> consider raising peak commute throughput instead of devising ways to suppress peak demand
Getting rid of most of the cars and putting people on trains does wonders for peak throughput.
Getting rid of most of the cars and putting people on trains does wonders for peak throughput.
Getting people on trains by forcing them out of cars can't actually do that. If you make it more expensive/inconvenient/impossible to drive, at most the same number of people will take the train. In practice fewer will, because some of them will find jobs somewhere else or do their shopping somewhere else etc. So the combined throughput inherently goes down.
The only way to get it to go up is to make something better instead of making something worse.
Even moderately dense urban areas are inherently poor places for personal automobiles, whose infrastructure wastes tremendous amounts of space. The more neighborhoods are optimized for human-scale activity and pedestrians/bikes/transit (at the expense of personal cars), the nicer they become to spend time in as a human.
Life in a place where all or nearly all trips can be made without needing to drive a car is very pleasant, especially for anyone who isn’t an able-bodied high-income adult. If neighborhoods have been designed so that that is impossible, then what needs fixing is the neighborhood design.
I've found the exact opposite to be true. Cars are great because they mean you'll never come in contact with crazy vagrants.
For a few years I tried taking public transportation in the bay area, but I gave up because I had too many encounters with insane homeless people. I've had crazy people scream at me and call me things like "faggot" or "peckerwood". I've had people threaten to rob me after I asked them to turn their music down on the bus. They're never caught by the police. The last time I was on BART, a guy smoked meth and threatened to kick the shit out of me if I called the cops. He got off at the next station and the cops never caught him.
Now I avoid public transportation and either drive or take Uber or Lyft.
But the widespread use of transit by the poor which you note here is great evidence for my claim that cars are not an effective means of transportation for low-income people.
If people are screaming at you or smoking meth on the bus, that’s indicative of broader social problems which aren’t really solved by changing the transportation system. American society does a really terrible job at providing housing, drug treatment, and other social support for people with mental health problems.
For what it’s worth, I ride buses, trams, the subway, etc. all around San Francisco on a daily basis with my 2-year-old, and haven’t ever felt threatened. My general impression is that many yuppies feel unreasonable amounts of fear / disgust when they come into brief social contact with the homeless or mentally ill. YMMV.
Knowing the proximate cause doesn't help me avoid crazy people on public transportation. The problem of crazy people in the bay area won't be fixed any time soon, so it's still in my best interests to avoid public transportation. Also, it's not clear to me that many of these people can be fixed. The bay area spends enormous amounts of money on mental health and homelessness, but the problem is far worse here than it is in Boston.
> For what it’s worth, I ride buses, trams, the subway, etc. all around San Francisco on a daily basis with my 2-year-old, and haven’t ever felt threatened.
There's no nice way to say this but... I don't believe you. Every single one of my coworkers has a horror story about public transportation in the bay area. Robbery, theft, stalking, threats, harassment, catcalling, etcetera. There is only one woman at my work who commutes via BART, and she's only been doing it for 3 weeks. The rest drive or take Uber/Lyft because they've been robbed or threatened in the past. I think it's much more likely that my friends & coworkers are telling the truth than that you are. Either that or your threshold for feeling unsafe is incredibly high.
If you regularly take public transportation in the bay area, you will encounter mentally ill people, and some of them will engage in violent behavior without provocation.
You don’t believe that I travel by bus/subway/etc. and don’t feel unsafe?
There are people of all ages, ethnic groups, social classes, occupations, etc. riding transit throughout the Bay Area every day: foreign tourists; nannies with strollers; pensioners buying groceries; businesspeople commuting; high school students; sports fans; families taking luggage to the airport; .....
There are certainly occasional violent incidents on transit. Out of the 400k BART trips every day, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a dozen pick-pocketed wallets/phones every day, and the occasional mugging. If I were a small 12 year old girl, there are some BART stations I probably wouldn’t want to be alone in at midnight.
But crime on transit is not common (in general mugging and other violent crime in cities are down dramatically from the peak a few decades ago), and I have never personally felt threatened.
My wife commutes to work in SF by bike, and that is unfortunately far more dangerous (especially with all of the crazy Uber/Lyft drivers these days) than riding the bus.
> Every single one of my coworkers has a horror story
How many of your co-workers grew up in a not-rich family in a city?
and the occasional mugging
There are also 400 traffic deaths and 2000 traffic injuries per year in the Bay Area.
Statistically, the BART is a very safe way to travel.
I sympathize with your experience, but if I had to count the number of times I've had bad encounters with bad drivers vs. the times with bad commuters on public transit, it doesn't come close. I submit it's very possible that you're underestimating the negativity with cars because you've normalized it. For example, the statistics bare out that cars are amongst the most deadly thing in America but people ignore it as a problem compared to say gun violence which is a political hot topic.
Then what do you need congestion pricing for? You don't need to suppress something that's worse than the alternative because if that were true nobody should have any desire to do it to begin with.
> Even moderately dense urban areas are inherently poor places for personal automobiles, whose infrastructure wastes tremendous amounts of space.
Congestion pricing doesn't change the amount of space allocated to those things. That's completely independent. You can build over roads or eliminate minimum parking requirements without congestion pricing. That also suppresses driving, but in that case it's a trade off which people are actually getting something out of, instead of just a regressive money grab that helps nobody but the corrupt politicians who will waste the money on pork. And then keep all the wide roads and parking spaces in the city because it's the only way to continue generating the congestion pricing revenue.
The context was another comment criticizing congestion pricing as more or less a band-aid and advocating for increasing transportation throughput instead of trying to shift demand. I was agreeing with that comment and proposing radical changes to the transportation system as a way to increase throughput.
Your nonsensical response was that replacing roads by trains wouldn’t actually increase throughput because people like car trips better. While it went without saying that this claim is wrong on its face (throughput of the transportation system is a property largely unrelated to passenger preferences), I furthermore disputed your claim that car trips are inherently better.
Your follow-up here is a non sequitur. It is obvious that congestion pricing doesn’t get rid of most of the cars and switch them to trains, and that cities could remove cars from roads without anything to do with congestion pricing.
That is not clearly an entirely different proposal than "congestion pricing". "Getting rid of most of the cars and putting people on trains" is exactly what congestion pricing proponents argue that it does. But doing it that way can't increase throughput because there is at most at one to one relationship between people deterred from driving and people who take the train.
And in the context of a response to a comment criticizing congestion pricing, yours sounds like a comment defending it.
> Your nonsensical response was that replacing roads by trains wouldn’t actually increase throughput because people like car trips better.
My actual response was this:
Getting people on trains by forcing them out of cars can't actually do that. If you make it more expensive/inconvenient/impossible to drive, at most the same number of people will take the train. In practice fewer will, because some of them will find jobs somewhere else or do their shopping somewhere else etc. So the combined throughput inherently goes down.
The only way to get it to go up is to make something better instead of making something worse.
All of which is still entirely true. If you want to increase throughput, don't make driving worse, make alternatives to driving better.
> Life in a place where all or nearly all trips can be made without needing to drive a car
> is very pleasant, especially for anyone who isn’t an able-bodied high-income adult.
Why? You seem to have an implicit hierarchy of transportation, and public transit is at the bottom of it.
No, many people prefer it -- everyone who uses it does. And everyone who drives prefers to drive. Because they both have the option to do the other thing.
But getting one person to stop driving can't get two people to use mass transit. Where is the other person supposed to come from? Why would someone who hadn't been driving to begin with change their behavior based on the option they were already not choosing becoming even worse?
If all you're doing is diverting people away from driving, you can't increase overall throughput because there is nowhere you're adding by more than you're subtracting somewhere else.
There are many parts of the US where this isn't the case, because cars are the only transportation available.
That said, I think you're wrong about these strongly held preferences. There a decent amount of people who just want to get to where they're going and don't necessarily care how.
There are few places that have no level of at least bus service. And bicycling and walking are generally considered mass transit, which you can do in every part of the US I'm aware of. The number of places accessible only by car is negligible.
But the mass transit in many places is terrible, to the point that a fifteen minute drive becomes a thirty minute walk followed by a twenty minute bus ride followed by a two hour walk. And the preference for cars comes in comparison to the alternative for the person making the choice, so people in those places obviously have a strong preference for cars.
You could get them to prefer the bus there by making the car trip take three hours or cost $100, but what good is that? Whose life does it improve?
> There a decent amount of people who just want to get to where they're going and don't necessarily care how.
That's the point. If you want more people to take the bus, don't make it worse to drive, make it better to take the bus. You get the result you want, but you do it by improving someone's life instead of making it worse.
It improves the lives of all those who are agnostic to their mode of transportation but want to get to their destination faster. The carrying capacity of a bus or a train is much higher than individual cars. It also saves cost on road maintenance because the amount of road strain / person decreases.
> That's the point. If you want more people to take the bus, don't make it worse to drive, make it better to take the bus.
In a perfect world, of course. We'd make separate bus roads, bicycle roads, and car roads, and then the road user would select their mode and their road and be done with it. In reality, budgets are limited. Prioritizing a car solution makes it worse for busses and bicyclists to use the same road. While a train can be a good non-disruptive alternative, it is extremely expensive to initially invest in.
I'm also not exactly sympathetic to allowing car drivers free access to the space they take up on the road when space is a limited quantity.
But they're not getting to their destination faster. They were getting there in fifteen minutes, now it takes three hours because they can no longer afford to drive but the bus doesn't actually go to their destination.
> We'd make separate bus roads, bicycle roads, and car roads, and then the road user would select their mode and their road and be done with it.
You don't need separate roads, you need mass transit that actually goes where people need to go.
Or better yet, to put more people where mass transit already is.
> Prioritizing a car solution makes it worse for busses and bicyclists to use the same road.
A bus can use the same uncongested road as a car with no problems, and traffic congestion is the same problem for both. There are a hundred different ways to address congestion other than "punish drivers" -- add new mass transit routes, build more housing on existing routes, lower or eliminate mass transit fares, switch from property tax to land value tax to encourage density, etc.