Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
vox.com
vox.com
America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recognize how much everything here is built around the idea of owning a car.
So now my wife has to give rides to our four kids, AND me, and there’s literally nothing I can do about it except petition for better transit, and pray self-driving cars get here faster.
Being dependent on rides feels like being 15 again. It’s humiliating being picked up from a job interview in a parking lot with 200+ cars.
We may get to that point, but for right now I work remotely (platform engineering) and just grin and bear the rest.
I crank up the text size so large my neighbors can read it, but not so big that it exceeds my visual field.
I use a screen reader to read docs. I’m super excited about the new AI powered narrators because listening to ANY of the older style readers for 30 seconds or more causes permanent rage conditions.
I tried Braille, but it’s like trying to be instantly productive using vim, in Chinese, while on the space shuttle during launch. I might return to it sometime because narrated code is horrible to listen to.
To you point about car dependence, not using one is humiliating, at least for me. I live about .25 miles from my office. I walk daily to and from (twice). I feel, and have seen, people look at me like I'm poor. It is a foreign concept to many that walking or biking might be better (especially in Florida where on those rare 30 degrees nights, me, a Hoosier, is right at home, but right now it's a balmy 68).
Each of us were stopped at least once by police for being suspicious...near as I can tell (we were all >middle class white people) all that was suspicious was us walking on sidewalks. Outside of the biggest cities America is actively antagonistic towards walkers. My sincere belief is because of the assumption that they are poor and should be judged.
In practice you actually see this with bike riders regularly ignoring red lights ect.
You can find a lot about these studies via Google, e.g.: https://www.google.com/search?q=comparison+of+cyclists+and+d...
By the way, I follow the law to the letter. Doesn't get me any more respect on the road, unfortunately.
Minor speeding (~15%) is not a significant hazard. Going through a red light is about as dangerous as doing ~50-100MPH over the speed limit which is very rare.
Other things like riding on lane markers between cars is blatantly ignoring the rules of the road and vastly increase the risk of death. Again about as risky as a car slowly driving on the sidewalk, which you just don't see.
Bike riders on sidewalks are again extremely dangerous and often lead to fatalities, but it's also very common.
PS: I worked with bike messengers who may be unusually bad about this stuff.
To address another point, even the "minor" speeding you mention is a significant hazard. 15% over the speed limit is 32% more kinetic energy. Combine that with the fact that speeding really does not save much time in most situations, I think it's a clear loser in a cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps on an empty highway it's okay. But a driver's time to destination in most cases is more limited by stop lights and traffic, and believe me, I know. As a cyclist who doesn't go faster than 25 mph it's really irritating to have a driver pass me dangerously, only to sit behind them at the next light for 2 minutes, or for me to pass them because they are waiting to turn. I have no detailed statistics for this, but it happens so frequently that I don't think speeding is likely to save much time. It mostly provides psychological relief for impatient drivers. (Your opinion, of course, may differ.)
> Other things like riding on lane markers between cars is blatantly ignoring the rules of the road and vastly increase the risk of death.
I don't "lane split" or "filter" as it's called, but it's worth noting that this is frequently legal (perhaps not in your jurisdiction) and it has its proponents, many of which tout it's apparent safety benefits. I don't think the data is clear about whether it's safe or dangerous on net. I personally don't think it offers any advantages, so it's not worth the potential risk. Also, many drivers encourage cyclists to do that to get out of their way. You should see how infuriated some drivers get when I take the lane at an intersection rather than filter through to the front. I've talked to cyclists who run red lights, and I frequently have heard that they just want to get away from angry drivers, and running the light allows them to do that. (I don't think this is the right approach.) The same applies to sidewalk riding, which is fairly clearly more dangerous, yet riding legally is often discouraged by drivers, sometimes violently.
As to speeding, we have actual data on this stuff. So it's easy to demonstrate the risks are very low directly from accident rates vs # of speeders. The risk of early death vs time saved actually favors doing 5MPH over the speed limit on highways.
As to personal experience I only have ~45,000 cyclists which may be high or low. But it feels like a very large number.
PS: People try any justify their behavior, but statistically bike riders regularly risk death.
> You only see cases where they lose that bet, but it's just a numbers game.
I don't follow. Seeing both is pretty easy; they drive away. What I question is that the 2 minutes that one saves at most (likely closer to 15 seconds or so on average) is worth the extra risk to other road users. The asymmetry is the problem. You say cyclists regularly risk death, and sure, they do, though the risk is probably lower than you suspect, and drivers risk death too. A large fraction of cyclist deaths occur late at night with a drunk cyclist; remove those factors and your risk is a lot lower. For someone like me who goes out of my way to ride safely, my main (perhaps only) risk on the road is bad drivers, who are by large tolerated or encouraged by western society.
> As to speeding, we have actual data on this stuff. So it's easy to demonstrate the risks are very low directly from accident rates vs # of speeders.
The NTSB says speeding contributes to about 10,000 fatalities per year in the US:
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/2017-DCA15SS002.aspx
Doesn't sound low to me. Maybe it seems low when you compare against how frequently people speed, but that's a red herring as far as I'm concerned. It's unlikely you'll die while smoking any particular cigarette, but clearly the net effects of smoking at significant. I focus on the net effects. I don't think the time the speeders save justifies the life lost, even neglecting those disabled, etc. As I said, I think speeding provides mostly psychological benefit.
> As to personal data I only have ~45,000 cyclists which may be high or low. But it feels like a very large number.
You have seen about 45,000 individual cyclists on the road? I find that hard to believe. That's comparable to the total number of transportation cyclists in Austin. For comparison, I suspect I've seen at least several thousand individual cyclists on the road. If I see only two new cyclists on the road per day I'll see about 7000 after 10 years. Seems reasonable to me.
In single accident deaths at night with only a cyclist this is actually the most common case (70%-90%). In deadly accidents between car and bicycle it's not very common for the cyclist to be drunk about the same as always.
The story about the dangerous jaywalker and bicyclists is a big falsehood if you look at the data. As I said; cyclists have the same behaviour than others have in traffic. The truth is that cyclists live longer, even with all the risky behaviour you think cylists are prone to.
The thing that is risky is spending ones life in a car, on so many levels. You refrase things so it seems like cyclists are to blame for being killed by cars when we know that is actually not the case. Just because the party line today is that jaywalkers and cyclists are worse than others doesn't mean there is any actualy evidence for it.
Even with a lot of bike infrastructure, and a biking culture Denmark sees 17% of traffic related deaths by cyclists which is vastly more than their share of miles traveled.
Their are augments around health benefits. But, these fail to show up in the data as Denmark has ranks #17 in Europe significantly behind even United Kingdom with it's well known obesity problem. https://www.reinisfischer.com/life-expectancy-european-union...
PS: You need or look at all related risks combined not just select a few. One risk rarely considered, is heavy exercise in traffic is very bad for the lungs.
While I agree air pollution is worth considering, "very bad" sounds like hyperbole to me. Definitely not anywhere near smoking. The solutions also are rather simple: change your route to avoid heavy traffic and/or wear an air filter. I've done both before and recommend the latter more, as it seems more effective, does not make breathing harder, and has other safety benefits as well. Also consider the length of one's commute.
It's also worth noting that air pollution can easily be worse when driving. In fact, while I can not find the link now, I recall one non-scientific article with some experiments run by academics suggested that net exposure to air pollution was higher when driving in some cases.
Exercise increases the amount of lung exposure to particulate matter per unit time.
You are right that traffic pollution is very bad for the lungs, it's actually the cause of 30%-60% of all deaths related to lung diseases, but this is true for everyone not just cyclists. It's the same number of deaths as for sucides but with an inverse demographics graph of course, at least in Sweden. Those numbers are staggering and the solution to that is not to stop bicyclists navigating normal commute traffic.
I would like to say that I do look at the combined risks: There are atleast two longitudinal studies on Dutch and Danish bicyclists that show that using bicycling as an active mode of transport means longer life, basically it's an integration test were you get X% increase in a population by just commuting daily.
Here is some commedy that is obvisouly just Norwegians and Swedes being jealous, but it gives you some view on how we think of Danes, and what might affect their lives a bit more than bicycling, as with your link they are very interesting but irrelevant since they do not affect the same population groups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJBtV_S8c1c
Exercise increases the amount of lung exposure to particulate matter per unit time. Biking is also a slower mode of transit which increases risks, further cars have built in air filters which further reduce risks.
So it's really not equivalent. On the upside, bike paths need not be next to traffic and in those cases may reduce exposure.
The solution is not to scare people with baseless arguments.
In part because the rules are designed for cars, I’ve always observed cyclists, including myself, breaking common sense rules at much higher rates than cars. Blowing red lights, riding on sidewalks, failure to signal, riding, etc.
This is like complaining that people treat guns and knives with different levels of seriousness. Of course they do; both are potentially deadly, but one far more so than the other.
If they behave dangerously and put themselves at risk of being hit, even if they are the one taking the risk, the car driver will always be at fault, no matter what. And yes, like some others have echoed in comments here, many bike riders do not stop at red lights. I see that every - single - day, multiple times.
Secondly, cyclist scofflaw-ness is mostly a result of a transportation system that's hostile to them. The Dutch aren't nicer cyclists because they're born that way, superior to Americans; they're nicer cyclists because the system there largely respects people on bikes, and so the system receives respect in return.
Go to any city with widespread segregated bike lanes and bike lights, and you'll likely find a culture where cyclists are no more likely to break the law than pedestrians or motorists.
Third, motorists are hardly exempt from constant law-breaking. How often do people not signal, or roll through stop signs, or enter the intersection right after the light turns red, or park in a bike lane, or 'block the box', or tailgate, or break the speed limit? I've lived in enough places in the US to know that the answer is "constantly". And all that with a vehicle that's vastly more dangerous than any bike or jogger.
I mean, my god, one of the most common and stereotypical complaints in America about where anyone lives is "ugh, drivers in [state] are the WORST".
If you cross the street on a straight-away with good visibility, you can gauge the speed of the traffic, determine a safe window, and cross easily, without disruption.
Coming from North Europe, where it's fairly natural to walk distances of a few hundred meters to do an errand, I and colleagues used to walk from a hotel in Rohnert Park to a Wal-mart on the other side of highway 101, whenever visiting the place and needing to do some shopping.
And each time there were people driving by who would stop at us and ask: "Do you guys need help, did your car break down?"
Very friendly people, apparently they thought we had a problem.
The only area in Scandinavia where I met actual antagonism for walking was a neighbourhood in Århus; I lead a group of 12-year-old football players in a neat dual line through it by foot, and some "youth" started to throw little rocks at the boys. I guess they wanted to signal that it's their territory.
I mean conscious lack of interest at a design level in engaging those populations. The situation you describe, to me, is a manifestation of that cultural antagonism. That situation exists because society is squeezing out people who walk.
even though it was like 1.5 miles...
It should be the other way round "People drive to stuff, even though it's only 1.5 miles".
Or look at where the stoplights are. In Germany, they're set back such that it's impossible for a driver to go into the crosswalk and still see the light. This naturally encourages drivers to respect the crosswalk. Not so in the US, unfortunately.
I could go on and on, but really almost all American streets are hostile to anything that's not a car.
The typical American street has a sidewalk set back from the street and light traffic (so the controls at the intersections barely matter).
1. At least here in Munich, most of them here have enough space for one lane of parked cars, and one comfortable lane of traffic; if cars happen to approach each other on such a street, one has to pull out somewhere, or sometimes they can barely squeeze by each other. Contrast that with the US, where room enough for two lanes of parked cars and for two lanes of traffic (albeit without any markings) are the standard.
2. Setbacks here, both for businesses and homes, are much smaller than in the US.
3. There are many "cut-throughs" and little paths that are only permeable to pedestrians and cyclists, not cars.
The practical impact of the above is that streets here feel more human scale, cars travel more slowly, and walking and biking are more convenient. I let my six-year old son bike on the road on local streets here to get to the bakery or train station, something I'd never do in the bay area, where I'm originally from.
The streets in town here are ~20-25 feet wide and mostly don't have much traffic. 3 or 4 extra steps to cross an empty street isn't a big problem.
Germany isn't even top-tier for active transportation; that title goes to the Netherlands. And even in the Netherlands, more money goes to cars than biking or walking, usually.
You can tell yourself all you want that walking is treated okay in the states, but budgets tell the real story of where priorities lie.
According to WaPo, 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, so I don't think that, statistically, many people are really in a place to look down on you for walking.
A few years ago i started telling people "I don't have any ID" and, remarkably, they all found ways to do business with me.
As it happens I do have a driver's license but I leave it in the car. 99% of the time I am walking around with no ID at all, and my life works fine. You can fly without ID.
I do carry a passport when flying internationally.
Here, children are driven to school by their parents. When school ends, the parents are there waiting in their cars. Kids mostly don't even play outside anymore.
Those of you thinking public transport is fine are likely at least a little bit physically imposing and/or you are in relatively fancy locations.
Do parents get out of their work in the middle of the afternoon to drive their kids from school to home? Do they go back to work for the last couple hours after that? Or do kids have 8-hour schooldays?
Some people have fully flexible time. Some people have a part-time job or two, so they simply don't agree to work shifts during the times they need to drive the kids around. Some people don't work, often because a single income is supporting a two-parent household.
It might have been better if the addition of woman to the workplace included an equal shift of men to a househusband role.
PS I like your username.
And I did stayed some time while the kids were small and disliked that a lot. You get used to depression as a normal state, basically.
Conversely, are there large cities in other countries that are similar to the US, where this does not happen? I'm going to suspect the Middle East, due to ubiquitous air-conditioning.
When I moved to London for university, there were 5-6 year olds on buses and trains, accompanied by an older sibling. And they were the rich children attending the private school I lived close to, normal children that age would live close enough to walk to their local school.
Yes, GP appears to be ill-informed about how kids get to school in large parts of the US. In NYC, students take public transit (and are provided passes, if necessary) from approx 13 years old. The same concept applies in most cities I know of on the East Coast (I can't speak for further west, though it appears Chicago has a similar system).
Obviously if people took the time to look at the crime statistics, the chances of being a victim of a crime is less than half of what it was when I walked a mile to elementary school every day.
For more normal crimes, the lifetime chance of being a crime victim is serious. For stranger-on-stranger violent crime, there is a total lifetime probability of about 5.3%.
You might think "oh that is just 5.3% so no big deal", but the chance of dying in a fire is only 0.09% and we still bother with smoke detectors.
Violent crime is a life-altering event. Given the potential for horrific consequences, it is reasonable to be concerned about the possibility. Transportation choices change that risk.
Weird, here in New York I see kids riding the subway to school every day. I must be imagining them.
When everyone uses it, then the share of regular people who just want to go somewhere instead of harassing others gets up. But if only marginal people take public transit, then of course you'll mostly encounter marginal people there. The problem is how to start making everyone take it again.
I do suppose you might have to share space with poor people instead of ignoring them.
That is how your comment sounds to people who use public transport. It sounds ridiculous.
My father got mugged at knifepoint on one. That is 100% not acceptable. It is a major reason why normal non-poor people encase themselves in cars.
My father wasn't even blind. He was just slightly old, maybe 50 years old. At that age, he could no longer sprint away.
The comment might sound ridiculous to the people who voluntarily use public transport, but your sampling bias is gigantic in that case.
Here in Germany, crime rates have been declining pretty consistently [1], with homicides and robberies down from "low" to "very low". The thought of getting mugged on the street or on public transit is just absurd to me. I don't know anyone whom it happened to. It's something that happens on CSI, not in real life.
[1] Except for internet-related fraud and Crystal Method abuse (since these are still pretty new), and stuff like unlawful border crossing (because of the refugee situation).
You may care to consider that people get held up in cars, even in their own homes.
If you're really concerned about mugging in public areas, there are basic safety steps that everyone can (should) take. Stick to well lit areas; don't wear headphones; don't use your phone; avoid any situation that doesn't feel right. If possible plan your route. In other words, have your wits about you.
Also, re the non-poor encasing themselves in cars. Crime increases when people perceive an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Does this mean the rich should use footpaths to reduce mugging? Probably not. But it might mean that public transport should get major investment so it's not seen as a shitty option only for the poor. If that's really how it's seen, everyone who has no option but to walk must feel constantly pissed off.
You mean they aren’t safe where you live?
Blimey. I’ve been attacked once, in total, and that was as a teen and an adult intervened within seconds.
I used to walk to school if I missed the bus (or if I wanted to miss mandatory religious activities), and that took me an hour. Sometimes I’d walk home afterwards, because the school had a then-novel internet connection. I’ve walked a few hundred kilometres around Berlin in the last few months, and explored several other European cities by walking around on foot for hours each day. If you go to Venice, your only options are foot or boat, and the boats don’t go everywhere.
It looks like you've decided the risk is worthwhile. I hope your luck holds. I think I'd be completely terrified. I found big cities scary even when I was a strong/fast 20-year-old male.
But during commuter hours, there isn't usually space for crime. And a real comparison of injuries per passenger mile would be instructive - cars aren't exactly safe either.
I do think we should avoid painting public transport as a utopia when it also can have access issues. We should just recognise it as an equal option that can be more comfortable and faster than sitting in a traffic jam and cheaper than paying the real cost of parking (which is often subsidised or hidden in the US)
I'd say it's irresponsible of her to keep up the license, except she has no options. The town she's in recently made it illegal for residents of her park to drive their electric carts across the street to Publix or down the sidewalk to the doctor's office. Those are the only two places she needs to go. Some of her friends who had given up their licenses in favor of electric carts are now SOL. They have to rely on favors to buy food and go to appointments.
How's your experience been with that kind of service? There's a reason lawbreaking octogenarians still ride golf carts down the sidewalk to get to the doctor's office, hoping they won't get ticketed.
> Uber.
I'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? Ninety-six?
HN forgets that not everyone has coastal tech money a lot.
As a former Mason, the teachings are symbolic. Few people think they are historical. People don't really do symbolic anymore. We do TV.
Not be too much of a curmudgeon, but I don't think our society at this time has much of a philosophical bone left in it. As a result, we mostly reflect on ourselves as narcissists. Look at Facebook. It's use is a known cause of depression. We feel bad because others make their lives look so perfect or interesting. We get in flame wars on political topics. We no longer appeal to traditions like Locke or Rousseau. We don't reason about things. We feel and are offended.
If what I said is even mostly true, how do you build a society on that? At this point we've stared too long into the abyss. Perhaps we need the "make-believe crap" to bind us. Perhaps its not crap, but rather what the world is and our ignoring is leading to our own demise?
At its zenith, as with all things lofty, religion started to fade. In its setting the government rose. It took up the mantle of diety. It became father. We live in its world now. We are poorer for it.
Government takes power from the people and apportions it to its acolytes. Organization for its own sake is the status quo. To streamline government is to unemploye millions. Our calf requires total subservience with little benefit.
Perhaps we’ll find a way to control our new leviathan. Maybe we can yoke it to till the soil of communal need. We could even do that by trying to preserve the dignity of man. To do that we might have to abandon our new truth that life is an accident. That man has no more importance than a rock. This might be a noble lie. We need something for we have only straw to grasp now handed to us by our new religion postmodernism.
Those countries usually have "stronger" Governments too, with stronger social safety nets, and healthcare systems that don't try to shaft you for $40k when giving birth.
More to the point, someone should visualise the relationship between rates of religiosity and quality of public transportation, across a range of geographic areas. I can imagine the general trend, though there may be some outliers like Poland and Italy.
Content aside, this text sounds like a street-preacher in Battlestar Galactica or The Expanse.
Perhaps have more obvious and better make believe (flying spaghetti monster)?
They won't do it because it'll hit their bottom line, but being the ride option of both the young AND the old would go a long way towards repairing their reputation.
Regardless of their "political" power, it'd just be a nice thing to do. Getting old sucks, and if Uber could do something as simple as making sure that an older person doesn't have to sacrifice their freedom then it's something a lot of people would get behind.
This right here is the problem - how? Why? Doesn't this violate disability discrimination law? I thought seniors were quite an effective voting bloc in cases like this?
It's bizarre to suggest our transportation system is failing them. It's exactly the transportation system they voted for, the transportation system a good bunch of them built, designed, railroaded through poor communities, terraformed cities to support. It's been failing large swaths of people for many centuries, but that generation didn't bother. They built this shrine to the personal automobile.
It's not even a case of buyers remorse. For the longest time in their life, they happily took advantage of limitless cheap fossil fuels, plenty of unregulated cars and wide roads to drive them on, and the best part, they managed to put it all on the tab for the next generation. Its Caligula all over.
But there's a certain logic to that statement too. American cities always had very wide streets, 100 years before the car was invented even. In hindsight, it's hard to rationalize why really, but it seemed to have been because of this obsession for utility and practicality. Those very wide rigid grids were a transport-oriented design choice. To keep the horse shit away, so carts could make U-turns, so you could dump your bathwater in the middle.
The tragedy was that those wide streets were the seed for cars eventually destroying urban cores. When cars were invented, they had the space for them right there. A street that was used for everything (markets, recreation, horses, ...), suddenly became a 4-5 lane highway filled with loud, stinking, dangerous cars. Of course nobody wants to live next to that, it's genuinely awful. It set in motion a vicious cycle of people moving out of the cores and needing more parking-infrastructure to accommodate that commuting.
In other words, giant corporate interests working together to shape the country in the way that benefited them.
"What's good for GM is good for America"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
But the problem is created by the over-reliance on cars in the first place, and the fact that cities are planned for cars rather than humans. Self-driving cars aren't a solution, when the problem is too many cars.
A real solution would be some kind of pulbic transport that's as convenient and as efficient as privately owned automobiles, but somehow we're much more interested in trying to solve the much harder problem of vehicle autonomy.
For the record, I live in a town in the South of London, on the East coast. From the first moment I moved here I was amazed at the number of people with mobility issues -disabled folks, seniors, parents with prams etc- taking the bus for shor hops around town. I understand it's very different in the US, where owning a car is a very big deal, but it doesn't have to be that way. Choices made in the past dictate the current situation; choices that can be undone.
Just imagine if they would actually move out of their houses: it would open up more housing, making it more affordable to new homeowners. It would alleviate transportation subsidies to better serve others. It would lower ambulance costs and reduce time to service. Just by putting older folks closer to the care they need.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-parents-...
It's not like the last 70 years of terrible urban planning and lack of transit construction didn't happen during that "entire life" you speak of.
Or they're old and poor, have little more than a house to their name, and the alternative is indifferent care by bottom-feeding nursing homes.
I mean "nursing home" and "retirement home" are two different things. One houses the chronically ill, often old - at very high prices but payable by insurances/the-state and the other houses old people at merely high prices but these prices have to be paid by the residents and there's no way to make them low even cutting all your costs. And apartments and trailer parks that house seniors at a slight discount.
But yeah, you're basically right, selling one house to movement into uncertain housing is terrible decision and there's
Most old people don't have the money to move into a retirement home so where would they go if they sell their house? Even with high housing prices, the money from a home sale isn't going to net more than enough for 2-5 years in a retirement community.
And yeah I've dealt with these issue for both my parents.
A more considered reaction - shouldn't you at least offer 'older folks' an incentive to give up their lives other than 'it'd be better for society'? I'll be one of these older folks in a few years, and were I to stay in my house into my dotage, I'm three minutes away by car from the emergency room, less than a minute from several groceries, coffee shops, barbers, laundries, parks, etc., ensconced in a building (a future coffin?) whose wiring, plumbing, masonry, landscaping, etc., are all known to me. Please feel free to enlighten this middle-aged goat on why he should be put out to pasture to give room to 'new homeowners.'
The article lists the incentives: mobility without a car, independence, and reduced risk of a fatal accident. It's about being realistic with your own constraints. I fully don't expect to be driving indefinitely, if I want to (continue to) live somewhere without transit I need to plan accordingly or look for options before it's too late.
Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be reallocated easily.
Imagine a place like New York, where buses can go out to the suburbs and bring people into the city and the evening and morning (say, 50% of the fleet), and during the day 90% of the fleet stays in the city doing intra-city transportation.
Rail doesn't have this flexibility.
EDIT: Rail definitely has its place, but you almost never hear anyone starting a bus project. Just curious to why there's relatively little mention of buses in the public transportation (new project) realm.
I imagine perfected public transportation would involve linking between self driving cars on the square mile level, buses on the square deca mile (is that a thing?), rail for a hundred mile radius and obviously planes thereon.
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/4524/average-schedule-speed-how-does...
Of course, I'm aware that things are much faster (literally) outside the US, but the OP was referencing the US.
It'd be cheaper, of course, to take an existing lane and convert it to a bus-only lane, but that's politically infeasible.
One bus takes less than 100 people, and you cannot run 200 buses per hour. Actually about 20 buses per hour is pretty much at the upper limits.
These are rough numbers, but if you need to move more than 2000 people per hour, trains can have the capacity but buses don't.
Major cities that are relatively close together. The Northeast Corridor works pretty well for the most part--at least the two ends of it do. The whole thing is a full day and probably costs more than a couple hour flight.
Various city pairs also work but anything longer haul has to be for the experience (or avoiding flying) even if everything goes according to schedule. NY to Chicago is about 20 hours for example. (And would be very hard to make fast because of the Appalachian Mountains.)
How fast can you drive a car in Manhattan?
And you probably don’t realize this, but modern trains go about 200 mph. They just don’t go that fast in the United States.
China managed to build about 18,000 miles of these trains in about 10 years.
So, that really doesn't favor the trains. Both trains and cars could theoretically they could go faster in the United States.
Additionally, driving that fast is stressful and dangerous.
I theory sure you could drive your porsche at 150mph down some superroad that doesn't exist.
Rail has a high capital cost, but lower operating cost due to the fact that a single engineer (and maybe a conductor) can run a 2000 passenger train while a bus driver carries 50 - 100 people so you only need about 1/20th the number of operators.
Another drawback of buses on the road is that unless they have dedicated lanes, they are stuck in the same traffic as cars.
BRT kind of blurs the gap between the two.
>> high capital cost
Apart from this one?
And IIRC, one of the most expensive part of rail building is the dedicated right of way, so if you are also doing that for self driving vehicle then might as well as go for rail (if there's demand, that is)
In Latin America, BRT is proven out as a cost-effective approach to mass transit.
Rail mainly offers comfort, a small incremental improvement in speed, lower manpower costs for drivers (offset by the massive capital costs) and greener running.
Comfort and speed should not be underestimated. There's a reason middle class people avoid buses.
Good times!
Because well-done High Speed Rail (HSR) is a blast over long distances. Certainly for city/metro areas a combination of light rail + buses as a web is the best option (light rail having the advantage of running emissions free), but the longer the distances are the better HSR is. The new ICE line Munich-Berlin with 4h one-way is so fast that it's actually threatening flight.
Also, traveling long distances by bus is really bad. Cramped seats, cramped everything.
Only because of the sunk cost of building all those interstates. At some point, you're going to need to repair or rebuild them.
Which makes me wonder: What is the cost of a new kilometer of rail vs. a new kilometer of highway? And which one is cheaper to maintain? I don't have any intuition there.
The seats were as large as business-class airplane seats.
It would likely have taken much longer by bus because of all the stops and transfers.
Visit Japan (or these days China) and you will understand.
This reminds me of people who say, "What's the big deal about electric bikes?" Ride one and you'll know.
See what Japan and China are doing WRT rail and you'll know.
https://www.japan-guide.com/g17/2361_01.png
Subway maps cover cities to insane details.
And at least for the able bodied, bike shares pretty much make up for it in the short term.
PDF: http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/routemaps/pdf/RouteMap_majorrailsu...
The trains run very frequently, with reasonable fares. It looked to be completely sensible and fast to live in an outlying city and take the train into a larger one for work, whereas the idea of catching a commuter flight from a smaller outlying city into a major metro area in the US (or likely anywhere) is almost completely untenable -- too expensive, too time consuming, too irregular, and too much hassle.
And unless you're (statistically) fairly short and thin for a westerner, you won't fit in anything.
But hot-damn does looking out the window at Fujisan while doing 300km/h do a good job at distracting you from having your knees around your ears.
Before I extol the virtues of the train system in Japan, there is one thing that you have to understand first. It is expensive compared to transit services in many North American cities. As far as I know, it's not subsidised by government, so you have to pay the full cost. The main rail system is owned by Japan Rail, but they are operated by individual companies -- each with a monopoly in their own area. Additionally, there are "private" train companies that both own the lines and run the trains. If you live in a very rural area (and it wasn't screwed over by the bus companies), you will almost certainly be using these private lines. If you want to go to a big city, it usually means that you have to transfer. Luckily the payment options are almost completely harmonised -- at least on the regional level. You can get pre-paid cards that work for all the companies in your region (with a very few exceptions).
I live in Shizuoka prefecture. To take the bus a distance of about 30 km it costs about $10 US (also not subsidised). To take the train, it's a bit cheaper (about $7). If you take intercity busses, the relationship switches. A 200 km bus trip costs about $30, while the train will cost about $50. However, the intercity busses only travel about 4 times a day, while the trains come every 15 minutes.
The main difference between the train and the bus is convenience and speed. The trains are quite fast. I often travel to Hamamatsu city from Kanaya city by train. Due to circumstances, my wife goes by car. I beat her every single time -- sometimes by hours. By car, there are lots of unexpected events: accidents, traffic jams, etc. On the train, there are very few -- really just suicide attempts and I haven't seen one in our area for years.
In Japan the trains are on time. Very, very, very occasionally the train will be 1 minute late. Once a year it will be 2 or more minutes late. Seriously, if the train is not on the platform 30 seconds before the scheduled departure time, people are looking at their watches in disbelief.
Part of this is because the trains are set up so that freight is generally able to pass and be passed. On private, rural lines, there is never any freight (though the trains often carry mail). Also the trains are all in good shape. I've literally never been on a train in Japan that broke down. When I lived just outside of London, the trains would break down every week at least. One of the other main points is that theft in Japan is virtually unheard of. When I lived in the UK, I heard that one of the reasons the signalling constantly broke down is because people would steal the copper cables for scrap. Culturally, this just doesn't happen in Japan, so it's a consideration you have to keep in mind if you want to emulate Japan's success with trains.
While my wife has a car, I don't like using it. If we go anywhere, it's usually by bus and then by train. It's only if we need a car at the other end that we use the car (for example, when we go to Hamamatsu, my wife takes the car so that she can take her mother shopping, etc). Because there is no train where I live, I end up always taking the bus.
Even though Japan is a country where punctuality is almost taken for granted, busses are not punctual. They suffer from the same problems that happen everywhere -- busses are really hard to predict. Sometimes the road is clear, and sometimes it is not. The busses usually end up being virtually randomly timed by the time they end up in the middle of their route. I almost always miss my connection at the train station. Because the bus comes every hour or so, it means I usually have to plan very carefully to ensure that I arrive on time. Often I end up arriving an hour early just to make sure I get there on time.
Before I got married, I went out socially a lot more. I discovered that even though the train station is 20 km away, it was faster (and more predictable) for me to ride my bike there, take a bath at the nearby hot springs and then go to the city by train than it was to simply take the bus there directly. This is where I got my love of cycling (and hot springs!).
As I alluded to earlier, a lot of the reason that Japanese trains work is due to Japanese culture. For example, companies that get a monopoly will rip you off, but only by so much. They truly have a sense of social responsibility. The UK moved from a national rail system to something similar to what Japan has and from what I can tell, it completely broke their rail system (I'll probably get some argument about that). However, from my perspective, it's pretty clear that rail is simply easier to make work well than busses. It doesn't necessarily follow that any area building a rail system will make one that works well (I come from Canada and though I love trains I am never going to give any more money to Via. Ever.)
Sounds like a rare victory of the good over its old nemesis, the perfect. I believe that a social environment that can pull this off will have a clear edge in many different ways, e.g. government can work so much better when it can be trusted that power abuse, if it happens, won't be excessive. Much better than pretend-saints who really aren't.
Optimism mandates that it should hopefully be the latter. It doesn't take much imagination to assume that celebration of ruthless, "take everything you can" types could (in theory) also be minimized in larger, now mixed communities.
You should try one in the Western Japan. My daily commute on Hankyu line during rush hour is generally 2-3 minutes late every day that I usually plan for it to be late. And JR West is not faring very better either. But we do look at our watches, the departure board, and back at our watches in disbelief, yes.
In a train you're simply transported sitting down. You can text, have a face to face conversation, look out the window, go to the toilet, buy reasonably priced drinks, read or work as you fancy. The occasional change between trains is a stronger punctuation in your journey than your car leaving the freeway, and still only requires a few minutes of cursory attention every now and then.
Edit: I didn't even mention the timing aspect! In Japan you could get the same train every day and arrive on time every day. Commute on the roads and you will always be wondering when exactly you will get to work/home and what you will do with the little random slither of spare or lost time. Of course, the accelerator pedal is right there so you always have the option to drive a bit more aggressively, so you will consider it every now and then, rather than thinking about something more meaningful to your life.
I was living in China for the last 6 months, you can just show up to the station without plans usually and book a high speed train ride 5 minutes before you go, where you'll be whisked from Xi'an to Beijing, a 13+ hour, 1,000km drive (about the distance from Boston to Cleveland), in 4.5 hours, with huge, comfortable seats, panoramic views of the countryside flying by at incredible speeds, and almost nothing will change your expected arrival (traffic? forget it, delays? pretty rare). You get clean restrooms and food and almost no time wasted at security, no worries about checked baggage limits and fees, and the ability to rebook for 10-20 minutes from now if you miss your train, all of this for less than $80?
Imagine if you could on an afternoon you decide that you want to go to Miami from Charlotte, and you can just casually get up and be there by dinnertime without going broke? It's terrific.
Or if you're more into regional transit, you can go from Suzhou to Shanghai, a 2 hour drive, within 30 minutes for like $5 without planning, similar routes which expand access to Shanghai within an hour's reach of over 120 million people.
It allows you to live in a small, isolated city in the countryside, yet be served by the huge scale airports and business of a megacity, with only a small fee and short time on a comfortable train where you can work, read, meditate, rest, or whatever it is you want to do. It expands your possibilities and brings equality of access in ways you wouldn't realize until you are a part of it.
In comparison with buses, for longer distance it definitely makes sense. For travel within cities, higher reliability (eschewing traffic and potential for accidents), very high capacity, comfort (no abrupt stopping and going, for modern systems at least; also less likely to experience motion sickness, which makes reading, etc easier), speed (think express trains in NYC or being able to cut through very busy places), and from some people's perspectives, increased property values, are all good reasons for it. But it is true, you get 80% of the way there with buses probably.
> Rail doesn't have this flexibility.
Because trying to maximize the utilized capacity creates worse outcomes. If there is only service every 30 minutes at a slow time of day then less people will use it because it's less convenient, so demand slows more and services are cut further, etc.
Induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) operates on public transport as well as roads.
Public transit is one of the reasons why my family enjoys traveling in Europe.
Flexibility is a disadvantage - you shouldn’t plan your life around a bus route remaining high-quality or even extant, because the planners could revoke it at any time.
This is what I was going to say. A rail line encourages development and densification around the rail line. Being "x minutes away from the train station" is a selling point for apartments and it can even create whole new commuting suburbs. At least this is how it works in Europe/Asia
If my city had good trains or trams we could have just chosen to live on a difficult-to-move tram line and forever removed ourselves from being 2 more cars on the road.
It is much faster to get from point A to point B with rail (metro, for example) than a bus.
You can create bus lanes. But if you're talking about "going out to the suburbs", then eventually you're going to get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else. You still have to compete for the same intersections, and you're probably going to end up in places that don't have dedicated bus lanes.
That doesn't mean that buses aren't useful too. You need both.
Seniors can't or won't walk very far. While buses are more flexible than rail in this regard, neither work for seniors in suburbia. Suburbia is incompatible with mass transit. Seniors want to be able to board and alight within 2 or 3 blocks of their terminus, maximum. Until we get automated cars, the only way to achieve that economically is with density.
I often tell people that San Francisco is the perfect place for seniors.[1] Bus stops are usually a maximum of 3 blocks apart, sometimes only 2 or 1. And there are enough bus lines that there's at least one bus stop within a 2 block radius for the vast majority of residences, and often multiple stops for multiple lines within 2 blocks. In other words, you can pretty much get from any place to another other place without walking more than a few smallish blocks. Whenever MUNI tries to reduce the number of stops, irate and politically powerful senior citizens flood the hearings.
I used to live on a particularly maddening segment of the 3-Jackson line that literally had 4 regular stops on 2 blocks (5 stops in 3 blocks): https://www.sfmta.com/routes/3-jackson Not coincidentally that stretch had two large housing projects--one exclusively for seniors and another predominantly for seniors--directly on the bus line, plus a population that skewed older more generally. The 3-Jackson line has at least 1 stop for most every block; the line averages about 1 stop per block! (I counted 29 stops in 31 blocks inbound.)
For this and many other reasons, San Francisco is an amazing place for senior citizens, rich or poor. (There's a ridiculous number of senior housing and community centers, mostly invisible to people not in the know.[2]) But the mass transit system sucks for working commuters because the system is biased towards the needs of the elderly.
[1] And I mean it. I cajoled my mother to move here in 2011. She finally sold her car last year. For awhile she worked at a community center that provided free lunches to seniors, where several very wealthy seniors from Marin commuted into the city to eat alongside and converse with very poor seniors, simply because they wanted and needed the company.
[2] Interestingly, San Francisco is (or was) being sued by HUD for racial discrimination. The supposedly most liberal large city in the country had a housing system that segregated people by ethnicity--senior housing projects tended to be Russian, Chinese, Latino, black, white, etc. Except for black areas, this was pretty much self-segregation. I don't know the extent to which the city perpetuated it, but they didn't seem to try to do anything to change it. (There's a waitlist system for senior housing and the seniors, at least, seemed to assume that people of the appropriate ethnicity were bumped, depending on the neighborhood. But I think mostly it simply had to do that seniors--and people generally--find their way to public assistance through their social networks, and different social networks will tend to channel people to particular programs and outlets.)
I think a lot of people here are imagining themselves as "seniors" without really picturing what that is like. It isn't just like being a 30-year-old male, but with wrinkles and free time.
Going up those hills is something the young take for granted. The elderly have painful joints, weak muscles, bad eyesight, slow reactions, and poor balance. I just try to imagine my grandmother going up a hill, maybe with a walker... and I mostly can't.
Invulnerability to crime is something that young males often take for granted. My grandmother would be such easy pickings. She can't run and she can't fight. She could very quietly scream after the crime had happened, but only if she doesn't fall down and get knocked out cold.
Many have poor control of core body temperature. They are in danger if the weather changes.
Many are not strong enough to carry very much. Typically you bring stuff with you when you go places. The point is often to go shopping, and of course you'd want to bring a purse. This is not something that everyone can reliably do.
I live in a pretty flat city, but there's so much transit in the inner city (<8 minute frequencies most of the day) that seniors just take it everywhere. It's safe, it's warm, there's room for grocery carts, there's special seating for the mobility-impaired....maybe it's just implementation.
Also, someone did a calculation that for buses to carry the same volume of passengers and NYC's L train alone when it's shut down for repairs, you would need to run them essentially bumper to bumper during rush hour.
It works like this: If you aren’t fit to walk to a bus stop, you get tax subsidized taxi (think it’s about 70 or 80% subsidized).
It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc.
The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.
Different people like different things. The nice thing about the USA is you can pick. You can live anywhere from a remote farm to a dense apartment.
(It may be true that there literally are no municipalities in the US with zoning codes that allow dense neighborhoods, but I would be highly surprised.)
There was a study a Few years about about which cities and suburbs could be built under their current zoning laws. I remember it showing that Somerville—a dense collection of 3-decker houses near Boston—was completely impossible to build under its current laws. I don’t have the link handy, but happy googling.
In most parts of the US, you can no longer build those dense, walkable, mixed use neighborhoods that make it convenient to live without a car.
Also, it varies from city to city (and within cities). Although most of the 20-35 crowd probably would prefer a denser city, old people prefer owning homes with lawns, so they wouldn't even want to live in that kind of place to begin with.
It's very difficult to find a place like our house in Italy in the US: we could walk to schools, grocery stories, pastry shops, our doctor, cafes, pizza place, a few barbers and a tram stop to go downtown.
And that's in a suburb of a mid-size city (about 300K).
Now, it’s not perfect: the T breaks down all the time due to criminal underinvestment, my bike commute is noticeably faster than driving through the traffic, the mass transit schedule is such that any route with multiple transfers is insane.
But I’m going to guess that the Italian and Dutch versions of this aren’t perfect either; it’s a matter of deciding which flaws to live with.
What's the justification for that?
That's fine, but why do old people need it legally mandated that everyone has to do that?
Even dense US towns are zoned against density. Somerville, Massachusetts had a rude awakening 5 years ago when they discovered the entire city is in violation of the zoning code. Every single home is out of compliance for one reason or another.
I don't really agree that developers are particularly responsive to the market in this regard, either. Or rather, they make quite a lot more profit from two 6K lot houses than they do from a more expensive house on a 12K lot. Builders always, always want to go for smaller lots unless they're selling super-premium houses of at least $1M (for context, the average house price here is probably right around $350-400K right now).
Your example does not show that developers are not responsive to the market. The fact that developers can make more profit on two 6K lot houses than they do from a more expensive house on a 12K lot simply means that there is more economic value in satisfying two peoples' desires for a 6K lot house than in satisfying one person's desire for a 12K lot house.
If you eliminated the minimum lot size, people who want big lots would have to pay a lot more for them to make it worth developers' while, and that makes total sense! One person buying a house with a 12K lot pushes out two people who might be perfectly happy with a 6K lot. They should pay more.
And that's in cities. Extend it out to podunk and they have to be subsidized, even when they don't know that's what's happening. And it's getting bad enough many counties in the U.S. have started to revert paved county roads back into gravel because they simply don't have the money to maintain the paving. They're worse full of pot holes than gravel. And the locals don't want to pay their fair share which might mean a dozen families sharing 50 miles of road - it's the exact opposite of economies of scale. Their incomes obviously have not kept up with the cost of even maintaining local roads... but there's no market force that's really correcting for this either.
With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes.
As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.
The automobile companies have trapped us into debt and traffic laden commutes that waste hours of our short lives on this planet and cause roughly 30% of climate change.
Do something. Get rid of your car and push for better mass transportation and development near train stations and major urban areas.
Cars are pieces of metal to get us from A to B. Making them out to be something more than that is self deception. We deserve better.
I have a car in NYC. The subway system here is amazing, while also being an embarrassment.
But, the car provides the freedom to visit friends and family for a day or weekend. The cost is $200 per month parking and $150 per month insurance, plus the cost of the car, which is relatively low as we drive less than 500 miles per month.
We can visit family in 45 minutes or 2 hours (depending on destination), instead of 3 hours or 5 hours by rail. And, we can make all our departures at will.
I can't imagine giving up car ownership, and I don't think I'm deluded.
He is saving about 5 hours each round trip. If his time is worth $50/hour, then $8000 for car ownership gets him 32 trips. Add a few more to account for the cost of rail ticket prices.
He breaks even if he takes that trip about 3 times per month and never finds any other use for a car.
Consider that this way: the time you spend sitting at a desk to earn the money to pay for your car is commute time.
How long does it take the average person to earn 8-9k (after tax)? I think at $50/h that might be an additional 5 hours work per week or an extra hour on your daily commute. For many people it might be more like 2+ hours. Given this, I would be very surprised if most urban dwellers wouldn't have more available time/money if they ditched the car for a bike.
Because I live in Melbourne, Australia, and $200 USD per month is literally what someone pays me and the spousal unit for our car space after conversion from AUD to USD, and I'm not in the CBD, and I'm assuming (i think correctly) car parking is far cheaper here than in new york city...
If you look at it financially, you owning a car is the same as owning an option to rent a car at any time. The less you drive it the more the ability to have it available costs you.
The city where I used to live removed the bus routes from the poorest parts of the city and opened up new routes to the richest part. Buses on the new routes were almost always empty...rich people own cars, you see.
The city where I currently reside simply shut down their entire bus operation instead of jerking around poor people.
The irony is that in Silicon Valley, the rich people ride the bus.
But what do we get in response for all our efforts? "I just don't want to."
Even in the face of viable technical solutions to the problem of old people on the road, you still have to solve the unsolvable issue that old people are insanely stubborn.
If the car itself was the only problem then Uber solves that. But it's not enough.
When I saw it, I didn't know what "our" referred to, until I read it - I didn't assume that the use of this word necessarily implied it had anything to do with my arbitrary country / community / culture / etc.
I think we should make relocation easy for the elderly who aren’t able to get around. I think it is terrible if they can’t move from their houses to places easier to get transportation from. But I really don’t see how this problem is more urgent and important or even independent of the general problem of people not being able to afford housing/transportation. Are we supposed to prioritize the elderly who already have houses over those who don’t?
1: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-affo...
In many American towns and suburbs it seems not even that level of service is available. And it's not due to the distances or population density either. I used to live in a suburb of Houston, TX that had 60,000 people, was about 20 miles from downtown, and it had no bus service! Now I live in a smaller and more remote town in the UK, and it has decent bus service.
It's not unlike the rural areas in the US that are heavily dependent on government subsidies that they vote against.
They're deathtraps for the driver, but their limited speed and distinct lack of structural integrity mean they pose minimal risk to other road users. It's far from an ideal solution, but it seems to work. I understand that golf carts are a popular mode of transport for elderly people living in some private retirement communities; perhaps it would make sense for US states to legalise their use on the public roads.