One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.
I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10.
Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.
> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.
Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.
And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
It is, it takes political effort and most importantly it takes adequate staffing on the state/local government for supervision and proper tender processes, and both is really short in supply - one might say that the latter is done on purpose as an excuse to privatize yet another piece of public infrastructure.
Of course a private toll road company can build faster and keep up with maintenance, it doesn't have to deal with tender bullshit, it can hire enough of its own staff to make sure vendors don't screw them over, and if it's a large enough company they can hire their own construction crews. Oh and obviously it can provide a source of extra income for the grifter politicians that vote for the privatization...
These ones aren't really accurate in this century. China is making massive gains in clean energy and undoing a lot of the mess they made in the 20th century. I'm honestly blown away by how clean the water, air, and everything as a whole is over there. And I'm a freak who loves visiting places in the middle of nowhere, so it's not some Potemkin village stuff like YouTube China Truthers(tm) pretend is widespread.
> When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged
Yeah, you watch a little too much YouTube. That stuff doesn't happen. Why would anyone be stupid enough to be an engineer if they risk having their entire family being arrested? Seriously.
You say this like China is the country openly flaunting the climate, purposely pushing for more carbon emissions to enrich a few people, calling climate change a hoax, 1984'ing all government research and policy on climate change, and forbidding agencies from even researching it, selling off public lands for profit.
That's not China, that's the good ol USA
Oh, and the USA also sent multiple completely innocent people to gulags.
Where's your high horse now?
Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
That's a bold claim without data.
Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Well done video essays:
Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg
Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd
Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm
More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N
Articles:
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...
Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.
Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.
Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L
The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.
In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too.
> In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process.
A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween.
Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.
Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because people know exactly where they are going to be - a bus can possible swerve and hit you but the tram will always be on its tracks so people feel (and are) much safer sharing space with them. And just because they feel more ‘premium’ than busses people seriously are more likely to use them.
This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)
> and are way more energy efficient to boot.
This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A bus does much more damage to the road than a tramway though (to say nothing of trucks, these are even worse). Anything rail based, the load from weight and movement is transferred via the rails and subterranean sleepers to the foundation, whereas a decently used bus road will need to be resurfaced at least every five years, more in a hotter climate as the buses will inevitably seriously groove the asphalt. Tramways is more like every 20 if not 30 years until you need to do a full replacement.
On top of that, this "the cost is already paid" math is annoying to me on a personal ethical level because it excuses putting people into cars and freight onto trucks because "they already are there".
> A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A single Class R 3.3 tramway vehicle (~36 tons) in Munich carries 218 people, more if you squish the passengers ("Sardinenbüchse" feeling). Munich's largest bus with a carriage unit, in contrast, carries 130 people [1] at ~20 tons. The gain from regenerative braking that you get on tramways actually matters at that scale, and as said, drivers are already short in supply.
Fully agree on your calculation regarding traffic by the way, however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/setzt-anhaenger-busse...
What is the weight of that bus and tram when they only have 20 people on though? Similarly what is the cost of the driver or a bus vs tram when there are only 20 people you need to move on the vehicle? Because this is a problem you should be aiming to have: getting transit to those less dense areas that will never have 200 people on board with 5 minute frequencies. You should prioritize high frequency service over larger vehicles until you are running something every 5 minutes because that high frequency is the best way to kill complaints that transit is not convenient. It is of course expensive, if you are getting enough riders to need a bigger vehicle you should have the money from those riders to give them better service.
There are places in the world where you need the capacity of a tram. However I submit that most places should be building a fully automatic metro system anyplace they are thinking about a tram. Only after you have that comprehensive system can we ask if there really is enough demand to also run a tram for shorter trips. The down side of a metro is the grade separation means very short trips are not feasible because of the need to get to the tracks - but most areas can live without that additional service and they need the additional speed a metro can give.
> however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
Nothing you can do about bad planning. Though really if the buses are that full and not paid for you should have already had them anyway, and there are plenty of other places you that don't have service yet (because if you did you would see this coming and the buses would be paid for) that you can move the buses. The only issue is the cost of building the tram - buying a lot of buses is cheaper than building a new tram line. (I'm assuming you are not talking about Bus Rapid Transit - that has a place but it is rarely a good answer)