The kicker: I'm not even in a suburb, I live in SF!
All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better. At least NYC has a plenty good enough train system.
I end up WFH anyway, largely because it's annoying to get to an office downtown every day.
In the last half decade we've seen the opening of the Salesforce transit center, the Chinatown subway station, the Van Ness BRT, the Caltrain Electrification Project, BART expansion to Berryessa, 800 new BART cars, and hundreds of smaller projects.
You can see a full list of SFMTA projects at https://www.sfmta.com/sfmta-projects
Chinatown subway station is great. Better connects SF residents and it's exactly what I want to see more of in SF.
- Van Ness BRT? That project started in 2003. It took 20 years to complete. Not exactly the poster child of solid transit improvements in SF, except if you ignore how it got there.
- The Caltrain electrification project is great for the environment, but doesn't help SF much as far as improving transit availability. It's slightly faster, at least.
- BART expansion to Berryessa is a bit separate from SF transit improvements, which is what I'm talking about.
- Salesforce transit center is fine and has good vision, like expanding caltrain downtown. But doesn't add a massive amount of transit availability that wasn't already nearby (yet).
I live in the Richmond, so I've been positively affected by the improvements to the 38/38R (although I still would strongly prefer a BRT system) and the new-ish-but-not-really 1X. In the next year I can expect transit improvements to the 1 and the 5/5R. Pretty much every bus I take on a weekly basis has seen transit improvements since I've first moved here.
- Stops moving after the light mean Transit Signal Priority works better. GPS on the bus can "hold" the green light for longer - https://www.sfmta.com/blog/green-lights-muni
- Red painted lanes decrease private car use in bus lane, so bus can go faster
- Speeding fell by 80%, so fewer accidents mean transit is more reliable
There have been a few different projects on different sections of Geary over the years. The bus now runs 10-20% faster depending on direction and variability decreased by 25-40%.
Check out pages 15-19 of https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
But wait, I have to ask: why do you live in SF?
Practically anywhere else in the US is cheaper and better for people who want to drive.
Very few other US cities are better for people who want to get around by other means.
But my comment was a bit tongue in cheek - it is mostly political dysfunction. Of course the US could find people willing to work for less than $400/hr or whatever, but there is an incentive disalignment.
People underestimate how new much of the Western US is. For example, Dallas only began expanding in 1891 after the railways were built, LA was a small town until the 1910s-30s era expansion, modern San Jose only formed in the 1960s-70s after absorbing dozens of farming towns like Alviso and Berryessa, Seattle was mostly sand dunes until they were leveled in the 1900s-30s).
Because of how new it was, most of the cities are planned primarily with cars in mind - especially after the 1930s era Dust Bowl Migration and the 1940s-60s era economic migration. Same thing in much of Canada and Australia as well, which saw a similar postwar expansion.
> before the NIMBYists stepped in
NIMBYism in SF only really began in the 1970s onwards.
While NIMBYism is now elitist, it initially started out as part of the civil rights movement ("urban redevelopment" was often a guise for razing historically Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods in that era - for example much of Japantown/Fillmore) as well as the early environmental movement (eg. Sierra Movement, Greenpeace), which was opposed to profit motive compared to modern YIMBY+Greentech model.
The better question is, have you ever seen a kid crying in the back of a bike?
I cringe when I see parents with their kids on the back of their bikes. Super dangerous.
It’s a bit like saying “sure, a cinema that refuses to sell more tickets than it has seats leads to a better cinema viewing experience, but only if you remove price from the equation!”
Cost is explicitly being traded away here to facilitate improvement in other areas. That's the whole point of implementing the toll/tax!!!!!
But again, dismissing the improvements because costs go up is like dismissing the reduction of water pollution because “now only people who can afford chemical disposal can operate a tannery next to the river.”
The latter in this context would be to e.g. build higher density housing so more people can feasibly take mass transit, as opposed to congestion pricing which is just a tax on people who can't afford the artificially scarce housing in the areas where mass transit use is feasible already.
there are some who the charge would be significant (long paid off reliable used car) while others who it is a drop compared to the othes costs (new luxury car)
They do that really well here in Barcelona. 21€ a month and you can use all the transport you want in the city, all modes. Why would i want a car what's expensive to own, park and maintain and I can only just it when I've not been drinking?
Problem is, making transport good costs money and a lot of effort. Taxing cars is easy and brings money in.
Well, congestion pricing would make driving better. (And perhaps make busses better, too, since they use the same roads.)
Except that SF public transit is actually pretty good. East-West transit works extremely well via buses and MUNI depending on whether you live in the northern or southern part of the city. Bay Wheels is extremely affordable and makes a lot of sense for short trips in a city of SF’s size. BART has its limitations but it also generally pretty good. Sure, SF public transit could be better, but I’d actually argue the problem is that driving in SF isn’t hard enough - many people have great public transit options but refuse to use them because we haven’t forced them to reprogram their car-brains.
Same happening here in my smallish (~300k peeople) capital of a small eu country...
Too many cars? More expensive parking! Less parking! More expensive parking! Less parking! More pedestrian-only streets, and even more cars around that...
And the buses? They suck. The city is roughly star-shaped.. want to go from one leg to another? Well, you have to cross the city center. Sunday? Half of the buses don't drive then. Something happening in the city center? Good luck with getting on the last bus after the event is over, and no extra buses added. Dog? Not during "rush hours" (6.30-9:30 and 13-17h). AC? Barely any. Two buses needed? No time sinchronization at all. Train-bus time sychronization? haha good luck. Need to go just a stop or two? It's expensive. Need to go across the whole town? It's slow, even with empty streets.
But hey, parking will be made even more expensive!
edit: also, a student? You get cheaper transport! Here's a line for you to wait to get the transport card: https://www.zurnal24.si/slovenija/pred-okenci-prevoznikov-pr...
Could raise a fortune for public transit if we enforced traffic laws and used that money.
Can we compromise at some number greater than 0? I've lived here for more than a decade and don't remember seeing anyone getting pulled over by SFPD.
They don't have to be everywhere. They have to be at least _somewhere_ and start visible enforcing. People need to know that they might get away with running a red light a couple of times, but they WILL be caught eventually, and there WILL be consequences.
> and there's research that shows that removing parking around intersections reduces pedestrian fatalities.
I read a lot of the urbanist propaganda research, and most of it is pure crap. Bad statistical methods, poor significance, P-hacking, biased tests, you name it.
If you consistently enforce the law then the fine revenue falls below even its current level because consistent enforcement reduces violations, meanwhile costs go up because the additional enforcement has to be paid for.
The existing system is the one cultivated to maximize revenue by setting speed limits below the median traffic speed so that cops can "efficiently" issue citations one after another as long as there isn't enough enforcement to induce widespread compliance. This is, of course, dumb, but the alternatives generate less net profit for the government.
This is called daylighting, and it’s a very good idea. The rest of your comment was just snark, and I assume you know that road improvements don’t have anything to do with law enforcement, but I just want to emphasize that daylighting is going to be a huge positive for the city.
Or maybe people will drive at 99 mph to get the best value.
This is transit 101 level stuff.
Second, implementing safety by modifying the physical environment is vastly superior to anything else because it scales. There's no longer a need to educate every single person who will use every intersection in the city every day on how to do it safely, nor a need to ensure x police officers are present. The physical design creates an environment that is safe by default.
Likely it’d not raise a fortune and the ticketing revenue would mostly offset the cost of enforcement.
trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.
almost not worth discussing honestly. this has become yet another factionalized holy war over the last decade.
I’m all for public transit myself, but after 25 years in San Francisco, I’ve only seen it decline. That sentiment isn’t just mine—many longtime SF residents share this cynicism.
As a consolation, I must say that e.g. NYC was also handled miserably, say, in 1980s. Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine, even outright enjoyable here and there.
I think that SF will also shake off its current insanity, and will turn back into a flourishing, living, and thus changing city.
It takes time, thoughtful voting (of many, many people), and likely a bit of luck.
Well, except for the people being pushing in front of subways to their death, or lit on fire in stations. The subways stations are getting dangerous enough, even in "not bad" areas, that people are avoiding them.
And banning cares from the city completely would be moronic, causing incredible harm to pretty much every aspect of it. I'm not "so worried about safety" that I would want to destroy the city, and your putting forth a strawman argument implying I am adds nothing to the discussion.
Getting rid of cars entirely may not be practical, but it is objectively true that many more people are killed and injured in car accidents in the same area over any particular length of time you could name compared to subway crime. What is the objective reason why subways are "scary" but cars aren't?
For that matter, what is the objective source for such statements as that stations are "getting dangerous enough" or that "people are avoiding them"? Is any of that backed up by actual crime statistics or ridership numbers, or just sensationalized headlines?
This is not true at all. Some ways of increasing throughput for both: Build higher density housing which allows more people to take the bus/train and reduces congestion even for the people who still have to drive, add more lanes that either can use (e.g. by building parking garages and then converting street parking to travel lanes), make streets one-way on alternating blocks (reduces congestion at intersections), build pedestrian catwalks above busy intersections to reduce pedestrian-induced congestion and keep pedestrians safer, etc.
> but many more people can be moved with a bus.
The "can" is really the problem. If you do the numbers for a full bus the bus seems very attractive, but then to run buses to everywhere that everyone travels in cars without an impractical amount of latency, many of the buses would end up having only one or two passengers -- and sometimes none -- while still requiring three times the space and fuel of a car and on top of that requiring a separate driver at significant expense.
So instead there is no bus that goes to those places at those times. And since you can't get those people on a bus, they're reasonably going to demand a solution that doesn't make their life miserable when they have to drive a car.
> trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.
Trains (especially subways) work great in the areas with the population density to justify them. But now you're back to needing higher density housing.
Imagine a group of non-rich people who decide to carpool because of congestion pricing and end up spending half the time in traffic every day and as a result get more leisure time.
Considering that a parking spot in Mahnattan costs close to $1K per month, most of the cars are driven by people who are not poor.
And spy on everyone, all the time, because now it “““has to””” track every vehicle's every move — Total Information Awareness
By moving out of crappy overpriced cities?
Which is the same reason housing in places like SF is so expensive. Artificial scarcity as a result of zoning rules that make construction prohibitively expensive or otherwise inhibit it from increasing the housing supply.
Houston metro has more people than SF metro, so why does housing cost more in SF? Because there is less of it.
Edit - I see you've changed your message. How does a bridge over water add road capacity to a peninsula?
You can also create more housing, so people are closer to their jobs and have to travel fewer miles. Manhattan has higher density than most places, but it also has more people, and would you be surprised to learn that the zoning in most of NYC no longer allows the buildings that are currently in Manhattan to be built almost anywhere? So as a result you can't create more of them and people who might like to live in Manhattan instead live in the suburbs around the city and drive into the city in a car.
You can also create things that aren't roads, like subways, which then allow you to remove cars and buses (and bus lanes) from the roads when it becomes viable for more people to take the subway, which reduces road congestion.
https://www.sfmta.com/reports/average-daily-muni-boardings-r...
Then use tolls to improve and expand the mass transit services instead of only ever catering to the single-person-car-commuters.
(ofc it takes more than ontime performance to sell people on mass transit, needs to be a safe environment at all hours of the day -- even if I can take BART into the city in the afternoon, if I don't feel safe taking it back at 10PM then I'm just going to drive both ways, to say nothing of the choice to stop running trains at midnight)
This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.
Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.
They're building up more and more Bus-Only lanes here in the Twin Cities, and as a daily bus commuter, the change has been fantastic. Really makes a big difference in speed & reliable bus timings when the bus gets its own space to operate.
Transit can never compete with cars on speed in well-designed cities.
Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives.
This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. (https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...) (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fe...)
Speaking of "wasting life in buses", did you know that the average LA / Chicago / NYC driver spends 85 to 100 hours a year just sitting in traffic? Food for thought (https://inrix.com/scorecard/)
No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me.
> This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars.
Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).
Even if that is true, average commute time is just a single factor. There's also health, cost, comfort, the environment, safety. Comparisons using a single metric are simply invalid.
> Go on, fact check me.
Ok.
Couldn't find any reliable data, could you cite your sources? What I have found is a few sources with wildly different data, e.g.:
- [1] puts Houston at 42 minutes, very different from your claim of 28 minutes.
- [2] claims the average time for the EU is 25 minutes.
Most of the sources I've found are based on self-reported data (surveys) so I do not put much weight on them. Do you have any sources that provide reliable data?
[1]: https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commu...
[2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
Houston is 28 minutes. So an average Houston citizen gets 20 more minutes every day. In reality, it's even more because Houston is way better designed for daily chores: buying groceries, getting kids to chess clubs, etc.
It can work out to a whole _hour_ a day of extra time compared to London.
And they will live in FAR FAR FAR better conditions. In their own house, with plenty of space.
So yep, dense cities are a folly and need to be refactored (by demolishing).
NYC in general also have plenty of different neighborhoods with very different lifestyles and vibes.
For certain high frequency routes in Chicago, I never minded sitting on the bus to get across town. At least once I got off I didn't have to find a parking spot. Now wasting life waiting for a bus is another story.
Yup. Wide roads, plenty of parking, distributed industry and office space, low density.
> That's not what well designed looks like.
It is more flexible, people-friendly, enables better living. So yeah, "well designed".
Waymo taxis deserve the same level of subsidies. It won't be happening any time soon because it'll be a death knell for transit, and will leave thousands of city employees without work.
And that’s leaving aside all the issues with our of control transit budgets or crime on public transit in many cities.
This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.
(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)
> And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
Yeah. And it sucks. The distributed nature of the US cities gave people far more economic opportunities than in Europe. This resulted in faster economic growth (and still does).
Bullshit. You are a victim of propaganda.
In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people. So with 10 buses per hour, you get just 180 people per lane per hour. Even at peak loads (200 people per bus) and a bus every 2 minutes, you get 6000 people per lane per hour.
Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math. Transit slowly consumes lives and increases misery. All it's good for is to move people to "misery centrals" (downtowns) where pretty much nobody really wants/can live in comfort.
The average car occupancy in the US seems to be around 1.5. How would increasing that be easy? You would have to somehow convince the majority of the population to change their habits, that does not sound easy in any way.
> A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people.
In the US, a country that has invested heavily into car infrastructure at the expense of public transport. All you're saying is the underfunded public transport in the US sucks. We all know this, but it has no relevance to public transport in general.
> Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math.
The simple math here is the number of cars goes up linearly as population increases, which is unsustainable. Meanwhile, public transport only gets more and more efficient.
What would buy you much is mixed neighborhoods (aka: the 15 minute city - everything you need for your daily life is within 15 minutes walking distance), because this will eliminate many trips. But mixed neighborhoods work better with higher density - because a supermarket in a low density place cannot be within 15 minutes walking distance.
Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.
And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.
> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.
This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
> This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Yeah. They are waaaaay too good at allowing people to move, so urbanists wage an all-out war on them.
Transit has this inherent problem: it HAS to suck. You can't realistically build a fast public transit network allowing easy arbitrary point-to-point trips. It's just mathematically impossible. So transit does what it can only kinda-sorta do well: move people to Downtowns from dense living residential areas.
By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space (both while moving and while parked) to be compatible with even a moderately dense environment. You need some kind of rationing or metering.
The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars. There are more parking lots, which means less density, which means fewer people can choose to live closer to work, which means more cars, and so on. (Transit does the same in its own favor, of course. Transportation is quite fundamental.)
It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out. But it works quite well with the levels of density in pre-war "streetcar suburbs", like those built around the Key System in Oakland. I think the most reasonable solution for post-war suburbs is transit most of the way, and cars (robotic or otherwise) for the last mile.
And? Buses also take a lot of space. A road footprint of a bus is equivalent to about 15-20 cars (because it has to stop often). It pays off when the bus is fully occupied, but outside of rush hours, cars are a more _efficient_ way to use the road space.
Cars force city designers to build in a people-oriented way, rather than optimize for bike lanes.
> The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars
Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
> It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out
It works nowhere. And yes, I lived in very dense areas (Amsterdam, NYC, Moscow).
> Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
I appreciate the value in being able to move freely, but cars also constrain in many ways. They force more building to happen at the wildland-urban interface, to devastating effect as seen in the Palisades fire.
More importantly, current zoning and parking regulations make modern America very far from a free market. Not as far away as the Soviets were, but definitely nowhere close to reflecting people's true preferences once all benefits and costs are factored in. I doubt cars would be nearly as central in a market where single-family zoning was abolished and the full externalities of driving were captured.
So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest.
However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput.
Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination.
This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)
The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)
The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.
The problem is that transportation system quality matters more for a lot of people. The problem ends up as people owning a car for the last mile - that is from the rapid transit to their porch. And once they own a car, the calculus changes - you already incure the cost for the car.
So what you need is a reliable way to get door to door - and that requires more than slapping down a few light rail tracks. It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable. In the end, building such a system requires the (political) will to regard public transport as a common good infrastructure like road that gets paid from taxes and is not considered an enterprise that (could potentially) make money. In the end, this could also be made free, but free alone will not make that happen.
This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math.
> You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car.
When most people have a car you have to compare it not to the amortized cost of owning a car but the marginal cost of driving one you already have.
The majority of trips might be suitable for public transport but then people have a car because it's such an inconvenience to go to Costco and carry back everything you buy there on a bus, or they occasionally go somewhere the bus doesn't. So they get a car and then the insurance, tax, depreciation, etc. are all sunk costs and to get them to take the bus instead of driving themselves it has to beat the cost of gas.
Which it can, if you make it zero. Which in turn increases ridership, allowing you to justify more routes, which reduces latency, which causes even more people to take mass transit. By making mass transit more attractive instead of making driving less attractive.
> It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable.
Or you can just handle 85% of the cases that would have a justifiable amount of ridership and then let people drive a car or get an Uber in the 15% that would be mostly disused, instead of leaving it how it is now where people drive the majority of the time.
But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners.
Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
"bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public. Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget. Meanwhile it would save the public money on net, because collecting the cost as taxes has lower overhead than operating a parallel fare collections infrastructure. And it benefits drivers by giving them exactly what they've always wanted -- an incentive for other people to use mass transit:
https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favo...
> Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it, so the amortized cost of the rail line becomes $30/trip because you have to pay for all the same fixed costs with fewer riders. But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Whereas if you set the price to zero, the actual cost per trip which is now being covered by taxes comes out to $4/trip, because at lower cost you get higher ridership and more usage to spread the fixed costs over. Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
> I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost? Subsidies are the thing where they're not paying the full cost.
Moreover, you want the same incentive for everyone -- if a free fare would get someone at the 70th percentile income to take the subway instead of a car, give it to them so they do that.
The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it. Means testing is effectively a scheme to impose high marginal tax rates on the poor.
Nope. A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).
> Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget.
So would be giving everyone a (cheap) car.
> Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it
Good, then don't build it! Easy peasy. Price is a GREAT signal. Subsidies, hidden fees, misplaced incentives and other crap lead to suboptimal outcomes.
You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
> But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit
Great, we need exactly that.
> which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Nope. People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
> Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
Nope. It just doesn't. Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit). Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
> You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost?
I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
Richer people should pay the full cost of rides. This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
> The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it.
That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
If you have a city without any mass transit, there will be traffic congestion. Beating the "stuck in traffic" time for a car is not hard at all. Beating the car's time when there is no traffic is harder, but an express train can certainly match it, and anyway how do you intend on preventing traffic congestion in a city with no mass transit?
> Price is a GREAT signal.
Price is a great signal for incremental costs. If you're going to burn a gallon of gas, another gallon of gas has to be produced, so you only want it to happen if someone is willing to pay the incremental cost.
It works poorly for fixed costs, because the price then deters usage even though the fixed cost is fixed and deterring usage saves nothing. This is why you should charge for gas but not for roads or for occupying otherwise-empty space on a subway car.
> You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
The argument is that transit is good because it allows density and density is good because it makes more efficient use of a scarce resource (land).
> People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
The buildings in the downtowns are not going to cease to exist. Something is going to be in them.
> And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Houston Metro has a population around 8M. NYC metro is 20M, is the largest in the US, and the NYC government has been corrupt and incompetent for decades.
In particular, one of the things Houston does well is to have less restrictive zoning than most other cities, which allows for mixed-use construction that in turn lets people live closer to where they work. But that's something that helps regardless of what you're using for transit.
Moreover, the level of traffic in Houston is not good. In spite of their zoning advantage their average commute is worse than the national average.
> Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
There is nobody dictating how many people will live in a city nor should there be. You can tell from the geography of the continent that a city in the position of New York is going to be a massive port, and so it is. Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago are big cities for the same reason. Nevada is mostly desert so Nevada is mostly empty; Las Vegas metro was created from the combination of cheap power from Hoover Dam and proximity to California with legal gambling and it's three quarters of the state population. Inland states are disproportionately farmland.
You don't get to decide where the beachfront property is. The question is only, given that 38M people live in California, how are they supposed to get around?
> Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit).
That's where the traffic congestion is!
> Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
This is the BS "induced demand" theory. What it's really describing is that if you have an otherwise desirable area (e.g. it's within an hour of the ocean) but the local government is mismanaging the area so it's full of traffic congestion or crime or excessive bureaucracy or whatever else, and you do anything whatsoever to make it not suck as much, more people are going to move there.
Fixing the problem doesn't induce demand, the demand was there the whole time and was being suppressed by mismanagement. And you get the same result from anything that fixes the problem. The only way to prevent more people from moving in there is to keep the place a hellscape so people don't want to move in.
Compare this to building a subway in Wyoming where nobody lives and the presence of a subway is obviously not going to cause a population boom there, which is what would happen if "induced demand" was actually a thing.
> I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
The issue is that $20 is the amortized cost, not the incremental cost. The bus costs the same to run whether it has 5 people on it or 40, but if it has 40 then the cost per passenger is 8 times less. And if it currently has 10, the incremental cost of making it 11 -- or 30 -- is zero, so that's what you want the fare to be. Which would in turn cause more people to take the bus and lower the cost per passenger.
> Richer people should pay the full cost of rides.
The incremental cost is still zero regardless of your income level.
> This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
It does also apply to cars, but we usually get it right for cars -- the roads (i.e. the fixed cost) are free but you pay for your own gas.
> That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
The proposal is that you'd have free mass transit, paid for by taxes, which are predominantly paid by rich people. There is nothing prohibiting you from buying a car, which would cost the same as it does now, all it does is make one of your options less expensive than it is now.
Reducing your choices can only come from making one worse than it is now, so that it takes that option off the table. Making an alternative cheaper or more convenient can't do that -- you still have the option to do the other thing and then only reason you wouldn't is if the new option is going to make you better off than the status quo which is still available.
If that increased to 100%, you wouldn't be able to park anywhere without paying a lot, and getting anywhere would be super slow.
It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
A classic case of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma .
I think they're intended to be anti-"getting killed by a car" measures. Traffic fatality statistics speak for themselves.
I'm also pretty far out and not all the trains run that far.
As it stands they're already maxing out and exceeding (when they're late) the max speed for the class of rail they have.
Some of the inner stops might get a few seconds faster with better acceleration but that's about it.
The grade crossings are also kinda f'd. At full speed you can be in the middle of the train and see the arms still be in the process of lowering at certain crossings. That ain't safe. Faster won't make that better.
Diesel-electric trains take a LOT longer to accelerate compared to a modern EMU, so much so that Caltrain's electrification project shaved 23 minutes off the SF to San Jose local trip, from 100 to 77 minutes.
Videos [0] [1] make the acceleration improvement pretty clear.
There will definitely be some improvement from electrification but I don't think it will affect median travel times much and the affect on average will mostly be from reliability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_...
I live in Boston and I could see it working here, now that the T is on a path to reliability.
While it would be great if money wasn’t a concern, you don’t need to plaster the city in a grid of metro lines. Careful usage of bus only lanes has really made a difference in some areas of Boston that I frequent.
Edit: The link above is only for heavy rail - Boston’s numbers are better if you also include light rail, which is a significant part of the system:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_light_...
The Subway, buses, trams, etc, etc are all way better for passenger density.
Instead the city added a per-ride fee, which will be covered by Uber/Lyft, making it useless as an incentive for ride reduction, https://archive.is/MtRgo
> Riding in a taxi, green cab or black car will now cost passengers an extra 75 cents in the congestion zone... The surcharge for an Uber or Lyft will be $1.50 per trip... cars for services like Uber and Lyft make fewer trips and are more likely to idle in the zone. In 2023, taxis made an average of 12 daily trips, while ride-hail vehicles made an average of six.
If you don't understand working poverty, you won't understand how devastating only $3kpa really looks like on a low wage. Lot's of people right now can't afford that, so cost-neutral alternatives have to exist or you price people out.
"The issue arises from a 1977 agreement between then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman Jr. and the state of Virginia. In the so-called Coleman Decision, Arlington agreed to drop its opposition to the construction of I-66 in exchange for certain promises, including a four-lane limit, sound barriers, and truck and car-pool restrictions."
https://www.arlingtontransportationpartners.com/services/i-6...
https://www.arlingtonmagazine.com/i-66-construction-protests...
A Long Road Bitter Fight Against I-66 Now History https://archive.is/oo06a
Arlington Board United In Opposing Wider I-66 https://archive.is/NMhbH
Got to make sure the multibillion dollar oil companies, executives, and shareholders get their fucking nut.
There's an easy solution to this: have ticket writers waiting at intersections to paper all the cars who do it. It's not like they can drive away. NYC used to be really good about enforcement, and it worked extremely well.
It doesn't solve traffic, but it does help stave off gridlock and keep intersections free for bus lanes to operate normally.
Meanwhile everyone blocks the box and there are cars without even plates on them.
It's like those pictures of Luigi Mangione being perp walked in Manhattan with 20 cops and FBI agents behind him. Imagine if those officers were on the beat or enforcing traffic laws instead. That would make more of a difference in our communities than a photo op ever will.
They just don't do anything like that in socal. I've not once seen a cop take radar in socal. Not once. I can't even remember the last time I've seen someone pulled over in socal but it happens probably three times in my view whenever I go elsewhere to visit.
As someone who doesn't live in Manhattan I wish there was a better way to go basically anywhere in New York without entering Manhattan. Every single road, bus, and subway goes through this super dense area.
Like why do I need to go through Manhattan to get from Newark Airport to Flatbush? (Unless I have a car, then I can go over the Verazzano, but in a bus/subway/train? It's all via Manhattan.
when the vast majority of daily trips are into and out of that dense core, that defines the most economic routes for building transit. beltways/bypasses exist to relieve the already saturated surface roads of the core. you don't see the same thing with trains because it's not necessary. it sucks for the passenger to transfer between three or four different trains to get from EWR to flatbush, but the rail infrastructure has plenty of capacity to accommodate a few extra pax on that route.
I think it would be a lot nicer to have urban life/transit built around many smaller cores with everyone living much closer to work. but in aggregate, businesses want the largest hiring base, and people want the best jobs they can get in the area.
It's an unnecessary conflict - just add some transit that doesn't revolve around the city center. This reduces the number of people just passing through the center and creating unnecessary stress, and it make transit possible for more people.
Manhattan is like a black hole - it sucks in every single transit from as far away as Massachusetts. Try to travel by public transportation from virtually anywhere nearby without going through Manhattan. You can't and it's unnecessary traffic.
I think that this is prevented in large part by local capture of state politics by leading cities. NYC money basically owns NY politics so NY will never neglect let alone screw NYC to the benefit of Buffalo and Albany and whatnot. Repeat for other states that have one or two big urban economic wells that run everything.
investing more into cities like buffalo would also be great, but I don’t think they could realistically become a first choice for people who enjoy the benefits of a large metro area.
If you removed all the through traffic, leaving just people who want to stop there, that change alone, would improve things dramatically.
IMHO, they would need to push higher than $50 to get drivers to blink.
So you need pricing which will make a few people reconsider driving, who were on the edge of using public transit anyway.
Driving for a commute isn't really possible in Manhattan unless the company provides parking. And those parking spots are reserved for executives. This group of people are price insensitive.
Passing through Manhattan can frequently save an hour of time in traffic elsewhere, those commuters will just see the fee as a higher toll.
All three major airports never tied directly to a subway, opting instead for airtran systems which create complexity and cost time. I suspect this causes a base level of traffic.
Personally I find it weird that SF’s public transit is so under water it needs bail outs from car drivers. Yet it also doesn’t serve the car drivers with any compelling equivalent.
i got a fine in London for doing this by mistake. i didn’t even block traffic, i just went into the intersection without the cars in front moving. bam, fine. lesson learned.
It's better this way that the law penalizes what you can control (your own vehicle movement) as opposed to what you can't (the cars in front of you)
Maybe it will work in NYC, but in the Bay Area I can’t help but feel like it’s a regressive tax because people who already have the money will continue their ways and pay but people who are on a budget now have to wait longer to get anywhere in the peninsula.
SF has a ton of folk coming from quite a ways away and it can easily take 2x the time if using public transit. Outside of rush hour Caltrain can take 1.5-2h, and Bart from Berryessa isn’t quick (plus contending with BART delays).
Sure, we could means test every toll and fee, but there's a different solution for that already - taxation.
There's a secret third option to congestion, which is you disallow some number of people at a time from using the facility, and people really don't like that one.
Dig deeper and you find it's a housing problem anyway. People can't afford to house themselves/their families in the cities they toil in. Build housing near jobs and there's less need to commute in from Tracy.
It's not actually that hard. You fund them through general taxes rather than fares. Then how much you pay is proportional to how much money you make -- even a flat tax does at least that -- as opposed to the largely fixed amount that corresponds to the amount the average person has to move around in order to live an ordinary life, which is approximately a head tax.
There isn't space in the current design. That's the thing you spend money to fix. Build subways in high traffic areas -- the ones where there is currently congestion -- and make them completely free to encourage people to use them (and eliminate the administrative cost of fare collection to both riders and government). Build more dense housing near the subway stops so people are traveling fewer miles, removing traffic from the roads -- this one doesn't even cost money, just stop prohibiting people from doing it with zoning. Build pedestrian catwalks or tunnels in high traffic areas to prevent crossings from congesting the roads and road traffic from killing the pedestrians. And yes, you can even add more travel lanes -- it's not always the thing you need but it sometimes is.
You don't have to rate limit the resource when you actually build enough of it to satisfy the demand. There exist roads that aren't congested, the demand for them isn't infinite.
That’s exactly what it is. The richer you are, the better it is. Now people on a budget will pay taxes to subsidize infrastructure that’s only accessible to the wealthy. It’s a massive scam perpetrated by the rich for the rich.
Why stop with roads? Why not have congestion pricing for schools or hospitals or access to water? That way we only have to build enough infrastructure to serve the wealthiest half of society.
Huh? The revenue from congestion pricing is used to pay for public transit. The rich people pay extra to subsidize transit for everyone else, which is exactly how things should work.
I prefer the framing that drivers should fund transit because drivers do use transit: NYC would be complete gridlock if transit went into a death spiral and straphangers switched to cars. Even if they never set foot on the MTA, drivers see a lot of the benefit of it existing.
Define "pays off". Who benefits, who suffers?
- watching people have to squeeze between stopped (mostly single-occupant) cars blocking sidewalks on Broome or Canal on their own pedestrian light at rush hour, and realizing that it would be impossible for someone with a stroller or mobility aid.
- seeing packed busses miss light cycles because the intersection is blocked
- seeing ambulances or fire trucks with sirens blaring stuck in gridlock
“Pays off” to me means that transit users and pedestrians are no longer regularly inconvenienced by the fact that more people choose to drive than there is frankly room for.
Cars blocking intersections and/or sidewalks can easily be solved with automated traffic fines - that's how Zurich and London does it (the former without any congestion pricing!)
Many cities also have special lanes only useable by some classes of vehicles - e.g. busses (or sometimes taxis as well) - I guess ambulances could also use those.
In fact, congestion pricing doesn't solve any of those problems, it's just an irrelevant (as in, it doesn't solve any specific problem directly) regressive tax to "drive less".
Rush hour traffic is so gridlocked that cars often can’t know if they will clear a light cycle, so fining would effectively just reduce to a stochastic congestion tax.
NYC does have some dedicated bus lanes, but adding more means reallocating more space from cars which is a political no-go without reducing the number of cars first. That’s what congestion pricing aims to do.
Fining for blocking intersection isn't stochastic. You simply don't enter the intersection if you're not sure you'll be able to exit it. You wait at green light. Simple. That's how people in London and Zurich drive.
Congestion automatically reduces the number of cars (because they literally can't get into the city!), without congestion pricing. If you reduce 3 lanes to 2, then... 2 lanes will be blocked, instead of 3, so there will be complete gridlock & congestion - for cars. But not for busses! So public transport will work, even thought private is gridlocked. Combine this with (1) - empty intersections - and busses can drive very well!
But somewhere like Atlanta, Dallas, etc.? Absolutely not. It's just a vice tax levied on poor people who are already not happy about having to commute long drives into the city center to find work. They have no alternative. They can't spend 3 hours each way on buses. They can't afford to live in the the handful of walkable blocks in the city with $3k+ rent that effectively serve as a little Disneyland for affluent residents who want to larp like they live in Brooklyn.
Build the public transit BEFORE you hit the poors with a giant stick. Because I guarantee you that hitting them with that stick is not going to effect change in any way, as these people have next to no influence on policymakers already.
Then stop digging deeper and improve the car infrastructure instead of sabotaging it.
But SF doesn't have public transport. This just makes driving expensive, without any real benefit. We already do this on 101.
https://www.iliveinthebayarea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12...
At minimum, all MTA executives should be payed off before any such measures can be considered.
That may be because NY/NJ have bridge tolls into the city that are often much higher than those in SF.
This falls solidly in the "it sounds good but causes significant negative unintended consequences" bucket of regulation, like the rest of NYC's many regulations that led up to this point.
Congestion pricing is a way to price an externality, which is usually a good thing compared to externalities being free.
Congestion pricing, like many fees and regulations, is a regressive tax, because the overhead seeps into all goods and services and it impacts the poor most of all and the rich not at all.
[1] https://blog.tstc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/how-car-fre...
17$/hr * 50hrs/week * 52weeks/year * 2 earners = 88.5k/year
We have always paid a congestion tax on goods and services, it’s just been in the form of paying workers to sit in traffic.
Not to be that guy, but from a European standpoint the clear answer is: If you make driving cars into the big city expensive, if you still wanna get people there you need to give them other, cheap, more space-efficient ways of getting there. Public transport, bus lines, trains, stuff that Asian megacities do as well.
Or you can build even more lanes and parking lots, because that worked out great and was without any consequences so far /s
I am not saying I trust in the success of NY congestion pricing, but that has nothing to do with the measure (it is fine) and everything to do with how how half-assed it might be implemented. But elsewhere similar concepts work just fine. But hey, so does healthcare..
So yes technically less traffic, but not really enough to make any meaningful difference IMO. It is still noisy, it is still congested, it is still polluted, it is still hard to cross roads, it is still hard to get anywhere on a bus in a predictable time, it is still very frightening to be a cyclist (and indeed it is still common for cyclists to get killed or badly injured), and it is still better to get the tube.
I view it more as a toll now really, rather than an attempt to dissuade people from driving in. If they were really serious about trying to stop people driving in, the price would not be £15/day but it would be £500/day or more.
As it stands at the moment, even on the weekend (yes, it runs on the weekend even though there is not much congestion e.g. on a sunday afternoon) if I want to go to central London with the family I will drive. It costs £15, but the price of a return tube ticket is £6, so x2 for me and the wife and it is already £12, then add in £1.75 for the bus tickets to-and-from the tube station (so £3.50 per adult return = £7), and you are already at £19 to use public transport, vs £15 for the congestion charge.
So it is approx 20% cheaper to drive, AND it is more convenient, AND it is quicker, AND it is more comfortable.
Like I said, if they were serious about it being a deterrent they'd price it way, way higher than £15. But actually they want to make cheap enough so that people pay it, and they get money for me using my own private transport and fuel to travel around, and don't have to pay for the running costs of more tubes/buses etc.
At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions).
In my opinion, we should primary focus on improving the standards of public transport. Safety, cleanliness, punctuality and price. I'm a car owner living 15mins drive from downtown of a European capital city, and I refuse to drive near the city because the parking is expensive, there's always roadworks but primarily the public transport is excellent and comfortable.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-02-what-are-the-ma...