Let’s cut traffic by road rationing, Italian style | Hacker News Reader

Let’s cut traffic by road rationing, Italian style

seattletimes.com

35 pointscurtis81 comments

I grew up in one of the Italian cities that adopted the "limited traffic zone" approach many years ago (Bologna). The fact is that many Italian cities were designed basically in the middle age and they have not changed much since then, hence they have very narrow streets, crossings, and sometimes wide sidewalks. They are simply not made for cars. Anyway, in the last years, the new administration additionally decided to completely "ban" cars from the main streets during weekends and public holidays: no cars of no type, no taxis, bus routes changed to only reach the beginning of the closed roads but they did introduce a small bus line that goes around the closed down zone. The idea was highly criticized at the beginning mainly by the business owners located there, who were afraid of seeing a sharp decline of customers. Instead, after a first period, those "T days" became a success: people re-discovered the pleasure of just walking everywhere on the streets, more and more events were organized, and also shops saw an increase in revenue, and in fact now they are asking to extend this ban to more days. Personally, I think we should start realizing that cars have put high cost on society in terms of pollution, safety, low efficiency in the use of resources (fuel), stress related to jams (which is a clear alienating experience). Maybe banning them from everywhere is not the solution, but at least the idea that every family must own (at least) a car should be publicly questioned.

> an increase in revenue

If you think about it, it's not a surprise. Walking through a commercial area lets people window shop. People generally ignore window displays while driving through them.

It's similar to the movement in the U.S. to reintroduce police to "walking a beat" instead of sitting locked away in their car all day.

It's the same story everytime a pedestrian zone is introduced in some town in Austria. Shop owners complain loudly that they'll lose customers, but as soon as cars are banned pedestrian traffic explodes, revenue increases, and a lively city center emerges.

Yet it takes years (often decades) of discussion for a single road to become a pedestrian zone, because all those people fail to see how benefitial pedestrian zones have been every time that they were introduced. I don't even think it's only because people love their cars, I think it's just a general fear of change.

So many cities/regions in the USA are simply broken by design in terms of having central business locations and urban sprawl living locations. Too many cities optimized around the highway which let greedy developers and poor urban planners dictate the present conditions of impossible congestion and the inability to have an effective mass transit system due to lack of population density.

Simply put, that model doesn't scale and we are now seeing it affect more and more cities. Not to mention that urban sprawl is expensive to maintain in terms of roads, highways, sewers and utilities being consumed by people living so far apart and in low density areas.

I propose we begin building planned cities focused on population density and mass transit that people actually want to use. Build up, not out. Share spaces like parks and have lots of little ones. Essentially, inherit from NYC where you don't have to, or even want to, own a car.

Lots of families in the US aren't interested in dumping their house with a yard and garage for an apartment. If what you described is what the majority of people really wanted, nobody would live in the suburbs.

And lots of Americans in the 1970s weren't interested in dumping their gas guzzlers. But eventually, people have to adapt to a changing world.

Anyone I've talked to who commutes in rush hour traffic absolutely hates it, yet most of them don't move or change jobs.

I suspect it's mostly fear and not love that keeps people commuting from the suburbs -- fear of other people's judgments, because living in an apartment is often considered a lower status indicator than owning a home.

It's also money. The mortgage and taxes on a suburban house are cheaper than renting an urban apartment.

If we had more supply in the cities, prices could drop.

If we even had more supply in close-in suburbs, this would be improved. The bay is weird in that you have low-density suburb running quite close to SF; you'd think it would be a more gradual shift. I don't necessarily need to live in the absolute middle of the city, but far too often the only options are "city core that existed before cars" and "suburb 15 miles out". Not always, but often.

Hating a commute does not translate into hating the suburbs at all.

The suburban lifestyle is imposed by zoning ordinances. Your house must be set back X feet, you must use half an acre of land at a minimum, must be no more than two stories tall, must provide parking, and have a minimum square footage it has to meet. Commercial buildings have the same restrictions.

Even with a bazillion dollars and an army of laborers, I couldn't build a multistory, mixed-use, urban style apartment building in most suburban districts without changing the law.

To top it all off, cities have also restricted development and enacted rent control or rent subsidization (effectively a newcomer tax) so those of us who want city living no longer can afford it because old cities became too expensive and new cities are not legally possible to build.

Well, with a bazillion dollars, you can often change the law. Or at least the zoning regulations.

You do have a point, of course, but in fact the problem often is that people with a bazillion dollars lobby and coerce politicians to change laws and zoning regulations, so that they could make another bazillion dollars.

> You do have a point, of course, but in fact the problem often is that people with a bazillion dollars lobby and coerce politicians to change laws and zoning regulations, so that they could make another bazillion dollars.

It may not even be the rich who oppose denser development. Here in Arlington, VA, we have a heavy rail system (DC Metro) that runs through two corridors of the county. Housing close the Metro is expensive because of the convenience.

Prior to the arrival of the Metro, Arlington allowed a section of the county called Rosslyn to get high rises, but it was designed initially in a pedestrian hostile way (it's changing nowadays) and was intended as a dumping ground for the GSA. Ugly 1970s and 60s office buildings with no retail sprung up like weeds.

Meanwhile, the Metro was being planned. Arlington saw the wisdom of transit oriented development and wanted the Metro to be built underground along a major thoroughfare, instead of above ground in the median of an interstate. It fought and won that battle and, at great expense, got the Metro to run along Wilson Boulevard. This, over the course of a few decades, drastically changed this corridor. It's now a walkable urban place with high levels of transit use. In my own zipcode, the majority of people commute to work by means other than driving alone. Many households don't own cars, and even many families might only have a single car.

In planning documents about the areas around the new stations, you can see that ordinary folks were opposed to expanding development too far from the stations or too high. They feared becoming Rosslyn, as documented in some of the planning documents Arlington has put online. As a result, you can walk up and down Wilson Boulevard and see very different land uses:

An example in the Ballston neighborhood:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.879883,-77.107849,3a,90y,330...

An example in the Clarendon neighborhood:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.888778,-77.090574,3a,75y,139...

A shot in Rosslyn:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.896772,-77.072468,3a,75y,178...

As you can see, land use intensity varies greatly despite proximity to the Metro. For added fun, go north or south of these neighborhoods. Notice how within two or so blocks it reverts to single family homes in most places? These could easily be upzoned, sold to developers, and make lots of money for the county and developers. The Metro would love to have additional transit dependent customers as it's going broke. Businesses along Wilson and Clarendon (the main drags) would love extra foot traffic. But they're not zoned for high density. Pure bribery doesn't explain this.

Bribery might explain why it hasn't changed in the modern era though. Modest, 1950s homes sell for over $600,000 or $700,000 regularly depending on the number of bedrooms. $1,000,000 might be a reasonable price if it's got four bedrooms.

Newer construction easily sells for over a million. Depending on the exact location, a one or two bedroom condo will run $400,000 to $500,000. Three or more bedrooms and you're in million dollar territory. We've not yet hit San Francisco prices, but the D.C. area is attempting to get there.

Those neighbourhoods look much nicer than what was my preconception of Washington DC suburbs.

I don't disagree with you at all. There's another contingent, like mine (who doesn't care about a yard), that would be happy to trade my large house for an equivalent sized apartment with 2 guaranteed parking spaces in the middle of a dense city...for the same price.

But cities are ruthlessly expensive, if we were to move even to our nearest city, an apartment of the same size would run 4-5x what our home cost and wouldn't be nearly as nice to live in. Move to Manhattan or SF and we'd be looking at an order of magnitude price difference.

People simply want more personal space, and cities make that expensive.

Fine, but there lifestyle should stop being subsidised.

It would be disingenuous to call the present conditions representative of unfettered market choice. The reality is that the US adopted some market distorting policies in the post WW2 period that gave rise to ubiquitous suburbs. The Home Mortgage Lending Act was one such measure, which granted loans to returning military personnel only in suburban environments.

Then, of course, was the highway building spree to take families further away from the city.

In short, the US manufacturered demand for the suburbs. And now we have a taste for it. So, even though there is clearly demand now, people didn't always prefer the suburbs. Suburban living isn't an intrinsic preference.

"build up, not out. share spaces like parks ..." This was essentially the idea of Le Corbusier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

They tried it around Paris and other cities in the mid of the last century, and failed miserably.

How did it fail?

basically they became ghettos. One of the problems is that real estate cost pressure eats away at the green zones.

Singapore seems to work fairly well under that principle. Perhaps you need a certain ruthlessness?

People want space, quiet neighbors and good schools. Hence the burbs.

Even in NYC, if you aren't in Manhattan or parts of Brooklyn, you need a car. And unless you're poor and lack options or rich and can throw money at the problems, people clear out of Manhattan when child #1 arrives.

As much as I like the city I also love being able to play Rockband or Dance Dance Revolution or watch an action movie with the sound up in my house anytime I want. I like that I have a radial saw, lathe, and other power tools in the garage so I can build stuff. I also love the peace of no shared walls or floors.

Well, I actually I used to love that. I haven't lived in a house in ~30 years but I miss that freedom and I can't imagine lots of people giving it up.

..though.. maybe with the right planning ...

How about an apartment complex with party rooms you can book, lan parties and a maker space. Sign me up

Is this a materials issue? I've got a concrete+steel place in Central America that's touching the walls of surrounding houses (packed subdivision). I play concerts in the middle of the night and there doesn't seem to be any problem. I never hear my neighbors to the side, only the open back yard ones. Compare to s townhouse in SF where I can hear stair usage and so on.

every apartment/condo/townhome complex I've seen that is larger than 30 units has a "clubhouse", usually located in the same building as the apartment management. They have a full kitchen, large area with 4+ couches, tables and a huge TV. Tenants can book the clubhouse for parties/meetings for free. As I understand it, they're very rarely used, though.

It's actually 1) a testament to how awful traffic in certain Seattle neighborhoods is, and 2) still really crazy to me that anyone at the Seattle Times would ever publicly endorse any measure that is anti-car[0].

The Seattle Times is notoriously anti-public transit, as evinced by articles like this one: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/04/05/seattle...

Notably, this article also appeared a couple days after Seattle saw its worst traffic meltdown[1] since an ice storm crippled the city and cost then-Mayor Nickels his job[2]

[0] Proper context: I'm an 11 year Seattleite, and walk, bus, car2go, and uber everywhere. I hope that, someday, my city has a decent public transit system. I am also the maintainer of the iOS version of OneBusAway, for which I receive literally zero compensation.

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/over...

[2] http://www.seattletimes.com/politics/after-storm-of-criticis...

Thanks for your work! There are thousands of happy public transit users thanks to apps (like OneBusAway) that make public transit more tolerable.

Thanks! Also, depending on your skill set/free time/inclination, I'd always love another pair of hands, or eyes, or anything else you can spare. We can always use more people raising issues to us on GitHub, or—even better—pull requests: https://github.com/onebusaway/onebusaway-iphone

If you want to get cars off the road, you need to provide some real alternatives. Build walkable communities. Build bike lanes. Build rapid transit that doesn't suck. I have seen all of these things elsewhere in the world, so I know it's possible.

I totally agree. I recently moved to LA for a job. A couple of months before moving I had bought a nice road bike. Even though I live 2.5 miles from work now, that road bike still sits in my closet every day. I would love to ride it to work, but LA doesn't even have enough lanes to support both driving and parking, let alone biking. The roads are full of traffic and impatient drivers and I value my life too much to risk riding my bike on the couple feet of shoulder that might exist on those roads.

I sympathize and hope you could find out how to cycle to work; as a side note, however, a "nice road bike" is not very good for commuting 2.5 miles to work.

1) road bikes are not good for taking you and a laptop a short distance to work; they are optimized for doing long journeys on free roads, not city traffic. What you want is a bike where you sit upright and which enables you to look around more conveniently, a bike with no clip pedals which enables you to stop at traffic lights at ease, and a bike with a rack which enables you to put your bag on it, etc.

2) a nice bike will be stolen in no time unless you keep it in closet (even here, and my country/city has actually very little crime).

That said, I understand your problem if roads are too scary. Where I live I have a dedicated bike/pedestrian lane 98 % of my work commute (10 km) and I mostly use a cyclocross bike which is almost like a road bike (slightly more agile, because there are many turns and crossings on the way, but I do use clip pedals).

Too often people buy "fashionable" bikes for commute (a carbon-fibre road bike, a BMX or downhill bike, or a fat bike) when the best one would be a cheap, general-purpose hybrid bike that rolls relatively easily but can take you across stone slabs or grit without puncture, and has a relatively upright sitting position with efficient access to pedals.

What part of the city? I used to work in Santa Monica and biking there, while not perfect, wasn't too terrible. There are plenty of tech jobs in SM, or Venice for that matter.

I agree that LA on the whole is a decrepit hellhole for cyclists, though.

Congratulations on a very manageable LA commute! Having biked many miles for commuting and for pleasure in LA when I lived there, I suspect this is a discomfort you can get over rather than a strictly rational risk assessment. Maybe you could try riding the route at times other than rush hour, like over the weekend, just to get familiar with the route and the basic mechanics of traveling it? Perhaps there is a longer route, over less obvious residential streets, that will be more comfortable? If there is one section that really concerns you, just walk your bike on the sidewalk for that part. There are a number of riding clubs and meetups, with varying degrees of formality and expectations; you might find riding in LA traffic less intimidating with a group. You will find that driving lanes are biking lanes. Swerving from shoulder to shoulder is a mistake you don't have to make.

And I echo sibling's suggestion to get a more practical bike. When you get "off the map" [away from routes that cars are forced to travel] you might find all sorts of sketchy but bike-friendly shortcuts, through parks, parking lots, industrial areas, etc. Skinny road bike tires don't like these routes, but LA streets are full of all the same hazards.

The problem with introducing traffic-rationed zones is that the areas surrounding those areas are going to be swamped with cars not allowed in (e.g. carsharing meetups as close to the border as possible).

That happened in Munich when areas in the inner city first got parking restrictions (before, parking was free, and now you have to pay iirc 20ct/10min) and then the entire area surrounded by the Mittlerer Ring got caught up in "Umweltzone" (environment protection area, where cars with too bad emission values are locked out; this only affects diesel cars, as petrol engines don't have fine-particulate problems)...

The entire border areas to those with pay-parking as well as anything outside the Mittlerer Ring is essentially so much swamped with outside cars that the locals don't get a parking spot any more.

Edit: The solution of Munich is to just put more and more border zones under parking restriction too (and the locals have to pay for their parking spots which used to be free, and it's anything but cheap). And the Umweltzone... well, if you manage to avoid parking anywhere in public, then cops don't really care.

I don't get it. Congestion pricing is bad, because it gouges the poor. But if we make the price much higher and call it a fine, then everything's okay.

"It's a regressive tax!" is the universal torpedo; you can use it to shoot down anything. Congestion pricing, parking meters, the gas tax, drought-driven price-of-water increases, fishing licenses, soccer field rental fees...

You can base the fine on income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

I'm actually kind of surprised it's not more popular.

I've been wanting this for years, but their needs to be a upper fine limit. No one should get a $5000 ticket. That said, a $500 ticket can make some poor people loose their residence, or go without eating. I remember getting a high priced ticket in college, and my transmission went out on that day too. It ate up all my savings, and I seriously thought it's(college) is not worth it. I was working on the weekends at a union job, but barely getting by. It just doesn't make sense that a person's income isn't a factor in the fee structure. (My mom used to go to court and the judge would reduce the fee, but that was the 70's- 80's; I hear that tactic seldom works, or the reduction is not much?)

> No one should get a $5000 ticket.

Why not?

This http://www.businessinsider.com/a-millionaire-in-finland-got-...

seems pretty fair to me.

If person A and person B commit the same fineable offense, it seems fair to me that the fine should be the same for both people. After all, shouldn't the fine be, in expectation, equivalent to the damage caused by the offense?

Do you think that it would be a good idea to have a fixed amount tax? I'm not talking about a flat tax, I'm talking about making everyone pay the same amount.

Because it creates a situation where it becomes stupidly risky to be affluent; people do make mistakes with e.g. speed limits - not everyone crosses them intentionally - and paying a € 50 000 fine for doing 21 km/h over a speed limit really makes people consider emigrating and taking their businesses to a more reasonable place. It also makes it more difficult to attract high-income workforce from abroad, thus having a negative impact on high-tech industries.

It just puts more pressure on people to move their wealth into corporations. How would you fine someone with no income or wealth, but who controls corporations that have plenty?

Also, a persons wealth has nothing to do with the crime. Punishment should be based on the crime, not on a person's status.

Ownership of corporations should show up as personal wealth. The corporate structure might slightly obfuscate the details, but if you try to hard to hide wealth in the corporation you quickly get to the point where fraud is being committed.

I guess you can have the corporation own the vehicle, but you get around that easily by fining the driver.

It also doesn't work very well. Rich people just end up buying two cars.

In Beijing, they also ration plates, so that isn't very effective either.

And parking, damn, parking sucks. Two cars? That would suck twice as much.

Note: By "it", the parent post is referring to even/odd restrictions, not congestion pricing.

This is not fine, they end up paying twice as much do drive twice as much.

This works perfectly.

It's the same foolishness as supporting mandatory water rationing instead of raising the price for water during a drought.

If you keep the existing rates on the first reasonable-amount-of-water amount of water per unit time and progressively charge more for every unit over that, you get as much savings without appearing to gouge anyone, rich or poor.

If you can't afford congestion pricing, you probably can't afford car ownership.

Note: millions of people own cars despite the fact that they really can't afford to.

Millions of people live in the city, despite the fact that they can't afford to.

We don't use that form of argument because it's stupid. People live in cities and use cars because they are necessary. If you have a family of 3 kids, using public transit costs more than a car. Fix that, then discourage cars.

>If you have a family of 3 kids, using public transit costs more than a car.

Depends on where you live and how old the kids are. In my neck of the woods, kids get to ride free up to a certain age (like 4 or 5). After that they pay adult fares.

If you're going the maximum fare distance at rush hour, it's something like $5.90 one way here per adult, but parking is like $15-$20. At that point you may be better of driving if you don't value your time (traffic is abysmal).

My own commute is $2.20 one way at rush hour. Even with five adults (two parents and three kids over four years of age) the $22 you'd spend roundtrip on transit fares is comparable to the cost of driving and parking, but with less hassle.

In cities like New York with cheaper fares and reasonable monthly passes you can drastically cut down on your transit costs and also have to deal with massively more expensive parking (if any) and tolls.

Of course, one of the advantages of urban areas like mine with regards to travel cost is that many trips can be done without any wheels whatsoever, be they steel or rubber. The grocery store is across the street, next to the pharmacy, there're a few doctors offices, many restaurants, convenience stores, schools, parks, restaurants, tourist attractions, etc. all within a few minutes on foot.

All of those trips are essentially free (minus the wear and tear on your shoes and clothes), promote good health, have a reduced environmental impact, reduce traffic, and require less tax resources than other forms of travel.

Bringing the whole family on transit would be a less common occurrence. For certain trips, ZipCar or Car2Go may also be an option. Also, for trips outside of walkable or transit accessible areas, rental cars are available. I myself have a rental car agency across the street, so if I wanted to go hiking and didn't own a car I could.

If revenue from congestion pricing is used for public transit, it tends to be progressive. (Also, those "on the clock" tend to be more sensitive to the high variance caused by congestion.)

Multiply throughput. Do it the Copenhagen way. Make it a bicycle first city. Reorganise urban planning around this. Build the infrastructure.

Almost as many people commute by bicycle in greater Copenhagen as do those who cycle to work in the entire United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Copenhagen

Copenhagen and most European cities are high density and were largely built before the car or zoning was invented. Most people there live within bike-commute distance, which isn't the case for the US.

Also, Denmark is completely flat. Like, you won't believe how flat it is. Denmarks highest point is "The Sky Mountain" and it's 147 m (482 ft) high. That's how flat Denmark is. The utility of a bike increases a lot when you only have to pedal equal to the rolling resistance.

There are also electrically-assisted bicycles (e-bikes), somewhat more expensive but good for short commutes.

If you are pedalling equal to the rolling resistance, you must be doing so in a vacuum.

Do you cycle in space? That sounds awesome.

Many American cities seem pretty flat to me. I don't remember huge inclines in NY, coastal LA, etc.

Yes, so Denmark is an exception to the rule where biking is always uphill and against the wind. In Denmark, it's only against the wind.

That said, you are right. E.g. I live in Finland, and biking is more popular in Oulu (which is way up north, but on former seabed and completely flat) than in Helsinki (which has a more temperate climate, but is on exposed bedrock and has small-scale hills up and down all the time).

Well, okay then, I guess it's not for you. Let's never change!

Not to mention, of course, that many cities in the USA are also high-density. In fact, a large percentage of people living in NYC and the like don't even own a car. They are endangered and have to endure pollution and the extra charge on their rent for all the free parking and road space taken up primarily by people that descend onto the city from outside of some suburban American hell. They clearly don't want to live in that kind of place, yet they think nothing of forcing their four ton suburban onto others.

What you are seeing is people in cities realizing they don't want to continue subsidizing some suburban middle class dream and be killed and endangered in their own city in the process.

The growing realization that walkable and bikeable cities are neato easily outpaces the ability to construct that into a reality in the US. There are decades of intertia from cheap cars and fuel and the "suburban-dream" lifestyle that has resulted in car-first cities, and the cost of rearchitecting and rebuilding that infrastructure is huge and takes years. Old world cities were laid out pre-car and it's much more convenient for them to revert to a pedestrian/cyclist focus (in addition to prevailing attitudes).

It's also not feasible for everyone to afford to be able to live downtown in a walkable city with the way cost of living is increasing, and gasp some people may even prefer to trade a commute in a car for not having to live in a box, or have a little space/land to raise a family, grow a garden, etc (the solution there being better rail networks).

Yes, it does take years.

And you know what? The cities that started doing that years ago (like Portland) are now blanketed in bike lanes, bike thoroughfares, and bike-friendly infrastructure that makes the city thick with non-car commuters.

On some streets (North Williams and Vancouver, for you Portlanders), the bike lanes are always full. You can sit there and watch hundreds of bikes roll by in an hour. That's a lot of traffic that, 10 years ago, would've been cars.

So, yeah, it does take time.

Start lobbying your city to start it today. 10 years from now, it's a whole new world.

There's a problem, though: bike is nice for good weather, but when weather is bad, most of those bicyclists will abandon bike, and you need enough car and public transport capacity to take them to work. So you end up paying for those roads and rail capacity and whatever.

I've noticed this because I ride bike to work regardless of weather, and in January in Finland, that means I'm almost alone on those nice bike paths (which are fairly well cleared of snow).

Portland etc may be slightly more convenient in terms of climate, but still I imagine winter will cut down the number of cyclists.

> I've noticed this because I ride bike to work regardless of weather, and in January in Finland, that means I'm almost alone on those nice bike paths (which are fairly well cleared of snow).

I live in Arlington, VA, directly across the river from D.C. Now that it's getting to be spring again, I've been noticing far more people walking and biking places. When it rains or snows, I've also noticed the foot and bike traffic are drastically reduced.

We definitely need the capacity to handle inclement weather in our transportation network.

Meh. This article is way too hyper focused on one tiny corner of the city. Any and all traffic proposals must consider the greater region. I-5 into the city, 405 into Bellevue, within the city, 90/520 across the lake, etc. Almost 100% of people in the greater Seattle area care a lot of about traffic. It affects us all. Only a tiny handful care about South Lake Union specifically.

The severe lack of arterials in our region is insane. The fact that there is no reasonable way to get from Ballard/Freemont to I-5 is mind boggling. Everyone loves to bitch about the gentrification of Capitol Hill/Central District. If there was more than one tiny land mass that allowed you to get across the lake it'd be less of an issue. If 520 was accessible by Freemont, Ballard, Queen Anne, and Magnolia the area that could live on the west side and commute to the east would increase by at least 8x.

"If 520 was accessible by Freemont, Ballard, Queen Anne, and Magnolia the area that could live on the west side and commute to the east would increase by at least 8x."

Looks like the perfect reason _not_ to increase road capacity from Freemont, Ballard, Queen Anne and Magnolia to 520. That would encourage "live on the west side, commute to the east", and a complete standstill in the long run.

We could pass a law saying you must live within 1 mile or your job. I don't think that'd be a good idea. Or legal. But it would improve traffic!

Perhaps we should considerably increase incentives for telecommuting. A lot of gridlock is from office workers who probably could do their job from home. This might also foster improved community development and less suburban sprawl, as people spend more time in their communities.

Public transportation needs to dramatically improve. In a lot of places public transportation is expensive, takes longer, isn't as convenient and still stuck in the same traffic jams that other cars are. Setting aside single lanes for HOV or broken public transit seems incredibly inefficient.

The simple fact is that moving people around a city is expensive and time consuming. The real solution is not having to move people in the first place.

> Public transportation needs to dramatically improve. In a lot of places public transportation is expensive, takes longer, isn't as convenient and still stuck in the same traffic jams that other cars are. Setting aside single lanes for HOV or transit seems incredibly inefficient.

And sometimes it is just a really bad experience. When I first moved to the Bay Area, I would always take BART into the city. Now, I'm willing to deal with the traffic and drive into the city.

I don't need something as posh as the Leap Transit solution, but it would be nice to ride public transportation without worrying about dealing with antisocial people urinating in train cars, etc.

> antisocial people urinating in train cars,

What? I live in second-world country, and even there the most gross thing you could stumble upon in a tram are hobos that stink.

WTF is wrong with BART?

http://sfist.com/2012/07/26/volume_of_excrement_in_the_wheel...

It isn't uncommon (later in the evening) to come across sleeping homeless people in the NYC subway who also smell absolutely terrible. You often will see a few jam packed train cars, and then 1 empty car, and more jam packed cars. It is empty for a reason.

Then why there are no... bouncers to eject them?

So, the author doesn't like congestion pricing because it is regressive. This is another strong argument for Basic Income - proper market solutions can be used for public problems without worrying about gouging the poor.

Also has happened in China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_space_rationing_in_Beijing

I seriously don't know if that article is being sarcastic or not.

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