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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> When it is given away, drivers overuse available roads, and clog them. The waste is colossal. An estimate by INRIX, a consulting firm, suggests that the value of time lost to traffic in 2018 in America alone reached $87bn.

Is it "colossal?" The U.S. is a $19 trillion economy with 156 million people in the labor force. $87 billion is about $557 per person annually, about half of what people spend on coffee each year: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/american-coffee-habits-spend-coff....

That's actually much lower than I would have thought, considering that traffic is such a big fact of life. That suggests that measures to reduce traffic may not be worthwhile.

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I mean it's so thoughtless of people to waste time in traffic instead of teleporting everywhere.

Even if we eliminated cars people still have to get to work/stores/church/school/home/etc... Mass transit options are more efficient in many ways than single occupant cars, but only occasionally are they faster.

Not all transport time is "wasted". Consider the difference of a normal vs congested road. Suppose a trip would normally take 15 minutes, and takes 25 minutes in congestion.

The 10 minute difference is the waste. The 15 minutes is some acceptable transit time you agree we must have. This discussion is centered around the waste.

Claiming there is some essential traffic time is a straw man argument

The point is, if everybody was on a bus there wouldn't BE traffic. There would be no such thing as a traffic jam, because the road would be 90% empty.

Traffic jams is not the only cause of longer than necessary travel.

I used to use PT religiously for many years when I was a young man. To get to work, using PT where I live means a one hour commute as opposed to a 20 minute car drive (one way). Now, having family, I prefer to save those 80 minutes every day and spend them with my kids -- however, there is hardly ever any traffic jams worth talking about where I live.

The sole reason for the longer traveling time on PT is that both my house and my work are not located in the center of the city but on the outskirts. All PT is organized in a star-like pattern, i.e., to go from my house to my work, I first have to take a bus and a train to get into the city center and then another bus to get out of it again. With the car, I never have to into the city in the first place but can drive right around it.

What I'm trying to say is: I find it very hard to imagine that even a very tight public transport net would be able to cover all individual connection needs efficiently. Where I live, a lot of people _do_ use public transport but for many people it would take a lot to make it an attractive alternative (and I'm just taking about travel time here, never mind all the other personal advantages of having your own personal space in which you travel).

Public transport is also quite costly around here, although it's already subsidized by tax money. If everybody starting using PT tomorrow and paid for it, this would create the instant funds needed to extend the connections to meet most people's needs. But it is a chicken/egg problem: as long as the system as it is is experienced as vastly inferior to someone, it will be very hard to convince them to use it. But without more substantially more people using it, the necessary funds to improve the system is missing. Government money (aka, taxes) could help but massive sums would be needed and already now there is never enough public funds to attend to all the things we expect our administration to take care of.

What you’re describing is a land use problem not a transportation problem. There are many cities where most trips are made by foot and most of the remaining trips are by bus or train and very few are by driving alone in a car.

I mean, you would also have millions of people spending 5 hours riding between bus stops every day.

Cars are a bare necessity due to how badly we fucked up urban planning. And we fucked it up because we planned around cars.

Do transit advocates have a solution to totally incompetent transit agencies? When we lived in Wilmington Delaware, we lived in an apartment that was ostensibly a 7-10 minute bus ride away from my wife's office and a 10 minute walk to commuter rail for my job in Philadelphia. We had just moved from Chicago, where we didn't own a car, and assumed we could continue our public-transit-oriented lifestyle.

We quickly gave up on both, and I ended driving 45 minutes each way, dropping my wife off at work in the process. The bus would just never come. Bus drivers would randomly skip stops. The train was regularly late. That was on the weekday. Once, we tried taking the bus on the weekend to the local mall. After waiting for 45 minutes (during which time three buses were supposed to have come), we went back home and got in the car.

(Another anecdote: When I was in law school, I spent a month in the Menlo Park office of the firm I was working at. Having spent the rest of the summer in the NYC office--before MTA's total collapse--I figured I'd rent something on the train line to get between San Jose and Menlo Park. Hah! A commuter train that runs only every half an hour during peak times? Are you kidding? I ended up renting a car and driving in every day.

Third anecdote--because I've really used a lot of public transit: When I first started working in DC, my wife kept working in Delaware. So we moved right next to Baltimore Penn Station, so she could take the Amtrak up and I could take MARC/Amtrak down. On paper it's under an hour for her, and about an hour and fifteen minutes for me between Amtrak and Metro. Hah! For my trip, Amtrak was routinely 10-15 minutes late, and the trip took 10 minutes more than scheduled. For her trip, Amtrak was regularly 15+ minutes late. And that was when it was almost on time. Several times a month there would be 1+ hour delays.)

That's the reality of public transit for the vast majority of the country. Chicago is basically the only place left that has public transit that runs mostly on time and has decent coverage between bus, subway, and commuter rail. Everywhere else the transit system has either completely broken down (DC, New York), or doesn't go anywhere (Baltimore, Atlanta, etc.).

This mirrors my experience where I went to college. Somewhat routinely, the driver would just not arrive, and you'd be waiting for nearly 2 hours for a bus to come.

We ended up calling the transit center basically every time. Their response was always "they should be there soon". Tons of students echoed the same results.

We went to a town hall meeting on transit. The person at the very top of the transit org-tree claimed he had never heard of these problems before, not even once.

---

At this point, our college was looking to get out of a multi-year agreement for ride discounts in year 1, because everyone who tried to use it was experiencing the same issues. There was already a paper-trail of complaints edging towards breach of contract claims. So the only conclusion we can really see is either a truly horrifying lack of communication along the entire chain, or they wanted to run the transit system into the ground and were intentionally lying about things. For a metro area covering nearly a million people.

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Edit: this is all of course not helped by a lack of data. Busses didn't even have position tracking (they were "considering" starting a "pilot" with embedded gps reporting location over radio "in the next few years" by the time I left), so the transit center quite possibly truly didn't know where drivers were. Or if their route changes led to any improvement at all. The closer we looked at anything around there related to transit, the more insane it became. Transit in many places goes so far beyond basic negligence, it's hard to believe.

>Do transit advocates have a solution to totally incompetent transit agencies?

At best you'll get people saying "the MTA is a corrupt money burner compared to European rail and we need to fix that" or something along those lines but that's about it. It makes sense that people aren't in a hurry to point out the flaws of what they see as a solution to a problem most don't care much about.

> It makes sense that people aren't in a hurry to point out the flaws of what they see as a solution to a problem most don't care much about.

Well, that's too bad, because if your "solution" is full of dealbreaking flaws, people won't adopt it. And you will not solve those flaws if you decide they are best ignored while you push the "solution" around.

Mass transit improvement should be the first thing on the list for people that are fighting car use.

For me the main advantages of a bus over driving my own car were:

a) you can read or watch movies

b) I walked for 5 minutes each day to get to and from stops

c) It was relaxing on a bus (driving is frustrating in busy traffic).

The benefits only worked when the bus route was convenient between home and work. At my new place the bus takes a very indirect route (slow) and requires a change (I hate time at bus interchange, I don't mind time spent on bus if it is not too much more than driving).

I did notice I still required a car: when my car was off the road for a while I became less social (too much hassle to visit friends without a car).

You need private transportation in rural areas due to the sheer size and remoteness. You also need to plan around cars in urban areas for people coming from rural areas. That's not to say you shouldn't focus on public transportation in urban areas, but it's not possible to ignore cars.

Eh let’s don't. The thing about rural areas is nobody lives there, by definition. Our city centers should not be degraded so a tiny minority can drive. Instead we should have the Swiss/German S-Bahn model where outlying areas have train stations that take the rural folks to cities quickly and efficiently.

Many people do live there, just more spread out.

It's not degrading city centers, you still need trucks to stock your stores, you still need tourism.

If everyone that lived in the city centers took public transportation, the already built roads would be freed for foreign traffic.

As you say, there's nobody living in rural areas so they wouldn't have a huge impact on the roads. They can share it with the buses and trucks.

I see this kind of elitism of urban > rural a lot here.

Elitism is when you tear down thousands of homes in black neighborhoods so rural drivers can go non-stop downtown. Elitism is when you spend a billion dollars on a freeway interchange in the middle of nowhere while cutting bus service in downtown Milwaukee. Elitism in America always works in favor of rural people because rural America is overwhelming White and American elitism is just racism.

There can be many forms of elitism, I don't see how it excuses your view of "not many people live in rural America, so fuck em". Black and white people live in rural America, and just because someone is white doesn't mean they are racist or had anything to do with what you're claiming.

You're generalizing people based on race, that's racism.

You need freeways to connect cities and transport goods, I don't see what that has to do with cities not properly funding public transportation.

Urban cities need rural areas for foods and goods. You're living in a bubble of your own elitism. There's more to America than your city, go travel, you'll need a car though :)

> You need freeways to connect cities and transport goods, I don't see what that has to do with cities not properly funding public transportation.

You don't see it because you aren't paying attention. In Wisconsin the people of Milwaukee had to sue the state because the state transportation agency cut funding for bus service in black, car-free Milwaukee while spending $1.7bn on an interchange to serve overwhelmingly white people from the surrounding area. It was not a meritless suit; WisDOT settled.

Re-read my comment. I don't see what rural areas have to do with cities not properly funding public transportation.

Like all cities, Milwaukee should get their public transportation in order.

That being said, public transportation cannot work for rural areas. It can only work in urban and possibly suburban areas.

In Wisconsin like most states cities are creations of the state and transit authorities are also creations of the states. Local tax revenues flow out of cities into the state government for redistribution, which usually results in a net flow of money out of those cities to rural areas, because the cities have the larger economies and the rural areas have a variety of high costs for things like firefighting and road building. The Milwaukee County Transit System, being a creature of the state, derives its funding from the state, which is not always equitably forthcoming.

NYC has the same problem with the MTA being controlled by the state government, despite the fact that 97% of the state's economic activity originates in NYC.

Any way, if you know anything about American history then you know about the phenomenon where a surrounding entity like a county or state arranges to extract money from a city while also starving it of services. St. Louis is probably the most notable example. Blaming such a city for its own transportation system, while also suggesting that those cities need to spend their own capital to provide parking and driving opportunities to rural citizens, just underlines how little you understand about American cities.

> The thing about rural areas is nobody lives there, by definition.

I get what you're saying, but according to this[1], about 46 million people live in rural areas. That's...not nobody.

I am a died-in-the-wool car loving 'Merican, but even I can agree that cities shouldn't necessarily be designed around cars. It'd make the most sense for a park & ride type situation (only one that actually works), where us rural-types can drive in close to the city, park, and take public transit in towards the town.

Edit: as another commenter pointed out, this plan wouldn't absolve the cities of needing roads, because goods still need to make it into the businesses in the city.

[1] https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/states/united-states

That’s only 14% of Americans. If we start spending only 14% of our transportation budget moving those people and storing their cars, that would be great.

It’s not just rural areas. There are vast swaths of low density suburbs all over the country. And getting to the city isn’t the primary concern—it’s getting between all these low density suburbs. I grew up less than 15 miles from DC and went there maybe a dozen times from ages 5-18. 90-95% of all jobs in the DC metro area are outside the city.

(That’s a big difference from Germany, where even in relatively rural areas most people live in villages that are pretty dense.)

You're right, the congestion instead would be at bus depots and stops. Moving any big group of things around, whether they be cargo containers, cars, people, or html packets, will incur some level of congestion.

Also I'd feel like we'd just be exchanging time stuck in traffic to time stuck on a bus as it deals with other people's destinations first

Thank you. This is what a ton of other comments are missing.

I've had to occasionally go to our main corporate office. If I rent a car from the airport, it's about 18 minutes from airport parking lot to door. Taking public transit means the absolute fastest I can get from transit stop to door is 32 minutes (25 minutes of transit + 7 minutes of walking). Taking public transit is an additional 14 minutes added to my commute time.

I'm not against public transit. People are pretending or under the wrong assumption that getting more people onto buses and rails means that the new commute time is now equivalent to driving a car on a road without traffic. You need to factor in time waiting for transit, stops between your pickup and destination, and last mile. Dense cities suffer from less of the last mile problem, because buses can take routes all through a city with more stops. Moving to the outskirts of the city will have a larger last mile problem where few buses are patrolling.

Driving a car point to point without traffic is obviously going to be faster. But if everybody drives point to point, there will be a lot of traffic and jams. The difference with public transportation is that it could move everybody without traffic, but if you remove the traffic lots of people want to use their car - profiting from the other people who use PTA and free their streets.

Classic tragedy of the commons.

> but if you remove the traffic lots of people want to use their car - profiting from the other people who use PTA and free their streets

This is true, but there's still a layer beyond that. There are cities where the layout is built to address the last mile problem. There are hub locations that can allow you to get from point A to B and to C within 5 minutes of each other on foot. This isn't true for many Americans.

Take my example from earlier. If you didn't bring your lunch, your 5 minute walking options from the office are very limited. Expanding to 10 minutes gives more options, but the selection is still very limited. 10 minutes via car gives a much better selection, but 10 minutes via bus (due to waiting and intermediate stops) doesn't get you much further than 10 minutes on foot. Other examples include running and errand after work. If I need to grab something from a store, how much additional time is needed to add an extra stop to go 5 minutes off of my normal commute path?

Again, I'm not against public transportation. Cities need to be designed to accommodate public transportation. Otherwise we are exchanging time idling bumper-to-bumper for time waiting and time hitting intermediate stops.

I agree that public transportation can't be the only solution everywhere. But, in cities above a given density, it's the only solution that can work without daily congestions.

Yes, there would. It would be traffic jams full of buses.

No. If you sent a bus down every street in San Francisco every minute, the throughput in terms of people per hour would be dramatically higher and the streets would be empty.

The claim was that there was no such thing as a traffic jam. I suspect induced demand and bus bunching would cause bus filled traffic jams.

And yet in cities that are transit-oriented it doesn't happen.

Buses can transport many more people than cars.

https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...

Private v. public transit is yet another example of the linear relationship between latency and throughput; private transit is low latency and low throughput, while public transit is high latency and high throughput.

Someday we'll all have flying scooters/jetpacks and be able to get anywhere point-to-point without being bottlenecked by latency or throughput, but until then, it's gonna be a matter of balancing the two.

Compare and contrast the use of roads today with another famous public works project: The Roman grain dole. The grain dole in Rome was MANY things at MANY times. But one aspect of it's effects on the Roman economy was the increase in luxury good purchasing in certain times and places. Much like today, basic food requirements took up a lot of the income for poorer citizens. By giving out food for free, these plebians were able to spend that money on more goods and services, thereby increasing trade in the ancient world. (NOTE: this incredibly simplifies a lot of things and is very debatable).

That said, roads act in a similar way. If you have to pay a toll for every road, then poor people will use the roads less. If the roads are free, then poor people will use that toll money on other things.

Per the article and the issue of traffic, I guess this means that poor people have more of their time taken away from them whilst sitting in traffic as they drive further and are not being driven around by chauffers. If we got rid of this 'time tax' that is traffic congestion, it would be better for poor people. They would use their time on other things that are good for the economy or their lives.

I'm also skeptical that this 'time tax' is all that high. Emotionally, traffic is a nightmare, and well extends past my time actually spent in it. But that's a seperate issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

I wonder how equally distributed that cost is. If it follows a Pareto distribution, which would be my first guess, then it would be costing 20% of the population over $2000 per year. If so, it would be relatively insignificant to the economy at large, but worth still worth tackling for specific states or cities where the problem looms larger.

>about half of what people spend on coffee each year:

Yeah, but the difference there is that when people spend money on coffee, they're getting a cup of coffee out of the deal. When we spend money on traffic, we're getting hypertension and car accidents instead.

That number is literally just time lost in traffic jams. That doesn't even factor in disutility incurred from actually being in traffic like lost sleep, road rage, traffic fatalities, etc.

You get hypertension from coffee too..

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