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Comment by languagehacker | Hacker News Reader

I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free.

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.

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A big issue with the market argument in converting car drivers to transit riders is the respective networks operate at different scales. Think of a little neighborhood with a bus line on a road; theres probably I’m not even sure call it 20x as many roads in that neighborhood that don’t have a bus line. There is so much more built out of the comprehensive road network everywhere than there is with transit. Cities are barely establishing their cardinal direction rail transit routes today. Even living in a place as densely railed as nyc most of those routes are extremely biased in the sort of commutes they best serve (in to manhattan for the most part).

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.

It’s hard to talk about the topic at very high level but for many American cities like Columbus where I live the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well.

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.

> the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities

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.

A city next to me (L.A. area) has some dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes. Unfortunately, they dont have one of the other benefits that you mention, like banning cars in some areas. There are also connections to the train to go farther, but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city. The buses themselves are typically faster and decent, as I ride them a lot. Meanwhile, the other traffic lanes are jam packed during rush hours. It is the L.A. area, so there's just a ton of people/drivers anyway.

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 are not wrong - this is where personal, private, transportation excels. And why Culver city desperately needs a quality network of safe, protected, bike infrastructure. Cars don't scale, but bikes do.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. If there was safe and protected infrastructure, I feel a lot more people, including myself, would bike, especially with all the new e-bikes available. I will give Culver City some credit because they do have some dedicated bike lanes but they're not really protected.

When I lived in Santa Monica it was supposedly building a great network of bike lanes. That was twelve years ago…

Santa monica has the best bike network in socal honestly

Well the bar is pretty damn low. There's nowhere I'd really feel safe letting an 8 year old bike to school.

> but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city.

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.

Culver City?

Yes, exactly! Lol I take it you've been or live there? Afternoon traffic is ridiculous and even in surrounding areas like Palms and Mar Vista, which I think are people avoiding Culver City. Just way too many drivers here in general.

It will change the habits of some but it’s not enough. We should continue to build out bus infrastructure and enhance bus rapid transit especially in the ways you mention, but those efforts won’t result in the large change we need to shift away from vehicle-based infrastructure.

> 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

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?

> Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this.

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.

Come to Edinburgh and the Lothians, it's not perfect but it's better than you might think.

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.

You’re telling us that buses must be empty, because people won’t take buses, because there aren’t enough buses, because buses would be empty if there are enough buses. Can you spot where the logic breaks down?

I'm telling you that buses must be empty because if they only go along the busiest roads then nobody takes them because their route is sleepy road -> busy road -> sleepy road, and a bus that only travels along the busy road can't pick them up or drop them off. Whereas a bus that travels along the sleepy road will be empty, because it's a sleepy road which only gets one car an hour as it is. These can both be true at once because the sleepy roads outnumber the busy roads in regions where most of the land area is the suburbs.

I agree, but want to add that part of the problem here and why this can occur is because of easy and cheap parking. It’s not strictly the induced demand phenomenon but I think your point is the major factor.

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.

this entire monologue boils down to “people want cars and public transit is bad, so don’t improve it and prioritise access” which sounds a lot like you work for ford

It's not that public transit is bad, it's that if you try to make car travel worse without providing people with a viable alternative to it, you will lose at politics. And just sticking a bus lane in there doesn't provide an alternative unless the bus comes at short intervals to the places where people actually travel, which isn't compatible with the geography of most American cities, because at least one of the endpoints will be in the suburbs which lacks the density for viable mass transit.

Unfortunately we built those suburbs without factoring in the real cost of transporting people to and from them. Now those homeowners are real used to that transportation subsidy and are not happy when it is threatened to be taken away. Something is going to give, cities can’t afford it any more.

Plenty of suburban homeowners like myself are happy to never have to go into the city and have been granted this due to work from home. I personally haven’t been downtown in like 6 months. A large percentage of the population who commute to city centers from the suburbs for jobs are probably working office jobs that could be done remotely. The ulterior motives I’ve heard for RTO are that commercial real estate prices are plummeting and city revenues are plummeting because of lack of workers. If that is the case then aren’t the suburbs subsidizing the city?

That only makes the bus beat the car if theres traffic on the roads. Cities like columbus don’t gridlock outside osu football games. Highways flow full speed even during rush hour which is actually less than an hour. Its a different planet than socal traffic where both sides of a highway are moving 20mph between 3-7pm

Columbus is one of those cities where the car experience is too nice, highway system built out and roads hardly congest (save for osu football games) . Say you live in worthington and work near downtown perhaps. You will probably be taking 315 or 71 there in like 15 minutes. Even if there was a train line 15 mins walk from your house that took you to downtown, it would probably double your commute at least. Not to mention when its raining or snowing that starts looking not so nice compared to your heated car a ten second walk from the door.

You’re not wrong! What I’m concerned about is with the new developments and population increases (I think it’ll be higher than expected) we should get ahead of our transit needs before we start to have really bad problems. This isn’t accounting for “political” concerns either like climate change.

> the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well.

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.

The increase in appropriate density tends to make public transit solutions more viable [1] and you also (with good zoning practices) can make small businesses more viable too so you walk 5 minutes down the street for your local cafe instead of driving 15 minutes to Starbucks to send profits to Seattle instead.

[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.

Bus coverage isn’t the only metric that matters. Frequency is also terrible.

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.

> Frequency is also terrible.

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 just checked the bus stop near my parents' place in Miami (I'm living in NYC now). The next bus arrives in 14 hours lol. Busses for that stop run hourly between 11am-4pm.

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.

The next bus is loud, uncomfortable, slow, filled with other people you don't want to share space with, stops every 2 minutes, and doesn't go where you want. The bus is run by a government that doesn't care what you want, and probably is either more expensive than you want, or basically "free".

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.

The transit systems used to be private. They went broke competing with free highways.

Compare this to Japan, where transit is still going strong because the highways must recoup revenues via tolls.

That's only part of it. Do you mean intra-city transit or inter-city transit? Highways are used by car drivers to move within the city (or between cities in the same metro area, such as between Yokohama and Tokyo), not just between far-apart metro areas.

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.

Both, and both. Both intracity transit and Amtrak is a total joke, and if anything Amtrak is significantly worse, with some intercity connections not even having daily service.

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.

I think in such places it makes sense for a municipality to pay for Uber rides for residents, instead of maintaining bus routes.

Or have minibuses that are smaller and come more frequently. Find a few drivers willing to work after hours as a second job perhaps and let them drive smaller shuttle buses or larger passenger vans.

When big buses stop their routes the smaller ones would start.

The key is frequency and dependability.

Labor is a huge cost and these transit agency budgets are thin

I like the sibling comment idea of using AI eventually.

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.

the problem, generally speaking, is even if it reduces costs per ride, if it becomes popular it quickly becomes too expensive.

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-...

this is a problem that autonomous driving could fix more easily than the general driving problem due to the fixed route, but good luck having the bus driver union not throw rocks at your AVs

Some places are experimenting with dial a ride shuttles

To expand on that, with small and midsized cities, daily cost of transit rides vs. gas is on parity. Of course this does not include maintenance, insurance, and depreciation, of owning and driving a vehicle, but most people only encounter those twice a year, vs gas and bus fees are daily and weekly.

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.

Yes, cars are not a universal problem to be "solved". Want to live car free? There are plenty of cities to choose from - go knock yourselves out.

> As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided,

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.

The cost to redo what is there is so high that efforts for road diets are usually only a few blocks or a few miles at a time. More money need to be made available for these projects by the federal government as municipalities are usually strapped for cash.

I had a conversation the other day with someone here from San Diego - which now has the highest cost of living in the US. I briefly looked into it from a rental pov and it seemed his statements checked out.

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?

https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/cost-of-living-calculat...

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.

It really depends on where in San Diego the other person lived. A lot of people will say San Diego instead of whatever little city they live in in the area. La Jolla is probably a better comparison to Manhattan Island. The average home price in La Jolla is over $2M, which I think is closer to Manhattan. It still shouldn't be higher than Manhattan, but pretty damn close.

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.

I would assume that in LA Jolla, that $2 million gets you a medium-sized house. In Manhattan, it buys you a one- or two-bedroom condo with a high condo fee.

Theres no solid way to determine cost of living because the data are so poor. Its not like all rents and incomes are known and tabulated into a single database. Usually its journalist-statistics and not real statistic being done. Like looking at zillow prices vs what people actually pay who currently rent.

In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a lot more of it, and cheaper).

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?

My experience of the UK (resident) and the US (tourist use of public transit in both central California and the Newark-Boston strip), is that the UK system is wildly better than the USA system.

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...

The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking.

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?

> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?

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.

Who benefits from running empty buses?

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?

The point is that if you fund transit instead of subsidizing cars in a hundred different ways, the buses will not be empty

Who benefits from not having service?

The driver who ain’t carting air around. The environment that isn’t burning fuel to cart air around.

At some point it becomes far more efficient to simply provide on demand service.

But we're not comparing a bus with an on demand service, we're comparing it with no buses...?

> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?

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.

Then you must apply the same logic to public infrastructure for cars. Why would someone who only walks or bikes have to pay for the gigantic and expensive infrastructure needed for cars? Why would they have to have their immediate surrounding sacrificed to make room for all these cars?

> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?

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.

"Why should I pay for that?" crippling good policy is one of our biggest impediments in the US

Seems like democracy is working correctly in my opinion.

No, this is not a democratic process. People are not voting on these things. A vocal minority with the time and ability to involve themselves in the process ruin things for everyone. It's readily apparent when it comes to things like building housing, and in this case funding transit.

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.

>No, this is not a democratic process. People are not voting on these things. A vocal minority with the time and ability to involve themselves in the process ruin things for everyone.

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.

You're mistaking me arguing normative vs. positive. Those voters support those things because they are not forced to bear the costs.

That's how it is with everything. Running a government involves taxing, and directing funds from one place to another; something is always going to be subsidized at the expense of something else (or debt). America's voters prefer to subsidize roads and highways for their personal cars.

> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?

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?

>The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less.

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.

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.

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).

> How does demand for public transit produce it?

Existing transit lines get pushed to their capacity, or reinvestment gradually helps snowball demand

Do you consider the DC Metro garbage and its recent Silver Line extension? People in seem quite pleased with their system.

As someone who used to live in DC, and now lives in Tokyo, yes, the DC metro system is pretty terrible. How long did that Silver line extension take again? And when are they going to build more lines or extensions? And when are they going to have trains that run like clockwork every 5 minutes? Heck, when are they going to install automated gates on the platforms so people can't fall into the tracks? I don't think the DC system's drivers could possibly stop accurately enough for that to work there.

    > when are they going to install automated gates on the platforms so people can't fall into the tracks?

It is interesting that you picked this one. For those unaware, in the busiest mass transit lines in East Asia, some countries and systems are slowly installing barrier gates to prevent accidental (and intentional) falls onto the tracks. To me, Japan is special because they are trying to reduce suicides when people throw themselves in front of oncoming trains. Is that really an issue on the DC metro? I doubt at even 10% the level of Japan. And accidental falls that result in serious injury are incredibly rare. One more thing to consider: These gates require maintenance, and a lot of it. Unless your system has world class maintenance (I really mean the "world class" bit), these gates will quickly become a nuscience and disabled.

The Silver Line is fantastic. I visit the DC area several times a year to see family. Used to rent a car or pay $$$ for Uber into the city from Dulles. Last time I paid $2 on a Sunday for me and my daughter to get into the city.

When I lived in Northern Virginia however I experienced many disrupted or very slow trips due to issues with the DC Metro.

The DC Metro service, according to wikipedia, was effective transit service that has been trashed over the years by neglected - like BART. And like BART, it's hard single extension but is basically in terrible shape now.

My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.

Is BART measurably worse than 10 or 20 years ago? I didn't see anything in the news.

bart is on the precipice of going bankrupt unless it can stick more fingers into taxpayers pockets

Is it possible that ALL infrastructure issues revolve around more people?

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?

This doesn’t make sense to me. The marginal increase in infrastructure costs for each new person is less than the tax revenue they generate.

If anything we should tax low density, since more infrastructure is needed per person.

Exactly! The urban core takes in way more taxes per person than it costs for infrastructure, suburbia is the exact opposite. Urbanites are subsidizing the suburbs currently.

The problem I have with reducing minimum parking is that in rural areas it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t stop people in my rural town of 2,500 houses advocating for reducing parking requirements.

Well, today's rural areas are tomorrow's suburbs. If you want to stop the rural areas from becoming a car slave suburban sprawl, then you need to do something differently than what we did in the past. It sounds like people in your town are forward thinking.

Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.

I consider it so forward thinking as to be unrealistic.

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.

If your town has just has 2500 people then it should be 5-10 minutes walk/bike from anywhere to anywhere.

No need for a car for most journeys.

The area of the town is around 43 square miles. The houses are not near the grocery stores.

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.

Sounds like it isn't really a town except in name. More like a densely settle old farming area.

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:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcHRLi9HjNiuMsvc6

New England towns are 100s of years old. My town was considered the gateway to the west as it is the last town in the northwest corner of Massachusetts.

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.

If you are talking about Williamstown then even though it is spread out it looks fairly cyclable. At least distance-wise.

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.

The big shared car park that I presume you see is the college's parking for a theater almost any parking lot you see in Williamstown is the college's.

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.

Why doesn't it make sense? I don't see why you should be forced to build parking if you don't want to.

The problem we have in the U.K. where most housing has a shortage of parking is people assume they have a right to store a car - typically one per adult too. If their property doesn’t have a space for a car they therefore assume that means there is a requirement for the public to provide the space. That view is by far the most common view, therefore vast quantities of public space is used to store people’s private possessions.

By removing the mandated private space for storing vehicles, you increase the public space used to store vehicles.

If there is in adequate parking for an apartment building it disrupts the neighborhood. A developer does gain much money from needing to provide free parking. The incentive is to have more people paying rent and less land wasted on parking.

I don’t see how this is a problem unless people are saying you need to stop people from moving in because they want to store their private property on public land for free. Which is silly of course.

I have little idea what you are referring to. During snow removal the streets need to be clear.

I'm saying you have no more right to store your car on the street than I have to store a hot tub on the street.

Thanks I understand and agree. I suppose I read the other as well but it wasn't as clear.

Minimum parking requirements are just that: A lower bound. Which allows the property owner to choose the number that makes sense. In a rural area that might be a higher number because there is no mass transit and everyone will be arriving by car, but so what? Then the property owner will choose to have more parking spaces, because their patrons will demand them and they don't want to lose business.

It seems to me that most people will not be willing to lower their standard of traveling to the extent required by public transit in most places in the US, even if travel by car becomes very difficult. The gap is simply too wide.

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.

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still.

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.

>Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. >Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir.

If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".

A sailboat costs $500+ on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace.

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.

Are you talking about a real sailboat, or one of those tiny things that boy scouts use in small lakes that one person can easily pick up and carry?

You can buy 14' fly J sailboats with trailer for $500 once in a while, or all the time for $1000.

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?

No, I agree: a boy scout dingy should not cost $40 to put in the water. A more serious boat, however, I can understand needing higher fees to pay for whatever services are used there.

Who the heck would launch a "real sailboat" on a reservoir?

Conflating free parking with a childhood core memory, a lake trip with your immigrant father, feels a little disingenuous to me. But I think you understand the core idea: by making something cheap or free, we incentivize the activity but we spend communal resources (tax dollars, or some rival good like space downtown, or space on a lake) to do so. But we as a society get to choose what to incentivize. Cars have externalities (traffic, the space they take up, pollution, their being required is expensive for working families) that other forms of transport don’t, so people are rethinking the various ways we incentivize driving.

What’s so great about transit besides the environmental savings. Having to share space with other people, walk to the train station, put up with a train schedule, have no way to travel past some arbitrary time (midnight to 2am in most places), no way to transport large items or groceries, no way to go off the beaten path, having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. I like the idea of having public transport but not at the expense of the incredible roadways we have.

> having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities.

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.

You may be missing the point that these activities can potentially be in your backyard if you don’t live in an apartment. My kids can swim or play privately in my backyard and I still have plenty of space for my gardening hobby, bbq-ing with extended family, various outdoor games, or just hanging out watching tv in the backyard. I’ve known people who have basketball, tennis, or pickle ball courts in their backyard. Outside of very specific museums or live music/sports venues I can’t think of any activity that is available in a dense city that isn’t in my suburban neighborhood.

Like what? There are a lot of toddler gyms, sports fields, art schools, music lessons, pools etc. in the suburbs. But you can’t easily woodwork, metalwork, garden, shoot guns, fish, kayak, hike trails, raise chickens/goats etc in the city.

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.

One solution would be a large fleet of cheap electric self-driving taxis. With current pace of AI development, that could be just 10-20 years away.

Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.

The proof of concept is already here, but the technology still needs too much human supervision to be cost-effective. If you want to make self-driving taxis cheap enough for most people to use daily, the prices have to be something like $2/trip.

To recoup the billions of dollars they've invested in it, it might be a decade before we get down to $2/ride. As far as how much human supervision it takes, we don't actually know the costs of it, though the latency involved means it's not Actually, Indians remote piloting the vehicles with Playstation controllers.

Also, robocars and mass transit are complements, or should be.

or you know, trains and trams and busses.

Those have fixed stops and schedules, so you need to walk up to the stop and wait for the next arrival. Taxis are more flexible in both space and time.

I kinda feel most Americans should be trying to walk more... but also if the schedules and stops were improved people would use it far more. I'd like to take a tram or bus I just don't want to spend an extra 40+/- mins getting there to arrive with no protection from the weather. I don't particularly like taxis much but at least they figure out where you need to go without too much effort, I do drive though way more then I taxi. Taxis are more rare trips for traveling in places I don't know or can't drive. I wish we had high speed trains where I lived in my capital city, just an easy way to travel to the major cities by train would make my day. I'd travel far more often if I could then. Trains to me are the best of all worlds.

> 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.

Almost everywhere it actually works, mass transit is heavily subsidised, with tickets covering only 20-30% of the operating expenses.

I was going to read The High Cost of Free Parking, until I saw that it's 800 pages long. Did you read the whole thing, skim, or entirely skip parts? I am familiar with the general argument and feel like 800 pages is too much for a book on the subject (at least for my taste).

I listened to the audiobook, and Paved Paradise covers most of the arguments made far more succinctly.

I think you might be missing a little part of, market vs free market.

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.

When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options.

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.

If you make the bus better than driving, people will take the bus.

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...

I think to would be extremely difficult to make the bus better than driving for people that already have a car. The most obvious option is making parking expensive or hard to find but I think that would lead to new politicians before people really embrace the bus. Reality is that americans dont enjoy being in enclosed spaces with strangers, hard to overcome that.

It shouldn't be that hard to make it better (for a decent fraction of people) for specific things, like say commuting or nightlife.

It would be very hard to make it better for, say, picking up DIY supplies at the hardware store.

The hardware store probably has a delivery service, because not everyone has a van or a pickup for those 2x4s. But if you DIY big stuff often enough for that to be a factor to consider, you're probably not the target group anyway. Just like people who need to drive 800 miles without a stop every other week aren't the target group for current EVs.

Is this a hypothetical future hardware store delivery service that enables a bus? No hardware store I have seen has a delivery service. I do a fair amount of gardening, and while most garden stores (not hardware stores, dedicated stores for landscaping and gardening) have the capability to deliver, it is always a very expensive service ($50-100 for a trip of less than 5 miles).

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.

Home Depot and Lowes (the two largest chains in the US) both have delivery. Home Depot also has rental trucks, as does UHaul (trucks and vans) if you need to self-drive the product and decided to not own a car.

The local lumber/building supply companies also usually have delivery, though they can be harder to deal with than a consumer-oriented hardware store.

> it is always a very expensive service ($50-100 for a trip of less than 5 miles)

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.

Theres no getting past the fact that being on the bus means youre necessarily close to strangers with no recourse when they do things you dont like. This is a pretty big problem to overcome in the US. The bus needs to be obviously much better than driving to get people to switch when they already own a car. Just a little faster/more convenient/cheaper wont cut it.

It's fine that you don't want to be next to people, but then you need to pay for that privilege. It's not sustainable otherwise.

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.

> It's not sustainable otherwise.

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.

That's how it is for many in Europe.

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..

The problem is that we live in a democracy and most American voters dont want to live in europe. They mostly want a single family home in a low density suburban area, which makes public transit difficult.

I think the argument is a little different. I’d say the best framing of it is that we have sacrificed every other method of transportation at the altar of personal cars. Building for cars is what has made every other option shitty.

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.

When I lived in Denver this GenXer gladly transitioned to light rail as it freed up an hour a day that I would have spent concentrating on driving on more relaxing things like reading. I miss it.

Respectfully, you should be arguing for more density so you don't even have to travel by rail that much.

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.

I’m in favor of both.

If boomers want to continue driving, they can. Just make them pay for what they use. Work out the real market value for the space and charge for it.

My response to that sort of argument is yes indeed you are 100% correct in theory and 100% wrong in practice. It's the result of framing everything as a moral argument and shooting for perfection. That never ends well.

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.

Yep. The same should be done for public transport.

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.

How are you coming to the conclusion that cars are paying their fair share of costs? I'm not familiar with Australian politics at all, but a quick look found that local governments pay most of road maintenance, not the fuel excise tax[1]. Another hidden cost of cars is that they decrease density of cities and suburbs, which causes all other infrastructure to also get more expensive (sewage, gas, power, etc).

[1] https://alga.com.au/policy-centre/roads-and-infrastructure/r...

You can see about half of trips are by car in for example Germany:

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.

Cars don't pay for their costs and it's not close. Fuel tax doesn't even cover a small fraction of infrastructure cost in most European countries. Building roads is heavily subsidized from federal budgets, land given for free, accident costs covered by public money etc. etc.

These transport options—more notably for cars, but everything else too—are still heavily subsidized in the sense that we’re allowing them to ignore the cost of cleaning up after them, or the cost of climate change (if they aren’t cleaned up after). If we stop that theft from everybody’s grandkids, the economics might get some people to switch over to public transit at least.

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.

The dutch use bikes a lot. Like really a lot.

Most cities in the Nordics as well as Japan. I am always amazed at the crazy weather that people will ride through in Sweden and Finland!

Similarly, all roads should be tolled.

Interesting point. Why don't you think this is true in more highly developed countries? Two example come to mind: The "seal" you must buy in Suisse, and most high speed roads in Japan are rolled.

Transit likely wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies. Even with them, it's a pretty terrible way to get around, at least in the US. The vehicles are dirty, even dangerous. There are frequent delays and rerouting. Transit is a huge target for government grift as well, from everything to projects that go way over budget and never get completed to outright scams. It's far from that panacea that it's made out to be.

Maybe in Japan or Europe it's better. In the US, public transit has a far from stellar history.

Don’t forget our automobile infrastructure gets heavy government subsidies too. Gas taxes and fees aren’t nearly high enough to pay for all the roads and parking we have.

Heck, they’re better in Russia. Marble, polished brash, chandeliers… and we’re talking the USSR period.

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.

>> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of 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.

This is a flawed analogy and I think there is a false dichotomy by framing skepticism around building more highways as inherently anti-car. I'm going to go out on a limb and say most drivers do not enjoy traffic and most residents near busy roadways do not enjoy the effects of traffic on their neighborhood. The question is what is the best policy approach that manages all people's concerns. For me, the question is how can we get people to live and work in areas where it isn't necessary to inefficiently, and very expensively, move people to and from work.

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.

> For me, the question is how can we get people to live and work in areas where it isn't necessary to inefficiently, and very expensively, move people to and from work.

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.

Yeah, I agree. Most built up areas in California are horribly planned!

I don’t think this analogy is quite correct. Driving on a particular route is not a driver’s objective like reading a particular book is a reader’s objective. The driver’s objective is arriving at a destination. The objective in driving is not a finite resource, but the multiple route options to the objective can be, which differs substantially from a library queue.

Let's consider a library with both a manned librarian and a self checkout, two different queues, same objective. Let's call the self checkout the 'highway' queue and the manned one the 'surface street' queue. Each of which could be expanded to improve throughput (more lanes:more self checkout lanes, more streets:more librarians).

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.

I believe there is way too much value judgement placed here.

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 people who freely use terms like "anti-car" always assume that the car is always the fastest most efficient way of getting anywhere... and then sit stuck in standstill on a 6-10-lane highway

don't forget driving around looking for parking for 20 mins as well

Ah, I think i just realized how to fix the analogy!

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).

I think that's a fair extension of the analogy, from which I would make two observations:

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.

I really appreciate the dialog! I find your observations interesting.

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.

In your example, replacing bulky self-checkout machines (analogous to removing road/surface parking real estate) offers a significant benefit to everyone. More room for what everyone actually wants most: books. The preference for self-checkout machines forces a cost on everyone for the benefit of a few.

And in a lot of cases it does, but the important point is that the argument needs to be framed as you've put it: how do we get everyone what the most of what they want [transportation/books]? Most cost efficiently being implied of course. Being dogmatically "anti" or "pro" anything is looking at the problem wrong.

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.

And since the self checkouts exist, there is no interest in paying to have librarians at the register, or drivers on buses; so the self checkout is the excuse for not providing a librarian, which effectively cuts off some users from checking out books at all.

If you are stuck in gridlock in a two hour commute with a soulless car that functions as nothing more than an appliance, then sure, that sounds like my personal version of hell. But for me “The driver’s objective is arriving at a destination.” couldn’t be more of a false statement.

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.

> an empty highway

The best way to have an empty highway is to reduce the number of people who are driving because they have to do so.

How much are you willing to pay for all those resources and space you want to monopolise?

Same minus the highway (sports car != touring car). Well, Except that I have it: depressed man driving a new MX-5 in the south of France, driving is one of my last joys in life together with food and sleep.

From my personal experience, growing up, people used the term induced demand in a strictly negative sense to describe road expansion plans. Then I lived in cities as an adult where new metro lines opened. The effect is real! Whole neighborhoods would get much more foot traffic after a new station opens. In this case, most people would describe the induced demand as positive.

I agree, "induced demand" is a word phrase to rally behind.

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.

> 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.

These are all good points. High-density housing makes trains easier. Conversely, trains induce demand for high-density housing near the stations. 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), right-of-way vs cargo trains (long-distance trains in the US), ...

> 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.

> Conversely, trains induce demand for high-density housing near the stations.

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.

>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.

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.

The 100 people can transfer at a traik station into 10 different convinently timed buses.

s/word/weird. Phone keyboards...

You can think of it in terms of simpler concept: "giving people free stuff causes more people to take free stuff".

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.

i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown.

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.

>> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown

But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?

> 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.

This just isnt true. Every metro area in the US has highways. Including the dense ones. NYC and Chicago are not concrete hellscapes

You say NYC and Chicago has enough highways to fill demand so there is no congestion? I am fairly certain that isn't true, I've read so much about congestion problems in NYC at least. Adding enough roads to fill all demand leads to concrete hellscapes, that was the point, the guy I responded to thought it was reasonable to add roads until all demand was satisfied.

No one is saying no congestion. The idea of highway expansion is to allow more people to travel while keeping congestion about constant. NYC and Chicago's highways allow the massive suburban areas and the tens of millions that live in them to semi conveniently go to the city. To do that with trains would require driving to a commuter rail station and then transferring to the metro to get where you want to go. Suburbanites just wouldnt go to the city in that case unless the destination is easily accessible on the commuter rail

Chicago and NYC have huge commuter rail networks that accomplish exactly what you’re claiming is impractical.

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.

Commuter rail only works if you want to go within a mile of one of the stations. No one wants to take the commuter rail and then get on another train. The people who use commuter rail in Chicago at least all also have a car that they use to get to the city whenever they’re doing anything else since the train only goes to the business area

I think that detractors of transit believe that eliminating cars is the goal like it’s this black and white thing. It’s either 100% cars or 0% cars. “If I can’t do 100% of every possible trip on transit, it’s not a good investment.”

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.

I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and have never heard of anyone transferring to cta after taking the metra. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s not scalable solution that people will buy into. The vast majority of people will just drive in that case

I did it every day getting to Ignatius from Beverly, and again getting to my office in South Loop when I lived in Evanston. One advantage the Metra often has is better parking, so even if I could end-to-end take CTA, I might park and ride a scheduled Metra instead. (Doesn't matter anymore, I live a short walk from the Green Line).

Your anecdote versus mine.

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.

The advantage of cars isnt that they are faster than public transit. Its that they are private space and usually a bit more convenient. Arguments about speed will convince no one. The loop buses are doing horribly fyi, the BRT is a complete failure in terms of ridership.

I think the counterpart question to that is, given how space-inefficient cars are, how many actual people do you enable by adding that car capacity, and how does that number compare to even basic public transit options?

If it means way fewer people took alternative means, then perhaps it is not good. Particularly when OP mentioned the original goal was to reduce travel times - which the widening did not.

"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."

At some point when you clear out all the actual places to go in order to add parking and make it easy to drive there, people realize there is nothing down there and stop going, at which point you just have what happened to Detroit.

My experience is the opposite. The harder it becomes to visit a locale, the less likely I become to visit it. Eventually I decide it's not worth visiting at all.

Have you been to downtown Detroit lately? It's beautiful (and easily navigable by car anytime the Detroit GP isn't going on...)

That the roads were added based on a request to make it quicker for existing commuters, not to get more commuters there in the same amount of time. And that if you’d used that time, space and money for a dedicated bus lane, a train, a tram or whatever, you might have done better on both adding to the number of people downtown and making it quicker to get there.

the dream is that if i already have to drive downtown, if only there were more parking spots, i could always find one easily instead of driving around searching. but this often won’t happen.

I simply would have refrained from writing multiple paragraphs about how good induced demand is until I understood the answer to this question.

Of all the times I have been downtown, I have never once wished there were more cars. A downtown without cars could be so much better.

Except that having more car traffic induces more pollution, more casualties, and more time spent unproductively (you can do other things on public transit, or get exercise commuting by bike), whereas more book reading has few downsides.

Investments in infrastructure is investing in huge net benefits for all members of society and the economy in the broadest sense possible. That's why it's been an unparalleled success all over the world to invest in roads for motorized vehicles and invest in electrification. Getting energy and goods to where they need to be as fast as possible is beneficial to all, no matter how you structure your government or economy.

Roads are not only for commuting.

It's not really a benefit to all the ecosystems destroyed by suburban sprawl, or all the people affected by the externalized costs of that economic activity. Unrestricted growth may not be so great of an idea in the long term.

>> you can do other things on public transit,

What can I do on public transit that people don't do in a car in traffic?

Read a book? Watch videos on a phone? Play videogames? I've done all of these on the train before. I wouldn't dare do these while driving.

I assume

> 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.

Browse your phone? Everyone does that in public transit, drivers don't do that in cars. You could read HN and post messages for example.

> drivers don't do that in cars

See the problem is that they do, right before they drive into a pedestrian or stationary object.

Don’t? Probably nothing. But they shouldn’t be reading or using their laptops while driving!

Get harassed by homeless? Or just men in general, if you’re a remotely attractive female (using the broadest term available as it certianly isn’t restricted to what we’d appropriately call “women”).

Do you think public transit is full of drunkards? Its mostly tired people getting to or from work, those doesn't harass a lot of people. When its late and its a lot of drunks on public transit sure, but not on normal commutes. Columns I've read from women getting harassed its mostly about dance floors at clubs, not commute trains, when people aren't drunk they mostly keep their hands to themselves.

Where do you live and what is your background that you think the only way a man might harass a woman is if he is drunk?

That is true everywhere, drunk or affected men are overwhelmingly more likely to harass women than sober men are. Subways here in Europe are full of pretty women, they don't go out of their way to take a car any more than men are, when I count gender on subways there are usually more women than men.

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.

Grocery stores are different because bums aren’t allowed to sit around there waiting for a woman to come by for them to harass. If they were, I’m confident many would object.

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?

A crackhead grabbed my girlfriend’s hair on the subway recently

Tell me, anti car fundamentalists, what are the odds that happens in a waymo?

That happens because the transit isn't used by enough normal people. The need for security personnel doesn't go up with more normal people, when you have the levels Europe has the crackheads etc gets removed from the trains.

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.

you can reduce the per capita rates of incidents by adding normal people, but even in a city like NYC where most households don't own a car, the subway still has an unacceptable amount of non-violent incidents like the aforementioned one (yeah yeah yeah i know the likelihood of dying on public transit is less per mile than driving)

There is extreme denialism here about the problems of public transit in the United States. Crime goes unpunished. Homeless addicts run amok.

Large groups of people are simply not safe, as police are not empowered to remove problem people.

I agree with the urban planning bias here, especially the idea that you shouldn't build more roads to fight congestion because more people will use them, and thus they'll reach the same saturation point anyways. Mind boggling that this is an accepted principal, and one that is completely disregarded when it comes to any form of transport that isn't a car.

Roads are incredibly low capacity for the value we get out of them.

Perhaps a library vs a commercial book store might have worked as a better analogy. The queue theory part of it I think breaks down a lot. Induced demand is not only about queue theory, but also choosing between options.

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.

Yea but really the choice here is "go somewhere vs stay home", not "car vs bus". Highway expansion leads to more people travelling because bus service is non existent in the vast majority of the country. Of course some people need to go where theyre going, but on the margins more people will go to the city or what not if traffic is lower.

Good points. Yeah, as the cost of travel goes up, people make various decisions: bite-the-bullet, find alternatives, delay, consolidate, and/or go without. As the cost decreases, the incentives to find alternatives, delay or consolidate trips goes down (which means roads are then used for less important reasons and less efficiently - why go to the grocery store once a week if you can go every day in half the travel time?)

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.

Absolutely agree. I really think the concept of induced demand with highways is misleading. Im not even sure reducing traffic is the point of highway expansion, pretty sure induced demand is literally the goal.

> 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!".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#

What you are missing is that every time we widen roads to allow more car throughput we are making every other type of transit and mobility less attractive. Busy streets with big parking lots are unpleasant to walk or bike along, so people just drive to their destinations instead, which makes the street even busier, louder, and smellier starts this cycle all over again. Every time a road is widened or a new parking lot is added the city also becomes less dense, making getting anywhere useful more time consuming. Drivers have to spend longer on the road to get where they want to go, public transit gets more expensive as routes get longer, and walking and biking quickly become too time consuming. There is just a maximum density that cars can support which works totally fine for suburbs but breaks down in denser cities. Personally I think Park and Ride programs are the most reasonable compromise.

People always seem to forget the bus takes advantage of having multiple travel lanes and faster intersection clearance too. City of LA is starting to take advantage of their wide roads and put in bus only lanes, something they could easily do with some paint since the pavement already exists.

You don't need more than two lanes to dedicate one to buses.

Books are not a finite resource? Obviously there is a finite number of trees but there are enough for it not to be a bottleneck. Land on the hand is a finite resource, especially in large, urban cities. There is no way to design a highway or other car infrastructure that will meet the demands of any reasonably sized city without dedicating an unreasonable amount of land to cars. Anyway, Ray explains it better than I could and he agrees that the term is bad: https://youtu.be/za56H2BGamQ

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