Doesn't having a car do this too?
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2024/04/a-voters-guide...
I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.
Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.
Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.
Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.
What we should aim for is everybody is in walking distance of 5 restaurants, 1 grocery store, 1 general goods store, 1 library, 1 elementary school (but not higher level - after about 6th grade students benefit from larger schools where they can take classes different from their neighbors), 2 parks, 3 churches. Then put them in close walking distance of good public transit so they can do other things that they do in life all the time (Note in particular going to work every day is not in the above list for most!). You should of course debate exactly what should be on the list and exact numbers, but the above is a good starting point.
Agreed. I did mistype what I was thinking though. Not 95% of destinations one might ever want, but my thought was 95% of trips. Nearly all my trips are routine, either to/from office (bikeable) or supermarkets (walkable), movies/library/restaurants/misc shops (all walkable), parks/sports (walkable), basic medical care (walkable).
I certainly have hobbies/needs I must to drive for, but those are fairly occasional trips. My thought is that if we as a society make it so that nearly all routine trips can be local (walk or bike) then the exception will be rare enough that we don't need more road capacity.
The only way to achieve this is density. Urban areas.
When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
The problem is that you can make MUCH more money building huge homes than affordable housing. And people, being ultra-individualistic, believe they need the huge home as opposed to denser housing. So here we are.
What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible.
Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress.
Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable. Instead of turning people away from a good cause by telling them they can't have the life they want, let's promote walkable/cycleable communities in all areas.
You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
If you have a store and you have to service, say, 1,000 people to make it profitable you might have a store every .5 miles in the city. Maybe that then translates to 5 miles in the suburb. Well... it's not very easy to walk 5 miles. It's trivial to walk .5 miles.
Stores are one example, but this really applies to literally everything. Besides things like parks, which don't need to turn a profit.
Sure, you can have walkable suburbs in that you can walk in the suburbs. But, to me, that's not what walkable means. Walkable means I should be able to do ALL of my tasks, whatever they may be, without a car. That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever. But it's very possible, and even trivial, in cities.
"Walkable" infrastructure only really matters if there's somewhere to walk to. Sure, it's nice having sidewalks that lead nowhere, but people won't turn to them like they would in Chicago.
Agreed, but you don't actually need the same amount for the suburban demographic.
For example where my friend lived in Manhattan (and I spent most weekends) we could walk to tons and tons of bars, multiple clubs, music venues and such, in addition to stores for food/medicine/etc. The sheer volume of that can't be replicated in a suburb.
But.. it is also not needed. Ones moves to the suburb when being a bit older, less single and more parent. So I don't need to be able to walk to dozens of bars anymore.
> That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever.
Sure it's possible. Like I said in original comment, that's where I live, a walkable suburb. I can walk/bike to the office, two supermarkets, theater, daycare, middle school, movies, at least 3 banks, library, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants and many other specialty stores I'm not listing. Also a couple city parks and a state park. The only thing in short supply are bars (one brewery within walking distance) and music venues (one bar/restaurant/live music hall within walking distance). But given the older married parent demographic, that's plenty for me.
The Induced Demand observed in car traffic, also known as Downs–Thomson paradox.
Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.
Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.
That's why I brought up Texas in particular. Interstate 45 as an example is effectively at saturation. Even if you add new lanes to it, you only get marginal throughput benefits when you actually try to get between Dallas and Houston or commute to either city from the region between them. The same goes for I-10 out of Houston.
Texas has reached the point where car ownership is actually costing the state and local governments astronomical amounts of money for marginal amounts of congestion relief (that is then immediately saturated).
I don't deny that cars have a place in low density regions and I think they are great for specific uses or areas but generally I believe that cars hinder growth in any metro environment in the long term. Doubly so because car centric infrastructure is extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't use a car which makes transition at that density threshold extremely painful for everyone involved.
Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".
1. Shower at home.
2. Have a change of clothes.
In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work five days a week and never showered there (even though available). (And believe me: people I worked with would have told me if it was a problem. )
Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
Also:
3. How much you sweat depends on your exertion level: take it easy and you don't sweat as much, at least in the morning when it's cooler. (I'm in Toronto, where summer afternoons are sometimes >30C, and I've cycled home in 35C weather; high-ish humidity too.)
As much as I agree with your general point, this isn't strictly true.
For a sizable chunk of the population, sweat doesn't contain high concentration of compounds that when digested by bacteria produce body odor.
However, despite being a sizable population, people lucky enough to have this trait are in the minority. I don't know the actual percentage but among European populations it's as low as 2% and among east Asian populations it's as high as 50%. Either way less than half the population.
The rest of the population has variations of that trait and their sweat produces moderate to extreme amounts of amino acid based compounds that when digested by bacteria produces the VOCs that make up the infamous body odor smell.
I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.
Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.
Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
We could bring down the cost of the taxi by putting more people in the car, to share the cost of the driver. That'll bring the costs down significantly.
If the car is sufficiently large, we can get, say, 50 people in a car with a single driver. That should make the extra cost of the driver split between the 50 lassengers significantly cheaper.
We could go further and link multiple cars together, with a single driver up front. They will be driving on one another's slipstream vastly improving fuel efficiency which will bring down costs even further.
Imagine if we can get them to run on some sort of rail or metal track, which makes rolling resistance of the wheels basically 0. No more expensive rubber tyres that need replacing and yet again improved fuel efficiency. This will bring down the costs even further!
And you can only work in it, because no one wants to use this monster on a daily basis, so its empty and you dont fight for space. :)
There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
That's sort of the point about low probability events though, it doesn't affect the average but it has a significant impact on the individual.
How much does it depend on where in the US you are?
I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.
I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.
You live in a place with some combination of far more traffic enforcement or far more conscientious drivers than me.
All I see when I look around is a sea of people glancing up and down between the road and their phone. It would be negligent to let my kids cross an arterial road, especially after dark.
It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)
I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.
HOA? Hah!- those shouldn't be allowed, neither should home ownership generally. You really need to live and raise your family in an apartment.. taxes should be raised enough that we can phase out private home ownership.
Your children will attend a public school and understand and implement equity from an early age. They will learn to use and love mass transit, only the approved destinations are necessary.
The Party may decide that the 50% of your income you are generously allowed to spend on approved items is too much. Social programs aren't free, you know, you need to pay "your share."
“That's really too bad: your lifestyle is only possible by indebting future generations for your luxury today.”
That’s great for those who have ridden the economic momentum from high fertility rates before the 1970s, but not so fun for those being born now.
Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.
Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.
Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.
So living outside a city is not an issue, although I often wished we’d be nearer to a city.
But society has changed a lot since and everyone is scared of the beautiful outside world.
We didn't have sidewalks. That area is still missing sidewalks actually.
In some ways our beautiful outside world is safer than it was 60 years ago, in others perhaps it's more dangerous.
> They're not just about reducing emission!
Cars increasing emissions seems to be a relevant disqualifier.