hard · Act reading
From a social-science passage: "Economists once treated traffic as a fluid: pour in more cars, widen the channel, and flow improves. The metaphor was seductive because it was tractable—fluids obey equations. Yet drivers are not water molecules; they anticipate, hesitate, and route around what they expect others to do. When a new lane opens, some who had avoided the road return, and the freed capacity quietly refills. The fluid model is not wrong so much as it is innocent: it cannot imagine that the channel might widen the river." The author uses the phrase "widen the river" primarily to:
- praise road-widening as a proven method for permanently increasing roadway capacity.
- capture how added capacity can induce the very demand it was meant to relieve.
- argue that traffic flow is governed by the same equations that govern fluids.
- suggest that drivers should be discouraged from returning to newly widened roads.
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