Cobra Effect in Urban Planning: Infrastructure Failures
Explore how urban planning mistakes like highways and redevelopment can worsen traffic and harm neighborhoods through systemic failures.
What was corrected
The article told the cobra-bounty story as fact, implied road expansion never solves congestion and freeway removal has no tradeoffs, dated Minneapolis's zoning change to 2040, said every new unit lowers pressure for all residents, and cited a Mast 2019 500-meter rent reduction.
Qualified the cobra parable, the induced-demand and supply claims, and the Mast filtering research to what the evidence supports, leaving the already-accurate freeway-removal and Minneapolis-2040 material intact.
Why this is better
The cobra story is apocryphal and several claims were more absolute than the evidence supports. Corrections qualify them and keep the genuine research (induced demand; Mast's filtering studies) rather than adding new sources.
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