So its like a more expensive version of public transportation, that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
Whether its the Soviet Union trying to optimize shampoo production to create a single "shampoo" brand or a health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition, bad service, low supply and high prices
That was the exact motivation of CoNs. Guess who lobbied for them? The healthcare industry.
Depending on the state you're in, it could be anything from bureaucratic red tape to dissuade new providers to the near-literal "We will ask your competitors how much business they will lose by you opening," that gives those competitors the ability to object on those grounds alone.
In NYC we got dollar vans.
Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
> that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
Public transit agencies want to outlaw services like Chariot (https://sf.curbed.com/2019/1/10/18177528/chariot-san-francis...) because they don't want the competition.
Which is to say a mostly empty bus scales down very well. The limits to scaling a bus are up not down - a problem more cities should have.
A great example of this in action happens each year for the Austin City Limits Festival [1]. A few routes have substantially more busses during those two weekends to deal with a couple hundred thousand extra passengers.
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[1] -- https://support.aclfestival.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405461498...
This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.
Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.
Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.
One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.
And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)
That's not surprising because the public agency is mostly tax supported. Fares never reflect the true cost of the ride on public transportation.
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What about the true cost of cars? I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership, including the storage of vehicles in public spaces. The various externalities — pollution, congestion, deaths, excess asphalt — are not included in the true cost of private car ownership.
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.
Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.
It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
Sure but it's rarely free parking, and when it is, it's generally because the property owners are essentially paying for it.
I don't believe that's true.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers, that's being paid by people that want cars to be at their house or business. I suppose you have some argument that the legally required minimums might be more than necessary but generally they reflect the need as it exists, not what we want it to bed. Allowing businesses to not have to supply parking wouldn't force people to use mass transit, it'd just force them to park further away in a space not paid for by the business they are frequenting.
And parking minimums are constantly criticized for being higher than necessary. How could they possibly not be higher than necessary in a significant percentage of use cases, when they don’t allow anyone to say “we don’t serve people who arrive at my locavore socialist workers co-op by car so we don’t need parking” - instead they get the same amount of parking as any other restaurant, which is too much.
When the cost is being borne by every single tax payer, then it's functionally equivalent.
Cars are easily one of the most subsidies goods in America. It's absolutely absurd how many trillions of dollars we dump into making automobiles work, even if they make no sense.
Which city is more natural — New York or Houston — and why?
Urban sprawl, and it's fucking awful.
Having driven around Houston trust me, nobody wants a city like that. Cities should be centrally planned, because otherwise you just expand out forever in pursuit of cheaper and cheaper land. Until you have to drive 2 hours to get from one side of town to the other.
As a homeowner this is abundantly clear by looking at your tax bill, and something that I suspect renters don't think about. I don't grumble much about paying my taxes, but when you look at the breakdown, it's insane how much goes to things I don't personally use or even get much benefit out of. I like the idea of public transit, but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go, not as an alternative transport method for people who can afford private vehicles.
>Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars and trucks do because of the way the weight is transferred to the axels. I think buses are important, but a lot of negatives are ignored because they are absorbed by the overall system.
The poor would probably be much happier with a $250 Uber voucher than a bus pass.
> They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars
This is very evident in my city where they had to install huge concrete pads at every bus stop because of the deep ruts and potholes busses cause when they start and stop.
I don’t understand… do you not go to places where the poor go? Is there no transit to take you to parks and malls and theaters and stadiums? I suspect it’s more that taking your private vehicle is easier and faster, and not because there isn’t service - it probably just sucks.
All those extra roads and extra parking spaces and extra land are subsidized for cars.
In Mexico they have these public transport vans and small buses (called combis and micro buses) that are truly a plague in bigger cities. Lots of pollution, lots of traffic, etc. It works for small cities but it just doesn't scale when you need to move millions.
In some routes they've been replaced by a metrobus[1] but still plenty of those vans around.