I live in San Mateo and work in the south bay. By car it takes me 35-40min (with no traffic) but with public transport it would be over 2h. After six there isn't even any option available to go back home. No surprise that so many people choose a car to commute.
And this says nothing of "comfort", which along with Time, is a rare commodity for working people. I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours. I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much. I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month. A car lease, insurance, and gas per month would be about $600. I will happily pay $200 more per month for the massively increased mobility and comfort that a car provides. The value proposition for public transit really sucks.
I'm coming from Boston where we have a solid subway system and I massively prefer using that over driving.
Why do you say mass transit is a non starter for kids?
She loves it and I love the time with her and not worrying about parking, accidents, etc.
But if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of other people in a major metro who don't fall into those categories, you'd probably appreciate the option to not have to obtain a personal vehicle or use it exclusively for your commute, errands, a night on the town, etc.... and the best part is that for all the remaining people who do drive, every person who takes transit is one less person contributing to traffic congestion!
Transit options benefit everyone. Your comment reads like you don't support transit options because they don't suit your particular tastes - I suggest you instead consider advocating for transit to make life better for both yourself and your community, regardless of whether you personally use transit or not.
I'd be fine making that shift if the public transit deployed today were actually good enough to be a like-for-like replacement of car ownership. It isn't unless you live in very expensive conveniently located neighborhoods.
You say:
> should push people to public transit by eliminating parking and closing (some) streets to vehicle traffic because density leads to bus routes and bicycles are intimidated by cars. That's not an option so much as a mandatory shift
I say society should stop giving away publicly owned real estate to the narrow segment of people who want to make driving their lifestyle choice.
I would prefer that the parking lots be replaced with something more economically valuable. For example,
1. stores
2. apartments
3. office space.
Take a look at Louisville's "award winning" parking crater: http://brokensidewalk.com/2016/parking-crater/?utm_content=b...
What is the economic value of so much real estate devoted to machine storage? --- < $0 ( because it takes away from the economic value of surrounding businesses )
If someone wants to drive then they can pay for the privilege.
In the meantime, the rest of society should spend the money saved to make the automobile a museum curiosity.
You'll notice that affordability is emphatically not a feature of high-rise, parking-starved, conveniently located urban neighborhoods.
The economic value of parking is in the thousands of dollars per person per month not spent on rent to be within walking distance, and the free time not sacrificed to low-speed transportation.
The people who drive to those stores from ~20 miles around would not necessarily have any money left to spend once they are forced to find homes within 2 or 3, or no will to visit them once transit times from affordable neighborhoods increase from ~15 minutes by freeway to ~90 by bicycle.
Despite the environmental benefits, living within walking distance of downtown offices and amenities is the most ostentatious and fiscally wasteful choice modern humans seem to be proud of making.
What we need to STOP doing is humoring the notion that spending big on urban rent is somehow more virtuous than an equivalently priced vacation or designer handbag, and especially that public policy ought to increase the pressure to spend ever-increasing proportions of income on land value.
You want to kill cars, find a suitable replacement. Paying more for less housing, living with roommates, or multiplying commute times are not acceptable approaches. Bedroom communities around actually good (fast, frequent, reliable, comfortable) commuter rail systems are a lot more compelling. Getting the rent differential between city center and suburb down below the threshold of TCO on a basic car would help too.
Average cost per year to own a car is $9000 per the AAA website.
Car storage has its own cost to cities - because parking lots generate no /little property taxes or sales tax.
Many Americans disagree about the value of walkability. ( https://www.houselogic.com/save-money-add-value/save-on-util...) :
> If you’re able to walk instead of drive to the store for a gallon of milk, you and your neighborhood home values may benefit from the exercise. A 2009 study sponsored by CEOs for Cities, a national consortium of civic and business leaders, found that homes in neighborhoods with good walkability are more valuable than similar homes in neighborhoods where residents have to drive to get to amenities.
> Walkability adds anywhere from $4,000 to $34,000 to home values, according to the study. The bigger, more urban the city (think San Francisco or Chicago), the bigger the boost in home prices walkability adds. Neighborhoods in cities with less dense populations like Tucson, Ariz., or Fresno, Calif., have the smallest boost in home prices from being walkable.
> The availability of public transportation also played a role. The higher home values tended to show up in walkable neighborhoods near good public transportation where people could live without an automobile.
You're making my argument for me. Housing costs a great deal more in walkable and transit-friendly areas. Equivalently, car-friendliness lowers housing costs.
I could drive a new BMW for less than it would take to upgrade from East Bay suburbia to an equivalent apartment within walking distance of my downtown SF office (~$2500/mo up to $4500/mo). But both of those choices would be equally and severely irresponsible from a personal finance perspective.
We should be running as far away as possible from policy intended to push people to spend even more on housing.
The car lets me live where housing is cheap(er), while still getting to work and accomplishing day-to-day tasks reasonably quickly. You propose to take that option away and force me to spend that extra $2000/mo, downgrade to a worse apartment, or spend more of my already-scarce free time commuting.
"Average" car costs are weighted upwards by new SUVs and luxury cars. It does not hurt very much to drive a boring reliable Japanese compact as a personal daily driver, everything beyond that is choice.
Two examples: The last time I was in San Francisco, I wanted to stop and eat. I drove around in ever-widening circles seeking a place to park, then gave up and drove away. That business lost out. On another day, across the bay in Freemont I think, I stopped at a place that had free parking right outside the door. They got my business.
In fact studies have shown devoting vast expanses of land to parking is economically bad. See : Stroup "The high cost of Free parking" and the http://www.strongtowns.org/ .
Also refer to the New York City data about removing parking in order to create a more bike/ped friendly neighborhood.
Most patrons to a business live local to that business. Your example of being willing to drive all the way from San Francisco to Fremont demonstrates this point well. You are not the normal example.
Wrt the business that did not get your business.... they may not have even noticed because they had more than enough local patrons.
On the day in San Francisco, I finally found a place to park in some super-rich residential area miles away from where I had started. At that point I parked, but only to rest and assess the situation. I think I then said "screw this" and went back to my hotel in South San Francisco. I probably ate cold food at the hotel, purchased from a supermarket.
On a different day in San Francisco, just a few years ago, I thought I'd try the public transportation. Silly me, that doesn't work either! I ended up walking from the bottom of the California line up to Russian Hill. Afterward, I tried to take a tram/streetcar thing. This being July 4, a day when public transportation is particularly sensible, they shut it down near the crowds who might want it. Of course! WTF SFO. I walked all the way back, then down into the subway station. I get on the train that runs south along the east side, I think the J train. This goes up to street level. It's dark and my cell phone battery is dying. Unlike the T in Boston since at least 1993, this train fails to have: a voice-over for the stops, an overhead text display for the stops, or big lighted signs at the stops. Boston had/has all that, but San Francisco has none of it even 2 decades later. Also, the train doesn't actually stop unless there is a person waiting, so you can't count stops to know where you are. It's GPS or screw you. I get off, walk too far to the "connecting" bus stop, and wait for the last bus. Oh, the sign didn't make it clear that you aren't supposed to wait at the bus shelter. The bus goes by on the other side of the street. So then walk several more miles, cut through Glenn Canyon in the dark, and finally back to the car parked at Turquoise Way.
Obviously, the car doesn't work, but neither does the public transportation. It seems I'm expected to hike up and down all those hills like it's 1849. My knees are too old for that, and my kids are too young for that.
However if you can easily find pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s where the streets look just as crammed with cars as any other city of that time. What happened is that people decided this wasn't working at all and they simply made a choice and they made a change to their spending priorities. Anyone can do this. All that is needed is the political will to make it a priority.
Amsterdam has average temps (in F) from the mid 30's to the mid 60's[0]. That's prime bike weather. That's pretty much in line with San Francisco, which is a good city for biking. Even Manhattan and Brooklyn have reasonably overall pleasant weather for biking.
But compare SF to somewhere like Washington, DC, or Austin, TX. For 3-4 months of the year, DC feels like a swamp. Same with Austin. It's much more preferable to use public transit or drive than bike in that weather.
Credit where credit is due, I stole most of my ideas about this from [0]. It's a non-prestigious contrarian blog that's easy to mock, but he seems to be correct on the merits about cities.
[0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html
Public transit is not resilient to these things. Our streetcars shut down in Toronto during heavy snowfall because they'll derail if the tracks aren't clear. Ice gets into the concrete supporting the tracks and they need to constantly be repaired because of that.
Asphalt roads are cheap and easy to maintain. Hell, you don't even need asphalt, cars are perfectly capable of driving on dirt or gravel. You can drive a car on shitty, broken asphalt, but you can't drive a train on broken tracks. There is a resiliency to road and cars that public transit just doesn't have.
They also have weather patterns that generally match ours. Sure, not tornadoes afaik, but that's not a huge chunk of damage to the US either. Public transit is resistant to those things. They have snow, ice, and other cold-weather issues over there as well and somehow seem to get along just fine.
And car's resiliency comes at an unsustainable cost. Not only is it environmentally unsustainable, it's not even population-density sustainable. Sure, there are big empty areas of land where it wouldn't make sense to put public transportation, just like in Europe. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the areas where it does make sense to implement it, just like in Europe.
None of these problems are really unique to the US.
Seriously, Most of Europe is further north than Maine.
Copenhagen and Amsterdam - 2 big cycling/transit cities get plenty of snow and rain.
U.S. wrt transit is "special" because we don't spend money to get a functioning system.
Most journeys are short distance, however. The article describes commuting, where the distances should be comparable between North America and Europe.
When's the last time you took the car to work rather than the bus because a hurricane hit your area? Last time you looked out the window, saw a tornado and said, "Looks like I'm driving to work today, honey, and not taking the bus."?
Ice storm? You better be a cardiologist needing to get to the hospital to do life-saving surgery if you're driving in that. Because the world doesn't need you in the office writing yet-another-javascript-framework that badly.
Heat wave? Okay, ya got me there. Take the air-conditioned car instead of the bicycle.
Even in an urban area with transit, most US cities have forced desegregation which means kids are scattered all over and economies built around cars. I could take public transit to work (30-40 minutes vs 10 in a car), but have to travel to the other side of the city to get to my kids school (15m by car, 60 by transit). Oh and even in an urban area, the nearest supermarket is a 20 minute walk.
My relatives in Europe walk 5 blocks to school, have decent local shopping options, etc.
Using a car in the US isn't that expensive, but offers a dramatic level of flexibility and freedom. I'm not limited to working in my city's central business district or forced to miss most of my kids school events.
this would make roads much less clogged so those who really need (and pay for it) should go on their own. it's very real added value that helps environment, increases happiness, cuts times and so on. what (local) government should do is to motivate people/orgs with some monetary subsidies.
Is this a joke? Car travel works for healthy people who are ~20–60 years old with a stable income.
For everyone else – children, teenagers, elderly people, the disabled, the poor, etc. – cars are terrible. The lack of other transportation options is perhaps the biggest reason that living in car-centric suburbs is hell for teenagers; they end up entirely dependent.
Go take a bus in a city and you’ll see a huge variety of people riding.
Do you seriously think every old person in e.g. New York City owns a car to get around? Have you ever been to New York City?
> You won't convince a salesman to carry a projector, screen, and a box of pamphlets on the bus and train.
This would not be strange in Manhattan. You couldn't convince the salesman to waste his Time, which is a rare commodity for working people as you say, driving a car which would be slower than taking the subway.
> I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
Subways avoid this problem. They're also expensive, but there's easier solutions -- bus and outdoor train shelters (which obviously protect from rain/snow) are sometimes heated in the northeast for this reason too.
Also, dealing with rain/snow is pretty easy and pleasant if you just dress right. The prevalance of cars in this country means many people never learn to dress right because they can get away with never spending more than 60 seconds outside, the brief space between the car and the building door.
> And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month.
Here it's $100 a month.
> I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours.
A lot of people find dealing with repetitive constant stop and go traffic but having a comfy seat to be a crappy tradeoff compared to having less space but freeing your mind to read, doze, whatever. There are crowded an uncrowded systems and lines.
Go try some good transit, then tell me what you think.
Never mind the fact that it is transportation. Being unprotected in a city is threatening. Walking counts. Sitting in a park counts.
Note that city and non-city have different political behavior. The people are different. Many people will simply never feel safe in a city environment. Private cars mitigate that somewhat.
There are currently 6 crimes per every 100,000 miles on Muni (http://sfgov.org/scorecards/crimes-muni). If you commute 5 miles per day, that's 12,500 miles in a decade. I work near Civic Center, a dangerous area, so I assume it's probably 3x more dangerous than average so the equivalent of 37,000 miles. So each decade I ride transit, I'd be victim of over 2 police reported crimes.
I know plenty of people who are terrified of driving in the same way some posters here are terrified of urban crime. It all comes down to what environments you're used to. If you're used to driving down a freeway, you'll routinize and minimize the risk of being in a collision. If you're used to city life, you'll routinize and minimize the risk of being mugged.
Also, once again, transit does not have to mean high crime. You're describing crappy transit systems. So let's improve those.
Given the numbers from the previous post, you should get into 0.02 crashes per decade.
You are about 2.5x more likely to die per mile driven on a city vs highway (http://freakonomics.com/2010/01/29/the-irony-of-road-fear/). Assuming the same ratio for crashes, you'd expect to get into 0.05 crashes per decade.
As a rough estimate, you'd expect to be a victim of a crime on the SF Muni about 40x more often than being in a car crash.
Very unlikely, but sure why not
Nevertheless, we're still for some reason comparing to a terrible transit system, the SF Muni. As usual, if you compare car driving to a terrible transit system, you conclude transit sucks.
NYC's transit system used to have terrible crime rates decades ago, but is much safer than the SF Muni poster describes. Many transit systems outside of the US are even better.
All of the slow-moving elderly I see on the buses around Seattle would like to have a word with you.
I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much.
I tried it for a few weeks when I got tired of riding the bus. Jaguar S-Type, leather, walnut on the dash, about as nice as one's going to get.
I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
To each their own. After two weeks of sitting on the 520 bridge staring at the bumper in front of me, I said "fuck this" and went back to the bus. You already said time was a "rare commodity" for working people, yet you'll sit in traffic while I sit on the bus making a bug fix or reading a book?
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month.
Yoiks. $100 for me to ride the bus, versus $200-$300/month just for parking in downtown Seattle. That doesn't include gas or the $50K Jaguar. Again, though, for me it had nothing to do with money spent.
But we all have our limits. Currently I ride the motorcycle to work (a different destination from above), which allows HOV lane usage, which whittles my commute down to 30 minutes and I park in front of the building. And my ride to work is a motorcycle, which is a plus in my book. Versus 90 minutes on the bus, a transfer, and the bus doesn't drop me anywhere near the building.
So what if this is the case? Moving 20% of the moving population in 2% of the vehicle-volume almost quadruples the capacity for everyone else.
I don't buy your assertion in the large (most regions with effective pubic transport seem to move a roughly representative population of users -- including wealthy people). My point is that it could be true in the Bay Area (which is more spread out than your typical big city) but still not refute the need for mass transport.
I mean sure, I would prefer to be in the back of my private car, but given the choice between the stress of driving, and the stress of reading somewhere crowded? I will pay extra to get the time reading, and I will deal with the crowds for a discount.
The monetary equation won't balance, if you are neutral on driving vs reading preferences, until we start requiring reasonable liability insurance minimums, and until I can get housing and my employer can get office space without paying for parking.
The true costs of driving in silicon valley are dominated by parking and by the unfunded liability inherent to the activity.
But even in San Francisco, unless you're going inbound/outbound the crosstown commutes are horrible. Try getting from Ingleside to Richmond, or Richmond to Dog Patch in a reasonable time frame --impossible. They are all less than 7 miles as the crow flies, but try getting to and fro with public transit that takes less than an hour for what amounts to roughly 5miles...
The transit system in SF is based on the assumption people are going to and from "downtown" and does not accommodate other commute streams.
Paris: 55,673 ppl/sq mi
New York City: 27,016.3 ppl/sq mi
San Francisco: 17,179.2 ppl/sq mi
Zurich: 12,000 ppl/sq mi
Vienna: 11,205 ppl/sq mi
San Bruno: 7,505.0 ppl/sq mi
Mountain View: 6,034.8 ppl/sq mi
San Jose: 5,256.2 ppl/sq mi
Cupertino 5,179.1 ppl/sq mi
Menlo Park: 3,271.3 ppl/sq mi
There is a lot of books on what makes city good place to live this days on. I found it fascinating (as SWE).
For example, a city can zone land to be high density residential but that doesn't necessarily mean that people who live there will sell their low density houses so that they can be redeveloped.
A high density area can "want" a public transit station, but the transit authority may not have the funds, or the motivation to give them a station. And there is no means for a city government for "force" them to.
Instead, we're left with the "master plan" system which is a living document that the city government maintains which expresses a "vision" of what the city would like (their plans) and the city council signs up to help make it real when there is something within their powers to do to help it.[1]
A previous example of how hard that can be is the "Coyote Valley" area in South San Jose that was going to be "anchored" in part by large campuses of big employers (Cisco was the headline client). But the dot com crash hit and Cisco never moved in.
A current example is the new Apple "spaceship" campus in Cupertino which is to far away from the train station and in a set of roads that don't easily feed or drain to the 280 interstate. [1] And part of that is the problem in Sunnyvale, the plan says one thing, and when councilmembers have voted to help implement it, it has irritated citizens who didn't realize that was what the plan said.
It would help a lot if the Caltrain would be improved with more rides and less street crossings. Then there should be more buses bringing people to the Caltrain.
If San José replaced all its single family houses with 3–5 story apartment buildings, the density would increase 5x.
They exist and they tend to be eyesores hidden behind trees. The tell-tale sign is the parking found underneath the living level exemplified with non-structural walls. So yes, it's even worse than I stated. Land is grossly underutilized for a city the size of sanctus iosephus. We can blame proper suburbs like MTV, Sunnyvale, &c, but S. Joe takes the cake. It's a city, at least on paper, and should act like one.
(Not that the other parts of San Jose are any better.)
As an historical note, the key planner/city manager from San Jose came from the Los Angeles area - Hamann ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann ). For twenty years (1950-1969), he did his best to make San Jose a sprawling city that sucked up as much of Santa Clara county as he could make happen.
For instance your figure for Paris is only the actual city of Paris, which doesn't include its own suburbs: it's really just the center. The subway extends a fair bit beyond the actual city boundaries. As an example "La Défense", the business district of Paris, isn't even inside Paris.
So of course it's very dense. The equivalent for NYC would be Manhattan without the 4 boroughs. Maybe even a subset of Manhattan.
The density of the Paris Urban area--which is about 1/6 the size of the Paris Metro area but about 20x the area of the "City"--is about 10,000/sq. mi. (10m people in about 1,000 sq. mi.
For example, this 2013 article describes how the VTA 22 El Camino route becomes completely full of homeless people during the overnight hours: http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/10/31/homeless-turn-overnigh...
It hurts a lot more when you come for people's parking spaces if they still need cars for everything except commuting.
e.g. Utah tried this and it seems to work on many levels:
San Francisco might be the only place in the world where that is a big challenge in public transport.
(I am not saying that really isn't a problem in SF, but for whatever reasons, the problem doesn't exist elsewhere.)
And a lot of places are "built out", so there isn't really room to expand roads, or it is very expensive.
The American model seems to have such narrow and badly paved sidewalks that no one uses them, so then you need wider streets to cater for the combined use by pedestrians, cyclists and cars.
I grew up in suburban Dallas, and there were sidewalks everywhere. The only neighborhoods I saw without sidewalks were older neighborhoods that always creeped me out when I was little... I always got the impression that they were dilapidated.
Here's an example from a neighborhood right near where I grew up: https://goo.gl/maps/qGSvbk4HdAM2
And even the six-lane arterials have sidewalks here: https://goo.gl/maps/DUR8mdVQysu and https://goo.gl/maps/hZ4dL3yj8F32
And for completeness, a sidewalk-less street in a nearby neighborhood: https://goo.gl/maps/TnQ8bogKttL2 -- that whole area just looks old, and the neighborhood gave me the creeps when I was a kid
I would definitely change the order from
road | sidewalk | lawn
road | lawn | sidewalk
http://homeguides.sfgate.com/sidewalks-considered-homeowners...
Standing room on public transit is much worse than driving, IMO.
The good news is that China is working on it:
http://www.china.org.cn/business/2016-11/01/content_39610565...
Why don't you look at a train schedule in the US and tell me how many trains go 200 mph. Hint: zero! Most trains average less than 50 mph.
As for a bus, you aren't going to drive it at 70 through the streets of LA or Manhattan. In fact, it's probably going to be tough getting it to 60 in this traffic:
http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/sjm-co...
A maglev carries 200-300 people? Your average bus holds 50?
Heck, most of the freeway HOV lanes are full of corporate bus routes during rush hour anyway...
That said, public transit is indeed slow, but it's mostly available in the area if you absolutely must take it. It covers a lot more than I think you're giving it credit for based on your choice of workplace and specific area of living though.
For example try to get from parts of Sunnyvale to Google.