I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well.
There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadruples the time. In some cases, the transit directions say 1h 20 minutes, where 47 minutes of that is walking. Meanwhile, a car is under 20 minutes.
I used to live outside of Chicago. The Metra could get me downtown faster than a car (during rush hour) for just a few bucks. The train became the pragmatic choice and dictated where I chose to live.
Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.
I agree that surface lots are terrible, but they have to be replaced by something.
Removing surface lots doesn't immediately mean removing parking. You're still free to build parking - you just have to integrate it into the building it is serving. Which gives you a pretty big incentive to only build the parking you actually need, and share it with neighboring buildings to reduce costs.
> Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.
Removing surface lots means increasing density, which means the same transit stop can serve more people, which lowers per-passenger costs and allows for higher-frequency running and denser transit networks.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't want surface lots removed because there is no good alternative, but a good alternative isn't economically viable due to the surface lots enforcing low density.
Building parking structures is also something else. They would make parking better than the surface lots, but make traffic worse.
My objection was so the “nothing else” part. Surface lots are bad, but just removing them doesn’t solve the problem they are currently poorly solving. Larger parking structures would be better, and transit options that offer options that are faster, cheaper, and easier than driving/parking would be better still.
Then once solved, let people get across from one suburb to the next on transit quickly but that is harder to do economically.
To change the culture in the US we will have to make category changes. Cars and busses are in one category, walking, biking, and rail options in another. We need the latter or we risk just wasting time, effort, and resources.
Busses make more sense and work better as an add-on to rail systems and walking/biking.
If your city is a shit place to commute adding buses and bus lanes can help. Once you are on a bus zooming past all the traffic you can see.
Also important point: I'd do min 300m between stops maybe more.
I would be more pro train and anti bus for "last mile(s)" if the bus is petrol but if all electric I am for the bus! Where I live there are a plethora of places my kids can get to on a bus much quicker than even if we were near a station and they got a train.
But rail is a category change. You walk up to it, it takes you somewhere on a fixed line, you hop off. You continue on your walking journey. You expect things to be a little closer, more dense (but not too dense). You're not thinking much about bus time tables, it's new, it's cool, Europe has it. Japan has it. And those are great places you've visited, right?
That's the main difference.
Of course if there were a train nearby I would probably get it. I'd pay an extra 10 mim commute time for that smooth ride (e.g. if train stops further away as they likely are). But if you are low on trains, buses can do a great job.
And if people won't shift make them free. Might be cheaper than building more roads anyway.
But if people in the main stop going into the city you'd probably see a drop-off in the city amenities that make many people want to live there in the first place.
Nowhere in the world, and I mean the entire world, has the scenario in which surface parking lots are replaced with other productive uses have resulted in a drop off in city amenities - it’s a non-sequitur. The businesses and residences that replace the lots are city amenities. Adding them has the opposite effect that you describe.
Think about it another way - what if we add surface parking lots? What would you drive to downtown to do? There wouldn’t be anything there because the amenities would have been replaced by mostly empty parking lots.
We can also just have multi-story garages. We can actually increase parking (on a social scale) while removing surface parking lots. That would create amenities and allow folks like yourself to easily come to town. Would it cost? Sure. So what?
Just go (or don't go) to places based on how much of a hassle it is to do so. If enough people--local or otherwise--want to visit good for them. I definitely make choices based on how easy or hard it is to get to the destination.
Which means you also need to battle the housing problem, too, though, plus changes in settlement patterns take years to decades to manifest. In the meantime, you might have to weather quite some griping about it or even serious pushback.
I don't think society needs to accommodate that lifestyle so someone can live 30 miles away from work and treat my city like a place you just commute to work to. Those days are increasingly over, as cities realize this is bad for the city and incredibly expensive to operate (surface parking lots are economic extractions and tax revenues low).
You are of course right there is pushback, and things take time to manifest, but we moved to the suburbs at one point there's no reason we can't fix that. I'm not entirely sure why my city council for example cares what suburban voters who don't vote in our elections really think outside of 2nd hand complaining from employers. But they're free to relocate their large downtown offices to the suburbs, we shouldn't cater to them anyway precisely because they can move at any time leaving quite the financial problem as building patterns revolve around this 8-5 white collar commuter scheme to surface parking lots, and if the anchor tenant leaves you're left with, basically, a dead city. It's incredibly fragile and stupid.
I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.
That's the key issue. We don't need to launch a war on surface parking to achieve the necessary density. Zoning and mass transit buildout go hand in hand and the problem getting in the way is fundamentally a political one. If the politics is solved and the density increases market forces will cause the surface parking to go away on their own.
You're pre-supposing that transit is _better_ than cars. It's not. ESPECIALLY the Japanese transit.
I certainly don't want to suffer through this bullshit every day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
That said, most people's daily commute isn't this extreme -- it depends heavily on the line and direction. The tradeoff most Tokyo residents accept is: 30 minutes of crowded train vs. hours stuck in traffic with nowhere to park.
This isn’t an anti-car rant. I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure we already have while restoring economic bases and entrepreneurship to our non-coastal cities. It is quite literally a win for everyone except bloated highway departments and their downstream contractors.
> I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure
Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.
Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.
If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.
I certainly agree subways aren't the way of the future, at least in America. Too expensive and, frankly, unnecessary. We are already de-densified (which is why I find your below comment bizarre)
> and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.
Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.
> Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.
> Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.
Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur. Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit. It's just logically false. It's also ignoring the fact that growth and congestion and transit typically go hand-in-hand.
> And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.
The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.
> If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.
No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense. Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.
The US is rapidly densifying, and this will get _worse_ as the population starts shrinking in earnest. Japan leads the way here, its population has been going down for a while. Yet Tokyo now is in a real estate bubble.
> Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.
Plenty of cities are resisting the density increases, NIMBYs are holding the line.
> Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur.
Again. Transit does NOT reduce the congestion. This is a simple observable verifiable fact.
You can say that transit enables more density (true), but it does NOT reduce congestion.
> Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit.
And there would be fewer of these people.
> The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.
In Seattle, I'm going to end up paying $150k in taxes/fees for the failrail line that will go nowhere near me. This is literally more than a lifetime of owing a cheap car.
But even if we just look at operating costs of transit, a single trip on transit is about $20. This ends up being about equal to the IRS deduction for car depreciation for the average trips.
> No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense.
Look at the fertility rate for people in dense city cores vs. suburbs.
> Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.
Indeed. Now think about this: the total US population is shrinking. NYC is growing. What is happening?
Hint: look at Japan.
There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect.
> Plenty of cities are resisting the density increases, NIMBYs are holding the line.
Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.
> Again. Transit does NOT reduce the congestion. This is a simple observable verifiable fact. You can say that transit enables more density (true), but it does NOT reduce congestion.
It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.
In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.
> In Seattle, I'm going to end up paying $150k in taxes/fees for the failrail line that will go nowhere near me. This is literally more than a lifetime of owing a cheap car.
Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.
Second, you're not including the costs for highway construction, maintenance, insurance, gas/oil (why do you think we're in Iran) &c. that goes into car ownership.
Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.
> But even if we just look at operating costs of transit, a single trip on transit is about $20. This ends up being about equal to the IRS deduction for car depreciation for the average trips.
Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.
> Look at the fertility rate for people in dense city cores vs. suburbs.
What about them?
> Indeed. Now think about this: the total US population is shrinking.
The US population is not shrinking.
> NYC is growing. What is happening?
People want to live there - that's my best guess.
Yes, it absolutely makes sense. The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.
> Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.
Princeton, Texas.
> It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.
No, it does NOT take cars off. A car that is on the road, stays on the road. Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.
You basically need to make your streets impassable before people start switching from cars to transit.
> In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.
Then people would out-migrate, companies will close dense offices, and congestion will relax.
> Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.
Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.
And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.
> Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.
As I sa
> Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.
That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.
And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.
> The US population is not shrinking.
It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...
And even before that, the rate of growth for large cities has been outpacing the population growth for the last 2 decades.
> People want to live there - that's my best guess.
They don't. Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.
It doesn't. Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people. That has very little in common with, say, where I live which is Columbus, Ohio. You can argue this point but I am closed-minded to any difference of opinion here.
> The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.
That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.
> Princeton, Texas.
Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so? What article are you referring to? Who specifically from Princeton, Texas is speaking out? Why do you have to go to such a small town to find an example?
> No, it does NOT take cars off.
Ok but it does, because those people have to move around and if they're not using a train or something they'll use a car. I don't know why you're disputing this pretty trivial fact.
> Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.
I don't think anyone needs to give up their car. I certainly don't want to. They're convenient and awesome. But I don't need or want to get in a car and drive 20 miles or something to buy a loaf of bread. That's a dumb and expensive transportation model.
> Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.
Not true in all states. Pretty much untrue generally. You're forgetting about the federal highway dollars that go into this stuff, which comes out of general federal taxes. Either way you pay for all sorts of things you don't use all the time. I don't use Social Security or Medicaid. Guess I should start arguing to get rid of those.
> And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.
Well to start we should just stop building freeways, we already built a lot and don't need them. Second please cite your source. Third, not applicable to all states.
> That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.
Very few people pay the full cost for anything, including highways, or the police who have to ticket traffic offenders, or the fire trucks that have to go scrape dead kids off the pavement. Bad argument.
> And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.
You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.
> It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...
We already have too many people anyway (earth should have closer to a billion). And we can increase the population if we so desire through immigration or benefits to promote procreation. What does this tie to anyway? Was your argument that because population levels are declining, Americans are moving to cities and driving up housing prices? Who cares?
> They don't.
Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there.
> Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.
If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.
There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).
Also, for whatever it is worth, I'm not in favor of NYC style development. I live in a single family house with a detached garage, with restaurants, parks, coffee shops, grocery, and more within a 15-20 minute walk and of course I can drive to those things too if I want. Initially what I was talking about was a city like where I live where we have these economically destructive surface parking lots and commuter culture which is bad for the city and bad for the economy. Adding transit to my city, particularly a north/south tram line will alleviate congestion, improve quality of life, and attract more people. Our surrounding neighborhoods can continue to have mixes of apartments, single-family homes, duplexes, and more.
Yes, and this exactly is the problem. WHY is it a city of 30 million when the country's population is shrinking?
> That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.
No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.
> Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so?
Moving goalposts?
> You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.
I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.
For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.
> Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there. > If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.
Spoken like a true privileged dude. Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.
> There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).
The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.
Am I missing an obvious joke here? Because I've lived in multiple cities with great public transit, and this quote couldn't be further from the truth - the people love their public transit options, and they keep voting to build it out further.
Because there are better opportunities and amenities in the city? I don't know. Can you elaborate on what your larger point is here? I still don't understand why Tokyo is relevant to this conversation, but happy to chat about it if you can help me better understand the point you are trying to make.
> No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.
Or maybe companies are locating to where people want to live? I.e. California or San Francisco specifically.
> Moving goalposts?
You just named a random city, the least you can do is grab an article where an elected official is talking about how they're against growth or urban infill or something.
Then we can talk about why this is a bad example.
> I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.
Or maybe you aren't doing a good enough job explaining the problem. What does filling some crappy surface parking lots and putting a tram through Downtown Columbus, Ohio (for example) have to do with Tokyo or New York City?
> For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.
Columbus, Ohio. Let's talk about that since you have the data and I live here and can confirm your data.
> Spoken like a true privileged dude.
Damn right, and I'm not apologizing for it. :)
> Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.
I've heard of it. I would categorize commuting as "doing what you hate".
> The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.
Doesn't seem to be a problem. The increase in density increases tax revenue, allows folks to live closer to where they work, enables entrepreneurs to start new businesses because they have a larger serviceable population, and more. And that can all happen while I still have a 2.5 car garage, car, and single family home.
If you want to talk about density in American cities, I'd suggest not talking about Tokyo or New York City, because those are extreme outliers and no American city is going to look like that anytime soon.
People in front of the door know that people will get out so they step outside to let the flow out and are the first ones to get back in, giving them the opportunity to go further inside so that they don't have to do it at every stop. Might even get a seat at some point (the longer the travel, the most likely to get a seat)
I have been stuck in commute traffic for hours, 30 minutes of that is infinitely preferable.
Also if it's really too packed, just wait 2 minutes for the next one
> I have been stuck in commute traffic for hours, 30 minutes of that is infinitely preferable.
Can't argue with that. I won't ever have another commuting job again. I go into the office once a month, and after driving 45 minutes each way just because my company felt like our office needed to be in the most congested area of Portland, at the end of that day I thank my lucky stars that it's only once a month.
Except that the next one will be just as crowded.