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CPLX

> It's not the roads that cause traffic, it's the convenience of driving.

Exactly. Roads make driving more convenient.

Build trains and that makes taking the train more convenient so you get more of that.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

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Convenience is only part of the story though. Price matters - and for me at least it is often as cheap or cheaper as a single person in a car to drive than get a train. I live in London, I can train anywhere pretty conveniently. But, somehow, if I decide that I want to go to Leeds next weekend to see my friend - it's £100.

Well, shit. The train is more convenient - but that's over twice the cost of petrol. Now imagine that I wanted to take another friend with me. It's absurd. The same scenario, but to a friend in Rugby (about half as far, different train line) costs me £23. Bargain!

There are multiple axes on which to nudge behaviour - and one of them is definitely price.

The trains in the UK are an outlier here. You're not wrong, it's outrageously expensive — it was cheaper for me to rent a car for 24 hours and drive from London to Bristol and back than it was to take the train. Between London and Newcastle it's sometimes cheaper to fly (and I don't even mean with a budget airline!). This is utterly insane. It doesn't need to be this way though. Trains work great in continental Europe. In fact the trains here in Poland are fantastic.

I'm a total petrolhead and I'm often irritated by the kind of cyclist that hates all cars and anyone who drives one, but I would like to see fewer cars on the road. Trains are an excellent way to achieve that goal (just not the way the UK does it).

This reminds me of Germany, where flights between Munich and Berlin are at a constant 40€(easyjet)/50€(Lufthansa) for booking next day, since the public train company has a 4hr service during "rush-hour" now (nextday booking costs 150€ without a discount card - which is 250€ for a 50% rebate for a year)

It's only cheaper because you're not paying for how much it will cost to get the combusted petrol back out of the air again. You're stealing that from future generations.

Trains don’t solve the last mile problem in metropolitan areas. It’s just not economically feasible to constantly run trains or buses that cover a metropolitan area with less than 1 mile spreads and acceptable intervals.

I’m being generous that ‘walk a mile’ at source and destination would pass muster for people with difficulties.

Making our infrastructure for cars better seems like a much better solution honestly.

Walk a mile at source and destination also adds 30 to 40 minutes to your trip.

Taxis, shuttles, rideshare are a thing.

Right, but the point is that all the solutions to the last mile problem are... cars. Which is fine but if you're going to do that then what's the advantage of not using it the whole way? The throughput of highways is great, there's no schedule to follow, you don't have congestion and surge pricing at popular stops with hundreds of people trying to hail a cab at rush hour, and if you're price conscious gas is cheap and you can find perfectly usable cars for less than $1k.

And you can use your car for more than just your daily commute.

Parking is the main difference.

It seems like a perfect opportunity to let the free market solve the last mile problem.

I mean the market has been solving the all mile problem with cars for the last 50 years. Outside of the downtown areas of ~5 cities in the US there isn't really a problem to solve.

The problem I have with mass transit is that outside of a couple major cities, the system is a horrible time waster. I used to take a bus to downtown job in my mid-sized Midwest city and it was like commuting 2x--I would have to drive to a park and ride, then wait for a bus, then board a bus and then go sit in traffic on a bus. I would arrive 40 mins later, dropped off near the building I worked at, but still had to walk outdoors in sub-zero temps and deal with low-level street crime at times, too. Yes, I got to read or do other crap on the bus, but all the colds and other sickness I caught didn't make up for that.

Contrast that with me just getting in my car and driving to the downtown parking garage and paying for parking at a place that has a skyway where my feet never touch the street at all, and you can understand the dilemma.

Then I got really smart and just stopped working downtown completely and got a job in the suburbs with free parking and while the traffic is still bad, it's nothing like heading downtown is.

One thing to note here is that roads and driving have been heavily subsidized while mass transit has been fought against.

Mass transit is usually subsidised too. Very few mass transit systems survive on fares.

> Then I got really smart and just stopped working downtown completely and got a job in the suburbs with free parking and while the traffic is still bad, it's nothing like heading downtown is.

In my case, working downtown would have been the smart move. I lived in a suburb and worked in a neighboring suburb. The drive was 10 minutes and I could avoid the freeway. I looked into taking the bus because there was a bus stop right outside my apartments and found it would take a minimum of 40 minutes, but realistically with traffic and decent timing on the transfer, it would have taken over an hour. The reason? All the bus routes were essentially straight shots to and from the city, so to take the bus I'd have had to go all the way into downtown, switch buses, and ride all the way back out.

> sub-zero temps and… colds and other sickness

Look into a vitamin D3 supplement, approx ~5000 IU daily in the wintertime. Haven't been sick more than a day in the last 5-10 years.

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