific: widening roads is 'self-defeating' because new capacity induces new trips that restore congestion — this is exactly option B. Option A and D overgeneralise beyond what the passage claims (it targets road-widening as a *standalone* strategy, not all infrastructure or all road-building); C is an unsupported aside about planners' motives.
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