Implementing a Personal Transportation Hierarchy
collindonnell.com
collindonnell.com
A pedestrian path that goes a block out of your way is discouraging in a way that a half mile dogleg in a car is not.
Sidewalks need to connect directly to destinations; not wander blocks out of the way to circuit parking lots.
The best “pathing” should be for pedestrians, followed by that for bikes. Cars and busses can go far out of their way, and trains can stay on their tracks.
Not having to dodge F150s or breathe in exhaust fumes can go a long way to upping the desire to ride your bike to work in the morning.
And on a bike it feels different than on foot - I like walking the nice trail but it is 10 minutes longer than the silly sidewalk, and it just kind of dumps you in nowhere three blocks from anywhere you would like to be.
I was stuck in a traffic jam once and decided to change my behavior.
I bought an electric long board that can go off-road, that I could also carry on my back, so I can take the train and the bus. I'm a big guy so I had to buy a bruiser of a board (50 pounds) and a pack that could carry it. The board has an 80km (50 mile) range and it can go as fast as you want, but it speed wobbles at 50 km/hour (31 mile/hour), which requires you to put your weight onto the front and accelerate through the resonance. It's illegal to ride in my city, so now I'm an outlaw, I get great exercise when I pack it, and an incredible sense of freedom when I rip past the traffic, or politely navigate the bike lanes. The board is dangerous, so I can get out of my head: if I don't pay attention, I die; so it forces a flow state and clears all of my life worries -- something my motorcycle friends talk about a lot. I have crashed, and though painful, I usually go at a speed that I can run-out-of if something bad happens. You don't get sweaty like you do from riding a bike, so you can wear a suit under the safety gear.
No need to change the city, you can get the revolution you want by deploying your own technology. If you live in a dirt-bag city, like I do, you don't have to worry about your windows being smashed or whatever, because you are carrying your car on your back.
In Portland it's actually worse than this. The areas that have built or maintained sidewalks are generally rich areas. The city puts sidewalk construction and maintenance on home builders and has an exhorbitant permitting scheme.
Regardless, once you own a bike and once bike lanes are built, there's no environmental reason not to bike instead of walk whenever you want to, right?
For short trips or connections, walking should be more convenient because you don't need any gear or space to store your bike. This also gives a multiplicative effect with other transport options, because (e.g.) people are much more likely to take a bus or train if they can walk directly to the station instead of needing a bike or car to get there in the first place.
As an aside, mature bicycle infrastructure goes beyond bike lanes, especially as the number of cyclists grows. For instance, here's a video showing off a huge bicycle parking facility in Amsterdam: https://youtu.be/EqwasBTzZS8?t=530. Obviously this is great compared to car parking, but it's still a lot compared to the infrastructure needed to support short walking trips.
I suspect getting hit by a bus will hurt a lot more than getting hit by a car.
I agree that this is pretty trivial in terms of environmental impact, it's probably just about the friction involved, we already have legs.
It is more efficient than walking in terms of calories per mile yes.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want a moped weaving around me in the bike lane, but that actually has never happened to me, whereas as taxis and ride-share cars definiely HAVE taken up the ENTIRE bike lane.
Plenty of cyclists don't have helmets, either. Is that affecting you?
I've noticed that as they gain experience, the e-cyclists tend to behave themselves pretty well.
In particular, EV's that are less than half a standard lane width wide would allow the grid capacity to double overnight at almost no extra cost. This will happen first in the busy city cores where the usual single occupancy gas vehicle will be dissallowed (already happening in a few cities in China and Europe). So basically this is a cross between and bicycle and a the current regular ICE cars.
But wait, there's more. Because EV's are non-polluting city core roads can be covered in poor weather and parking can be almost anywhere. This won't be your father's city core.
(apparently there are tiny electric cars for handicapped people, in use in the Netherlands, with rights to access bike lanes and such with a permit)
However, I could definitely see a city core where all personal car traffic is banned and commercial truck traffic is only allowed if it's EV and under a certain tonnage.
Taxis (including uber, lyft, etc) greatly reduce costs for someone who only needs to travel by car sporadically, possibly making cities marginally more affordable.
Also taxis net more traffic as the time taxi driver is driving to the next customer is essentially useless.
If you take a train to the burbs But you can't get from the station to your destination you may choose to drive the whole way instead of a short taxi trip, leading to more driven miles and more congestion.
How people go to work, get health care, buy groceries, go to school, get entertainment, etc all require transportation. The denser the city, the better it is suited to do transportation right. London is notorious for its traffic, but given its size and population, I think it is doing very decently. I wonder how many transport improvements is coming from an US centric hammer, i.e. a better, environmental friendlier car
Yet public transit is unusable except for small swaths of the city. And building new transit is virtually impossible due to corruption (a new 1.9 mile subway spur recently opened after 20 years of construction and $2 billion). Even worse in recent years crime has gotten out of control on transit and drug users are using train cars to smoke fent. So nobody wants to use transit.
The city built a lot of bike lanes but owning a bike is impossible because it will get stolen just about instantly.
so yeah we have the worst of all worlds
public transit sucks
Personally if driving were super deprioritized where I live, I'd have more incentive to move out of the city and live more rurally, which seems like a net negative overall (environmentally).
Probably, most people would stay in the city and balance it out though.
I enjoy cycling and walking, but I'd rather keep my usage of public transport to a minimum.
If we could completely exclude all arseholes, make public transport cover far more places, make every bus and train have good climate control, it might be different. 3 seems possible, 2 seems like it would then approach the energy requirements of driving, 1 is a non starter.
Mid sized cities (or larger cities built up after the 50's) just aren't designed to support this kind of lifestyle, and would require laws to change around zoning/parking/etc.
The reason my city isn't more bikable isn't zoning or parking or density or whatever, it's that there is literally no safe way to reach many of those destinations by bike because the only route there is on streets with high speed limits designed exclusively for cars. I think this is the case for a lot of mid-sized cities in the US if you really look at the distances involved. In fact my city is slowly improving things by turning sidewalks into mixed use paths that make it much easier to get places without using a car, so it's clearly doable. Sure, a lot of exurban bedroom community type places are never going to be anything but car dependent without totally rebuilding them, but alternatives like biking are definitely not only possible in the densest American cities.
Unless your city also has a public transit system that is sufficient enough in coverage and timing to replace the need for anyone in your city to own a car, in which case... Please send me a direct message with the city name, I don't want the secret to get out before I move there.
Also, don't discount the impact that zoning and parking requirements can have on the ability to have communities like this. Does your city have a collection of parking lots occupying valuable real estate in your downtown? Land that could be used to build a valuable business or multi-unit housing? Yep - that's mandatory parking requirements. Does your city have a lack of neighbourhood businesses and restaurants, leading to the necessity to travel by car to big box stores in a spread out car-centric shopping center away from any other part of the community? Yeah, that's because of zoning laws.
These laws can be changed, but cities have already been built entirely around the automobile in most of the US - there has to be a specific push to enable alternate lifestyles to be a possibility. Otherwise, the only viable lifestyle revolves around four wheels and two tons of steel.
And yet, biking could be a perfectly viable transit option without changing most of those factors if there was just more bike infrastructure. You wouldn't get the full hierarchy, as you said, but you could very realistically have more options than just driving.
If you live in a massive sprawling southwestern city like Phoenix or you live in a relatively rural area, then yes you have to use a very different hierarchy.
I'm also curious about what your concept of "usable" is with regards to bus transportation, since in my experience bus service tends to be highly focused around commuting to a downtown work area - with very degraded service outside these times and areas.
> very few midsized cities are livable if your only form of transportation is your own two feet.
I mostly agree, but nobody is saying you shouldn't own any kind of vehicle, just that you should consider walking first for closer destinations. If you can't walk then you start moving down the hierarchy.
"Usable" bus system is also hard to define, if I'm being honest what I mean is when I was there and moving around for non-work reasons, I was often able to use a bus. I don't have a better source than my own limited experience so you can ignore that part of the comment.
I'm not sure that you could go much further than NYC without making private car ownership impossible for most, though.
Maybe that's the point. Despite having a good transport network overall (I live in London), it's just such an integrated part of my life to be able to jump in the car and go and visit friends say 50 miles away that I can't imagine ever wanting to give that up. I'd rather have that than the fancy downtown bars. Am I old? :)
Arseholes aren't the norm in public transportation where I live. Not non-existent but also not the norm. If your local system tends to have more of them, that probably makes it less attractive to you. Large and thinly spread out communities generally make public transport less attractive from a resources point of view because it's harder and less economical to have it efficiently cover the area.
But generally preferring community structures that do allow for efficient public transportation makes sense from a resource use point of view, even if that doesn't always mean it's preferable to you in a particular location. Giving a greater weight to walking or cycling makes sense both from resources and health points of view.
I wish that we had conductors or something. I would gladly pay to have someone like that who could at least tell antisocial people to calm down. Passengers don't want to deal with it.
5% of trips being disturbed also sounds high albeit not outlandish. (It's still significantly higher than what I'd expect in commuter traffic here. On weekend night buses quite possibly yes but I use those so rarely that I wouldn't be able to say.)
Either way, the point was that such things obviously carry weight for individual preferences, but that they may apply on top of some kind of a baseline weighing hierarchy from a broader point of view.
For me I just don't want to interact with weirdos. It doesn't have to be that extreme, the marker is something like - if I went to a restaurant, bar, workplace, party etc and it had the same number of degens as public transport I wouldn't go back there, I have options.
I place great importance on spending time in places where the people around me feel like equals that I can converse with rather than potential threats.
edit: No, I don't mean "different strata of society". I mean dickheads. A different strata of society is, say, Matt Hancock MP vs. an immigrant single mum, both of which travel on the Tube. I enjoy living in a diverse neighbourhood. My neighbours are from all walks of life.
A dickhead is someone smoking weed on a bus, shouting homophobic slurs at people who look a bit different, playing loud music on speakerphone. I am indeed intolerant of in-your-face antisocial behaviour and I'm proud of that fact.
I have a lot of trouble interacting with people I feel are weird, too, but to a large extent I consider that a personal issue and limitation. In principle I consider some amount of such tolerance to be part of a civil and human society. It's natural to not like uncomfortable things but IMO gentrification and intolerance of different strata of people are also problems.
Of course how much should be tolerated also depends on what kind of weird we're talking. "Weirdo" and potential threat aren't necessarily the same thing. But of course how easily a weirdo feels like a potential threat depends on the place and the culture. In some places the threat of actual violence might be common enough that it's understandable to be wary. I might underestimate that since situations that might actually be threatening are a lot less common than just uncomfortable ones here.
If a "weirdo" or a "degen" means just someone who's not part of your understanding of normal or equal, and that means you don't want to tolerate having to deal with them, then I have to say that sounds quite intolerant to me.
So, depending on the point of view and what kind of weird (and how much) we're talking, I might agree or vehemently disagree.
No, I don't mean "different strata of society". I mean dickheads. A different strata of society is, say, Matt Hancock MP vs. an immigrant single mum, both of which travel on the Tube. I enjoy living in a diverse neighbourhood. My neighbours are from all walks of life.
A dickhead is someone smoking weed on a bus, shouting homophobic slurs at people who look a bit different, playing loud music on speakerphone. I am indeed intolerant of in-your-face antisocial behaviour and I'm proud of that fact.
What goes on in your local public transport is probably not quite universal about public transport, though. So, as I said, it makes sense as a weighing factor -- and in this case it sounds like a significant one for your individual preferences -- but it doesn't mean the suggested hierarchy doesn't make sense in other ways if you don't have that factor.
And if looking at it from a general community structure or transport infrastructure planning point of view, those probably shouldn't be based on the assumption that public transport means having to deal with dicks.
Consider Argentina's case, for instance. Its size is comparable to India, yet it has a population smaller than Spain, making it a daunting task to fund extensive rail networks.
The same rationale can be applied to the US in comparison to smaller European nations.
Ultimately, promoting driving by making cars more affordable and investing in the highway system may indeed be the most adaptable and practical strategy for larger countries. Just something to ponder over.
Edit: The US east coast is always a particularly interesting use-case since it's more comparable to the density found in a lot of countries with far better transit while also being significantly richer. The Bos-Wash corridor has about the same population as Spain but it is significantly more dense and with 3x the GDP. Yet Spain has far better inter-city high-speed rail and other transit options.
The rail connecting tbe cities is not very good. It costs upwards of $100 for a BOS->DC ticket and takes a day of travel.
You don't really need to fund extensive rail networks, just rail networks that get to a large enough share of the population to make it worthwhile
The vast majority of people don't need to go from anywhere to anywhere else in their countries every day, if you live in or around Philadelphia (first name that came to mind, no clue how good their transit system is) it doesn't really matter that there's people in Montana (again, I think they're fairly sparsely populated but not the point) who need to drive two hours to meet their neighbors
Looking at a population density map of argentina I don't see why it'd make more sense for them to invest in highways to nowhere rather than railways between the population centers. (Within reason of course, I'm not advocating for not maintaining infrastructure to less dense areas at all)
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#5/-37.736/-70.972
When you look at where people actually live the US is not that different from France or Poland and might even be in a better place for rail interconnections than Spain or Sweden
> Since then, I’ve come back to Portland, and the options to get around without a car are better again. Portland has a pretty good bike share program, an above average light rail system, and an okay bus network. Plus, my neighborhood is pretty walkable, with a 73 walk score.
Portland's friendliness to biking has dropped in recent years. Pedestrian deaths have risen quite a bit, which makes people not want to use our many bike lanes. Some background: https://bikeportland.org/2023/03/15/city-counts-reveal-data-...
There's two main theories that I think reflect the whole truth:
- PBOT built a lot of bus and train infrastructure. Turns out they designed it in a way that can be hostile to biking.
- We eliminated our traffic division and around that time pedestrian and motorcycle fatalities greatly increased.
I'd also like to point out that walkability in Portland mostly correlates to how rich/new (almost the same thing in Portland) the area is. Portland has a lot of old neighborhoods and they don't really have a density strategy, meaning they'll just build in density anywhere including demolishing most of a street and compounding a whole two lane street with dense housing. The thing I've learned from this is that density needs to be integrative; it should be smartly built among SFHs and should not the the majority or only housing on an existing street. That's to say, if you take a street designed for 10 homes and then you turn it into quadplexes bad things happen to traffic, much less the vibe of the area. My street is a good example of how to do it right, they capped the dense housing so it could only occupy half of the street. We have condos for a quarter of the street, quadplexes for a quarter, and SFHs for half.
Why does this matter? Portland ties paving of roads and building of sidewalks to new construction. It's a perverse incentive that resulted in there being sidewalks and a minimally paved road up to my house. Everything thereafter is a gravel road in the middle of Portland. It's dangerous during Portland's rainy season, but the city doesn't really care. This is their carrot. When we asked the city to come in and pave the road and finish the sidewalk so that folks can get to our deli/grocery store easier, Portland responded that we could raise money and build our own on their land and we still needed to pay the exhorbitant city permitting fees.
On the other hand, Portland does an excellent job with mass transportation. Just outside my neighborhood you can catch a bus to anywhere around Portland, including the train, which in three hours can take you to Seattle. It's really nice.