A lot of people won't ride bicycles in the city because they feel unsafe, so any data collected on existing bicycle traffic patterns misses this dynamic. If you create physically protected bike lanes separate from car and pedestrian traffic that interconnect the major activity zones of a city, you'll get more bicycle traffic on those routes.
Figuring out where the major activity zones are is something that this kind of data could help with, however.
As H. L. Mencken said, "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
A full bus is indeed far more efficient than a car. But buses run pretty empty most of the time. As https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenh... estimates, in 2009 buses emitted nearly double the CO2/passenger mile as cars! Prioritizing buses, meaning adding more, makes that figure even worse. And therefore as simple as the bus logic looks, it doesn't actually work out to better in the real world, in most American cities.
There are ways to fix that particular problem. But the place to really start is in housing permitting, NOT the streets. When you get sufficient density of housing in one place and work in another, then mass transit becomes efficient. But people involved in traffic planning seldom have the authority to overcome NIMBY obstacles to building denser housing. And so they have to operate under constraints that make additional mass transit a generally worse option.
I'm glad you got to show off your neat quote and link. But I wish you would have given it more thought.
You could have started by finishing reading my comment - it wasn't very long, and it highlighted [housing] density.
You could also imagine that in 2009 we didn't have viable electric vehicles, but in 2023 it's easier to electrify a bus fleet than hundreds of thousands of cars in a given metro area.
You could also wonder why buses are so underused in America, the land of underinvestment in bus routes and overinvestment in car propaganda.
Lastly, you could consider why you chose to lash out at buses when I said "mass transit". Is your point to vilify all mass transit by picking on the weakest member? Do you only have a single data point on buses and zero on other forms? Or was it just the fact that you didn't really read my comment? Perhaps it's something else. I'm being meaner than I need to be. It's just that I get a little prickly about watching cities and ecosystems die for the profits of crooked car dealership owners.
You're the one who dismissed gathering evidence about real usage of streets because the only sensible solution is to live in dense housing and use mass transit. Which fails to recognize that solving the density problem involves major political battles that make it a generally nonviable solution to real problems that cities are faced with. Refusing to consider a politically workable solution because it is not your preferred one is counter-productive. And your preferred solution is NOT politically workable.
Second, in my reply to a sibling comment I showed evidence that electrification of cars is proceeding faster than electrification of bus fleets. So even though there are more of them, electrifying cars is actually proving to be politically easier.
Third, I picked on buses because they are the easiest form of mass transit to move to from cars. If buses can't be made to work for a particular metro area, then nothing else is likely to work either. And buses are failing to work very well in most places where they are used.
And fourth, the big problem with buses in America is population density. We're driving mostly empty buses that make little environmental sense. This is a sign that we're not actually underinvesting in bus routes. But it is hard to make mass transit work when people aren't all in one place. And as much as you might wish it otherwise, we're not inclined to congregate in a small area for convenience.
> You're the one who dismissed gathering evidence about real usage of streets
One study from 2009 is not enough evidence to base a discussion on. We're both arguing entirely off our preconceived notions here.
> your preferred solution is NOT politically workable.
I'm not sure what solution you're referring to here. Increasing housing density? We both argued for that.
> electrification of cars is proceeding faster than electrification of bus fleets. So even though there are more of them, electrifying cars is actually proving to be politically easier.
That's fine, but it's actually not fine because this does nothing to solve any of the negative externalities of cars except for CO2 emissions. They are still dangerous, loud, extremely wasteful of resources, extremely wasteful of space, and expensive and difficult for individuals to maintain. Plus they still pollute the local environment with burned rubber tires (worn down faster due to greater weight).
> If buses can't be made to work for a particular metro area, then nothing else is likely to work either.
I disagree with this assertion and I don't see any evidence that it's true. Besides, you've switched from "politics matter more than logistics" to "logistics matter more than politics" with this argument. Buses are less popular than trains.
> And fourth, the big problem with buses in America is population density
I know! That's why I said we need to fix density!
> we're not inclined to congregate in a small area for convenience.
Again, no evidence for this. Mixed-used, walkable developments tend to be extremely popular and prohibitively expensive. If it wasn't illegal to build more, we would probably be building more.
In other countries such as Japan public transit is generally faster then private transportation. I think one of the reasons you see a low adoption of public transportation in some North American cities is because it can do the opposite and extend your trip duration by a significant amount. Safety is obviously another factor. It seems like in a lot of places pedestrians are treated with disregard. Pedestrians being able to safely commute within their communities shouldn't be controversial, but for some reason it is.
The things required to increase passengers per bus to the required 3-4 average to beat cars are well known. More frequent service, better route coverage, reduced prices. As these variables move that way, average passenger counts tend to go up. The layout of cities usually does not need to change at all in order to make public transit function well.
I haven't looked at the research recently, but my understanding is that while more frequent service is strongly correlated with higher average passenger counts, the causation seems to be that higher average passenger counts justify increased bus service, and not that increased bus service generally results in higher passenger counts.
Better route coverage likewise.
Reduced prices are complicated. That does increase usage, until the prices drop so far that you attract homeless people who your would-be passengers are scared of. It turns out that making mass transit passengers feel safe is a very important consideration.
More frequent buses tends to have a split effect. The first-order effect is linearly fewer passengers per bus. The second-order effect of people now switching to buses has to be quite strong (and often is) to overcome this direct effect.
I happened to travel from Amsterdam to Boston today (missing King’s Day). There was no chance I wouldn’t take the train to the airport on the Amsterdam end. There was equally no chance that I would take mass transit on the Boston end, despite living in Cambridge.
There are roughly a million buses, total, in the United States. Compared to auto electrification, it would take a relatively minuscule effort to replace them all with electric vehicles — that's roughly the number of vehicles that Tesla alone sells in a single year. By contrast there are about 280 million cars in the US. In general a new bus costs about ten times as much as a new car, so you're looking at a much lower expense.
In practice, it's my understanding that most municipalities are buying new buses electric anyway.
Why the discrepancy? There are a lot of reasons, but I wouldn't discount the fact that buses spend a larger fraction of their lives actually being driven, and so the fact that fueling is faster than recharging matters more for buses than cars.
Therefore even though it costs more to replace all of the cars in America, economics suggest that this will happen before the buses all convert over.
>Second, electric vehicles are currently 7.2% of all new cars sold in the USA, and only 2% of new buses sold in the USA.
You are comparing a centralized decision to a decentralized one. It is very easy to get 20% of the population to do anything; it is extremely difficult to get 90% on your side. The purchase of electric buses is a choice that can be made by governments.
I agree with your solution, and that densification is the most important piece of the puzzle. However, it is a chicken and egg problem. The second you build new housing in an area that requires a car, the person sinks in the cost of a spare car. That very second, public transport stops being a competitive because it becomes an added cost. Additionally, the spare cars demand lanes and storage that destroy any dream of densification. Densification has to start with low-occupancy buses.
Most of the US has low occupancy buses because there are just few enough buses that no one wants to ever ride them. Buses suffer a self-fulfilling prophecy of occupancy rates. Bus occupancy in Europe is consistently high [1] and there is nothing to indicate that the same cannot be achieved in US cities of similar density given enough time. It is fair to use these numbers.
First, the density of a city is different than the density of the area over which people live who commute to that city. Even American cities with comparable density are not necessarily as dense on that apples to apples comparison.
Second, you have to look at commute distance. The average American commutes around 40 miles each way. The average European commutes around 9 miles each way. 4x the distance = 16x the area, which means that adding a bus from A to B is likely to be helpful for about 1/16 the people. And that, right there, is going to explain a HUGE difference in ridership on mass transit.
This is a problem that can be addressed by dedicated bus lanes. But if you're going to have dedicated lanes, then it may make sense to go all of the way to light rail. Also dedicated lanes get push-back from unhappy car commuters. Who tend to have an outsized influence.
Many cities worldwide have had luck combining dedicated bus lanes, with "park and ride" lots, and congestion parking in downtown. Now you're providing both carrots and sticks to push people towards a hybrid trip that starts with a car, and then switches to bus in the high density areas. But it is a combination that tends to be politically unpopular in the USA.
My commute route has semi-dedicated bus lanes. They're not exclusive for bus use, but because there are many buses, most car drivers avoid that lane unless they are masochistic enough to plod along behind a slow bus.
Which raises my other point - even with a semi-dedicated bus lane like this, the buses are still at least half as slow as driving a personal car on the same route. I blame this on 1.) the bus itself being slow that it barely accelerates up to 20mph before it has to stop again, and 2.) there are too many stops.
Having done the route, I would say even bicycling it would be faster than the bus.
I'm sure even just reducing the number of stops would improve speeds significantly, but then I'm sure there will be tons of people complaining that the bus doesn't stop within X feet of their building.
Now that electric scooters have become so common, I've met more than a few people who now choose to do this commute route via electric scooter rather than take public transportation, claiming it's much faster and less stressful. I believe them. Bicycling is probably not as feasible of an option due to 1.) fitness levels, and 2.) theft risk.
Not sure why you are focusing on busses here, they're just one option.
Also we can do housing and transit improvements at the same time. I'll note I'm also not sure that "people involved in traffic planning" would be expected to have authority over housing, though maybe they should, provided that they have a mandate to not consider automobile traffic in any of their planning.
cool project but again one of those areas where dozens of pretty easily actions already exist. force cars to be smaller, add in roundabouts, tax car usage in high density urban areas, single lane one ways roads, etc.
It's very simple to do, for example via taxes, or by building the roads such that huge cars are impractical. You find very few F150s on twisty narrow Italian roads.
If lanes are smaller, then people buy smaller cars. If parking spaces for compact cars are differently priced than that for huge cars, then people buy smaller cars. Set insurance minimums for liability by vehicle class. (scale it to liability damage statistics)
There are a lot of ways to strongly disincentivize big vehicles. If we merely start making them pay for the space they occupy, they immediately become too expensive.
I think it could be done with coordinated license requirement changes. Make most trucks/SUVs require a higher more rigorous license class based on height/weight, grandfather in existing vehicles for now. But if you want to register the 2030 9 ton Hummer EV you better be able to prove you can safely drive the thing and won't park near the intersection just because it's Sunday and you won't get a ticket.
Of course that will never happen so you're right...
Likewise for roundabouts. They're putting in new ones in some areas. In other areas, there simply isn't the room based on existing buildings, etc. Not to mention the cost aspect. It might help, but it's not "easy".
GP was most likely thinking not of large roundabouts that take the place of major intersections, but the smaller traffic-calming type where the center can be as minimal as a 3 foot wide concrete block. They can be fit into pretty much any intersection because their purpose is not to change the path so much as to, frankly, eat up whatever extra space is available, which forces cars to slow around them.
Are you thinking just of roundabouts that include a raised middle and/or central reservations on approaching roads? In general, roundabouts need no more space and cost than a regular road would, see e.g. https://goo.gl/maps/Y6jzLq5SuYzMMf2a6
I have to say I agree with you on the roundabout. Nothing changes a driver's mind like a square curb. That particular intersection didn't have space though, so they installed that abomination.
Changing driver behaviour though? I'm pretty negative about it.
I get honked at regularly for stopping at those stop signs. The police head to Twitter and make fun of a few drivers a week for stunt driving. The city is opening a new processing centre because they can't handle the load of the speeding tickets from the speed cameras.
Yet I only see more and more aggression out there. People drive like they're the only ones on the road.
It's a 40 minute walk, one way, from my door to the nearest store. As much as I'd love to avoid the situation altogether, I don't have time to walk. Forcing people to drive everywhere is probably part of the problem, though.
Really cool project, I frequently see those pneumatic lines used here in Ireland.
Presumably you could mostly eliminate the hardware cost by re-using video feeds from existing traffic monitoring cameras?
Obviously doesn't apply to roads without cameras already in place.
This is a fine example of citizen data science. I am curious why the vision stuff needs to run online. Would it be just as useful to collect the images for a week and run the analysis offline? Seems to solve some of the energy and frame rate issues.
I think some camera software like ZoneMinder and Frigate (?) have offline recognition software. I believe it's tailored toward faces but I might be possible to adapt it to vehicles and pedestrians.
This gathers data, but doesn't exactly improve pedestrian safety. Something has to be done using that data for that to happen. Very cool though and should save tax payers money with this cheap solution.
An upside of this approach over the counting strips is a possibility for less vandalism.
As remarkable as it sounds, people are so anti-bike in my city there were instances of people literally cutting the strips put on bike lanes to count use.
If you want to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe all you have to do is make it illegal to be on the phone in any form while driving a car or truck.
No talking, no browsing, no sms, do not touch the damn phone while moving.
Make that law, enforce that law with real penalties and tada, you've immediately solved 90% of safety problems.
Dedicated, protected, bicycle lanes would be a real plus but either cities just don't want to be bothered or people just drive in the bicycle lane while they talk/browse on the phone.
It already is illegal, and people keep doing it. Trying to make addictive behaviour stop by making it illegal doesn't work for drugs and it doesn't work for using phones while driving.
Really cool product. Though I wonder if it might result in actually less infrastructure dedicated to bikes. If you look at the charts, there are more cars in a 5 minute period than pedestrians or bicycles all weekend.
You build bike infrastructure in the places where you want more of them, not the places where you have more of them. Or as we say in the active transportation advocacy business, they didn’t count swimmers to decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
This is short sighted though, and the Golden Gate Bridge analogy, while cute, is flawed.
You build a bridge to enable people to travel somewhere they want to go but currently cannot.
When you're building a bike lane you're trying to get people to switch from driving a car to cycling.
Driving is more convenient for most people. It's faster, it's easier, it's safer, and they are already used to it.
Simply plopping in a bike lane is not, ever, going to convince the majority to start cycling. All it will accomplish is pissing most of them off because a road lane that used to be a useful piece of public infrastructure for them is now a bike lane dedicated to some small fraction of people who cycle, and it negatively impacts their commutes and therefore their lives.
>You build bike infrastructure in the places where you want more of them, not the places where you have more of them. Or as we say in the active transportation advocacy business, they didn’t count swimmers to decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
These sorts of statements are analogous to the median vs mean slight of hand (aka lying) that people routinely employ to intentionally mislead.
At the very best it's "not the whole truth". To just build stuff and have it be used to a useful degree you need latent demand for transportation of all forms. These assumptions are generally questionably optimistic or untrue outside of urban areas (like real ones, not the census definition).
A bike lane to a strip mall off the highway that has nothing else immediately around it does nobody any good. Slap up a bus stop. Even if the bus service is crappy it will still benefit somebody.
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First of all if you are going to say that my remark is "analogous" to a lie, and that I "intentionally" mislead people in the course of bicycle infrastructure advocacy, then my reply is that you are analogous to a guy who needs to intentionally fuck off. Where the hell do you get off saying something like that about me?
Secondly, there is a massive latent demand for cycling infrastructure in highly populated places that are suitable for cycling. That there are other places unsuitable for cycling is irrelevant. Another thing we often say on this topic is there are no transportation solutions to land use problems. But in America even when the development pattern is reasonable the infrastructure for cycling still doesn't exist. The dangerous, unpleasant, and inconvenient scattered bike lanes that we have in most American cities are acceptable to < 1% of potential cyclists, which is why the bicycle mode share in most American cities is << 1%.
You broke the site guidelines badly here. I realized you were provoked, but users need to follow the rules regardless of what other commenters are doing.
I'm not going to ban you right now because, after skimming through your recent history, it looks to me like you've been making a good-faith effort to stick to the rules, which I appreciate. But if you keep resorting to aggressive/abusive posting, we're eventually going to have to. We've cut you a ton of slack over the years, but it's not infinite!
> Secondly, there is a massive latent demand for cycling infrastructure
A claim like that needs some evidence. I don't believe you at all that many people are eager to get rid of more convenient transportation (cars) for less convenient (bikes)
> The dangerous, unpleasant, and inconvenient scattered bike lanes that we have in most American cities are acceptable to < 1% of potential cyclists, which is why the bicycle mode share in most American cities is << 1%
These numbers suggest that if we had perfect cycling infrastructure that netted 100% of potential cyclists, we would still be seeing actual "bicycle mode share" usage of about 1-2% of commuters?
Seems like a poor use of infrastructure to me to cater to such a small demographic of cyclists.
I think the Mountain View - San Jose area is one of the bike-friendliest in the whole USA, and there's still no way I'm riding a bike around here (or letting my wife take our kid on one)
So long as morons are browsing Instagram on their 3 ton deathboxes while speeding around town, it's just too risky. My coworker got tapped by an SUV in a very low-speed fender bender. He was out of commission for months, all sorts of broken bones, it was brutal.
Would it be a case of improving infrastructure even further to convince you to cycle then? Or would it require more or less removing all cars from the roads?
I'd ride a bike on a completely separate path with no cars near it, or if they make an exercise suit that makes me impervious to car crashes, but otherwise I think I'm going to opt out
Very cool technology project, but this all seems like a lot of work and infrastructure attention for a vanishingly small constituency- 113 bikes in this analysis versus over 14000 cars.
Not only does this not do anything to improve pedestrian safety, the datasets generated are not even validated? I struggle to understand who this benefits.
The title is perhaps not ideal, but it seems like municipalities do need to collect this information and use it for projects to improve pedestrian safety, so using machine learning to make this type of sensor cheaper and easier to install seems useful.
Figuring out where the major activity zones are is something that this kind of data could help with, however.