In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.
Similarly for housing, the well substantiated claim from modern urban planners is that we've been prioritizing housing for cars well beyond housing for people, and the best solution for that is to overturn minimum parking requirements and unbundle the cost of parking from the cost of housing.
Personally, I still find these opinions somewhat counterintuitive. The weirdest part about it is that it all posits that the solution to a centralized planning problem is market solutions, and it's coming from people you'd expect to have the opposite opinion. However, what we've had in terms of transportation clearly doesn't work for people and for the environment, and the last 20 years of "Shoupism" has shown some serious promise in terms of reversing the trend.
Really there should be a high speed rail along the front range and subways in places like Denver. And zoning that prioritizes development that utilized that.
In the US Farebox Recovery Ratios of 20% or less are common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
Only 58% of fuel tax in Australia is spent on any kind of transport including rail.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being...
Australians drive a similar amount to the US.
From
https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-could...
Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car.
So even in Europe and Australia where cars more than pay for their costs people still drive a lot. This is with all the effort put in to public transport in Europe.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309333/germany-modal-sp...
Public transit isn't all, just being denser so that biking and walking is more viable is also a big part to why European cities aren't concrete wastelands full of parking and roads. The normal way to go and buy groceries is to walk not drive.
But it is really easy to steal from these people, they are tiny babies or not even born yet, they can’t vote. Like stealing candy from a baby, except the candy is their planet’s ecosystem. Sucks to be them, I guess.
[1] https://alga.com.au/policy-centre/roads-and-infrastructure/r...
You're better off depending on age and grim reaper to get old people to stop driving and focus on habituating young people to just not.
Ideally, you'd do that by improving the bus rather than accepting the current shitty bus situation and degrading driving to the point that it's even worse...
It would be very hard to make it better for, say, picking up DIY supplies at the hardware store.
Most cars can fit a few 8' 2x4s as well as several bags of bulk dirt, and what hardware stores often have is a cutting service that lets you make those 2x4s shorter for transit. None of those would fit on a bus.
The local lumber/building supply companies also usually have delivery, though they can be harder to deal with than a consumer-oriented hardware store.
A.k.a the cost of not owning a car. Where I live, I could pay 100€ weekly for deliveries and it'll still be cheaper than owning and operating a decent (as in, not a 20th century rust bucket) car would be.
The big problem with sprawl is that it's subsidized. The federal government taxes the population at large and uses that tax money to build large roads and lay down the necessary utilities, sewage, and drainage. Interstates and interstate connections (viaducts, onramps, offramps, etc) come purely out of the FHWA budget which comes from taxes. Gas taxes help but the federal gas tax hasn't been changed since 1990 (indexed for inflation that's basically been a discounting gas tax) and as fuel efficiency standards increase and hybrid/EV penetration increases gas taxes end up netting less money per mile driven. Add to that the fact that cars are getting heavier in the US, increasing wear-and-tear on existing roads, and you're basically making maintenance of roads in the US cost more money per taxpayer. Some states have been increasing vehicle registration fees to compensate but that remains very unpopular.
Local roads are initially funded by the government and based on whether they are collector roads or arterials, state and federal governments allocate extra money to these roads. But when construction finishes these roads often need to be maintained by local municipalities which is when the problems come in. Often times municipalities, especially ones with lower incomes, begin having trouble maintaining roads. Higher income municipalities raise local taxes to pay for their roads but Americans also hate paying local taxes which makes this unpopular and often unviable in poorer municipalities where incomes cannot accommodate the extra tax. That's how you get huge, sprawly cities that have terrible pavement. My city is struggling with this. The rust belt has tons of cities with this.
Moreover as the US population increases we continue to sprawl outward, destroying nature with sprawly housing developments that are viable because federal and state governments often pay for initial development. You mention democracy but there's not that much democracy going on. Often times rural voters aren't organized enough to create the kind of opposition to sprawl that urban voters have. You can't have opposition via public comment in a rural area because there is no planning agency which listens to public comment in many rural areas. In fact that's often why developers target unincorporated rural areas in the first place.
Unlike Europe, Asian countries are fine with car use, but don't subsidize it nearly as much as the US does. Japan, outside of Tokyo (which is a huge city and an outlier in the way NYC is), has narrower and fewer lanes on their roads for given traffic volumes. Public street parking mostly doesn't exist and authorities quickly tow vehicles that park where they're not supposed to. As such there's a robust market for parking lots. The closer you are to a city center the more vertical, compact, and expensive the lots are. The further you are the cheaper the lots are. In really rural towns the towns run parking lots that are basically free during the day.
The US does a lot to encourage car use. It has much higher LOS standards for its roads than other developed countries, it uses federal and state tax money to offer free parking, police officers are kind to drivers and let them overstay parking limits for longer than they should and only ticket the most flagrant offenders tacitly allowing everything from using your phone in the car to styling your hair in it. And this car culture is irrational and taking up an increasing amount of GDP and emissions.
Also if it's democracy that's your problem, this article in Colorado is all about democracy. The voters voted in a pro-transit governor, they voted in the tax increases to fund additional transit, and they approve of planning officials who refuse to widen highways. So car culture isn't as popular in the US as some think. There is an increasingly vocal minority of people who aren't happy that car culture is losing its popularity though.
This has never stopped politicians before, not really sure why it will now.
Polis is much more than a pro transit governor. He's a successful serial entrepreneur, he's gay, he's charming in a nerdy way, and he's pragmatic. I dont think his election proves much about political will in regards to transit policy.
You've got a car but using it to get to work is inconvenient due to parking, and buses often have priority lanes.
But the idea of commuting to Paris or Rome in car is...tough..
But any density is opposed strangely by the anti-car crowd due to (e.g., see SF local politics).
1. "It will ruin the character of our precious million year old city"
2. "Building more housing will magically cause existing people to move out the city"
3. "Developers will get rich. Can't ever let that happen. They should be in perpetual misery."
If someone is advocating for anti-car policies but neutral or against density, they are holding inconsistent views.
So it’s not so much that just make driving cars shitty for no reason as it is that you _have_ to make driving shitty if you want to unshittify walking/biking/transit.
Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense.
Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the best selling children's books".
The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!".
Of course in this analogy, we realize the fallacy. People are better off because more kids get to read books. Even if the queue stays the same length, we have more throughput, more kids get the benefit.
Now if we translate that to cars, of course, we see the difference. People who write books like "Paved Paradise" or "The High Cost of Free Parking" hate cars. They really do. They hate the suburbs too.
So when they see something that would enable people who don't currently drive cars to drive cars, or for people who live in urban areas to live in suburban areas, they're of course going to be against that.
"Induced demand" is being used here by languagehacker, as it is used by other people who are opposed to private property, as some sort of technical term that supports their case. But that isn't true.
By adding more copies of popular books to libraries, we want to induce demand. We want people to read the books, and we want people who don't currently use libraries to consider using them. The induced demand is not bad. We had a queue, it was too long, we shorten the queue, and by doing so some people who thought the queue was too long will no longer think that. This is good.
What languagehacker is saying, by referring to induced demand, is that, in the opinion of languagehacker cars are bad.
It is as simple as that. It sounds super-scientific when you use terms like "induced demand", but it is not, in fact, super-scientific. It's just a value judgement.
To me, if you build a highway in an area that has high traffic congestion, and after you build the highway, it still has high traffic congestion, it means more people are getting where they want to be. It's called "induced demand".
Induced demand is good. We should have more of it.
What can I do on public transit that people don't do in a car in traffic?
See the problem is that they do, right before they drive into a pedestrian or stationary object.
Tell me, anti car fundamentalists, what are the odds that happens in a waymo?
Large groups of people are simply not safe, as police are not empowered to remove problem people.
You basically ensures your transit system will remain shitty forever, but that is easily fixable. The more good actors that use it the cheaper fixing it gets per person, you can have people who clean and security remove such bad actors at low cost since so small fraction are causing bad events or pissing where they shouldn't. Good people overwhelmingly outnumber bad people in the real world.
When was the last time you saw women avoid grocery stores because they are afraid of getting harassed? Well used public transit is that level, it isn't something women worry much about compared to many other much larger threats. There is no reason at all for public transit to be worse in terms of harassment than grocery stores are, its just that USA choose to let their public transit become shit.
It’s clear that you don’t have much concern for the harassment experienced by those woman columnists you read, so I don’t think there much more I can say here. I imagine if you were to have any direct experience at all with the problem, your position would be different.
That all said: what’s your upside? What do you gain which you consider to be worth these women whom you do not know sacrificing their safety?
> What can I do on public transit that people *don't* do in a car in traffic?
was an intentional and funny word choice to include terrible drivers doing the things you listed.
Roads are not only for commuting.
it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize.
But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?
That downtown is now a concrete hellscape instead of a pleasant place to be. Your solution ensures that always happens, overall people prefer less infrastructure built for cars, but if it is there of course they will use it.
The Metra commuter rail in Chicago handles over 2.5 million trips per month.
59 percent of the people who commute to Manhattan do so via public transit. People commute to work to Manhattan from Connecticut and New Jersey by train.
Penn Station is the busiest transportation facility in the Western hemisphere, serving 600,000 passengers a day, primarily commuter rail and regional rail. And that’s just one station.
One subway tunnel with two tracks is equivalent to something like a 15 lane highway in passenger throughput. That’s where highway expansion truly falls apart: it only really scales up to a small to mid-sized cities before the land waste becomes a burden.
A lot of urban highways have no way to add lanes because there is no more physical space, or you have to destroy the actual destinations that the highway is supposed to serve to expand it.
I will also add that there are a decent amount of suburbs with walkable downtowns along those NYC and Chicago (and Boston!) commuter rail networks where you can buy a condo, rent an apartment, or even a buy a single family home within walking or biking distance of commuters rail and go downtown. In addition, suburban bus lines that feed people into commuter rail stops also exist. So it’s not all park and rides.
And park and rides still help spread traffic across the metro area highway network instead of sending all traffic into to a handful of highways going downtown. If I drive to my town’s commuter rail stop my car is probably not even getting on a highway.
But the reality is that reducing car trips is really helpful to congestion and traffic for everyone, and having alternative options can make a lot of sense to a lot of people if they’re planned well.
If I take all my daily commutes in with the Metra but then my weekend trip to the city outside the business center is in a car, I still reduced my dependency on my car by huge percentage. That means more of my miles are being spent on safer, more energy efficient, less costly mass transit.
And anyway, you’re not really correct here in the first place. Chicago commuter rail stations downtown have easy connectivity to the L and numerous buses.
You just brazenly claim that nobody wants to transfer but it happens all the time.
Yes, it can take longer than driving…except when it doesn’t, because Chicago has two or three of the nation’s slowest highways. Metra plus a transfer is often a trivial difference in travel time, plus on the Metra you can relax, use the bathroom, and even legally drink a beer if you wish.
Many trips using the L plus Metra transfer are pretty competitive to drive times. Obviously it doesn’t work for every trip but doing a Metra ride plus a $10 Taxi ride will beat parking costs, plus you’re not operating and maintaining a personal vehicle.
Finally, for those who can’t drive at all or have difficulty doing so, having an option that’s slower or less convenient than driving is still a godsend. Being able to get somewhere via transit in 2 hours will beat a 1 hour car ride when the alternative is not taking the trip at all because you’re elderly or disabled and can’t drive yourself. If your car got totaled and you can’t afford a new one having a transit option solved the catch 22 of needing a job to pay for a car and needing a car to get to your job.
As an example, there are 12 different bus lines that are directly adjacent to Millennium Station. You barely even have to step outside to use them.
Hell, you don’t have to step outside at all to transfer from the blue or red line to Millennium station trains.
All loop CTA lines are a 10 minute walk to Union Station and Ogilvie.
You really think with these kind of stats that nobody is transferring?
Not to mention the fact that the Metra runs express trains during rush hour to high population suburbs. You can get from Downer’s Grove to non-downtown neighborhoods like Lincoln Park or Wrigleyville faster than a car during rush hour via express trains + purple line.
"it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize."
Since the 1950s, we have optimized for essentially the least efficient form of transit available. It seems completely bonkers to me that in the bay and other high density areas, you have many, many workers, particularly at the low end of the income scale, driving over an hour each way to work. It is an understandable and rational decision for the driver, but crazy to me for society.
I cannot comprehend why more firms aren’t embracing remote work more than they do. It helps alleviate a lot of these traffic challenges and can result in reduced carbon footprints as well as more happy employees. I hope we start considering remote work as a solution to some of these problems more in the future.
Ultimately the problem with anti-car rhetoric is that it seeks to limit access to the objective because it is "wrong" to use a self checkout lane and people must be forced to check books out in the morally correct manner.
No one (reasonable) has a problem with the library adopting a mobile checkout app, which let's call mass transit. But crippling self checkout to force adoption of the mobile checkout app could be at best described as a 'dark pattern', forcing people to check out books 'the right way' at the cost of overall readership.
To the specific example, removing self checkout lanes makes sense if the removal adds more value than the lanes were providing, but not if they are providing more value than their opportunity cost -- perhaps because of woefully understaffed registers and a buggy mobile checkout app the self-checkout machines are responsible for a large portion of checkouts. Which would make them counter productive to remove.
If you have two checkouts, people will use whichever one is faster (assuming everything else is equal). Make one faster, and people will shift from one line to the other. Though, to make it an even better analogy, make one line shorter, and people will start coming in from off the street rather than switching lines.
A much better example - telecommuting. IF commute is bad, one is strongly incentivized to have some work-from-home days. If the commute time is improved, then that incentive disappears and one would then consider commuting daily.
Induced demand I think is generally all about the idea that when something is painful - people don't do it. Take away that pain point, and people come. I don't begrudge people too much for driving, as an example I'll note I do my errands on a bicycle. As such, I'm strongly incentivized to make many stops and fewer trips. Meanwhile, I've noticed that people in my family will make a car trip errand as soon as the need comes up. "Oh, I need to go to the grocery store." They get back, then realize they also needed to go to the hardware store, drive out again real quick and back when had there been more planning, the two trips could have been combined. Switching to a bike is an extreme example to avoid the excessive/unnecessary trips that are made simply because it is so convenient. If the drive time were tripled, then there might be a behavior shift to group errands together. Why do so though if it takes just a few minutes to make the individual trips? Eventually the cost of the trip is sufficient that a person will start conserving, avoiding that cost (which can be: travelling in off-hours, grouping trips together, not doing a trip altogether, finding a different mode of transport, removing the trip by moving, etc...)
The issue is with how many books are checked out a time. If the line is absurdly long, at some point you will make fewer trips to the library to avoid paying the cost of waiting in line. You would check out more books so you would go less frequently. You would be trading storage space at home in exchange for time (not having to wait in line). If the line were infinitely fast, then why not go to the library exactly after you have finished one book to then go get one new book.
If an automated checkout then exists, the line time would be less, making it less expensive to go to the library, which means a person would be willing to increase their trip frequency to the library. Suddenly, you have a line full of people all checking out exactly one book, and returning the next day to do the same thing again (rather than checking out one weeks worth of books, and coming back a week later instead of the next day).
First is that with frictionless checkout the library's efficiency is maximized (books are only checked out when being read and people's time isn't spent unproductively).
Second is that there is a limit to the demand of the library. A book will be finished before checking out a new one and a person can only read so many books a day. No matter how entertaining there is a fairly hard cap based on a persons need to sleep and reading rate. So a library would only ever need enough automated checkout lanes to match the populations awake time and reading rate before book demand is fully sated.
Though, I do think you might be overemphasizing the number of checkout lanes.
To torture the analogy, let's consider the variables at play:
- how often a person goes to the library
- how many books they check out at a time
- how long they wait to checkout (we can potentially include travel time with this number, and this number is a function of the number of checkout lines)
- how many books can a person use at a given time (can a person read 3 books at a time?)
- how fast a person consumes books
- what is the max number of books that can be transported
- what is the max number of books that can be stored
The variables of "how many times do you go to the library" and "how many books do you get each time", and the cost to do so - "the time to check out", I think are the 3 really interesting variables to demonstrate induced & latent demand. The others are a factor, but we can hold them constant in order to demonstrate the relationship of the other three.
Diving in now - latent demand are people who would rather not read at all rather than spend more time than X waiting to check out. If the time to check out decreases, some people will start making the trip - this is latent demand.
As time to check-out decreases further, some people will start making multiple trips instead of just one - this is induced demand. The people making multiple trips are still checking out the same number of books overall - illustrating there is demand for high frequency and not just an absolute number of books. If all you wanted was 'X' many books, why take more than one trip to get them? The frequency provides flexibility and relieves other costs (carry capacity cost & storage cost).
For example, an expedition to antarctica would be very willing to pay a high cost to have a high carry capacity in order to transport a lot of food (they'll buy a literal boat to carry it) and another high cost to store it (storage space is not free). The expedition is willing to pay these costs because the cost to get more food is so high.
One can also ponder, why not get a lifetime supply of books from a library (ignoring late fees)? To one extent, fitting that many books in your arms and then getting them to your home, and then storing them are costs. Why do that when you could make another trip a week later?
Though, let's say for some reason you knew this was your last ever trip to a library. In this case, you would be highly incentivized to invest in higher carry capacity (eg: rent a truck) and to also invest in storage for the books. (Or, the person would be very incentivized to find alternatives). The really interesting part of induced demand IMO is that typically for existing road resources, we are pretty well into the state where many people would prefer to make more trips than they do today. So when we think about the inverse, as travel costs go down, the incentives to carry more and store more go down - which results in more trips being made. As more trips are made by more people, congestion increases, which creates a balancing effect and a steady state of traffic congestion. Naturally, other factors can break the steady state, the fact there is this counter-balancing force is the (IMO) interesting part of induced demand.
Give me a nice European sports car, a manual transmission, an empty highway and some nice scenery and commuting can be an incredibly relaxing experience. Even when I lived in the Bay Area commuting this way off-peak was awesome. In fact the commute was the highlight of my day.
The best way to have an empty highway is to reduce the number of people who are driving because they have to do so.
In short though, induced demand is somewhat simple. If it takes 10 minutes to drive and 30 minutes to take a bus, then I drive. If it takes 30 minutes to drive and 10 minutes to take a bus, then I take the bus. Eventually enough people choose to drive, or take a bus, that that mode becomes congested/inconvenient enough that people start making other choices. In other words, there are some people who avoid highways during rush hour because the traffic jams are bad. If the highway is widened, then they would join the rush hour once again and be part of the traffic jams. Induced demand is about taking away the reason why people avoid something, and thereby doing so they change their behavior to start doing that thing.
I would agree, at some point when all alternatives are equally unattractive (or non-existent), then going without is a more attractive option.
Though, the "consolidate" option is a big one to consider. Rather than going to the city every day, perhaps people could do so every other day for the same benefit. If traffic is bad, then people will go less often (frequency of travel is a function of cost). Thus, in some cases, highway expansion is filled by people that want to go to the grocery store every day rather than going once a week. Meanwhile, those that commute to work, are still going to do so because they have to. If the commute gets too bad, then some people will decide to move.
On the other side of the spectrum, at some point there are so many people that want to go into the city every day - you can't do it with single occupancy vehicles and roads. It's a scaling problem. For example, someone did an analysis of parking decks in Seattle and whether there were not enough of them. They found if there were all filled and everyone then tried to leave - it would take 2 days for all the vehicles to exit the city.
There are certainly many aspects to consider.
The argument must be (and, I believe, is) that induced demand for buses and trains is far cheaper to a society than induced demand for cars. Adding a train car at a peak time serves a lot more people than adding a highway lane at a peak time.
I'm actually curious to compare them.
Apparently, 100 people is a reasonable capacity for a train car (200 is possible for BART at rush hour). A lane of 100 single-occupancy cars in a traffic jam is about a third of a mile. So, an extra car lane a mile long is about an extra half a train, give it take.
The problem with this math is the last mile.
With a road network you have highways with multiple lanes and a lot of traffic, and those branch out into streets with fewer lanes but more destinations.
You can run a train next to the highway and it will achieve much more throughput, but as soon as you get to the offramp, what now? Those 100 passengers all have different destinations that fork off in every direction. You can't run 100 train cars one for each passenger, that's even worse than the road cars. But you also can't just dump them all right there, miles away from where they want to be.
The reason this works in NYC is the density. You can actually get 100 people who are all going to the same place at the same time. Which is also the only way to make it work anywhere else: Build higher density housing. It cannot work in the suburbs because there isn't enough density to run high-occupancy mass transit at a viable frequency.
Whereas in that environment having the occasional four or eight lane highway increases carrying capacity along more than its own length. The single-lane surface streets that branch off in every direction have a vast amount of otherwise unused carrying capacity, which a highway lane unlocks by connecting low-density destinations together. And which you can't unlock with mass transit because those destinations don't have the density for mass transit, even if the path directly parallel to the highway does.
The problem isn't cars or highways, it's zoning density restrictions.
> The single-lane surface streets that branch off in every direction have a vast amount of otherwise unused carrying capacity, which a highway lane unlocks by connecting low-density destinations together. And which you can't unlock with mass transit because those destinations don't have the density for mass transit, even if the path directly parallel to the highway does.
In a lot of suburbia, there are large parking lots near train stations. In theory, your point is a great advertisement for this setup. In practice, I never lived in a place where driving to the train station was convenient, but it's quite possible that is an accident. For one, parking lots have to be truly large to fit the number of people that would fit in a train car.
The primary existing problem is that high-density housing is prohibited through zoning, or made prohibitively expensive through other regulatory rules. It doesn't matter how much demand you generate if increasing supply is constrained by law. Whereas if you could fix the zoning and building codes then you wouldn't need to induce demand because demand is already there -- it's why housing is so expensive.
> There are many other considerations that need to be taken into consideration to make trains useful: frequency, right-of-way on road crossings (often a problem for light rail)
These are all density again. You get frequency by having enough passengers to fill the transit car on that interval, which you get from higher density. There is no point in sending a bus to carry one person to one house, it might as well be a car.
This is also why right of way and bus lanes are the wrong way to think about it. If you don't have enough density you're going to lose regardless and all the bus lane is going to do is make the traffic worse, because people can't take the bus if it doesn't go where they're going when they're going there and then you're just wasting a lane. Whereas if you do have the density then you still don't build a bus lane because instead you build a subway.
> In a lot of suburbia, there are large parking lots near train stations. In theory, your point is a great advertisement for this setup.
That's trying to have it both ways. If you have to drive to the train station then you have to buy a car and insure it and unless the parking at the train station is free you're now paying for parking. At this point people start wondering why they're hoofing it up to the train platform and paying for transit tickets and waiting for the train instead of just driving the rest of the way to their destination.
To fix this you need more people to live within walking distance of mass transit. Which is to say, you need to build higher density housing or allow mixed zoning so people can live closer to where they work.
Usually, it's because
1) the highway to their destination in the city center has too much traffic, and the train is faster, and
2) there's no parking at their destination, and no place to build it at any kind of affordable price.
Just look at Washington DC: tons of people commute by car to suburban train stations, pay a monthly fee to park in the big parking garages there, and then commute the rest of the way into the city center by train to work in government offices.
Cars and infrastructure for them is heavily subsidized so building more if it (giving free stuff away) induces more people to use it.
As car infrastructure has a cost which car drivers don't cover building more if it is very expensive for everyone else that's why we shouldn't want more if it.
How does demand for public transit produce it? I mean public calls for more transit have been loud for many years and US politicians have taken that as opportunity to tax more and produce garbage transit construction project that enrich their friends and fail to change the situation (see the "mystery" of the US not being able to build public transit).
Existing transit lines get pushed to their capacity, or reinvestment gradually helps snowball demand
My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.
When I lived in Northern Virginia however I experienced many disrupted or very slow trips due to issues with the DC Metro.
> when are they going to install automated gates on the platforms so people can't fall into the tracks?
Since most cities can’t afford to ever build their rail networks as comprehensively as the existing road network in even a small city, we are left with bussing to build that comprehensive network. And what do you know, if you look up most cities bus networks they look pretty good and high coverage. So why don’t people take them? Its still worse than a car. A car is a direct bus on your own schedule, a bus route is a compromised route of average population and job density, might not help you get to where you are going especially for drives outside a fixed commute to a central business district. Scheduling and especially transfers can be fickle.
As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided, people are going to take cars if they can afford it, even with a shiny new light rail line or whatever is attempted. I have yet to see a project like that attract wealthy ridership that can afford choice, transit rider median demographics are working class or even at the poverty line in a lot of metros. Even nyc subway ridership is 40k income on avg, bus ridership 28k. In the most expensive city in north america no less.
Many cities, including Columbus, are expanding bus rapid transit and other bus related activities which is laudable, but to your point, and which I agree and would frame it slightly differently, the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities and so you need category changes to change habits (trams, bikes, walking).
I think we need to focus our efforts on cities like Columbus, or others, which do have the population to support rail development and solve for that and not get too worried about solving everything everywhere all at once.
Most state departments of highways and cars (they are not departments of transportation) simply don’t fund alternative means of transportation. Leadership from the top down needs to change its focus. The mantra should be the best, safest car is the one you never get in. Instead it’s “we need to preserve going from here to there in 20 minutes without traffic surprises” as if not being stuck in traffic is a Constitutional right. It’s bankrupting us and it’s bad for business and wellbeing.
You can change that by giving them their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc. That is what they do where I live.
I feel like we are in agreement. It might not be enough but it is necessary. Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this. Bill deBalsio the ex mayor of New York came on a radio show and said (paraphrasing) he can't order cops to ticket cars and trucks that are loading or unloading in the bus lane. The bus lane is NOT a business' property for loading and unloading, especially not at busy hours. I'd you must do so, do it when there is no traffic in the middle of the night.
How can we do more when we can't even do the bare minimum?
The problem is that you're proposing a new problem rather than a solution.
Suppose there are two car lanes and they're somewhat congested. You suggest converting one to a bus lane to encourage people to take the bus. The result is to make the remaining car lane disproportionately more congested, because the bus lane gets 10% of people to take the bus and the other car lane is now 105% over capacity instead of 15% over capacity.
Your theory is that this will cause enough people to take the bus to make this problem go away, but that theory only works if it doesn't. If people taking the bus relieves the congestion then the car lane is uncongested and there is no more reason to take the bus.
So let the car lane be interminably congested, you say. Force people to take the bus. Only the bus doesn't service all destinations, or doesn't run there often enough (because if it did it would be empty), so the bus is no option for those people no matter how bad the car traffic gets. At which point they're prepared to boil you alive for making the traffic worse without giving them any viable alternative to it.
You need to make their lives better, not worse, or you can't win.
From what I’ve seen in my own reading and world travels is that you have to just stop expanding the roads or working on them outside of necessary maintenance and such. Add bike and bus lanes, make the car lanes smaller (safely) and then let people sort out whether it’s worth it to drive. Finding ways to tax the ever living hell out of or zone away surface parking lots should help too.
Whenever a department of “transportation” or city/regional officials get together in a room to discuss these topics, there should be very little if any discussion about how changes affect drivers.
A couple of important aspects:
Once buses are frequent enough, people don't need to worry about the timetable and will just get the next one. Edinburgh's main arterial routes have frequent enough buses to achieve this, even if not every bus goes to the same ultimate destination. Some of the busier bus lines have frequent enough buses all by themselves.
This does mean that there are lots of empty buses off-peak, this may seam wasteful but it's a necessary component of a functional transit system.
We also have a number of "bus gates", as well as bus lanes, with cameras to prevent other vehicles from using bus-only lanes. This lets buses go through residential areas without making them rat runs for car drivers.
Buses and trams (especially trams!) can take a lot more people than cars. If everyone who gets the bus tried to take a car instead then no-one would get anywhere.
And we also give free bus travel to young people, old people, and anyone with a medical condition that means they can't drive.
A combination of a smartphone and free bus travel gives my disabled daughter a lot more freedom than she'd otherwise be able to enjoy.
The last time I went through there driving, it took almost 20 mins to go 2-3 miles due to traffic (and stop lights), obviously during rush hour. The buses were still nearly empty (I wished I didnt have to drive that day). At a non-rush hour time, it takes me maybe 20 mins for my whole trip home which is about 9 miles.
My point, I guess, is it's not always just having a free bus lane. There are a lot of people that need convincing to take buses and alternative transportation. A few of my coworkers wish they could take the bus/train, but having kids in school and other things make it a bit harder for them.
Maybe one day...
You take the bus so this goes without saying but, let's say a bus is mostly empty and has 8 people inside. If you were to put those 8 people into individual cars, you'd make the road a lot more crowded. I think a lot of folks look at these mostly-empty buses and don't realize that most cars are mostly-empty also (average 1.5 occupants / car in most of the US, honestly probably lower in the LA area due to its sheer car centricity.) But of course if you're in a car you're more likely to view another driver as "someone like you" while you look at the bus and think of it as a waste of space and taxpayer money.
That only answers where new development should go. It does nothing whatsoever for the people who already live in neighborhoods with no (useful) access to public transit.
[1] Car-only infrastructure isn’t viable economically but it’s hard to make that argument in this context because it’s the default and the costs are hidden.
It is entirely a symptom of investment. Bus ridership was found to decline in large part because the actual amount of service hours had declined as well. https://humantransit.org/2015/06/pity-the-poor-city-bus-writ...
Canada has significantly higher bus ridership than the US despite having pretty similar urban forms and it is entirely due to the difference in services provided.
Seattle has seen noticeable increases in bus service hours and ridership from across income ranges, and the new rail extensions are performing similarly well.
This is almost completely the issue.
If I can count on a bus every 10 minutes, I will take a bus. If I can't just hop off a bus and back on the next because of long time intervals, I won't take a bus because I know something will go wrong and waste a huge chunk of my time.
The political problem is that you need to keep a bunch of empty buses running continuously in order to change the behavior of people to start taking those buses more often at which point they quit being empty.
The current problem is that in most places I have lived, I can WALK between points faster than I can take a bus. It will be 40-60 minutes between buses and because those buses are unreliable I can't count on my transfer, so I can wind up with a 2 hour+ bus ride for something which is less than 15 minutes by car.
I don't get how they think anyone can depend on that. Not only is an hour between busses incredibly frustrating, if I needed to do anything past 4pm, (like I don't know... commute to work?) I would have no way back home until the next day.
When big buses stop their routes the smaller ones would start.
The key is frequency and dependability.
But in general for public transportation I think running at a loss is not unreasonable. It's nice if it's profitable, but it's ok if it isn't. Hopefully it's reducing emissions, giving people who can't or don't want to drive reliable access to their employment, etc. is still worth it.
New York City tried replacing its dial-a-ride accessibility public transit service that required 24h advance appointments with an e-hailing subsidy and blew out its budget. https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/06/22/mta-paratransit-ehailing-...
Transit systems need to be about twice as fast, comfortable and convenient as car options to be competitive, and in the US political and operating environment of the last 100 years, it's not happening. Suburbs broke two major rent-seeking dominances-- urban property owners AND transit unions. Together those actors preserve a terrible experience and the path to a car-free future is doubtful precisely because it would require overcoming those social groups in addition to solving major technical and capital problems.
Compare this to Japan, where transit is still going strong because the highways must recoup revenues via tolls.
One huge difference between the US and Japan here is parking. Having a car is one thing, but where are you going to park it when you arrive at your destination? If you're driving between two towns or smaller cities, this might not be an issue, but if you're driving between Yokohama and Tokyo, it probably is. The car is only a feasible choice if you're traveling between points where there's a place for you to park. So of course, this drives a lot of traffic onto the trains and keeps ridership very high.
This is entirely a policy choice. America subsidizes parking by requiring very high parking per place, and since they’re required to build it anyways and there is so much supply it is always free.
Japan does not subsidize parking like this, in fact quite the opposite. There is no free street parking and to buy a car you need proof of a parking spot to store it in, and parking is more of a market as a result.
In small and midsized cities, driving a car takes less time, likely 1/2 to 1/3rd the time of taking a bus.
Lastly, there’s the sense of control over personal space. When you’re on a bus, you do not control who gets on the bus with you. When you’re in a car, you have total control.
I'm not saying that NYC is actually cheaper than San Diego - I'm aware it's incredibly expensive but I think that all the cities are more similar than they are not as far as unaffordability goes
That actually really surprised me but it does make sense once thought about - goes against everything I've been taught tho. How can San Diego be as expensive as NYC?
doesn't agree with that. It says cost of living in San Diego is almost 40% lower than living in Manhattan. it pulls from ACCRA.
San Diego would probably be better compared to the Bronx, SI or Queens, maybe. But again, it depends on where in SD that person lived. Heck, you can move inland to Kearney Mesa and still find a home under $1M, hopefully. It's been a minute since I was down there.
Also, I feel that the website/ACCRA is trustworthy, but why lump Los Angeles and Long Beach together when every borough in NYC is separate? Doesn't make sense to me. Long Beach is as independent of L.A. as the boroughs are to each other.
Two ways to fix that (in general): improve one side, or worsen the other. Some measures do both simultaneously, eg. bus lanes take away asphalt for cars and improve bus infrastructure.
It's fairly easy to make a bus network more convenient than a car in a city. You can easily take measures such as dedicated bus lanes, one way streets, pedestrian areas, narrower streets + wider pavements and cycle lanes, less and more expensive parking.
The current attractiveness of public transport is roughly how attractive cars should have been. But most US cities have focused for decades on making car use more attractive. Congratulations, it worked.
Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.
I hear what you are saying but my town is more or less in accessible and a suburb to know where. We don't uber and taxi's after dark should be considered ahead of time. We have minimal mass transit system that essentially connects towns together. If we ever get train service from a metropolitan city I could see it.
Currently I see the people demanding reduced parking requirements as echoing talking points they don't understand.
No need for a car for most journeys.
New England towns used to be very neighborhood centric. Our town used to have 14 schools because everyone had to walk to school. Our schools have been centralized and now require busing.
Walkability used to be a thing but no longer. Off street parking is convenient during snow removal.
Where I'm from (New Zealand) a 2500 person town would be 1/4 acre suburban sections with wide streets surrounding some shops. eg this place:
The town was developed around walking but our modern infrastructure has eliminated the practicalities.
My only point is that parking minimums shouldn’t be thought of as universal solution.
There is even a big shared carpark for the built-up area so individual shops don't need to provide parking.
Whereas in North Adams the aerial view shows the (I assume mandated) carparks are pretty empty. I'll bet a few landlords would love to have more buildings and less carparks
Remember when you say "our modern infrastructure has eliminated the practicalities" you pretty much mean everything is designed for cars.
I'm not saying it is not cyclable. When managed to get a bike path built all the way to North Adams. The neighborhood argued against using the easement on their properties and caused a multi-year delay and 2 mile diversion of the bike path.
I'm saying that the entire environment is built around cars. The entire notion that limiting parking for apartment buildings will help housing costs is backwards. People need access to groceries all year round and if the closest grocery store is in North Adams it is too soon to worry restricting parking.
North Adams on the other hand has a really weird relationship to cars and the destruction of the local economy.
Sometime in the past 50 years some central planner decided that have Route 2 run through North Adams downtown was inconvenient. The fix was to tear down all the buildings on Main Street and replace them with an overpass and Route 2 can then run through straight through with only a couple of stop lights.
This plus the loss of factory jobs decimated the economy local economy in the late 70's. When I move to the area in the 2001 they had the highest teen pregnancy rate in at least Massachusetts.
MassMoca is a contemporary art museum meant to lift North Adams and I would say after 25 years it is showing some traction with the local economy. North Adams is the best place for housing in the area. The downtown has everything one needs including affordable housing. North Adams doesn't need to build more parking. If the trolly that used to connect Williamstown to North Adams still existed that may change my position on parking in Williamstown.
My Mom was anti-car and growing up in Florida we could do anything we needed in Gainesville on foot, bike, or bus. When we moved north to Pennsylvania Dutch country we got a car.
I'm surprised by your diligence and I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.
By removing the mandated private space for storing vehicles, you increase the public space used to store vehicles.
Maybe in Japan or Europe it's better. In the US, public transit has a far from stellar history.
Imagine telling your kid to mow the lawn, and he deliberately does a terrible job so you quit asking him to do it. That’s what legislators have been doing to US public services for fifty years. It’s the same thing with the post office, they are wretched by design.
Depends on activities, I guess, but my experience is the opposite, densely populated areas has vastly more activities available within 20-30 minutes reach especially to parents with kids.
As someone that lived in Manhattan for many years as an adult all I could think of doing was restaurants, bars, broadway shows and walks in Central Park.
There are many opinions, of course.
Subsidise what you want and tax what you don’t is pretty popular, based on what people actually do.
If a place is nice, more people move there, and then the infrastructure is overburdened? but momentum just makes things end up bad in the end.
What about finding ways to distribute the population more broadly, by say fighting return-to-office kinds of things? Maybe taxing dense populations somehow?
On the other hand, does fighting all this like colorado is doing - does it make colorado less competitive?
If anything we should tax low density, since more infrastructure is needed per person.
I live in the Boston area and commute by car. My commute by car (despite the recent closure of a lane on the most heavily trafficked road on my commute, for no reason other than to not have it) is between 25 and 45 minutes. The fastest I can pull it off by public transit is an hour, with a long tail up to 1h20m or more in case of shutdowns, etc. I’d gladly take public transit if I could even meet my worst-case commute time consistently, but the worsening of my life by doubling my average commute time far outweighs the benefit of being a little greener and not having to pay attention to driving during my commute.
In other areas of the economy we wouldn’t consider inducing demand for alternative remedies by making the way average person operates worse. It becomes quite dystopian in my opinion. For instance, one could argue that too many people are seeking healthcare rather than pursuing lifestyle changes to improve their health, due to the availability of healthcare, so we should shut down hospitals. Or one could argue that the presence of housing induces demand for housing and so we should stop building new houses while providing no additional place for people to live. That will just create homelessness and/or very expensive housing. Both of these solutions will lower demand, but in a quite painful way for many people.
To me the solution which makes far more sense is to build improved public transit and people will naturally gravitate toward it, reducing demand for roads/cars, AND their quality of life will improve. For instance, if Boston expanded the MBTA with the long-sought-after urban ring project [1], my commute would reduce to perhaps 30-35 minutes by train. At that point it would be an absolute no brainer for me to switch all my commutes to public transit.
This is a rare situation where almost everyone really can win. Easier, cheaper, faster, greener travel. I don’t see why people argue for an approach where the majority of people lose.
The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less. Do you think this will be greatly different in the US?
With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditure and the operational expenditure. Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
And more generally, everyone voting only in their narrow self-interest is not "democracy working correctly". As numerous people have pointed out above, we live in a society and not everything that society needs to function well will benefit each and every person. Democracy working correctly does not mean everyone saying "I oppose any public spending that does not directly accrue a benefit to me personally". That's a recipe for a broken society with a great deal of deal being left behind.
Have you actually talked to American voters? No, mass transit isn't directly on the ballot, but in most places, it's not a popular thing. Americans, by and large, like their cars, and really don't like public transit. The more liberal ones might give it some lip service, but they generally avoid it if they can afford to. More importantly, Americans don't want the changes needed to make it more feasible, namely higher density and a lack of free parking everywhere.
If you don't believe me about American voters, just read the other comments in this discussion.
>It's readily apparent when it comes to things like building housing
Again, people say they want more housing built, but they don't actually want to make the changes needed for this to be done. They don't want to remove zoning restrictions that prevent housing from being built in places where it's really needed to make cities more walkable and make transit work better.
>And more generally, everyone voting only in their narrow self-interest is not "democracy working correctly".
This is absolutely wrong. Democracy isn't some magical thing that produces the best possible result when done the best way. It's a product of the voters and their whims and demands, no matter how stupid or ignorant they may be.
>we live in a society and not everything that society needs to function well will benefit each and every person
If you want a society where people vote outside their narrow self-interest, you need voters who understand this and vote accordingly. If you're assuming most humans are like this, you're sadly mistaken.
>Democracy working correctly does not mean everyone saying "I oppose any public spending that does not directly accrue a benefit to me personally".
Yes, it does, if you have a population of voters who think exactly this way.
This is a question that can be applied to a lot of things, with deleterious results. Why would a person with no kids pay increased taxes to subsidize schools? Never sick but subsidizing hospitals? Not retired but subsidizing someone else's pension? Any kind of spending that you don't benefit from explicitly, directly, and instantly deserves the same question, right?
You're living in a society, the well being of the society reflects on your well being. People being more educated or healthier makes society better for you too. People having the option to take public transport to work because it's more efficient, cleaner, and cheaper (so for some it's the only option) and thus keep that job also makes society better for you.
If your logic is "pay only for what you use" then the one day when you need to use any of that "subsidized" infrastructure of services it might just cost more than you'll ever afford.
That road you ride/walk on, the park that gives you some fresh air, or the electricity that keeps your computer running were brought to you by someone who probably received subsidized education, healthcare, and public transport to get to work.
P.S. All those big fans of Thatcher's "[socialist governments] always run out of other people's money" aren't actually against subsidies, only against the ones that don't predominantly benefit them. Subsidy for the parking spot I need is good, subsidy for the public transport I don't need is bad.
Because putting people on the bus who would otherwise park their cars where the bike lane is or the sidewalk, is a good deal for you!
Also because the people on the bus pay taxes for your bike lanes & sidewalks. (If only bikers paid for the bike lanes, your taxes would probably be much higher than what you pay to subsidize buses.)
Also because the majority of people don’t bike & walk everywhere.
Also because there are rain days.
Also because we’re all in this together.
Because the cost of living in a society is helping to drive that society forward, even though you personally aren't benefiting from every dollar spent. Would that same person balk at paying emergency services, even if they aren't the ones riding an ambulance or getting help from a cop?
But even more importantly, the whole issue of cost is misplaced, imo. It's all based on millage, which ends up meaning public transport costs less than $20/year to maintain. There's no reason I'm ever going to complain about $20/year to keep buses running, and I look very questioningly at people who do complain about it. It's so small, I feel like they're making proxy arguments, or don't understand how millage works.
What population density do you need to sustain a 15 minute service from point A to point B on a Sunday at 6am? Or 9pm?
At some point it becomes far more efficient to simply provide on demand service.
Also, I assume that for consistency you would say someone who never cycles should not pay increased taxes to pay for things like cycle lanes? Do you think we should make no provision for cycling, or introduce a road tax on bicycles to pay for it?
I needed to show a passport (perhaps any photo ID would have worked, but still WTF?) to get the train from Davis to Sacramento, the trains were not particularly frequent, and that's the equivalent distance of Petersfield to Portsmouth & Southsea:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Davis,+California,+USA/Sacra...
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Petersfield,+UK/Portsmouth+a...
I'm not poor, I love travelling (and travel a lot), and I don't even have a driver's license. You don't need to drive to travel, at least in Europe.
Almost everywhere it actually works, mass transit is heavily subsidised, with tickets covering only 20-30% of the operating expenses.
Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time.
It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately?
I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty fair. But making a poor person living paycheck to paycheck come up with $40 to go to the lake with a cheap sailboat seems harsh to me (my dad and I used to go as a Kid. It was $5 then. And my dad made $20 an hour as a recent immigrant in construction).
And don't start that people that use services should pay. My tax money goes to a lot of things I don't use or even agree with.
If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".
We had one when my mom was cleaning a convalescent home as her job, and commuting 35 miles one way to do it.
My dad worked 55+ hours a week, and commuted 60 miles one way to do it.
So unless you think my dad let my mom clean hospital floors and bathrooms while we weren't low income, I'd argue you can.
Obviously it's not some keeled ocean going vessel you keep at the marina.
But let's use your version.. a tiny boy scout dingy you can lift by yourself and put in the water. Should it cost $40 to put that in the water?
To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen.
Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.
Maxi/midi scooters like Yamaha Majesty / X-MAX are the commuting vehicle of choice.
I’m glad we live in a democracy where telling people to endanger themselves for the environment is a nonstarter
This sounds like something that is very thrilling, enticing, and "Nope!" all at the same time.
And honestly as a biker taking the entire lane is so much safer than some bike lanes even. Sure people honk but they arent psychotic they will pass you by merging the lane. If you ride on the shoulder they try and squeeze by and thats where there are issues. You are also more visible to turning traffic from other directions when you take the lane.
You’re subject to fewer overtakes and have much better protective equipment if anything bad does happen.
However I’ve not been able to find any data or studies inspecting this directly. There’s some urban data but I think that can include certain motorways and high speed roads.
It is super dangerous. I couldn’t stop though because my commute was 4x as long in a car and 6x-8x as long on public transportation.
It’s a weird activity that’s simultaneously very unsafe due to car drivers but also due to the average rider themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
I became a motorbike in my late 30's and I see I am not taking risks like a lot of riders around me. I am taking ample distance between me and cars, act as if I was invisible and other users would do the most insane thing possible at all times and don't swerve around vehicles. I am even slower descending a mountain pass on my motorbike than I am riding my road bicycle.
I know from my experience driving cars at the same age that it would have been totally stupid to let 20y old me ride a motorbike.
OTOH motorbiking would be much safer with less cars on the road.
I certainly can't rule out freak accidents. However, I think that both speed and situational awareness make a difference on a bike. I tend to notice things that come into my field of vision, with plenty of time to react. In fact, I probably steer clear of things like debris and potholes on virtually every ride.
The reason why I mention congestion is threefold. First, getting hit by a car is by far the predominant hazard. I consider avoiding cars to be the #1 safety measure for cycling. If you take away that factor, then I doubt that cycling is more dangerous than driving. Second, beyond a certain level of congestion, drivers are not fully in control of their cars, but are controlled by the pace of traffic. Third, dodging traffic is the primary distraction that would make a cyclist fail to notice something like debris on the road.
I'm lucky to live in a town that has a network of bike paths, bike lanes in the more dense areas, and ample routes along sleepy residential streets. I encounter very few cars, and don't have to mix it up with heavy car traffic. Granted, living in a mid-sized town doesn't solve the car problem for humanity.
Edit: Re-reading our posts, I realized that I should clarify. "Bike" is a pedal bike in my case.
Also dangers are easier to avoid on a bike provided you are going at reasonnable speed because your own vehicle is smaller. The biggest danger is target fixation but that is something riders need to train against.
Obviously training both of riders and drivers vary a lot between countries and that is where lie most of the problem as well as considering that driving/riding is a right and not a privilege accorded to people serious enough to operate vehicles safely. I find it completely insane that some countries like the USA allows kids to drive with barely any training. IMHO before 24-25 year old, there are very few adults that are mature enough to drive safely. I also fThat is probably ind insane that a country allow people to buy, rent and drive a vehicle after more than 2 DUI convictions. That should lead to a lifetime ban.
If you follow the lane splitting laws as written, it is actually pretty safe.
It is like the stupid people who say all cyclist burn the lights. They are just so jealous they only see the one that do and completely ignore those that stop at the lights.
They say 10% of traffic being replaced by motorcycles reduces congestion by 40%. California has pretty good weather so it's probably feasible to commute by motorbike almost every day.
Motorbikes as a solution to congestion is a post-autonomous driving game.
You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.
And for context, the ranking says USA is the 36th most democratic country, which is pretty darn low if you ask me.
https://www.democracymatrix.com/online-analysis/matrix#/char...
after further looking it turns out that it was also categorized as working before 2020 and after 2020. the difference being 0.01 points. in 2020 it took a dive in rules settlement and implementation for which there is an obvious culprit: covid.
https://www.democracymatrix.com/online-analysis/country#/Uni...
I've seen representative democracy, and representative republic, but rarely purely one or the other.
Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.
and i don't mean propaganda, but teaching people not to be selfish, to care for others and consider others needs, to contribute to the betterment of society. to have compassion, remove prejudice, etc.
if these values were taught in schools, then the next generation would make better choices and they would know better and vote for better infrastructure.
Oil and car companies' futures depend on continued public support for free parking, more lanes and housing far away from destinations. It's in their interest to manipulate people into opinions that are beneficial to their bottom line, and they will continue to do so.
Come on.. you're better than that. Compassion, empathy, etc are found almost anywhere.
Do people need to be shown it could work? Yes. They don't need to thought of as deficient people.
People vote completely the opposite on things like nuclear energy, wind energy, defense spending, etc all while thinking they are bettering society.
Getting everyone consistent on those requires full on propaganda and forced “re-education” whenever people critically examine things.
a consistent vision is that everyone has a right to live their live according to their own ideas, as long as that doesn't affect others. but this vision requires an understanding that we all are contributing with good intentions.
it is the good intentions that we need to instill in everyone.
Look at the abortion debate. One side is about the rights of the woman and the other side is about the rights of the fetus. When people see the fetus as a baby, it suddenly becomes murder. There isn’t much nuance there for a compromise.
what are current religions for you? i do not want to promote a particular religion on this site, but there are options out there that you may not yet have considered.
i also believe that while peoples behavior reflects their religion, the religions do not control or limit anyones ability to examine things critically. if you are in a religious community that does that, i'd urge you to get out as soon as possible.
Look at the abortion debate
that kind of feels like moving the goalpost. just because there is one topic where a compromise is difficult, if not impossible, doesn't mean the whole idea of finding a solution that works for everyone is not possible.
i am not american, so i am observing the debate as it happens there only from the sidelines. one of the primary criticisms i see against the anti abortion crowd is that they don't consider helping parents with resources they need to raise the baby. where i come from this is mostly a solved problem, because parents, including single mothers, receive plenty of support to raise children.
but more importantly i have a problem with the major religions being obsessed with punishing people for breaking god's laws. as humans we need to concern ourselves with those crimes that actually cause problems in our society, and leave the punishment of breaking god's laws to god.
the compromise is to recognize the needs of the mother as well as that of the unborn child.
Religious leaders mostly disagree with you, and in religious societies, their beliefs are reflected in public policy.
for starters, better education will also affect future religious leaders and make them better leaders. but the religions themselves also need critical examination. examples for a better model for religions exist. we need to look at them and adopt some of their ideas.
this discussion shows how the process works. we identify a problem, look for potential solutions, and in the process we find other problems that get in the way, so we work on those problems, until we find issues we can actually fix. and once fixed earlier found issues can be fixed as well, and so on. every step along the way we are making the world a little bit better than before.
Of course, you're looking at this as an outsider who doesn't believe the religion, so you don't see it this way, and you have entirely different goals in mind. You're probably thinking about people living together in a pluralistic world or something like that, but that's not a concern to a True Believer in a religion, where anyone who disagrees with the religion either needs to stay out of the way or be killed if necessary.
i am a religious person, btw. and i absolutely believe that religion needs to change and advance just like everything else on this planet. the purpose of religion is to address the problems a society faces in its time. as our society advances, so must religion, to be ready to address the problems of a modern changing society. if it can't do that it needs to be replaced by another. this is exactly what jesus did, and the reason why he came to earth. and it is the reason why he promised to return. it is the purpose of all of god's messengers to advance and reform our religious beliefs.
Absolutely, yes, if you ask the religious people who did those things. Of course, non-religious people (or people of a different religion) disagree, but that's simply a difference of opinion.
>have you not noticed how christianity has changed over time?
It's changed in many ways, and depends on which group of Christians you're looking at. Are you looking at the Mormons, the "supply side Christians" that are popular in American mega-churches, the rather liberal Presbyterians, or what?
>is everything religious leaders and people do in the name of religion today backed by their holy scripture?
I'm pretty sure it is. You can interpret that scripture an infinite number of ways, so they always seem to find some way of supporting their claims.
>there is room for improvement.
"improvement" is your opinion only. For them, your idea of "needed changes" are anathema.
>this is exactly what jesus did,
Jesus specifically said (if you believe the quotes in the bible are true) that he did NOT come to replace anything. Of course, the teachings attributed to him are quite different from the religion he claimed not to be replacing. And of course, there's no real evidence to support any of this, either his existence, the words claimed to have been said by him, the previous religion the people in that region followed, etc.
Jesus specifically said that he did NOT come to replace anything
but he did come to reform. with the sword.
there's no real evidence to [...] his existence
historians beg to differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
and as for the words, well, the bible is authentically almost 2000 years old. so someone must have said the words that the people in the bible report. of course, given how the bible was written it is hard to find real evidence for that. so i am not faulting you for not believing it to be real.
to me that doesn't really matter. whether religions are of divine origin or a fantasy, they clearly have a strong influence on the world, and therefore we must subject them to criticism and to reform if they want to keep their relevance in the world.
alternatively, it's time to look for their replacement. it is possible that jesus already came back and the majority of the world missed it.
Why do they need to stay relevant? If you're willing to accept they're fantasy, then it'd be better for everyone to read Lord of the Rings instead. At least it actually promotes wholesome values and thinking, unlike the Bible which promotes rape, slavery, and genocide. The god of LotR is consistent, whereas the god of the Bible seems to be narcissistic, sociopathic, and worse, schizophrenic (somehow going from directing his followers to commit genocide, to later reproducing somehow and then promoting peace and tolerace, but only sometimes).
And at least with fantasy epics, everyone knows they're not real, so no one is setting up theocracies based on their interpretations of them and committing atrocities to support these.
they don't need to stay relevant. reform is what they need to do if they want to stay relevant. otherwise they will soon stop being relevant. however as long as they continue to have a strong influence, we need to keep an eye on them and look for their replacement
If that sounds ridiculous to you, it’s not. It’s what all of the other religions that don’t stem from Christianity think of it.
This is why “education” will not fix any of this. There are very fundamental rifts in what the truth even is.
the legitimacy of the bible or of christianity has also been confirmed in the koran as one of the religions of the book.
i agree with you that this book and others are not suitable for our modern day society. hence the need for reform or replacement.
but the interesting part is that the replacement has been announced in the bible itself. in it jesus states that he will return.
and in the past 200 years some people have made the claim to be the return of jesus. it is now up to us to investigate these claims and find out which of these, if any, is genuine.
the primary goal of education here is that everyone needs to learn and understand that they need to critically investigate and search for the truth. all of us. and that search is not done as long as there are conflicting ideas of what the truth is. so we need to keep searching.
It’s not shifting any goalposts at all. All it takes is one example to show how the idea fails and that’s what I provided.
education means teaching people that it is desirable and beneficial to cooperate, and that it is necessary to put aside our differences in order to achieve that.
you assume that current religious doctrines trump any hope of achieving that. but i beg to differ. every religion in its core is based on love, and therefore any form rejection of non-believers is already a failure of the core beliefs of every religion.
and for every claim that their rejection or hatred is backed by their holy scripture, we can find another member of that same religion who disagrees. i have been participating in interreligious dialogue and i know that peaceful coexistence and cooperation among religions is possible.
The divine teachings are intended to create a bond of unity in the human world and establish the foundations of love and fellowship among mankind. Divine religion is not a cause for discord and disagreement. If religion becomes the source of antagonism and strife, the absence of religion is to be preferred
The establishing of the divine religions is for peace, not for war and the shedding of blood. Inasmuch as all are founded upon one reality which is love and unity, the wars and dissensions which have characterized the history of religion have been due to imitations and superstitions which arise afterward. Religion is reality and reality is one. The fundamentals of the religion of God are therefore one in reality. There is neither difference nor change in the fundamentals. Variance is caused by blind imitations, prejudices and adherence to forms which appear later, and inasmuch as these differ, discord and strife result. If the religions of the world would forsake these causes of difficulty and seek the fundamentals, all would agree, and strife and dissension would pass away
Yep.[1]
The governor is _trying_ to build comprehensive transit in Colorado[2], but between an incompetent transportation district and the difficulties of building public transit infrastructure to serve our metastatic urban sprawl makes public transit difficult to fund over cars.[3]
Our state metro areas just refuse to accept that if they want growth they'll need density. They'd rather pave their farms because they value the taxes they get from McMansions more than actual food.
[1] https://www.cpr.org/2024/04/17/rtd-leadership-elections-cont...
[2] https://www.cpr.org/2024/01/12/jared-polis-2024-state-of-the...
[3] https://pressbooks.uwf.edu/envrioscience/chapter/14-3-the-im...
But say we have to keep that, my next question is, what's the tax haul for a house compared to an apartment complex? Cities out here will choose the former as much as they can, increasing sprawl, because "quality of life."
This seems to be an ideological conflict where some people are trying to force everyone else into options they dont want- why?
The solution seems simple. relax zoning where it exists and let people who want to live in tiny urban apartments do so, and let people who want to live in suburban houses do so too.
However, the market evangelists don’t understand that just because there is a business case to do something, doesn’t mean anything should happen either. People and therefore their markets don’t operate on entropy alone. There is a lot of irrationality that is hard to quantify.
I know there are some counter examples, but I always think about the beautifully organic growth from some of America's greatest cities in the early 20th century. And how that growth would be categorically impossible today because everyone's afraid someone's gonna build a lard rendering plant next to a single-family house. Or that poor people will move in across the street. Goddamn I'm sick of selfish assholes.
Link? This NotJustBikes video suggests it is the other way around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I thought is is pretty well established that in US cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Because 10 houses need 10 of everything, paid for by taxes: street pavement, sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc. A 10 unit complex needs only one. It all needs maintenance too, starting some 25 years after being built. Most US suburbs can't pay for their own maintenance from taxes.
Street pavement is the only thing you mentioned that does cost the tax base, but how much the poor dense area subsidizes the suburbs is completely dependent on the split of funds. In many of the suburban sprawl regions of the western US, the dense urban city (e.g. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA) has a small jurisdiction and the suburbs are in completely different legal cities with their own road budgets.
>cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Definitely not well established. What you might be thinking of is poor dense neighborhoods subsidizing rural areas that depend heavily on federal or state grants for pretty much all of their infrastructure.
What is even more tempting is that all this infrastructure and right of ways are still there. A lot of these towns have the old station land empty still, some have the old station preserved even. A lot of the rail grades are either sustained by freight rail or have been railbanked as trails. Its practically turn key as the hard part of gathering all this land was done over a century ago.
Too bad rail ambition is so paltry in comparison today.
The problems that Colorado faces are transportation within urban areas. Driving to salt lake and ski resorts isn’t an issue.
How did you quantify this? Or this a purely anecdotal observation?
There's a map of official California monitors: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/applications/air-monitoring-sites-int...
They offered it as a data point. I think it's fine form to question it.
Determining pollution exposure can be done anecdotally. I've done a number of long distance bike trips, the few times where I was next to a highway for upwards of 8 hours - having a nose bleed by the end of that is pretty common for me. In that vein, recognizing air pollution effects is not necessarily that difficult. Symptoms include: sore throat, headache, burning eyes, etc.. The other side, people do get used to low level irritants, and yeah - you don't really notice its there until you go somewhere else and realize "the air smells different."
CA is fairly unique in this respect in that there are major road ways with residential close by.
I live in a small country, where a lot of jobs are in the capital, A LOT of people drive to the capital daily (20, 30, 50, even 100km one way), and complain about it... and complain how everything is there, complain about centralization, etc...
..and then also complain when a company in their smaller city wants to expand or when someone wants to build something new there. Also complain against the current companies that exist there.... even though their house was built due to closeseness to that factory in the first place (like whole neighhbourhoods that were built by workers in that company nearby, and now, 30, 40 years later, their kids want the company to close, due to a lot of random reasons).
for americans: not all tech has to be in california, other states exist too
I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer.
Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.
Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.
No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.
But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400.
I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment.
Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.
Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.
Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)
I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.
That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.
Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-c...
> I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive
Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.
Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.
My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.
In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.
Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
At the limit the optimal commute is work from home.
You don't get to imagine an alternative like "cars for everyone", because it's simply not possible.
I do agree that work-from-home should be a part of the transit solution. But not even the entire software industry can work from home, nevermind all the other industries that sometimes use computers.
nobody should live in a sprawl or rural area so far they need to commute two hours. make transit and trains fast and cheap and frequent, build opportunities in cities, and design cheap housing in desirable areas.
> Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category.
You can lament all you want, but the difference in space between a car and an apartment/office building makes the problem you're discussing completely unsolvable.
So, if you really care about making everyone richer, the only question you can ask is how to improve public transit. Anything else is pure make-believe.
Public transport is cheap for an individual, and when many people use it, it reduces traffic and pollution.
Cars have the opposite effect. They are expensive for an individual, and when many people use them, it increases traffic and pollution…
Don’t aim to increase cars on the road, it’s better and cheaper for everyone to improve public transport
Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.
By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive.
But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car.
Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month.
And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work.
The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68.
The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62.
The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true.
--
But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute.
So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out.
With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day.
With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them.
On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason.
So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)
Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains.
I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.
Segregated services for commuters are great, but catching a bus to shop/recreation/restaurants is miserable and restrictive.
As as aside, developing mass transit always has the problem of being at the whim of the next political goal (subsidised bus routes especially). Roads are physical easy to understand, so less subject to political vs.
???
Yes, roads require less 'active upkeep', an austerity government might stop funding transit but they will not close roads. However, this is more of a feature of the supposed 'independence' of car transport, not 'easy to understand'.
In addition, defunding transit would be a lot harder and weirder if it is in a form that requires actual infrastructure (metro, train, tram) rather than some stops and a schedule (bus). That's one potential reason to trust bus transit projects less.
Do keep in mind that roads aren't free after construction either; they typically require pretty significant upkeep (especially things like repaving, but also e.g. traffic signals).
Roads are public in a way that introducing a toll on an existing road is not politically viable, and maintenance issues are easier to spot.
> The double decker buses are beloved.
You haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about. See "little to no experience with daily reliance on buses for urban transportation".
I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise.
When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all.
Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.
I want good inter city rail. I want good urban railway or subway in metropolitan areas. And I want bike lanes for last mile travel.
Once we do that and reduce the demand and congestion on the roads, we can plan new roads accordingly.
Our governor adopted budget cuts that forced the public busses to run private ads, then called them an “eyesore.” People—especially poor people or families that don’t want to rely on cars — need reliable public transportation!
That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!
Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.
Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.
It’s also extremely inconvenient with three kids, especially if you’re trying to bring a stroller onto the train during rush hour. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every city with excellent public transit is also dying because people aren’t having kids.
My kids hated the bjorn and so did my (very third world communist country) foreign wife. I liked it.
The stroller also has storage space for, for example, the medicine bag that keeps my last kid alive in case he swallows <insert long list of allergens>. The stroller has everything ready to go except the baby and we don't have to don our various accessories.
Finally, as Europeans, we find those Americans and their various polyester bags (back, front, bjorn, fanny, etc) look ridiculous. One looks like a marine about to assault Fallujah. The stroller has a dignity to it that all those bags lack.
In fact, despite the smell of urine, I used to love Atlantas MARTA for its brilliant airport exit.
There's nothing inherently undignified of public transportation system. America's indignity comes from our inability to clean.
I don’t know about Singapore or Hong Kong. But I suspect rich people there drive rather than taking public transit.
Source:
>>> Differences between cities [public transportation vs car transportation times] mainly concern the magnitude of the ratio, where the car is remarkably faster than public transit in Los Angeles but _not that much in Tokyo and Seoul._ (Emphasis mine)
```
PT travel time (minutes) Min: 9 Max: 121 Mean: 52.8
Car travel time (minutes) Min: 11 Max: 123 Mean: 41.8
PT travel cost (¥). Min: 110 Max: 1290 Mean: 430.8
Car travel cost (¥) Min: 149 Max: 6138 Mean:2102.6
```
Source: Altieri, M., Silva, C., & Terabe, S. (2021). Keep pushing! Analysing public transit and car competitiveness in Tokyo. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9(2), 457–465. doi:10.1016/j.cstp.2021.02
Fwiw, my experience is same as OP. In Shanghai, it is far faster to take a Didi than public transit. It's typically a 20 minute door to door vs 40.
Unfortunately, EVs do not solve the problem of air pollution from motor vehicles: tires produce a LOT of particulates.
https://theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-pr...
100 gallons of gasoline produce ~1 ton of CO2, and it costs ~600$/ton to perform CO2 air capture.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
They wouldn't be if everyone was in a car.
Average commute time in greater Tokyo is double that: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...
Have you ever flown over Texas?
Minor note that 2/3 of Atlanta was destroyed in 1864.
So in contrast to other major American cities, it had the benefit of being mostly planned in an automotive era.
Add in the fact that the surrounding geography doesn't preclude expansion in any direction, and it's essentially a "best-case" city for cars.
Even LA became an automobile city, and it has much more substantial barriers to expansion. Now that it's built out, LA is developing a pretty expansive metro system, but it will take decades to truly cover the region. It would have been nice to at least lay the main lines of the metro when land was cheap. One thing China got right is learning from these mistakes and building out their metros ahead of their city growth.
I think mass transit can be great in the right contexts. For ATL, I think it makes the most sense in the few sq miles of city proper, not 20+ mi out.
what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.
since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?
though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.
That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of your world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)
May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.
There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.
You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.
I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)
And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.
"nicer" and "cleaner" mean the same thing, and I'll give those to you. When you create a transit system that poor people can't afford to use... you don't see poor people anymore. But they didn't disappear, and you didn't solve a problem.
My larger point is that public policy is a meta-market. We subsidize the suburbs because the majority of people like the suburbs. The net migration patterns in this country are to places like Dallas and Atlanta because that's where more people want to live.
I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.
Traffic is a hard problem. There is no single solution that fits everywhere, and you will never be able to go everywhere with your preferred means of transit. At least if you are not a major political leader such as the US president. If you are, you can just stop the normal traffic and let the peasants wait.
Of course, commuting to sit in front of a computer all day is pretty absurd. Maybe unnecessary commuting is the real problem.
Or do keep building more roads. I don't really care. If people love traffic and want to live in their car, there should be a city for them (so long as they are not sucking up federal dollars to do it). The problem is that right now, in NA, all we build are roads. Every city is a shitty carbon copy of the next one. No one is trying anything new.
Sounds reasonable until you see how the Swiss do it. Nobody said that but that's where I feel this conversation is going and the previous commenter did say 'buses first'. Probably to exploit the existing road network and achieve ambitious goals in a piece meal manner.
Colorado is half Switzerland and half Kansas. Literally everyone minus a rounding error lives on the flat part.
For that, we first need density.
And who is against more density in existing cities where naturally more density makes most sense?
More or less the same people arguing against cars.
https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/03/25/letting-aaron-pesk...
https://www.kqed.org/news/11964754/sf-supervisors-to-vote-on...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/sf-permitting-paltry...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-drivers-say-war-on...
I’ll give you that. Who else though?
It seems as if most of the rail networks in the us are built to serve people with no other alternative as opposed to providing a better alternative to driving. Speaking of airport connections it blows my mind that US cities haven’t built trains like the Heathrow express.
The rest of your statements are relative to the myriad costs of no cars and other transportation. It's narrative.
>That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!
What? Get a grip.
We already have buses and trains. Trains are great but can't go everywhere a car is required. Buses are a poverty pattern and the working class should be elevated away from their necessity rather than toward. The practical tax is such that it is racist to mean to force people into bus transportation.
Automotive transportation has always been the future. It is not only a form of wealth but a form of anti-poverty and anti-strife, as is freedom of movement that they better facilitate.
Great comment! This is an incredible way to put it.
right now i cannot even go half a mile to get groceries because someone obsessed with "not modeling poverty" decided there should be no way to safely cross the 6 lane street between me and the grocery store.
If, for example, Denver, CO had an actual functioning transportation network, it would cover a decent chunk of its neighboring suburbs, and these parts will be considered more desirable because you don't have to waste time driving in and out of Denver. And then these parts will be developed faster, providing more housing to people who don't like the hassle of driving and parking, which will create even more public demand to extend existing infrastructure.
That it doesn't happen just means Americans are stuck in the worldview of "I have never seen a functional public transit system in my life; I can't imagine why anyone would waste money on that!"
If denver built out that light rail into a network dense housing could exist in the suburbs at an extremely reasonable cost (suburbs are cheaper than downtown, apartments are cheaper than housing). Like the article says, the neighboring counties/etc just don't want this, as the HOAs/homeowners in the suburbs want to entrench themselves and increase property values.
Buses that can drive in the shoulder are better for people who already take the bus, but they aren't going to get many more people riding the bus. A light rail that actually went all the way to Boulder would help. Or a lightrail that actually went to Golden, and not only the government building 3 miles uphill from downtown Golden.
Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level
lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived without in some of those other cities for 15. without was way better. When I really needed a vehicle to carry something I could get a taxi.
Trains are slow when poorly designed. good train systems have multiple levels of express trains.
I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america.
The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cities probably dont have anywhere near the crime levels of the US) c) its easier to raise kids because decent schools dont have waiting lists and basic stuff like grocery stores are cheaper
I know it's a meme on Reddit but people living outside metropolitian areas aren't there simply because they are pro-car.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out...
As an aside, the countryside can survive without cities but cities cannot survive without the countryside. Perhaps consider your dependences before brazenly brushing them off.
Cities need farms (a few people and a few roads) they don’t need suburbs (people wasting resources, living large, and stealing tax resources from the cities to subsidize their lifestyle)
Instead, the recent trend has been that wealthy areas near downtown (e.g. Buckhead) have been trying to incorporate so that they're no longer subsidizing the rest of the city.
> I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?
You can have whatever connection to the rest of your state your community and the state can afford and decide upon.
FWiW I've very much been there, I grew up in the most remote corner of a state 3x larger than Texas with a population (then) of under 1 million.
We graded our own airstrip, 150 km of road, maintained our own vehicles and aircraft, fed and managed our horses and camels, loaded and unloaded ships off the mud flats at low tide.
Colorado has the right idea.
It must be very cultural. I'm pretty well off (as most experienced IT people are), and I travel with Bus (or a Bike) to my job every weekday. Most of my friends and coworkers do the same (I don't even know anyone in my team who drives to work).
I'm sorry about your experience with school bus - this sounds disastrous. But believe me that it's possible to improve. In my (big, European) city public transport and biking infrastructure is pretty good, cheap, and useful.
I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction.
In the end these are policy decisions that can change and I can imagine this backfiring long term in some ways.
I'm not sure if you're saying that it can't be improved or what.
It doesn't change my point, this policy easily could swing the other way if it is perceived by voters as just a stick swung at them.
That's what the article is about...
> Mr. Tafoya was working for the City Council when he heard about the plan to expand the highway just blocks from where his mother still lived. “I-70 radicalized me,” he said. He quit his job and helped organize a statewide coalition of activists and community members who tried to stop the Interstate 70 expansion with lawsuits and protests. In the end, Interstate 70 was expanded. But the fight served as a warning to leaders like Ms. Lew that future highway construction would face spirited opposition.
The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.
Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and business that is enabled by roads you see that they pay for themselves several times over.
That's even easier to measure because these gains are localized.
Specifically, though, viewing roads or metro as a "loss leader" is probably an inappropriate analysis.
Also some studies have calculated the impact on health in the society and calculated a cost to the society per km of driving a car and the money saved when doing the same km walking or with a bicycle.
If you tried to do that for merely the operating costs of many transit systems, they’d enter a death spiral.
It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and lowering infra spend.
If that's too difficult the next best compromise is a park-and-ride scheme. Put a couple stations with huge parking lots in strategic locations between suburbs, and offer good rail or subway connections to work places and shopping destinations. That doesn't enable anyone to get rid of their car, but it gives people a faster alternative to the most congested roads
Thankfully, Massachusetts has shown how to do that.
The governor has to make a public statement that he will not allow any more eminent domain takings for highways on his watch (and issue executive orders to that effect.)
After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.
They always have the option to leave the state due to a perceived reduction in QOL.
>Massachusetts is hemorrhaging people. In fact, it’s seeing the highest outmigration numbers in the last 30 years, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. A net 110,000 people moved out of the Bay State over roughly the first two years of the pandemic within the United States, most of them between the ages of 26 and 35.
>The question is: why? Rent is certainly a factor. Boston has the second-highest median rent in the country after New York City. Traffic congestion and the many woes of the MBTA have also dominated headlines.
>https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-05-30/massachusetts-res...
Our biggest challenge in MA is building enough housing capacity so people can park their heads somewhere safe every night. Since geometry brooks no compromise, it's nice that none, absolutely none of our existing building stock can be torn down for highways.
It's also nice that our inner ring cities have abolished parking requirements, which makes it easier to build more housing.
All infrastructure runs at a loss? Do roads generate revenue
You've totally misunderstood induced demand. You can build unlimited roads and they will all be used up and commutes will increase for everyone.
People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it.
This is why initially highway projects look like successes. Wow. My commute is so much better. And then. In a decade. They're even worse than they were originally.
well yes, that is the objective of building transit[0]: to get people where they would like to go. That people 'induce demand' by moving to a place where they can go where they would like to go with (initially) less friction is the system reequilibrating - from places where demand was not adequately sated[0].
Consider the opposite situation: we remove one lane from all highways, and drop the speed limits on all surface streets by 25 percent, and reduce the departures of all trains and planes by 25%. If adding capacity is bad, then reducing it must be good [for the economy and people's quality of life].
[0]If demand was adequately sated, where was it induced from? Adequately sated here might also be read as 'optimally sated' or even just 'less well sated'. Obviously there is a point where cost exceeds the marginal benefit, e.g. adding 10 new bay bridges would surely reduce mean transit times across the bay, but at a patently unreasonable cost-benefit ratio.
[1]Unless you like to argue that we are at the local or global optimum for transit capacity?
Given that personal transport is such a large percentage of the nations' carbon footprint, adding more cars detracts from that goal. From that perpsective, or a localized pollution perspective, or people wasting time in traffic jams (because NO alternative exists) - those are bad things.
I've generally lived in places in the US where driving is the ONLY viable option. By adding lanes, an ineffective tactic, instead of investing in more scalable (ie: effective) solutions - therein lies a problem.
> well yes, that is the objective of building transit
The US traffic engineer currently tries to optimize for throughput as defined by vehicles per minute, rather than passengers per minute. Therein lies the rub. Take a 2 lane road, dedicate one for buses, and it turns out the passenger throughput per minute goes way up, a single bus can be equivalent to 50+ cars.
Which is all to say, build more lanes of road for single occupancy cars has a limiting factor for when that is no longer an effective solution to the transit problem. Yet, adding more lanes is often still the only solution applied in many jurisdictions.
Imagine if there was a portal on your front lawn that allowed you instant access to downtown London. How much more frequently would you travel to London if it took you literally no time at all? All of those trips are induced demand--that is, it is extra demand that is induced by the ease of the trip. Shifting demand from one route to another is, by definition, not induced demand, since it already existed!
As an example, in Bellevue, Washington - the evening rush hour starts (and is really bad) at 3pm - there are that many people leaving work progressively earlier that there is still a rush hour of people leaving work early to avoid the big rush-hour.
I can think of counter-example where it's more clear that travel time is not an independent variable to road width:
- lanes on highways are extra wide so you drive faster. (The wider the lane, the faster people will drive, the margin of error is greatly reduced allowing a faster travel speed). If what you were saying is true, then there would be first a lot of projects to narrow lanes to the minimum in order to increase the number of travel lanes. IIRC, US highways have as a standard a 13 foot width (I might have that somewhat wrong), IIRC as well, the absolute minimum width is more like 9 feet. There could be almost 50% more lanes by narrowing, but that would reduce traffic speeds.
I'd argue the true goal of the exercise is to increase the capacity of the transit system, and that includes the proposal to not widen the roads. This isn't being done to punish drivers, regardless of how someguydave wants to frame it. The money (to the tune of a cool billion dollars) is being reinvested elsewhere in the network with the intent of increasing the number of people the city can move. The naive proposal of widening roads does work! It increases capacity, but it also makes everybody's experience worse via traffic and pollution. Let's see if there's something better!
I think the US has a big problem where SFHs are the epitome of what it means to be successful for a huge number of people. These people will always vote for policies that enable living in a single family home, even if they don’t live in on themselves and will never be able to afford to because the freedom to do so is so deeply ingrained. Highway expansion is a policy that enables single family home living as it enables people to live farther and farther from the city center so I suspect it will always see a large amount of political support.
This is also great for owners of current housing since the road network will not be enlarged to accomodate large new housing developments. Win-win.
I ultimately agree with the approach they're taking. It isn't going to be accomplished by building additional lanes and subsequently asking people to pretty-please take transit.
It does need to be weighed against the practicality of transportation to/from where your transit riders need to go. Given the vast majority of Western states are sparsely populated, transit dollars can only go so far.
> given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.
I have a notion the former is related to the latter and might even be a downhill spiral.
Is being "driven by the cattle prod" a valid excuse to hold views described as "distrusts or dislikes the government?"
https://medium.com/bigger-picture/what-is-a-motte-bailey-aad...
I don't think the prod that is in the people's hands is a good idea here.
It seems weird that the response to "a democratic government, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, has lost the confidence of large swaths of the electorate" is to give that institution more direct social control.
That seems like the opposite of what a sane system would do.
Where do you think the money is going?
> Within a year of the rule’s adoption in 2021, Colorado’s Department of Transportation, or CDOT, had canceled two major highway expansions, including Interstate 25, and shifted $100 million to transit projects. In 2022, a regional planning body in Denver reallocated $900 million from highway expansions to so-called multimodal projects, including faster buses and better bike lanes.
Punishing drivers isn't a solution. We need comprehensive solutions that make regular people feel welcome on public transit. Otherwise those people won't support public transit funding.
Impossible. Mass transit, walking, and non motorized bicycling do not mesh with individual motorized traffic. It’s just physics.
The classic individualist vs collectivist dilemma that nature presents. You have to sacrifice one for the other.
As proof, simply look at all the best places for mass transit. Individual car usage is painful in all of them. The more painful using a car is, the better the public transit can be.
> clogging the roads
The roads already be clogged and adding more lanes is not likely to unclog them. Single occupancy vehicles at the end of the day are not a solution for moving hundreds of thousands of people around - there's an intrinsic scaling problem that can't be solved by building infinite roads.
It's kinda like trying to get high speed internet by adding more & more 56k modems.
There are three main issues that need to be solved for even me, a train lover, to prioritise using them.
1) Undesirables need to be removed. I don't want to deal with beggars or other general hoodlums. Transport police need to be aggressive with stamping out these behaviours. If I have to interact with these people I won't do it.
2) It needs to be clean and comfortable. My car has air conditioning. If I have to feel sweaty and worry about touching surfaces I'm just not going to do it.
3) I like a good walk, and there are also real limitations to scaling here, so I'm less rigid on this, but it does need to go roughly to where I want to go and it needs to be frequent. If I'm out in the rain for fifteen minutes waiting for a bus I'm just not going to do it, I could already be halfway there by car.
I don't think these are insurmountable, Japan does pretty well, but in the absence of that, the stick just isn't going to work. If travel times via car doubled, I'd probably just do less and then eventually move out of the city.
edit: I can't reply about libraries due to rate limiting.
Libraries are a great example of how public transport _could_ work!
I love libraries!
The British Library is truly public. Anyone can go, anyone can enter the reading rooms. It is a lovely environment to read or work in, as they have strict rules. It is peaceful and pleasant because of the way that it's set up.
It's also a great example of how the many can come together to do more than the few. Almost no-one is able to create a home environment with that sort of atmosphere, and by sharing it we all get more.
I would love it if public transport were like the experience of using a good library.
The reason Japan doesn't have them on the trains is not because the guards have removed them, it's because they weren't there to begin with.
Here in London, hardly a quaint and sleepy village, everyone uses public transport, including beggars and hoodlums as you put it, and it's fine.
It has nothing to do with "sectors of society".
If you want me on the bus, kick off the dickheads. Making driving worse will not get me on the bus however much you attempt to manipulate me emotionally.
I don't understand your double standard, you should apply the same rules for driving and public transits.
Nope in a waymo I don’t have to smell piss snell, get begged at, have a crackhead grab my girlfriend’s hair, have another crackhead leer at my female friend, have another crackhead catcall my female friend, etc etc etc
Their examples of undesirables are about behaviors, not sectors of society.
Since we're using Japan as an example, Japan does have very strict social rules on public behavior that probably help in this area.
And I am so grateful for that.
Got some Darwin Award honorable mentions doing it.
LA has been building a decent amount of transit for how hard it is to get anything done there.
SF already has a fairly robust and solid transit network, and there have been some great maintenance projects done in the last 10 years to keep it going. Its only current major issue (imo) is the frequency, which still isnt the worst ever. MUNI is also getting new signaling to improve frequency, and a massive underground train station is going to get built at Salesforce (finally making use of a great transit hub).
BART is a great system with some much needed improvements happening currently, including new fare gates and all new signaling. They also just finished upgrading to the new fleet of cars, and came in under budget!
CalTrain is also rolling out their brand new electrified system in September, with hugely upgraded frequencies, that will make transit up/down the peninsula much better.
It isnt a ton when compared to other countries that build much more efficiently, but its still more than anywhere else in the country.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-10-26/los-angel...
California does somewhat better building transport than housing, but it's still far from enough, IMAO.
And I don't think the high speed LA-SF railroad will be finished before most who voted for it in 2008 has died...
Also the Phase II BART extension that will take BART to downtown San Jose, the high speed rail station at Diridon and to Santa Clara.
https://www.vta.org/projects/bart-sv/phase-ii
Above link says construction to start this year and take 12 years. So eventually you'll have CalTrain, CAHSR and BART as connected system.
A good point is the projects are being rolled out they way they are due to funding constraints and a desire provide ongoing side benefits, like the electrified CalTrain and the grade separation projects in the central valley. (Every over pass over the existing rail is a benefit).
That new perspective - I would now say that induced demand relates the efficiency of how well a resource is used to the cost of using that resource. If cost of use is high, then the resource is used more efficiently, and the inverse is also true.
An example, if going to the grocery store takes a literal minute, then buying one item at a time per trip is very viable. OTOH, if that travel time takes one hour, then a person is likely going to avoid that trip, and when they do make it - they'll buy two weeks of groceries at a time and be very careful not to forget anything.
In the latter case, the number of items transported per unit distance increases, usage efficiency goes up. If the cost goes down, then the number of people for whom it is economical to use that resource inefficiently will increase. That's induced demand.
Inducing demand can often be good. We build things so that we can use or sell them. A railroad should induce new trips just as a highway should.
The problem with highway expansion in 2024 in the US is that each new mile of highway gets ever increasingly more expensive and hard to build and produces diminishing returns, at high cost to the neighborhoods that will be bulldozed and divided. And these high costs are sucking the money away from not only the development of alternative modes which could be good backup options, but also the maintenance of the current network. It is not unheard of for a single highway interchange to now cost nearly $2B+: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Interchange
I would quibble here, it depends. Another example I am thinking of is toilet paper during the pandemic when it was in short supply. At that time, when we were counting squares of toilet paper and predicting when you were going to run out, people used their toilet paper very efficiently. When it is plentiful, suddenly you don't care about using every last bit as efficiently as possible.
In my previous example in the parent post, everyone is still making it to the grocery store and/or work, but it's a question of how efficient people are incentivized to be when making those trips.
When it comes to highways, I'm guessing that it's more the case that inefficient/unnecessary trips become more economical than typically enabling people to make a given trip at all. I know a lot of people are pretty lazy about planning their trips, I'm guessing there are a lot more of those people than those that cannot go to a city because it requires 45 minutes instead of 30. Just my guess there though, and certainly that is context dependent.
I like your points regarding efficiency of cost for expansion as well. Though, my point is more that induced demand is the minimum efficiency of a resource someone is willing to incur for it to be worth the cost of using that resource. That latter part, is a bit independent of the cost of building that resource in the first place, though that construction cost is still an important thing to consider.
Food spoilage does come into play and creates a lower limit on the frequency. At some point you'll buy so much you can neither store it nor consume it before it spoils. At some other point on the other side of the spectrum - the cost to travel is not worth the convenience of buying exactly what you want each day. All in all, people would indeed prefer to go more frequently for less, but there are reasons to not do so.
Thus, high frequency does give flexibility, and that is really important. It's a big reason why people like to have their own car, and do things like buy one weeks of groceries and not a full months at a time. That same flexibility is why people rationally choose to make multiple trips when they could make fewer. I do find it quite interesting to think about the various 'sweet spots' in these equations, and the various constraining factors.
Which is to say, it's profitable to go to a grocery store for very few items if you live close by. Live farther away, and it's less profitable, perhaps to the point where it's not worth doing unless you buy a lot.
I agree that latent demand becomes a factor for sure as well.
It is slow.
Denver isn't the only city on I-25. Forget Denver, I-25 is increasingly more congested because the population and trade in Colorado is increasing.
Politicians myopically prioritizing Denver while forgetting Colorado are colloquially referred to by locals as the "State of Denver".
Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes.
So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more? Trains.
In many cases people will continue to not want to share their space with someone with boobs hanging out, pee all over the seats, weed smell 24/7.
Hmm, so I guess we're just in a stalemate at this point.
1. People can stand in them, increasing vehicle density and
2. A smaller proportion of the vehicle is dedicated to the engine, fuel tank, etc.
There’s also bicycles, e-bikes and such which have higher density as well. Most American trips are not actually that far.
The intercity trains, when in a maximum length 6+6 car configuration of 2-floor trains, can carry over 1200 (sitting!) passengers. That's as much as a single lane of road can carry in half an hour with average car occupancy (low). So running such a train every 15 minutes should give a similar capacity to a free-flowing road with 2 lanes, while needing less room for infrastructure. Plus people mostly go to the station by foot, bike or bus rather than car, which is also nice capacity-wise and pollution-wise.
Per-lane efficiency drops with additional lanes. It doesn't stay the same, and definitely does not increase.
> that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more?
Yes. A typical city transit bus can hold 40 seated people, and a "crush" capacity of about 70. Coach numbers are relatively similar give or take. Typical rush-hour max capacity is probably around 60 which is fairly comfortable.
40-60 people taking up about the space of three cars, instead of (if we're being very gracious) 20 cars, to as many as seventy cars.
If we graciously figure that when stopped in traffic each car is 15 feet (length of a compact SUV) and there is one foot of spacing between them (also gracious), that means anywhere from 320ft to over one thousand feet of lane usage, compressed into about forty feet.
Now think about how much roadway space is used when those vehicles are traveling; those cars have to accordion out to have, say, about one car length between each of them (likely more, but we're being gracious.) Now you're looking at 600 to two thousand feet of lane.
This is why bus-only lanes (either during rush hour or all day) and traffic signal prioritization for busses is gaining popularity in municipalities. One full bus erases two thousand feet worth of cars on that road.
We should be looking at the status quo as "look at how much road capacity is being wasted by single occupant vehicles."
The Green Revolution increasing crop yields induced demand for humans. Metro systems existing and building new lines induce demand, in some cases resulting in overcrowding. Building housing and offices induce demand in a location.
There is nothing wrong with improving a thing so that more people are able to do that thing.
I can understand concern about emissions without necessarily agreeing. But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.
Public parks, museums, schools, and public safety all induce demand.
You don't just get to do whatever you want. The government's job is to look after The Public and ensure that most people get what they need—not to ensure that all people get what they want.
Induced demand can be positive, yeah, but I think induced demand is more complicated. It concerns a positive feedback loop phenomena that leads to the saturation of a system beyond its intended capacity. Like more people taking the metro is good, but more people taking it than it can handle can degrade their impression if it.
If people are willing to spend an hour in traffic to go to the beach, you are basically stuck with that travel time. You can only increase the number of people that end up going.
That said it's definitely more complicated in how to article is discussing it. The article is clearly talking about a Braess's Paradox-like situation where an individual's optimal decision incentivized by changes in the system is worse for more participants than the previous system, due to anticipatory and dynamic effects. This is inherently more complicated to measure and predict.
In practice, they are public funds so it ends up being a public decision. Do people support spending $X so that Y people can obtain Z preference.
I'm off to my 1 hr commute right now, which I chose because it is preferable to my housing options near work. You couln't pay me enough to live in a condo downtown. I wish transportation infrastructure was even better so that I could live further and this is where I would like my taxes directed.
You have a 1 hour commmute because the good house you can afford is about 1 hour away. I would propose that if we (all taxpayers) added 6 more lanes to the road you drive to work, your commute would dip for a short while, more people just like you would move to the new suburbs beyond yours, that are now an (improved for them) 1 hour commute, eventually re-saturating the new wider road. Now your commute is, best case, the same, maybe a little worse, because if it gets better, more people will squeeze into your suburb. You also have the option to move even farther out, but your commute will on average always be roughly as bad as it is today because people in your situation tolerate about that level of 'misery.' (Again that's how i conceptualize the variable, not saying you're literally miserable).
Yes, I suppose stimulating another splash of suburbs out in the countryside does provide Y more people an opportunity to become long-distance commuters, but I'd say:
Surely there's some limit, right? You wouldn't say that California should bulldoze neighborhoods in all the closer suburbs in order to make I-80 30 lanes wide as it gets closer to the Bay, so that people can commute from new suburbs built 150 miles away... right? And if there's some limit to reasonable highway size, why not the current size. And if we want to further increase capacity to bring in humans to a city, build a bullet train and bring them in in a way that's more efficient than individual 6,000 pound SUVs for each commuter. That's where I'd direct incremental transportation dollars. That, or subsidize commercial development nearer population centers so that people who live 2 hours from the city have other options.
I mostly wanted to highlight that there's a trade off of preferences at play. Using your terms, Urban living is also a misery for many people. If you want to talk about Misery, listen to some Millennials and Zoomers that feel priced out of ever owning a home or starting a family.
It seems like most of these induced demand arguments I see start from the conclusion they want (dense Urban living) and reverse engineers a justification.
As you point out, High speed rail also induces Transportation demand.
It's not that increasing highway bandwidth doesn't work (it does). This doesn't preclude the idea that alternatives solutions or a hybrid can't be more efficient.
The fact of the matter is, roads and highways required a lot of space for use and storing vehicles. Space that would otherwise go to homes or supporting mass transit or other more desirable infrastructure and uses, part of the puzzle why owning homes are so expensive but of course, not the only reason why.
You can add lanes, and more people can attain the life that they wish to lead.
You're not back where you started, because more people get to do what they want to do.
It seems as if you have the intrinsic axiom that people should travel less and the fact that they are not doing this is somehow wrong. Your model is wrong.
But for someone in an inner ring suburb, induced demand means that if the interstate near my house is widened, I don't get an easier commute. I just get more pollution and more noise and the same traffic misery as before.
projects usually have a goal. especially multi-billion-dollar transportation projects. if the goal of the project aligns with the behaviour it is inducing, then induced demand is good. if the goal of the project (according to the people making decisions about funding it) contradicts the behaviour it induces, then induced demand is a bad thing and it's not going to get funded.
for a highway project, the goal isn't usually to allow more people to drive cars. it's to reduce congestion, improve safety, or to improve the flow of commercial vehicles through a corridor. the demand that more lanes induces is contrary to that goal, which is why the induced demand is a reason not to do it.
Pretty eye opening entry point on the subject
Does anyone else think the timing of this anti-thoroughfare attitude is ironic given that electric cars are gaining traction?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like enough to build a China-like countrywide rail network. Spending it on resurfacing asphalt would be criminal.
Remember that the SF to LA rail line is up over $135B and still has many years of cost growth ahead of it before completion.
Demand isn't created. It becomes visible when it looks like it might be satisfied, but that's a very different thing.
This is entirely false. I'm surprised to see it in the NYTimes. They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high
And manufacturing the renewable electricity generation infrastructure isn’t zero emissions either.
I propose small motor scooters (as is common in asia) as the solution. Cars also take up a godawful amount of space, all the time. Especially in a city. That's the real harm, the tailpipe emissions are trivial compared to the space consumption.
Snow, obviously, is not great. Cold is fine, though.
I live in Denver, ride the scooter year-round, though obviously don't go out in certain conditions.
We should be making both out of steel instead.
First, NY Post is kind of a tabloid. You gotta dig deeper. Here's the actual study: https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...
I recommend reading it. It's actually pretty well done.
Secondly, the report itself and common sense dictate that regenerative braking on EVs (or hybrids) greatly decrease brake usage, therefore brake dust. Some EVs have "one-pedal" modes where you don't use the brakes at all in normal usage.
Thirdly, tires is a different calculation. This looks like a fairly unbiased source (https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/2020/1/28/tyres-not-..., https://www.nokiantyres.com/company/news-article/there-is-a-...).
Looks like tire issue is a toss up, and it depends on what the type of tire and how you drive. The much higher torque on an EV and a heavy foot will wear down the tires a lot more, but that has more to do with driver behavior than EVs.
Also, this whole issue is kind of a red herring because tractor trailers and heavy pickups and SUVs are a much, much larger source of brake and tire dust, and overall particulate pollution.
Breaking: construction and manufacturing require energy and materials, film at 11!
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-story-of-the-embarca...
"The city adapted to the new traffic network with few problems"
I mean this. I ride transit multiple times a week. I love the experience but it requires actual investment and many cities don't do that. In general, most government in America seems unable to actually build anything. I don't think we should applaud that they're now also choosing not to build highways.
By the way, she is the daughter of Jack Lew who was President Obama’a Chief of Staff.
Bringing morality into an economic, fluid dynamics, and behavioral argument is not helpful, and the private car entitlement (which is demonstrably unaffordable and unfunded long term) is wild.
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
https://pirg.org/articles/america-cant-handle-more-highways-...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/13/we-could-never-afford...
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/road-funding-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/business/energy-environme...
This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at the very least we shouldn't deliberately make it worse by also artificially juicing demand in one of the main fossil-fuel-burning sectors of the economy (any more than we already are). Every petroleum-powered mile not traveled (and energy is to a certain extent fungible, so in principle this also applies to electric cars burning "free" solar energy) is a win for human civilization.
This isn't hippy-dippy environmentalism, just soulless Chicago economics: mispriced commodities do real damage to a political economy, and in the globalized era, there is effectively only one political economy anymore.
The conclusion people seem to draw from this is that widening the highway didn't help. This is wrong.
4 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph is still creating twice the value of 2 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph. With the 2-lane highway you were just forcing half the people to divert to other roads or to give up on their plans entirely. With 4 lanes you're serving twice the people.
But if the highway is still full it implies that there is still demand for more travel. By refusing to widen the highway further you are still forcing some number of people into a worse outcome where they aren't able to exercise the travel that they wanted.
I'm all for public transit alternatives (I personally love taking trains when I can), but the goal should be to make the public transit better, not to make the highways worse.
Adding highways creates more traffic by telling developers to put housing in the newly accessible land.
The point of building and expanding highways isn't to reduce traffic, but enable more people to go places. Zero Highways would mean Zero traffic. a $1000 toll would mean zero traffic.
Maybe what you're describing is a positive outcome?
You can't be "we can't build roads because it will cause houses to be built" and "it's a crisis that nobody can afford a house" at the same time.
Highways proscribe a particular way in which to build housing. Low density sprawl. Which results in horrible commutes people hate.
We don't need that. We need high density transit. Which results in high quality of life.
The reason housing isn't built is because cities abuse zoning laws. It's time for states to take back zoning regulations.
If I had no kids I'd love to live in a downtown high rise apartment. Really wish I had done so when I was younger. Among a lot of things I wish I could go tell my younger self to do...
I like privacy, having a workshop, chickens, fruit trees, and a garden. I like having a huge kitchen, a pantry, a meat smoker, and hosting dinner parties. I like having room for an off-road vehicle and camping gear.
It is hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head when someone tells me how much better dense urban living is. I have never met anyone IRL that would happily trade their suburban home for urban life.
Also you can have a workshop while having high density.
Suburban is probably the worst of both world for me: expensive, impractical and not even quiet/isolated enough for when you need that. I'd rather have a flat in a european city + a small rural house in the middle of nowhere than a house in US suburbia.
All this to say that we don't have to agree on what is best for everyone because everyone do not value things the same way.
Im mostly rejecting the idea that this is a "solved problem" and dense flats are the best for everyone.
It probably isnt worth trying to communicate the folks in this thread that think everyone should be forced to live in government owned flats which are assigned based on family size
I'd rather have that than spending half an hour or more driving 2 overweight kids to school twice a day, then having to taxi everywhere they want to be after school.
There is only one reason why the public agrees to highway construction: the idea that their commute will get better. But it won't after a few years.
The highway will always be full! That's induced demand. If you have a highway to a desirable destination people will build out along it until it's full. You can expand that highway as much as you want, it will always be full after a few years.
This isn't a solution. It's just a way to design horrible cities that punish drivers with stressful, unproductive, and long commutes.
You cannot win by adding highways. You can only win by not playing that game.
If people are filling up the new lanes it's because they are getting value out of it. It's making people's lives better, even if the traffic doesn't go faster (though in many cases, it does).
Housing cost does not go down with highway construction.
No. It's making people's lives worse. They could have better lives with transit.
I think you and others have convinced yourselves that this is true because you like the conclusion: that we should stop building highways. But it's a tortured argument that doesn't make basic economic sense.
> They could have better lives with transit.
Then build the transit! I am all for building better public transit! I am all for dense urban development, downtown residential highrises, mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, etc. We can do all of these things -- and also expand highways. With all the options available, people will choose what's actually best for them. If you're right, then people will stop using the highway and it won't be congested anymore. Win win!
I really do not believe in refusing to give people what they want because we think they'd be better off with something else that we're also not building.
I agree that there could be alternatives to widening highways that will make everyone better off but I rarely see all the tradeoffs being carefully considered.
The Amtrak Cascades 518 goes from Everett (Tukwila) to Renton daily. Surely Boeing should do their part, show a good example for the community and take public transportation.
In the end I told myself I don’t have to go through all that crap, so I got myself car and it very quickly dawned on me that this was indeed the correct decision and I should’ve done it years ago. The laundry list of positive changes outweighed any negatives associated with owning a car.
Only way I’m giving it up now is if we manage to invent portable teleportation devices.
But I also love good public transit, and think it's a huge competitive advantage for 2nd tier cities in the US. As remote work becomes a norm for the middle class, transit will be one of the main ways cities can lure people.
I agree that public safety is critical and that cities must take transit safety and cleanliness seriously. (And for that matter, take public safety in general more seriously - my city of San Antonio doesn't seem to take action on crime unless police are able to get there while it's in progress or if it's high-profile.)