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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read.

> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.

What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!)

I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita.

I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus

As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people!

It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus.

I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

View on HN

the simple fact of the matter is the Waymo is a better public transport solution for Dallas than the bus. The bus doesn't work very well in endless cul-de-sac suburbia, and that's what the Dallas/Fort Worth area (and indeed most of America) is. Like, you have to understand that most of Dallas isn't even commuting into downtown Dallas every day to work. They are just commuting to other suburbs and then back to their suburb. If your public transport solution is step 1. nuke the place and start over, it's not really a solution.

What if the public transport solution involved policies like taxing the existing suburbs in a way that ensures a break-even on infrastructure upkeep and operating costs so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society?

We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?

The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?

Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.

Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.

From a municipal finance perspective, most Dallas-Fort Worth suburban municipalities are far and away outperforming urban Dallas (the City of Dallas proper). That's not opinion, you can see the finances as they are all public. Ask the LLM of your choice to make research easy.

I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.

I think you're sort of missing my point.

After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.

There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.

The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.

The climate part is certainly an issue for dfw, but the superiority of dense urban areas from a financial or ecological standpoint isn't backed by data. Buses were better for fuel efficiency, but now the bus and robotaxi are both ev, the robotaxi has a smaller impact ecologically due to microplastics scaling with axle weight ^4 and financially because road wear scales with axle weight ^3. If buses and trash trucks didn't drive on streets they would last virtually forever the way they are built now. While the glorious excesses of the last 75yrs are definitely going away, the suburbs may very well not. Urban cores might instead rot in infrastructure until only the highways between them with low density adjacent settlements remain.

What is the timeline you expect for this?

What about the problems negative externalities from unchecked crowding and bus culture? Like overcrowding, sky high prices for housing, very high prices for everything, broken infrastructure that is to expensive to fix and over capacity?

The finances of these metros rarely incorporate road costs; their accounting does not require them to incorporate the future liability for infrastructure maintenance and so everything looks good until they need to redo the roads.

What leads you to say that? Capex is typically budgeted.

If it's anything like my municipality, all that stuff is balanced in the budget by issuing bonds. My accounting knowledge is weak, but as I understand it, even though a city's credit rating and the prospective interest on its bonds are a feedback mechanism to help moderate the spending, it's still tempting for a city to overbuild without a plan to fund the bonds plus the incurred cost ongoing maintenance without ending up with too much debt.

The other thing people often get wrong is these things are funded by 20 year bonds, but they last for much longer. If you make the incorrect assumption that something must be replaced when the bond is paid off the suburb cannot support itself. However pipes last a lot more than 20 years in most cases. Even if the road surface only lasts 20 years (which is true in some extreme cases but not in general), the right of way is a one time expensive, and the ground work below the surface is generally one and done so the replacement costs are much less than the first time new road costs.

>I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities

Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.

Source: Live in one.

At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.

I wouldn't dispute Dallas numbers and I may be wrong. But in general this feels wrong at a first approach. Denser low rise apartment blocks with more commercial square are per inhabitant and fewer expensive infrastructure per inhabitant (road area, length of water/sewers/electricity/data lines, amount of common things like lamp posts, signs, security (police/fire/medical etc.)) just logically should be better financially performing than single family home suburbs. In any part of the world at any age or local variation. And in fact in most countries that's true so far.

When logic and the observation disagree that means your logic is missing something. Don't double down on flawed logic, figure out where the flaw is.

I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.

I know this isn't /. but a car analogy seems appropriate here. A city is like a modern cramped engine bay vs an old one where you can sit next to the motor to work on it. Anything you try to fix or upgrade in a dense city causes large problems.

Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.

Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.

You are missing one thing. Logic can be faulty AND observation can be faulty just as well (it's just more rare usually). Especially in the financial reporting. I've seen enough to immediately doubt and try to find intentional tricks in any level of financial reporting or analysis. The tools are endless - simple faking, reclassifying specific inflows and outflows to the different time frames or divisions or even separate companies (both fake and real), confusing or obscure terminology is certainly widely deployed, metrics can be fudged from industry standards to some better looking custom ones, companies can "forget" some of their liabilities and debts or even rename them into something unrecognizable.

I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..

When you step back you can see that suburbs have existed since 1880 (street car suburbs), and most of them are still around. The roads have been replaced several times since then in most - they don't last for 140 years so they must have been. Likely the first ones didn't even have water/sewage pipes, but they all have that now so somehow they added them. We know how long pipes in the ground last (both average and maximum), so we know they must have replaced at least some of them at some point since they were added. We know that telephone and electric would have been built sometimes between 1920 and 1950 - and we know those wires don't last forever so they got replaced. We know that cable TV was added likely between 1970 and 2000, some of those much be wearing out and been replaced. We know that fiber is being added now.

I don't know how they managed to do the above. However we know that they have done it, and the costs must have not been excessive.

When you show me facts I'll change my mind. Until then the above facts are compelling.

Sure. But you are assuming that somehow all those expenses come strictly from those same suburbs. Or if there is the is an external inflow (also known as debt) it is not larger than for the similar population low rise blocks. And I say that is far from fact, even without giving my own opinion.

Basically you are making correct observations but only for part of the picture. And if the discussion is about finances and economics, I would say that the part about where money comes from is pretty damn important, no? :)

Also, even from across the pond, I also saw historical photos of the old USA. Those suburbs from before WW2 were way closer to the Europe really. There were more small businesses everywhere, there were commerce blocks etc. And pre-WW2 infrastructure was much cheaper and less complex that contemporary one. So sure, old suburbs were probably much healthier economically.

As for the moderns suburbs (from 50s and up) you can view more knowledgeable people than me if you really wish to uncover facts and truth. I won't post spoilers, but you may guess them from the context easily.

>so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society

>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas

So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?

Why is a bus not fit for endless culdesac suburbia where people are commuting between the suburbs instead of to the downtown?

I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.

because you can't fill the buses!

1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.

2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.

3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.

4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.

1. I promise you that a bus can get through winding narrow loops just fine. All medieval old towns are like that.

2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.

3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.

4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.

From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.

I can't say for a properly designed system but I can get anywhere in my city (~90k population / ~0.25m metro) in 15 minutes via car. (Some days traffic effects a bit.)

Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.

Can and implemented are often worlds apart.

A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.

Just scale your small bus further down and you get a cybercab/waymo. It gets full easily but its routes are fully customizable and you never have to change lines and it runs at all hours with no wait. Ohh and its actually way cheaper to run per passenger mile. IMO shared, electric, autonomous AVs are the best solution for mass transit for 90% of the routes

Lots of single user "busses" cause dramatically lower road wear and microplastics than a many user bus. Those scale with axle weight to the third and fourth powers respectively.

It works in some countries with a low gini coefficient. In places like Germany or Spain people use public transport because everyone, broadly speaking, is in a very similar socioeconomic status. In some other countries, the wealth inequality is much higher, and people with a higher economic standing don't want to share space with crackheads or mentally ill (a direct consequence of not having access to cheap or free mental health). Some societies are set up in a way that public transport can work, and others don't, it's just the way it is.

> I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats.

Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?

Sure, but the Dallas residents still don't have the autonomous on-demand bus while they could have had a normal bus decades ago.

And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.

Microvans exist. However they are not cost effective. Drivers are expensive and they don't get much better fuel economy than a bus that holds several times the number of passengers. Waymo changes the driver costs but not the other costs of running transit. Worse for the van, it holds few people so you dare not let it get popular because it can't handle a random surge of just two families trying to go somewhere at the same time. Your 4 person bus cannot handle my family of five, which is only slightly above average, there are bigger families in every neighborhood.

A larger bus is needed for useful transit.

What happens, is your underserved bus has to increase stops per loop for viability.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

"You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot…"

Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?

Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)

Chicken and egg problem. If you start with the assumption that you have a car, they are pretty great. Quiet, no through traffic and can become neighbourly, potentially large blocks. Somewhere to park your car...

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

Sadly yes. Normally it isn't a cul-de-sac. It is a neighborhood with several streets, but the streets are more like a maze so that residents can get in (they know the way), but anyone just passing through cannot find a path (without a map). Since everybody has a car it is only a couple minutes to a main road and so good enough - but that is still a long walk and so nobody walks to get places. (People do walk their dogs on the sidewalk, and generally there is a park inside that the kids will walk to)

It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.

I've seen big yellow buses driving through every neighborhood I've ever lived in picking up and dropping people off on a fixed schedule... Seems like the concept works just fine when it's not being actively fought against and sabotaged.

school buses only work because their customers have no other options. Take a look at transportation methods among Dallas high schoolers old enough to drive. Suddenly big yellow buses arent so popular.

Your entire view point is framed incorrectly. The problem isn’t can a bus solve the problem, it’s the majority of people don’t want to endure the hassle of riding the bus.

Not saying to refute your point just flagging that in places like Germany the bus works flawlessly. People there are really proud that you can even go hiking with public transport, buses are clean, safe and cheap (cheaper than using your car).

The human geography of Germany is completely different from the US. The US has much more continuous sprawl vs Germany has more clearly defined borders between higher density areas (towns and cities) and lower density ones along with land use laws that maintain this. Also US zoning laws typically don't help either with clear divisions between commercial and residential instead of more mixed use zoning.

I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.

In Germany they penalize using cars by taxing cars and fuels. They reward using public transport by subsidizing it. Car owners pay so public transit users get cheaper rides.

So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.

And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.

ok... Why the majority of people don't want to endure the hassle of riding the bus?

Because most buses have terrible service and people are confusing the service with the vehicle. Where buses get good service they get used.

When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.

Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.

Oh I fully agree. One thing that (I think) is being overlooked is that when some people switch from cars to public transit, the congestion eases. One doesn't have to make everyone switch to buses/light rails. Just enough for everyone to benefit.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. People don’t comprehend some areas of the world are simply different. If you could get a bus to pick up near my house and drop me off near work absolutely I would consider it but the reality is everyone in most US cities are going in many different directions. It’s not a problem a bus can even solve and like you said, folks don’t want to take a bus.

Why not both? Driver-less (or even just with drivers) mini buses, without fixed stops and dynamic routes/stops based on demand.

I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)

Why would you think it works? Let’s say you have a community of 100 people in Dallas. That neighborhood is going to be commuting in all sorts of directions, sure you might be able to transport some groups going the same direction but there is a complete lack of central offices so how does the last mile work? Lots of transfers would be required and that’s a nonstarter

Your community should be more like 500 people. Each house will have more than two people (most people live with a romantic partner, and kids are still common enough) and there are more than 100 houses in the neighborhood.

And now what? You now have 500 people going in every different direction still sure some overlap but in a metro like DFW you probably don’t see anything meaningful until the thousands and DFW does not have that kind of density.

A bus isn't going to be able to pull into my driveway, obv.

Buses were indeed the logical solution before Waymo/etc. Now, they are just a modern version of horse carriages. Dirty, slow, smelly and insecure.

The faster you get out of the bus, the faster you liberate grandma and kids from a fall, being mugged, or from freezing to death while waiting, and instead you promote an active lifestyle.

Waymo-like transport is incredibly liberating for low middle class parents, that cannot be trust their young kids to ride a bus alone and take time off blue collar work to take their kids to X practice.

Plus, they are much cheaper and safer to operate long term

Buses are a solution today, but only for upper class americans & soccer moms, who don't realize the issues that low income or limited fixed income seniors face in their everyday life.

No, it's not. It's a car for hire. Problems created by car-dependency will not be solved by adding more/cheaper cars.

"If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." Henry Ford, about the resistance to a paradigm change.

So you are pro-bus? Because Waymo is the faster horse for someone in Dallas while a working public transit would be the paradigm shift.

For the average person in Dallas the car they already own is faster than waymo: it is sitting in their driveway where they left it (or in the parking spot where they left it - while cars are stolen that is rare enough to ignore). They don't need to summon it and wait for it to show up - which saves a lot of time. Those who drive used cars (which is most people) the car is cheaper than waymo as well.

My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.

Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.

> (and indeed most of America)

Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.

Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.

Can you explain how environmental regulations induce that housing style? I struggle to see the connection

Basically every rule that tries to piecemeal outlaw the concrete jungle (muh setbacks, muh maximum impermeable area percentage, and so on) winds up introducing sprawl because you wind up wasting site plan space on whatever it is in your context.

I'm pretty sure you are confusing your state's zoning laws with federal environmental regulations.

I find it a rather offensive that the suburbs don't have walking/bike path cut-throughs. They're cheap. They can cut down on non-car travel by a ton. They're just damn nice.

Some do. It all comes down to whether the local government cares/thinks about this when setting up ordinances and approving PUDs. I was also appalled when I moved from a place that did this to one that didn't. There were so many obvious opportunities to improve connectivity with a few hundred square feet of easement.

They made it work in hong kong with buses/minibuses... it can work everywhere, as long as you try it a tiny bit. But no let's send billions to private company to add more 2500+ kg of metal that displace a single 70kg meatbag, such a waste of resources and energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

Is it not simply a density problem? HK is a very different beast or any other major dense urban area. Dallas is a sprawling with an urban communities and office buildings.

Hong Kong is around 5x the density of Dallas.

So what? One day the excuse is "it's too small", the next "it's too dense", the next "it's too large", meanwhile the 200 hab village next to mine in Poland has better bus coverage than the uni I attended in Los Angeles

You don't have to nuke anything. Every street is fixed/rebuild from time to time (30-40 years). The steps to follow are: 1) Allow mixed use zones. 2) Update the specs how the roads/streets are supposed to look like.

After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.

waymos don't remove lanes of traffic, they remove parked cars and parking infrastructure, which is still pretty huge. In many suburbs, parking is the real bottleneck not traffic.

Taxis and rideshares are actually proven to make traffic worse.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...

They still have to park somewhere... And the service (Waymo or a future competitor) that has it's cars closer will win more customers or can charge higher fees for faster service. The parking infrastructure might move a bit. But it won't disappear. I'd wager it'll even increase.

> That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

We did that though!

It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.

Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...

I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public.

- https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod

- https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...

If you have to say “with respect” don’t say it at all. You can share your ideas without calling names.

A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.

Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs?

Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.

Transit going to where. That’s the problem, you could build a new development that is transit oriented but where is it going? The average person in Texas does not want to transfer busses.

Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples.

Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area.

Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle.

Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.

I guess I should have expected these talking points to come back after posting a comment like that and I should have headed them off at the pass.

If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands. This argument of "America has a bunch of empty space outside of metro areas" is irrelevant to the conditions inside of those metro areas.

Most Americans by population live in metropolitan areas. They don't live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, some people do, but 80%+ of Americans live in very much urban areas. So we can exclude the <20% of Americans from this "we should have decent public transit" debate if you would like, I am fine with that.

The Netherlands actually built out a lot of car-focused infrastructure in the mid-century just like the US. The difference is that they have since pushed that development mindset out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTSNWDTE888

This idea that America "can't go back" is a farce, because it makes an incorrect assumption that other countries never grew in population and therefore never built any new suburbs after the spread of the automobile.

The Netherlands grew from 11 million people in 1960 to 18 million people today. Do you think the Netherlands never built a new neighborhood in that time period?

This doesn't mean that people in the Netherlands or Japan don't own cars. Far from it. What it does mean is that driving a personally owned car in a one-person-per-car paradigm isn't necessary to survive and thrive in those places. Transit-oriented development means that they have other options.

You are concerned about how difficult the climate is, here is how Singapore stays walkable despite hot and rainy climate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SJ1NBMrH0

Here is how people use public transit in Yakutsk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0

I will also inform you that buses are indeed air conditioned and have heaters, just like a car. You can think of a bus as a car but much larger and fits more people inside.

Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.

I will tell you why: because demand is induced. There isn't some innate human nature where we all automatically prefer cars and have decided by evolution that anything less than a car is less ideal. No, demand is instead induced: if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.

Induced demand is especially prevalent in the US because personal vehicles are heavily subsidized over other options. The US government engages in forever wars to secure low oil prices, subsidized by federal tax dollars. Gas taxes are underfunded and don't keep up with inflation to ensure driving is offered below the real cost. Society subsidizes traffic deaths as nobody, not even insurance companies, compensate society when a 19 year old dies in a drunk driving crash and all the economic activity they would have generated over their lifespan evaporates.

Personally owned cars at a ratio of one car per person are literally the most expensive way to get around on this planet until you get into stuff like private jets and helicopters. They're even more expensive than buying a plane ticket between many destinations. You say that people in Dallas don't want to take the bus, but if it was available, reliable, had a frequent schedule, and got them to everywhere they needed to be, they probably would be very excited to ditch the $5,000-10,000 annual total cost of vehicle ownership.

And, while public transit in Texas has a long way to go, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has ridership of 52,823,800 annually. If you are saying that people in Dallas don't want to transfer buses, I'd have to ask where those 52 million rides are coming from?

I don’t think you touched any of the critical issues. You’re also incredibly rude for no reason.

- Dallas is much much hotter than the Netherlands.

- Overall Netherlands population density (including rural areas) is higher than DFW metro.

- For most of the cities in the YouTube video shared they are a few miles by a few miles. The length of a typical Dallas frontage road. It makes sense to walk and bike in those small hamlets.

Going back to density, you are right the Netherlands moved back from a car centric life but that did not change population density before or after. Most cities in the Netherlands are a multiple of DFW so you have this tough argument. What works in the Netherlands is not necessarily a solution for DFW. You would need to rebuild the city to be denser, have more businesses located together and then build out transit while ignoring that it’s too hot for a good portion of the year to ride a bike or walk around outside.

My back of napkin math ended up with 30k sq ft per person in DFW compared to 20k sq ft per person in all of the Netherlands.

I think Waymo is a great step in the right direction.

> If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands.

EDIT: Your statement of "its not like its drastically smaller population" is also just not true. 8 is not about the same as 18. I ended up replying thinking they were closer without realizing this as well. So less than half the population on about the same area. Having half the average density before even thinking about how dense the clustering is really makes quite a difference!

Density of where people actually choose to live, which you've already alluded to with the things you're saying. Similar population, similar kind of area. But look at both on a satellite image. One actually has a lot of farmland for that area. Where people actually live its often a good bit denser.

Why is it like that? That's what people have voted for, that's what they've supported. Try actually talking to the people who live there and suggest to them they should live in a zero lot line home or a townhouse with shared walls.

> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses?

I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service. But instead transferring busses around here usually means sitting in the baking hot sun on a concrete bench in >100F heat for a half hour. If the next bus was in like 5 minutes, I probably wouldn't care.

It also often means you're probably taking a very suboptimal route instead of a direct route to the place. So not only do you have an additional wait to change busses, you then also have a much longer path to ride. And you're likely going to end up going a slower average speed, as you're having to stop to pickup/dropoff people along this longer route as opposed to just continuing on. For instance, it'll take me over an hour to go to where the new Dallas Stars arena will be in Plano as I need to make 4-5 bus changes. Its a 15 minute drive although it will probably be way more than that once 20k people try to leave at once.

Now, obviously, busses can change routes. They can get more busses and do more routes. They can get more busses and offer faster service. There's a lot of potential solutions to this. It doesn't have to be that way. But in the end getting people to put more funding into it is pretty challenging.

> if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.

Its often not very comfortable riding a bicycle in 110F heat index when you've got this air-conditioned box you could ride in sitting in your garage.

> I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service.

Literally what I'm advocating for is good service.

> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.

Because taking a bus there is much more inconvenient compared to driving. And not all people take a shower, someone undesirable sits next to you and so on.

The thing is that different countries have different cultures. I live in a country where big cities have public transport and relatively narrow roads. I wish we had bigger roads where everyone drove its own car. I can do whatever I want in my car as opposed to sitting in a crowded bus.

> This is entirely because of the design of Haarlem and its pedestranized city-center

Practically all of those towns have had a focus of building walkable/bikeable spaces with dense mini-downtown areas for at least decades if not longer.

Its not impossible for this to eventually happen to these already built US suburbs, but a lot of these places were explicitly designed around everyone coming and going by car. A lot of these suburbs weren't even planned with the idea of pedestrians ever leaving the neighborhood. They'll have few actual entrances and exits, with those rarely connected to any kind of infrastructure outside other than busy roads.

> fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented

A lot of those fast-growing areas are in cities with zero transit and often don't even neighbor a city with any real transit. Look at places like Princeton, Celina, Melissa, Anna, etc. They border towns like Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and more which also aren't connected to DART. All of these towns actively shun public transit. A lot of home buyers in these areas just don't care about transit access at all, with many actively opposed to transit. So what, maybe Princeton does decide to make some transit. Ok, where do I go with that? From one suburban house to another without a car? A bit easier time getting to Little Ceasars, Taco Bell, and Walmart? Its entirely disconnected from practically any other place the people there actually need to go, because its not like many people actually work in Princeton or Celina.

So it'll take a lot of additional development and rethinking of what these places are and how they ultimately function for transit to actually make sense there.

I'm not saying public transit and walkability/bikeability can't possibly happen in North Texas. I like biking around, I ride DART when it makes sense, and I do push for expansion of bike infrastructure and good DART access. But I also see the heat index for today is 105F, it'll be about 110F on Friday. I don't think I'll be riding a bike to get the groceries. I don't think the Netherlands often gets weeks where the heat index is >100F practically every day. And finally, it will take changing a lot of minds about public transit to get buy-in from a lot of the population to actually do it.

Hot weather transit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SJ1NBMrH0

Cold weather transit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0

Transit is small towns and suburbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.

It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car.

I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.

You keep drawing on this random anecdotes. Singapore is nothing like DFW. The best solution is progress that people will use. People are not going to walk around in the hot Texas sun across miles of frontage roads and nobody is going to rebuild the city to look like Singapore.

While I accept what you're saying about rebuilding an entire city, I also think what you're saying is effectively "there's nothing we can do."

There's a huge gulf between doing absolutely nothing and accepting the status quo and refusing to change at all.

By all means please come here to DFW and convince the people of Frisco, Allen, and McKinney the folley of their ways and get them to agree to changing up things and adopt transit. Go tell them to allow the train lines to continue up their paths. Good luck! I've been trying to talk these people into it for over a decade. Most are afraid of "the wrong people" and are concerned about crime. Make of that as you will!

Go watch the ignorance of the Addison City council on how transit operates, and realize this is one of the allies of supporting transit in this area! Makes muh teeth itch!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dallas/comments/1qdywz5/addison_cit...

Go see how the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Stars move away from their fine stadium right off a train station that's serviced by several different lines by multiple transit agencies for places with just limited bus services, and darn near everyone cheers it on as a good thing.

Things won't change if the people won't change.

If I lived in Singapore I'd absolutely ride and walk most places, as owning a car is extremely expensive. To own a Toyota Corolla, before even thinking about paying for the garage to park it just the taxes and fees, its like $130k. Then you're looking at a few hundred dollars in rent just to store the car.

This might be news to you, but it doesn't cost $130k to drive an old Toyota Camry around in DFW. Every home is pretty much guaranteed to have parking for 1+ cars.

If the average Singaporean could buy a car for $5k, the government mandated their apartment had a parking spot or two, and gas cost $0.79/L you think they'd all still want to be in the heat all the time?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying transit can't possibly work in hot places. But you're needing to convince people to leave a nice comfortable air-conditioned space to willingly go be outside in the heat. Singapore did that by making cars incredibly expensive to own. I can't imagine making a Toyota Corolla cost $130K to be a popular policy in the US.

> I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas.

I 100% agree with this. People are choosing to ride around in air-conditioned boxes instead of being in the heat. People choose to live in these sprawling suburban neighborhoods with zero walkability. People choose to prevent overturning parking minimums, people choose to expand highways and people choose to vote against bonds to build bike infrastructure. That is the choice tons of North Texans are making. I do think their decisions are rather short-sighted and often disagree with them, but those are the choices being made.

> This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.

I never said this. You're literally making a straw man here. In fact I'm saying the opposite of that. I agree its not impossible. Just a lot harder as people's mindsets are extremely different and the climate is very different.

If I had the weather of a lot of Germany or the Netherlands or UK or Norway I'd probably be outside a good bit more. I really don't mind riding a bike in the cold, exercise warms you up. If I was taxed like Singapore, I'd probably eschew the car.

I know you are not saying this but in defense of what you are saying…I think if you could rebuild all of DFW that yes I bet you could get some portion of the population to live in denser apartment buildings with everything they need in a walkable area and have trains connecting these dense areas together. But people choose to buy a home in the suburb and choose to drive that suburban with AC. Folks who want density move to those places.

Waymo is a step in a direction of an interesting future. If you can take the current blueprint and make it more efficient that sounds like a win to me?

I think we're seeing that kind of happen with self-selection driving it.

While we're experiencing tons of growth in the far-flung suburbs with practically zero walkability, we're also seeing a good bit of redevelopment of places like Richardson, Garland, Carrolton, some parts of actual Dallas, and even some parts of Plano like the old downtown. A lot of these towns are trying to rebuild their downtown areas and more to be far more pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly.

Its entirely possible to live a car-free life in some places in DFW. There are definitely pockets where one can comfortably live without a car. I spent a bit of time without a car and got by with just a bicycle and motorcycle after my car was destroyed in a hailstorm. Because I had purposefully chosen bikeable places with decent transit to live near where I worked it really wasn't that big of a deal. But in the end you pretty much have to give up going to large parts on any kind of regular basis.

And yes, I do hope things like AVs can solve a bit of the current cost of operating bus lines. Nearly half of the cost to operate a line is the cost of the driver. We could run so much more capacity and really rethink a lot of the economics.

Agree and it reminds me of my time in the Bay Area too. You could absolutely live car free but you give up a good part of going places (thinking of hikes and other activities).

I still think it’s really hard because even with that self selection, what happens when your work changes. Probably some of my Silicon Valley bias of swapping companies every few years but it can throw a wrench in your commute easily.

I share all of your views. I think there is opportunity in some of the new developments to have some more amenities built in which I have seen some doing, community spaces, light retail, more schools baked in but I don’t see how you solve the density problem or how diverse work locations are.

I have never lived in Amsterdam but my obeservatiob is that these are older cities already baked in with density. So it’s much easier to switch back to bicycle and share infrastructure.

You can build a new city in Texas with transit in mind but people are still going to be commuting 30mins or more in every direction.

> Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs?

To give a clear answer that others have beat around: it is the network. Transit works when you can get places. When you can get many places it doesn't work.

The real question is how can Dallas get there - which is a hard problem is you need a massive network investment before it becomes useful to many people and so there is a lot of upfront investment needed first.

The US has a poor history with getting a good return on investment for transit. In general even where the investment does get good ridership, the amount spent was way out of line from what anyone else in the world would have spent for that system.

That trivializes the problem too much, part of the equation but you also have to have a population that actually wants it along with high enough density that it makes sense. For places like Dallas I struggle with all of the above. Sure some percentage would use it if it was flawless but I think far too few would.

Dallas has plenty of density as proven elsewhere. As for wanting it, people don't want what they don't know. How they would act if something existed is very different from what they say.

Proven where? DFW is not as dense as you might think. Last mile is an incredibly hard problem to solve when it comes to transit and you add in unfavorable weather and it’s a not go.

Good luck though! Just sharing as a member of the DFW community has taken dart and bikes a lot. The metro is absolutely not dense.

Coppell (a suburb of Dallas) will not permit public transportation because the residents believe that it would bring in "undesirables".

They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.

Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.

I think we should let autonomous, shared EVs use bus lanes (just like how some cities let taxis use them). They are just so good for society.

But I don't get the Waymo "solution" in this thread.

Genuinely and not trolling.

Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.

My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.

If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.

Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.

With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.

Because people are not nearly as rigid about a 9-5 as you are imagining in aggregate; enough people commute off hours to increase the number of round trips per car significantly.

Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...

Fair and I concur.

Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?

As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.

I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.

This is false. A fixed route is predictable. You know when it will be there and can plan for it. Non fixed routes mean you cannot be sure when your ride will arrive and thus cannot be sure you will arrive on time.

That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.

Bus routes can be fixed in the sense that they can stay in place for decades. Even simple things like paint, signs, and shelters provide psychological permanence.

Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.

You don't even need that. Just seeing the bus go by "all the time" provides permanence. Really it is better, I've seen plenty of paint/signs/shelters, but when I bothered to look the bus only came rarely. When I moved someplace where I saw buses all the time I realized I could use them even though there was no paint/sign/shelter close to where I got on.

I agree with you and hate car centric development, and yet, if this idea gets low or no parking housing built, it could be worth considering.

You can even buy some paint and build dedicated bus lanes. Some alien technology shit.

This is a simple conversation involving ‘what abouts’ and divert your attention to delay public transit build.

In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.

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