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Comment by rtlfe | Hacker News Reader

Idk if you think that statement somehow refutes my point, but it certainly doesn't.

In general, I agree with you. In specific, I drive almost everywhere despite being a supporter of public transit, because I can't afford to live near a skytrain station and the 'last mile' adds an hour to a trip. If we had more buses, and most routes had dedicated lanes, sure. But since we're half-assing it all, more gridlock is just more gridlock. Which, among other things, means more pollution.

edit: compare to a city like Seattle, which has similar weather, hills, density, etc. A notable feature of the transit centers there is a Park & Ride: a place where folks can park their cars (for free, when I lived there) and get into transit. Vancouver does not have anything of the sort. If you want to park somewhere and take transit into the downtown core, there are extremely limited options. So you get too many drivers. Disincentivizing cars usage is great when there is a viable alternative -- in the absence of such an alternative, it's just flagellation for its own sake.

Huh? The only park & ride in Seattle is in Northgate that's pretty new. They're only really seen outside the city in the suburbs

It's not that new, there's been a park&ride there since the 90s[1]. And, my apologies, I'm referring to the greater metropolitan area as Seattle.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_station_(Sound_Tra...

Sure, you're making a reasonable choice given the current reality. But it doesn't have to be that way. When I say driving should be difficult, I don't mean just make the roads worse without any other changes. I mean improve active transportation, transit, and housing density/affordability. In the short term, each improvement here will cause some pain in making driving slightly harder, but after sufficient time the other options will be good enough that nobody will miss driving.

Of course it does. Crappy for cars means crappy for buses which are public transit.

> Crappy for cars means crappy for buses which are public transit.

Not if you give sufficient priority to buses.

Cleveland has an excellent center-running BRT line: https://nacto.org/case-study/euclid-avenue-brt-cleveland-oh/

And NYC is starting to implement busways: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml

This is not an obvious thing. Cities can (imo should) give more priority to buses in the form of dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority.

Sure, but the commonality is both need roads and at some point they'll be an interaction between cars and buses.

If the situation is crappy for cars, it will impact the buses at some point.

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