I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free.
A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.
Similarly for housing, the well substantiated claim from modern urban planners is that we've been prioritizing housing for cars well beyond housing for people, and the best solution for that is to overturn minimum parking requirements and unbundle the cost of parking from the cost of housing.
Personally, I still find these opinions somewhat counterintuitive. The weirdest part about it is that it all posits that the solution to a centralized planning problem is market solutions, and it's coming from people you'd expect to have the opposite opinion. However, what we've had in terms of transportation clearly doesn't work for people and for the environment, and the last 20 years of "Shoupism" has shown some serious promise in terms of reversing the trend.
A big issue with the market argument in converting car drivers to transit riders is the respective networks operate at different scales. Think of a little neighborhood with a bus line on a road; theres probably I’m not even sure call it 20x as many roads in that neighborhood that don’t have a bus line. There is so much more built out of the comprehensive road network everywhere than there is with transit. Cities are barely establishing their cardinal direction rail transit routes today. Even living in a place as densely railed as nyc most of those routes are extremely biased in the sort of commutes they best serve (in to manhattan for the most part).
Since most cities can’t afford to ever build their rail networks as comprehensively as the existing road network in even a small city, we are left with bussing to build that comprehensive network. And what do you know, if you look up most cities bus networks they look pretty good and high coverage. So why don’t people take them? Its still worse than a car. A car is a direct bus on your own schedule, a bus route is a compromised route of average population and job density, might not help you get to where you are going especially for drives outside a fixed commute to a central business district. Scheduling and especially transfers can be fickle.
As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided, people are going to take cars if they can afford it, even with a shiny new light rail line or whatever is attempted. I have yet to see a project like that attract wealthy ridership that can afford choice, transit rider median demographics are working class or even at the poverty line in a lot of metros. Even nyc subway ridership is 40k income on avg, bus ridership 28k. In the most expensive city in north america no less.
It’s hard to talk about the topic at very high level but for many American cities like Columbus where I live the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well.
Many cities, including Columbus, are expanding bus rapid transit and other bus related activities which is laudable, but to your point, and which I agree and would frame it slightly differently, the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities and so you need category changes to change habits (trams, bikes, walking).
I think we need to focus our efforts on cities like Columbus, or others, which do have the population to support rail development and solve for that and not get too worried about solving everything everywhere all at once.
Most state departments of highways and cars (they are not departments of transportation) simply don’t fund alternative means of transportation. Leadership from the top down needs to change its focus. The mantra should be the best, safest car is the one you never get in. Instead it’s “we need to preserve going from here to there in 20 minutes without traffic surprises” as if not being stuck in traffic is a Constitutional right. It’s bankrupting us and it’s bad for business and wellbeing.
> the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities
You can change that by giving them their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc. That is what they do where I live.
A city next to me (L.A. area) has some dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes. Unfortunately, they dont have one of the other benefits that you mention, like banning cars in some areas. There are also connections to the train to go farther, but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city. The buses themselves are typically faster and decent, as I ride them a lot. Meanwhile, the other traffic lanes are jam packed during rush hours. It is the L.A. area, so there's just a ton of people/drivers anyway.
The last time I went through there driving, it took almost 20 mins to go 2-3 miles due to traffic (and stop lights), obviously during rush hour. The buses were still nearly empty (I wished I didnt have to drive that day). At a non-rush hour time, it takes me maybe 20 mins for my whole trip home which is about 9 miles.
My point, I guess, is it's not always just having a free bus lane. There are a lot of people that need convincing to take buses and alternative transportation. A few of my coworkers wish they could take the bus/train, but having kids in school and other things make it a bit harder for them.
You are not wrong - this is where personal, private, transportation excels. And why Culver city desperately needs a quality network of safe, protected, bike infrastructure. Cars don't scale, but bikes do.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. If there was safe and protected infrastructure, I feel a lot more people, including myself, would bike, especially with all the new e-bikes available. I will give Culver City some credit because they do have some dedicated bike lanes but they're not really protected.
> but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city.
You take the bus so this goes without saying but, let's say a bus is mostly empty and has 8 people inside. If you were to put those 8 people into individual cars, you'd make the road a lot more crowded. I think a lot of folks look at these mostly-empty buses and don't realize that most cars are mostly-empty also (average 1.5 occupants / car in most of the US, honestly probably lower in the LA area due to its sheer car centricity.) But of course if you're in a car you're more likely to view another driver as "someone like you" while you look at the bus and think of it as a waste of space and taxpayer money.
Yes, exactly! Lol I take it you've been or live there? Afternoon traffic is ridiculous and even in surrounding areas like Palms and Mar Vista, which I think are people avoiding Culver City. Just way too many drivers here in general.
It will change the habits of some but it’s not enough. We should continue to build out bus infrastructure and enhance bus rapid transit especially in the ways you mention, but those efforts won’t result in the large change we need to shift away from vehicle-based infrastructure.
> their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc
I feel like we are in agreement. It might not be enough but it is necessary. Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this. Bill deBalsio the ex mayor of New York came on a radio show and said (paraphrasing) he can't order cops to ticket cars and trucks that are loading or unloading in the bus lane. The bus lane is NOT a business' property for loading and unloading, especially not at busy hours. I'd you must do so, do it when there is no traffic in the middle of the night.
How can we do more when we can't even do the bare minimum?
> Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this.
The problem is that you're proposing a new problem rather than a solution.
Suppose there are two car lanes and they're somewhat congested. You suggest converting one to a bus lane to encourage people to take the bus. The result is to make the remaining car lane disproportionately more congested, because the bus lane gets 10% of people to take the bus and the other car lane is now 105% over capacity instead of 15% over capacity.
Your theory is that this will cause enough people to take the bus to make this problem go away, but that theory only works if it doesn't. If people taking the bus relieves the congestion then the car lane is uncongested and there is no more reason to take the bus.
So let the car lane be interminably congested, you say. Force people to take the bus. Only the bus doesn't service all destinations, or doesn't run there often enough (because if it did it would be empty), so the bus is no option for those people no matter how bad the car traffic gets. At which point they're prepared to boil you alive for making the traffic worse without giving them any viable alternative to it.
You need to make their lives better, not worse, or you can't win.
Come to Edinburgh and the Lothians, it's not perfect but it's better than you might think.
A couple of important aspects:
Once buses are frequent enough, people don't need to worry about the timetable and will just get the next one. Edinburgh's main arterial routes have frequent enough buses to achieve this, even if not every bus goes to the same ultimate destination. Some of the busier bus lines have frequent enough buses all by themselves.
This does mean that there are lots of empty buses off-peak, this may seam wasteful but it's a necessary component of a functional transit system.
We also have a number of "bus gates", as well as bus lanes, with cameras to prevent other vehicles from using bus-only lanes. This lets buses go through residential areas without making them rat runs for car drivers.
Buses and trams (especially trams!) can take a lot more people than cars. If everyone who gets the bus tried to take a car instead then no-one would get anywhere.
And we also give free bus travel to young people, old people, and anyone with a medical condition that means they can't drive.
A combination of a smartphone and free bus travel gives my disabled daughter a lot more freedom than she'd otherwise be able to enjoy.
You’re telling us that buses must be empty, because people won’t take buses, because there aren’t enough buses, because buses would be empty if there are enough buses. Can you spot where the logic breaks down?
I'm telling you that buses must be empty because if they only go along the busiest roads then nobody takes them because their route is sleepy road -> busy road -> sleepy road, and a bus that only travels along the busy road can't pick them up or drop them off. Whereas a bus that travels along the sleepy road will be empty, because it's a sleepy road which only gets one car an hour as it is. These can both be true at once because the sleepy roads outnumber the busy roads in regions where most of the land area is the suburbs.
I agree, but want to add that part of the problem here and why this can occur is because of easy and cheap parking. It’s not strictly the induced demand phenomenon but I think your point is the major factor.
From what I’ve seen in my own reading and world travels is that you have to just stop expanding the roads or working on them outside of necessary maintenance and such. Add bike and bus lanes, make the car lanes smaller (safely) and then let people sort out whether it’s worth it to drive. Finding ways to tax the ever living hell out of or zone away surface parking lots should help too.
Whenever a department of “transportation” or city/regional officials get together in a room to discuss these topics, there should be very little if any discussion about how changes affect drivers.
this entire monologue boils down to “people want cars and public transit is bad, so don’t improve it and prioritise access” which sounds a lot like you work for ford
It's not that public transit is bad, it's that if you try to make car travel worse without providing people with a viable alternative to it, you will lose at politics. And just sticking a bus lane in there doesn't provide an alternative unless the bus comes at short intervals to the places where people actually travel, which isn't compatible with the geography of most American cities, because at least one of the endpoints will be in the suburbs which lacks the density for viable mass transit.
Unfortunately we built those suburbs without factoring in the real cost of transporting people to and from them. Now those homeowners are real used to that transportation subsidy and are not happy when it is threatened to be taken away. Something is going to give, cities can’t afford it any more.
Plenty of suburban homeowners like myself are happy to never have to go into the city and have been granted this due to work from home. I personally haven’t been downtown in like 6 months. A large percentage of the population who commute to city centers from the suburbs for jobs are probably working office jobs that could be done remotely. The ulterior motives I’ve heard for RTO are that commercial real estate prices are plummeting and city revenues are plummeting because of lack of workers. If that is the case then aren’t the suburbs subsidizing the city?
That only makes the bus beat the car if theres traffic on the roads. Cities like columbus don’t gridlock outside osu football games. Highways flow full speed even during rush hour which is actually less than an hour. Its a different planet than socal traffic where both sides of a highway are moving 20mph between 3-7pm
Columbus is one of those cities where the car experience is too nice, highway system built out and roads hardly congest (save for osu football games) . Say you live in worthington and work near downtown perhaps. You will probably be taking 315 or 71 there in like 15 minutes. Even if there was a train line 15 mins walk from your house that took you to downtown, it would probably double your commute at least. Not to mention when its raining or snowing that starts looking not so nice compared to your heated car a ten second walk from the door.
You’re not wrong! What I’m concerned about is with the new developments and population increases (I think it’ll be higher than expected) we should get ahead of our transit needs before we start to have really bad problems. This isn’t accounting for “political” concerns either like climate change.
> the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well.
That only answers where new development should go. It does nothing whatsoever for the people who already live in neighborhoods with no (useful) access to public transit.
The increase in appropriate density tends to make public transit solutions more viable [1] and you also (with good zoning practices) can make small businesses more viable too so you walk 5 minutes down the street for your local cafe instead of driving 15 minutes to Starbucks to send profits to Seattle instead.
[1] Car-only infrastructure isn’t viable economically but it’s hard to make that argument in this context because it’s the default and the costs are hidden.
Canada has significantly higher bus ridership than the US despite having pretty similar urban forms and it is entirely due to the difference in services provided.
Seattle has seen noticeable increases in bus service hours and ridership from across income ranges, and the new rail extensions are performing similarly well.
If I can count on a bus every 10 minutes, I will take a bus. If I can't just hop off a bus and back on the next because of long time intervals, I won't take a bus because I know something will go wrong and waste a huge chunk of my time.
The political problem is that you need to keep a bunch of empty buses running continuously in order to change the behavior of people to start taking those buses more often at which point they quit being empty.
The current problem is that in most places I have lived, I can WALK between points faster than I can take a bus. It will be 40-60 minutes between buses and because those buses are unreliable I can't count on my transfer, so I can wind up with a 2 hour+ bus ride for something which is less than 15 minutes by car.
I just checked the bus stop near my parents' place in Miami (I'm living in NYC now). The next bus arrives in 14 hours lol. Busses for that stop run hourly between 11am-4pm.
I don't get how they think anyone can depend on that. Not only is an hour between busses incredibly frustrating, if I needed to do anything past 4pm, (like I don't know... commute to work?) I would have no way back home until the next day.
The next bus is loud, uncomfortable, slow, filled with other people you don't want to share space with, stops every 2 minutes, and doesn't go where you want. The bus is run by a government that doesn't care what you want, and probably is either more expensive than you want, or basically "free".
Transit systems need to be about twice as fast, comfortable and convenient as car options to be competitive, and in the US political and operating environment of the last 100 years, it's not happening. Suburbs broke two major rent-seeking dominances-- urban property owners AND transit unions. Together those actors preserve a terrible experience and the path to a car-free future is doubtful precisely because it would require overcoming those social groups in addition to solving major technical and capital problems.
That's only part of it. Do you mean intra-city transit or inter-city transit? Highways are used by car drivers to move within the city (or between cities in the same metro area, such as between Yokohama and Tokyo), not just between far-apart metro areas.
One huge difference between the US and Japan here is parking. Having a car is one thing, but where are you going to park it when you arrive at your destination? If you're driving between two towns or smaller cities, this might not be an issue, but if you're driving between Yokohama and Tokyo, it probably is. The car is only a feasible choice if you're traveling between points where there's a place for you to park. So of course, this drives a lot of traffic onto the trains and keeps ridership very high.
Both, and both. Both intracity transit and Amtrak is a total joke, and if anything Amtrak is significantly worse, with some intercity connections not even having daily service.
This is entirely a policy choice. America subsidizes parking by requiring very high parking per place, and since they’re required to build it anyways and there is so much supply it is always free.
Japan does not subsidize parking like this, in fact quite the opposite. There is no free street parking and to buy a car you need proof of a parking spot to store it in, and parking is more of a market as a result.
Or have minibuses that are smaller and come more frequently. Find a few drivers willing to work after hours as a second job perhaps and let them drive smaller shuttle buses or larger passenger vans.
When big buses stop their routes the smaller ones would start.
I like the sibling comment idea of using AI eventually.
But in general for public transportation I think running at a loss is not unreasonable. It's nice if it's profitable, but it's ok if it isn't. Hopefully it's reducing emissions, giving people who can't or don't want to drive reliable access to their employment, etc. is still worth it.
this is a problem that autonomous driving could fix more easily than the general driving problem due to the fixed route, but good luck having the bus driver union not throw rocks at your AVs
To expand on that, with small and midsized cities, daily cost of transit rides vs. gas is on parity. Of course this does not include maintenance, insurance, and depreciation, of owning and driving a vehicle, but most people only encounter those twice a year, vs gas and bus fees are daily and weekly.
In small and midsized cities, driving a car takes less time, likely 1/2 to 1/3rd the time of taking a bus.
Lastly, there’s the sense of control over personal space. When you’re on a bus, you do not control who gets on the bus with you. When you’re in a car, you have total control.
> As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided,
Two ways to fix that (in general): improve one side, or worsen the other. Some measures do both simultaneously, eg. bus lanes take away asphalt for cars and improve bus infrastructure.
It's fairly easy to make a bus network more convenient than a car in a city. You can easily take measures such as dedicated bus lanes, one way streets, pedestrian areas, narrower streets + wider pavements and cycle lanes, less and more expensive parking.
The current attractiveness of public transport is roughly how attractive cars should have been. But most US cities have focused for decades on making car use more attractive. Congratulations, it worked.
The cost to redo what is there is so high that efforts for road diets are usually only a few blocks or a few miles at a time. More money need to be made available for these projects by the federal government as municipalities are usually strapped for cash.
I had a conversation the other day with someone here from San Diego - which now has the highest cost of living in the US. I briefly looked into it from a rental pov and it seemed his statements checked out.
I'm not saying that NYC is actually cheaper than San Diego - I'm aware it's incredibly expensive but I think that all the cities are more similar than they are not as far as unaffordability goes
That actually really surprised me but it does make sense once thought about - goes against everything I've been taught tho. How can San Diego be as expensive as NYC?
It really depends on where in San Diego the other person lived. A lot of people will say San Diego instead of whatever little city they live in in the area. La Jolla is probably a better comparison to Manhattan Island. The average home price in La Jolla is over $2M, which I think is closer to Manhattan. It still shouldn't be higher than Manhattan, but pretty damn close.
San Diego would probably be better compared to the Bronx, SI or Queens, maybe. But again, it depends on where in SD that person lived. Heck, you can move inland to Kearney Mesa and still find a home under $1M, hopefully. It's been a minute since I was down there.
Also, I feel that the website/ACCRA is trustworthy, but why lump Los Angeles and Long Beach together when every borough in NYC is separate? Doesn't make sense to me. Long Beach is as independent of L.A. as the boroughs are to each other.
I would assume that in LA Jolla, that $2 million gets you a medium-sized house. In Manhattan, it buys you a one- or two-bedroom condo with a high condo fee.
Theres no solid way to determine cost of living because the data are so poor. Its not like all rents and incomes are known and tabulated into a single database. Usually its journalist-statistics and not real statistic being done. Like looking at zillow prices vs what people actually pay who currently rent.
In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a lot more of it, and cheaper).
The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less. Do you think this will be greatly different in the US?
My experience of the UK (resident) and the US (tourist use of public transit in both central California and the Newark-Boston strip), is that the UK system is wildly better than the USA system.
I needed to show a passport (perhaps any photo ID would have worked, but still WTF?) to get the train from Davis to Sacramento, the trains were not particularly frequent, and that's the equivalent distance of Petersfield to Portsmouth & Southsea:
The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking.
With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditure and the operational expenditure. Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
Because the cost of living in a society is helping to drive that society forward, even though you personally aren't benefiting from every dollar spent. Would that same person balk at paying emergency services, even if they aren't the ones riding an ambulance or getting help from a cop?
But even more importantly, the whole issue of cost is misplaced, imo. It's all based on millage, which ends up meaning public transport costs less than $20/year to maintain. There's no reason I'm ever going to complain about $20/year to keep buses running, and I look very questioningly at people who do complain about it. It's so small, I feel like they're making proxy arguments, or don't understand how millage works.
> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
Because putting people on the bus who would otherwise park their cars where the bike lane is or the sidewalk, is a good deal for you!
Also because the people on the bus pay taxes for your bike lanes & sidewalks. (If only bikers paid for the bike lanes, your taxes would probably be much higher than what you pay to subsidize buses.)
Also because the majority of people don’t bike & walk everywhere.
Then you must apply the same logic to public infrastructure for cars. Why would someone who only walks or bikes have to pay for the gigantic and expensive infrastructure needed for cars? Why would they have to have their immediate surrounding sacrificed to make room for all these cars?
> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
This is a question that can be applied to a lot of things, with deleterious results. Why would a person with no kids pay increased taxes to subsidize schools? Never sick but subsidizing hospitals? Not retired but subsidizing someone else's pension? Any kind of spending that you don't benefit from explicitly, directly, and instantly deserves the same question, right?
You're living in a society, the well being of the society reflects on your well being. People being more educated or healthier makes society better for you too. People having the option to take public transport to work because it's more efficient, cleaner, and cheaper (so for some it's the only option) and thus keep that job also makes society better for you.
If your logic is "pay only for what you use" then the one day when you need to use any of that "subsidized" infrastructure of services it might just cost more than you'll ever afford.
That road you ride/walk on, the park that gives you some fresh air, or the electricity that keeps your computer running were brought to you by someone who probably received subsidized education, healthcare, and public transport to get to work.
P.S. All those big fans of Thatcher's "[socialist governments] always run out of other people's money" aren't actually against subsidies, only against the ones that don't predominantly benefit them. Subsidy for the parking spot I need is good, subsidy for the public transport I don't need is bad.
No, this is not a democratic process. People are not voting on these things. A vocal minority with the time and ability to involve themselves in the process ruin things for everyone. It's readily apparent when it comes to things like building housing, and in this case funding transit.
And more generally, everyone voting only in their narrow self-interest is not "democracy working correctly". As numerous people have pointed out above, we live in a society and not everything that society needs to function well will benefit each and every person. Democracy working correctly does not mean everyone saying "I oppose any public spending that does not directly accrue a benefit to me personally". That's a recipe for a broken society with a great deal of deal being left behind.
>No, this is not a democratic process. People are not voting on these things. A vocal minority with the time and ability to involve themselves in the process ruin things for everyone.
Have you actually talked to American voters? No, mass transit isn't directly on the ballot, but in most places, it's not a popular thing. Americans, by and large, like their cars, and really don't like public transit. The more liberal ones might give it some lip service, but they generally avoid it if they can afford to. More importantly, Americans don't want the changes needed to make it more feasible, namely higher density and a lack of free parking everywhere.
If you don't believe me about American voters, just read the other comments in this discussion.
>It's readily apparent when it comes to things like building housing
Again, people say they want more housing built, but they don't actually want to make the changes needed for this to be done. They don't want to remove zoning restrictions that prevent housing from being built in places where it's really needed to make cities more walkable and make transit work better.
>And more generally, everyone voting only in their narrow self-interest is not "democracy working correctly".
This is absolutely wrong. Democracy isn't some magical thing that produces the best possible result when done the best way. It's a product of the voters and their whims and demands, no matter how stupid or ignorant they may be.
>we live in a society and not everything that society needs to function well will benefit each and every person
If you want a society where people vote outside their narrow self-interest, you need voters who understand this and vote accordingly. If you're assuming most humans are like this, you're sadly mistaken.
>Democracy working correctly does not mean everyone saying "I oppose any public spending that does not directly accrue a benefit to me personally".
Yes, it does, if you have a population of voters who think exactly this way.
That's how it is with everything. Running a government involves taxing, and directing funds from one place to another; something is always going to be subsidized at the expense of something else (or debt). America's voters prefer to subsidize roads and highways for their personal cars.
> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
Also, I assume that for consistency you would say someone who never cycles should not pay increased taxes to pay for things like cycle lanes? Do you think we should make no provision for cycling, or introduce a road tax on bicycles to pay for it?
I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.
How does demand for public transit produce it? I mean public calls for more transit have been loud for many years and US politicians have taken that as opportunity to tax more and produce garbage transit construction project that enrich their friends and fail to change the situation (see the "mystery" of the US not being able to build public transit).
As someone who used to live in DC, and now lives in Tokyo, yes, the DC metro system is pretty terrible. How long did that Silver line extension take again? And when are they going to build more lines or extensions? And when are they going to have trains that run like clockwork every 5 minutes? Heck, when are they going to install automated gates on the platforms so people can't fall into the tracks? I don't think the DC system's drivers could possibly stop accurately enough for that to work there.
> when are they going to install automated gates on the platforms so people can't fall into the tracks?
It is interesting that you picked this one. For those unaware, in the busiest mass transit lines in East Asia, some countries and systems are slowly installing barrier gates to prevent accidental (and intentional) falls onto the tracks. To me, Japan is special because they are trying to reduce suicides when people throw themselves in front of oncoming trains. Is that really an issue on the DC metro? I doubt at even 10% the level of Japan. And accidental falls that result in serious injury are incredibly rare. One more thing to consider: These gates require maintenance, and a lot of it. Unless your system has world class maintenance (I really mean the "world class" bit), these gates will quickly become a nuscience and disabled.
The Silver Line is fantastic. I visit the DC area several times a year to see family. Used to rent a car or pay $$$ for Uber into the city from Dulles. Last time I paid $2 on a Sunday for me and my daughter to get into the city.
When I lived in Northern Virginia however I experienced many disrupted or very slow trips due to issues with the DC Metro.
The DC Metro service, according to wikipedia, was effective transit service that has been trashed over the years by neglected - like BART. And like BART, it's hard single extension but is basically in terrible shape now.
My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.
Is it possible that ALL infrastructure issues revolve around more people?
If a place is nice, more people move there, and then the infrastructure is overburdened? but momentum just makes things end up bad in the end.
What about finding ways to distribute the population more broadly, by say fighting return-to-office kinds of things? Maybe taxing dense populations somehow?
On the other hand, does fighting all this like colorado is doing - does it make colorado less competitive?
Exactly! The urban core takes in way more taxes per person than it costs for infrastructure, suburbia is the exact opposite. Urbanites are subsidizing the suburbs currently.
The problem I have with reducing minimum parking is that in rural areas it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t stop people in my rural town of 2,500 houses advocating for reducing parking requirements.
Well, today's rural areas are tomorrow's suburbs. If you want to stop the rural areas from becoming a car slave suburban sprawl, then you need to do something differently than what we did in the past. It sounds like people in your town are forward thinking.
Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.
I consider it so forward thinking as to be unrealistic.
I hear what you are saying but my town is more or less in accessible and a suburb to know where. We don't uber and taxi's after dark should be considered ahead of time. We have minimal mass transit system that essentially connects towns together. If we ever get train service from a metropolitan city I could see it.
Currently I see the people demanding reduced parking requirements as echoing talking points they don't understand.
The area of the town is around 43 square miles. The houses are not near the grocery stores.
New England towns used to be very neighborhood centric. Our town used to have 14 schools because everyone had to walk to school. Our schools have been centralized and now require busing.
Walkability used to be a thing but no longer. Off street parking is convenient during snow removal.
New England towns are 100s of years old. My town was considered the gateway to the west as it is the last town in the northwest corner of Massachusetts.
The town was developed around walking but our modern infrastructure has eliminated the practicalities.
My only point is that parking minimums shouldn’t be thought of as universal solution.
If you are talking about Williamstown then even though it is spread out it looks fairly cyclable. At least distance-wise.
There is even a big shared carpark for the built-up area so individual shops don't need to provide parking.
Whereas in North Adams the aerial view shows the (I assume mandated) carparks are pretty empty. I'll bet a few landlords would love to have more buildings and less carparks
Remember when you say "our modern infrastructure has eliminated the practicalities" you pretty much mean everything is designed for cars.
The big shared car park that I presume you see is the college's parking for a theater almost any parking lot you see in Williamstown is the college's.
I'm not saying it is not cyclable. When managed to get a bike path built all the way to North Adams. The neighborhood argued against using the easement on their properties and caused a multi-year delay and 2 mile diversion of the bike path.
I'm saying that the entire environment is built around cars. The entire notion that limiting parking for apartment buildings will help housing costs is backwards. People need access to groceries all year round and if the closest grocery store is in North Adams it is too soon to worry restricting parking.
North Adams on the other hand has a really weird relationship to cars and the destruction of the local economy.
Sometime in the past 50 years some central planner decided that have Route 2 run through North Adams downtown was inconvenient. The fix was to tear down all the buildings on Main Street and replace them with an overpass and Route 2 can then run through straight through with only a couple of stop lights.
This plus the loss of factory jobs decimated the economy local economy in the late 70's. When I move to the area in the 2001 they had the highest teen pregnancy rate in at least Massachusetts.
MassMoca is a contemporary art museum meant to lift North Adams and I would say after 25 years it is showing some traction with the local economy. North Adams is the best place for housing in the area. The downtown has everything one needs including affordable housing. North Adams doesn't need to build more parking. If the trolly that used to connect Williamstown to North Adams still existed that may change my position on parking in Williamstown.
My Mom was anti-car and growing up in Florida we could do anything we needed in Gainesville on foot, bike, or bus. When we moved north to Pennsylvania Dutch country we got a car.
I'm surprised by your diligence and I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.
The problem we have in the U.K. where most housing has a shortage of parking is people assume they have a right to store a car - typically one per adult too. If their property doesn’t have a space for a car they therefore assume that means there is a requirement for the public to provide the space. That view is by far the most common view, therefore vast quantities of public space is used to store people’s private possessions.
By removing the mandated private space for storing vehicles, you increase the public space used to store vehicles.
If there is in adequate parking for an apartment building it disrupts the neighborhood. A developer does gain much money from needing to provide free parking. The incentive is to have more people paying rent and less land wasted on parking.
I don’t see how this is a problem unless people are saying you need to stop people from moving in because they want to store their private property on public land for free. Which is silly of course.
Minimum parking requirements are just that: A lower bound. Which allows the property owner to choose the number that makes sense. In a rural area that might be a higher number because there is no mass transit and everyone will be arriving by car, but so what? Then the property owner will choose to have more parking spaces, because their patrons will demand them and they don't want to lose business.
It seems to me that most people will not be willing to lower their standard of traveling to the extent required by public transit in most places in the US, even if travel by car becomes very difficult. The gap is simply too wide.
I live in the Boston area and commute by car. My commute by car (despite the recent closure of a lane on the most heavily trafficked road on my commute, for no reason other than to not have it) is between 25 and 45 minutes. The fastest I can pull it off by public transit is an hour, with a long tail up to 1h20m or more in case of shutdowns, etc. I’d gladly take public transit if I could even meet my worst-case commute time consistently, but the worsening of my life by doubling my average commute time far outweighs the benefit of being a little greener and not having to pay attention to driving during my commute.
In other areas of the economy we wouldn’t consider inducing demand for alternative remedies by making the way average person operates worse. It becomes quite dystopian in my opinion. For instance, one could argue that too many people are seeking healthcare rather than pursuing lifestyle changes to improve their health, due to the availability of healthcare, so we should shut down hospitals. Or one could argue that the presence of housing induces demand for housing and so we should stop building new houses while providing no additional place for people to live. That will just create homelessness and/or very expensive housing. Both of these solutions will lower demand, but in a quite painful way for many people.
To me the solution which makes far more sense is to build improved public transit and people will naturally gravitate toward it, reducing demand for roads/cars, AND their quality of life will improve. For instance, if Boston expanded the MBTA with the long-sought-after urban ring project [1], my commute would reduce to perhaps 30-35 minutes by train. At that point it would be an absolute no brainer for me to switch all my commutes to public transit.
This is a rare situation where almost everyone really can win. Easier, cheaper, faster, greener travel. I don’t see why people argue for an approach where the majority of people lose.
Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still.
Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time.
It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately?
I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty fair. But making a poor person living paycheck to paycheck come up with $40 to go to the lake with a cheap sailboat seems harsh to me (my dad and I used to go as a Kid. It was $5 then. And my dad made $20 an hour as a recent immigrant in construction).
And don't start that people that use services should pay. My tax money goes to a lot of things I don't use or even agree with.
No, I agree: a boy scout dingy should not cost $40 to put in the water. A more serious boat, however, I can understand needing higher fees to pay for whatever services are used there.
Conflating free parking with a childhood core memory, a lake trip with your immigrant father, feels a little disingenuous to me. But I think you understand the core idea: by making something cheap or free, we incentivize the activity but we spend communal resources (tax dollars, or some rival good like space downtown, or space on a lake) to do so. But we as a society get to choose what to incentivize. Cars have externalities (traffic, the space they take up, pollution, their being required is expensive for working families) that other forms of transport don’t, so people are rethinking the various ways we incentivize driving.
What’s so great about transit besides the environmental savings. Having to share space with other people, walk to the train station, put up with a train schedule, have no way to travel past some arbitrary time (midnight to 2am in most places), no way to transport large items or groceries, no way to go off the beaten path, having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. I like the idea of having public transport but not at the expense of the incredible roadways we have.
> having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities.
Depends on activities, I guess, but my experience is the opposite, densely populated areas has vastly more activities available within 20-30 minutes reach especially to parents with kids.
You may be missing the point that these activities can potentially be in your backyard if you don’t live in an apartment. My kids can swim or play privately in my backyard and I still have plenty of space for my gardening hobby, bbq-ing with extended family, various outdoor games, or just hanging out watching tv in the backyard. I’ve known people who have basketball, tennis, or pickle ball courts in their backyard. Outside of very specific museums or live music/sports venues I can’t think of any activity that is available in a dense city that isn’t in my suburban neighborhood.
Like what? There are a lot of toddler gyms, sports fields, art schools, music lessons, pools etc. in the suburbs. But you can’t easily woodwork, metalwork, garden, shoot guns, fish, kayak, hike trails, raise chickens/goats etc in the city.
As someone that lived in Manhattan for many years as an adult all I could think of doing was restaurants, bars, broadway shows and walks in Central Park.
Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.
The proof of concept is already here, but the technology still needs too much human supervision to be cost-effective. If you want to make self-driving taxis cheap enough for most people to use daily, the prices have to be something like $2/trip.
To recoup the billions of dollars they've invested in it, it might be a decade before we get down to $2/ride. As far as how much human supervision it takes, we don't actually know the costs of it, though the latency involved means it's not Actually, Indians remote piloting the vehicles with Playstation controllers.
Those have fixed stops and schedules, so you need to walk up to the stop and wait for the next arrival. Taxis are more flexible in both space and time.
I kinda feel most Americans should be trying to walk more... but also if the schedules and stops were improved people would use it far more. I'd like to take a tram or bus I just don't want to spend an extra 40+/- mins getting there to arrive with no protection from the weather. I don't particularly like taxis much but at least they figure out where you need to go without too much effort, I do drive though way more then I taxi. Taxis are more rare trips for traveling in places I don't know or can't drive. I wish we had high speed trains where I lived in my capital city, just an easy way to travel to the major cities by train would make my day. I'd travel far more often if I could then. Trains to me are the best of all worlds.
> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.
Almost everywhere it actually works, mass transit is heavily subsidised, with tickets covering only 20-30% of the operating expenses.
I was going to read The High Cost of Free Parking, until I saw that it's 800 pages long. Did you read the whole thing, skim, or entirely skip parts? I am familiar with the general argument and feel like 800 pages is too much for a book on the subject (at least for my taste).
When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options.
Really there should be a high speed rail along the front range and subways in places like Denver. And zoning that prioritizes development that utilized that.
If you make the bus better than driving, people will take the bus.
Ideally, you'd do that by improving the bus rather than accepting the current shitty bus situation and degrading driving to the point that it's even worse...
I think to would be extremely difficult to make the bus better than driving for people that already have a car. The most obvious option is making parking expensive or hard to find but I think that would lead to new politicians before people really embrace the bus. Reality is that americans dont enjoy being in enclosed spaces with strangers, hard to overcome that.
The hardware store probably has a delivery service, because not everyone has a van or a pickup for those 2x4s. But if you DIY big stuff often enough for that to be a factor to consider, you're probably not the target group anyway. Just like people who need to drive 800 miles without a stop every other week aren't the target group for current EVs.
Is this a hypothetical future hardware store delivery service that enables a bus? No hardware store I have seen has a delivery service. I do a fair amount of gardening, and while most garden stores (not hardware stores, dedicated stores for landscaping and gardening) have the capability to deliver, it is always a very expensive service ($50-100 for a trip of less than 5 miles).
Most cars can fit a few 8' 2x4s as well as several bags of bulk dirt, and what hardware stores often have is a cutting service that lets you make those 2x4s shorter for transit. None of those would fit on a bus.
Home Depot and Lowes (the two largest chains in the US) both have delivery. Home Depot also has rental trucks, as does UHaul (trucks and vans) if you need to self-drive the product and decided to not own a car.
The local lumber/building supply companies also usually have delivery, though they can be harder to deal with than a consumer-oriented hardware store.
> it is always a very expensive service ($50-100 for a trip of less than 5 miles)
A.k.a the cost of not owning a car. Where I live, I could pay 100€ weekly for deliveries and it'll still be cheaper than owning and operating a decent (as in, not a 20th century rust bucket) car would be.
Theres no getting past the fact that being on the bus means youre necessarily close to strangers with no recourse when they do things you dont like. This is a pretty big problem to overcome in the US. The bus needs to be obviously much better than driving to get people to switch when they already own a car. Just a little faster/more convenient/cheaper wont cut it.
It's fine that you don't want to be next to people, but then you need to pay for that privilege. It's not sustainable otherwise.
The big problem with sprawl is that it's subsidized. The federal government taxes the population at large and uses that tax money to build large roads and lay down the necessary utilities, sewage, and drainage. Interstates and interstate connections (viaducts, onramps, offramps, etc) come purely out of the FHWA budget which comes from taxes. Gas taxes help but the federal gas tax hasn't been changed since 1990 (indexed for inflation that's basically been a discounting gas tax) and as fuel efficiency standards increase and hybrid/EV penetration increases gas taxes end up netting less money per mile driven. Add to that the fact that cars are getting heavier in the US, increasing wear-and-tear on existing roads, and you're basically making maintenance of roads in the US cost more money per taxpayer. Some states have been increasing vehicle registration fees to compensate but that remains very unpopular.
Local roads are initially funded by the government and based on whether they are collector roads or arterials, state and federal governments allocate extra money to these roads. But when construction finishes these roads often need to be maintained by local municipalities which is when the problems come in. Often times municipalities, especially ones with lower incomes, begin having trouble maintaining roads. Higher income municipalities raise local taxes to pay for their roads but Americans also hate paying local taxes which makes this unpopular and often unviable in poorer municipalities where incomes cannot accommodate the extra tax. That's how you get huge, sprawly cities that have terrible pavement. My city is struggling with this. The rust belt has tons of cities with this.
Moreover as the US population increases we continue to sprawl outward, destroying nature with sprawly housing developments that are viable because federal and state governments often pay for initial development. You mention democracy but there's not that much democracy going on. Often times rural voters aren't organized enough to create the kind of opposition to sprawl that urban voters have. You can't have opposition via public comment in a rural area because there is no planning agency which listens to public comment in many rural areas. In fact that's often why developers target unincorporated rural areas in the first place.
Unlike Europe, Asian countries are fine with car use, but don't subsidize it nearly as much as the US does. Japan, outside of Tokyo (which is a huge city and an outlier in the way NYC is), has narrower and fewer lanes on their roads for given traffic volumes. Public street parking mostly doesn't exist and authorities quickly tow vehicles that park where they're not supposed to. As such there's a robust market for parking lots. The closer you are to a city center the more vertical, compact, and expensive the lots are. The further you are the cheaper the lots are. In really rural towns the towns run parking lots that are basically free during the day.
The US does a lot to encourage car use. It has much higher LOS standards for its roads than other developed countries, it uses federal and state tax money to offer free parking, police officers are kind to drivers and let them overstay parking limits for longer than they should and only ticket the most flagrant offenders tacitly allowing everything from using your phone in the car to styling your hair in it. And this car culture is irrational and taking up an increasing amount of GDP and emissions.
Also if it's democracy that's your problem, this article in Colorado is all about democracy. The voters voted in a pro-transit governor, they voted in the tax increases to fund additional transit, and they approve of planning officials who refuse to widen highways. So car culture isn't as popular in the US as some think. There is an increasingly vocal minority of people who aren't happy that car culture is losing its popularity though.
This has never stopped politicians before, not really sure why it will now.
Polis is much more than a pro transit governor. He's a successful serial entrepreneur, he's gay, he's charming in a nerdy way, and he's pragmatic. I dont think his election proves much about political will in regards to transit policy.
The problem is that we live in a democracy and most American voters dont want to live in europe. They mostly want a single family home in a low density suburban area, which makes public transit difficult.
I think the argument is a little different. I’d say the best framing of it is that we have sacrificed every other method of transportation at the altar of personal cars. Building for cars is what has made every other option shitty.
So it’s not so much that just make driving cars shitty for no reason as it is that you _have_ to make driving shitty if you want to unshittify walking/biking/transit.
When I lived in Denver this GenXer gladly transitioned to light rail as it freed up an hour a day that I would have spent concentrating on driving on more relaxing things like reading. I miss it.
My response to that sort of argument is yes indeed you are 100% correct in theory and 100% wrong in practice. It's the result of framing everything as a moral argument and shooting for perfection. That never ends well.
You're better off depending on age and grim reaper to get old people to stop driving and focus on habituating young people to just not.
Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car.
So even in Europe and Australia where cars more than pay for their costs people still drive a lot. This is with all the effort put in to public transport in Europe.
How are you coming to the conclusion that cars are paying their fair share of costs? I'm not familiar with Australian politics at all, but a quick look found that local governments pay most of road maintenance, not the fuel excise tax[1]. Another hidden cost of cars is that they decrease density of cities and suburbs, which causes all other infrastructure to also get more expensive (sewage, gas, power, etc).
Public transit isn't all, just being denser so that biking and walking is more viable is also a big part to why European cities aren't concrete wastelands full of parking and roads. The normal way to go and buy groceries is to walk not drive.
Cars don't pay for their costs and it's not close. Fuel tax doesn't even cover a small fraction of infrastructure cost in most European countries. Building roads is heavily subsidized from federal budgets, land given for free, accident costs covered by public money etc. etc.
These transport options—more notably for cars, but everything else too—are still heavily subsidized in the sense that we’re allowing them to ignore the cost of cleaning up after them, or the cost of climate change (if they aren’t cleaned up after). If we stop that theft from everybody’s grandkids, the economics might get some people to switch over to public transit at least.
But it is really easy to steal from these people, they are tiny babies or not even born yet, they can’t vote. Like stealing candy from a baby, except the candy is their planet’s ecosystem. Sucks to be them, I guess.
Interesting point. Why don't you think this is true in more highly developed countries? Two example come to mind: The "seal" you must buy in Suisse, and most high speed roads in Japan are rolled.
Transit likely wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies. Even with them, it's a pretty terrible way to get around, at least in the US. The vehicles are dirty, even dangerous. There are frequent delays and rerouting. Transit is a huge target for government grift as well, from everything to projects that go way over budget and never get completed to outright scams. It's far from that panacea that it's made out to be.
Maybe in Japan or Europe it's better. In the US, public transit has a far from stellar history.
Don’t forget our automobile infrastructure gets heavy government subsidies too. Gas taxes and fees aren’t nearly high enough to pay for all the roads and parking we have.
Heck, they’re better in Russia. Marble, polished brash, chandeliers… and we’re talking the USSR period.
Imagine telling your kid to mow the lawn, and he deliberately does a terrible job so you quit asking him to do it. That’s what legislators have been doing to US public services for fifty years. It’s the same thing with the post office, they are wretched by design.
"Wow, these are really bad takes" is just name calling with no argument. I guess the comment is not technically ad hominem, just a more generic kind of irrelevant assertion.
>> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit
Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense.
Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the best selling children's books".
The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!".
Of course in this analogy, we realize the fallacy. People are better off because more kids get to read books. Even if the queue stays the same length, we have more throughput, more kids get the benefit.
Now if we translate that to cars, of course, we see the difference. People who write books like "Paved Paradise" or "The High Cost of Free Parking" hate cars. They really do. They hate the suburbs too.
So when they see something that would enable people who don't currently drive cars to drive cars, or for people who live in urban areas to live in suburban areas, they're of course going to be against that.
"Induced demand" is being used here by languagehacker, as it is used by other people who are opposed to private property, as some sort of technical term that supports their case. But that isn't true.
By adding more copies of popular books to libraries, we want to induce demand. We want people to read the books, and we want people who don't currently use libraries to consider using them. The induced demand is not bad. We had a queue, it was too long, we shorten the queue, and by doing so some people who thought the queue was too long will no longer think that. This is good.
What languagehacker is saying, by referring to induced demand, is that, in the opinion of languagehacker cars are bad.
It is as simple as that. It sounds super-scientific when you use terms like "induced demand", but it is not, in fact, super-scientific. It's just a value judgement.
To me, if you build a highway in an area that has high traffic congestion, and after you build the highway, it still has high traffic congestion, it means more people are getting where they want to be. It's called "induced demand".
Induced demand is good. We should have more of it.
This is a flawed analogy and I think there is a false dichotomy by framing skepticism around building more highways as inherently anti-car. I'm going to go out on a limb and say most drivers do not enjoy traffic and most residents near busy roadways do not enjoy the effects of traffic on their neighborhood. The question is what is the best policy approach that manages all people's concerns. For me, the question is how can we get people to live and work in areas where it isn't necessary to inefficiently, and very expensively, move people to and from work.
Since the 1950s, we have optimized for essentially the least efficient form of transit available. It seems completely bonkers to me that in the bay and other high density areas, you have many, many workers, particularly at the low end of the income scale, driving over an hour each way to work. It is an understandable and rational decision for the driver, but crazy to me for society.
> For me, the question is how can we get people to live and work in areas where it isn't necessary to inefficiently, and very expensively, move people to and from work.
I cannot comprehend why more firms aren’t embracing remote work more than they do. It helps alleviate a lot of these traffic challenges and can result in reduced carbon footprints as well as more happy employees. I hope we start considering remote work as a solution to some of these problems more in the future.
I don’t think this analogy is quite correct. Driving on a particular route is not a driver’s objective like reading a particular book is a reader’s objective. The driver’s objective is arriving at a destination. The objective in driving is not a finite resource, but the multiple route options to the objective can be, which differs substantially from a library queue.
Let's consider a library with both a manned librarian and a self checkout, two different queues, same objective. Let's call the self checkout the 'highway' queue and the manned one the 'surface street' queue. Each of which could be expanded to improve throughput (more lanes:more self checkout lanes, more streets:more librarians).
Ultimately the problem with anti-car rhetoric is that it seeks to limit access to the objective because it is "wrong" to use a self checkout lane and people must be forced to check books out in the morally correct manner.
No one (reasonable) has a problem with the library adopting a mobile checkout app, which let's call mass transit. But crippling self checkout to force adoption of the mobile checkout app could be at best described as a 'dark pattern', forcing people to check out books 'the right way' at the cost of overall readership.
I believe there is way too much value judgement placed here.
If you have two checkouts, people will use whichever one is faster (assuming everything else is equal). Make one faster, and people will shift from one line to the other. Though, to make it an even better analogy, make one line shorter, and people will start coming in from off the street rather than switching lines.
A much better example - telecommuting. IF commute is bad, one is strongly incentivized to have some work-from-home days. If the commute time is improved, then that incentive disappears and one would then consider commuting daily.
Induced demand I think is generally all about the idea that when something is painful - people don't do it. Take away that pain point, and people come. I don't begrudge people too much for driving, as an example I'll note I do my errands on a bicycle. As such, I'm strongly incentivized to make many stops and fewer trips. Meanwhile, I've noticed that people in my family will make a car trip errand as soon as the need comes up. "Oh, I need to go to the grocery store." They get back, then realize they also needed to go to the hardware store, drive out again real quick and back when had there been more planning, the two trips could have been combined. Switching to a bike is an extreme example to avoid the excessive/unnecessary trips that are made simply because it is so convenient. If the drive time were tripled, then there might be a behavior shift to group errands together. Why do so though if it takes just a few minutes to make the individual trips? Eventually the cost of the trip is sufficient that a person will start conserving, avoiding that cost (which can be: travelling in off-hours, grouping trips together, not doing a trip altogether, finding a different mode of transport, removing the trip by moving, etc...)
The people who freely use terms like "anti-car" always assume that the car is always the fastest most efficient way of getting anywhere... and then sit stuck in standstill on a 6-10-lane highway
Ah, I think i just realized how to fix the analogy!
The issue is with how many books are checked out a time. If the line is absurdly long, at some point you will make fewer trips to the library to avoid paying the cost of waiting in line. You would check out more books so you would go less frequently. You would be trading storage space at home in exchange for time (not having to wait in line). If the line were infinitely fast, then why not go to the library exactly after you have finished one book to then go get one new book.
If an automated checkout then exists, the line time would be less, making it less expensive to go to the library, which means a person would be willing to increase their trip frequency to the library. Suddenly, you have a line full of people all checking out exactly one book, and returning the next day to do the same thing again (rather than checking out one weeks worth of books, and coming back a week later instead of the next day).
I think that's a fair extension of the analogy, from which I would make two observations:
First is that with frictionless checkout the library's efficiency is maximized (books are only checked out when being read and people's time isn't spent unproductively).
Second is that there is a limit to the demand of the library. A book will be finished before checking out a new one and a person can only read so many books a day. No matter how entertaining there is a fairly hard cap based on a persons need to sleep and reading rate. So a library would only ever need enough automated checkout lanes to match the populations awake time and reading rate before book demand is fully sated.
I really appreciate the dialog! I find your observations interesting.
Though, I do think you might be overemphasizing the number of checkout lanes.
To torture the analogy, let's consider the variables at play:
- how often a person goes to the library
- how many books they check out at a time
- how long they wait to checkout (we can potentially include travel time with this number, and this number is a function of the number of checkout lines)
- how many books can a person use at a given time (can a person read 3 books at a time?)
- how fast a person consumes books
- what is the max number of books that can be transported
- what is the max number of books that can be stored
The variables of "how many times do you go to the library" and "how many books do you get each time", and the cost to do so - "the time to check out", I think are the 3 really interesting variables to demonstrate induced & latent demand. The others are a factor, but we can hold them constant in order to demonstrate the relationship of the other three.
Diving in now - latent demand are people who would rather not read at all rather than spend more time than X waiting to check out. If the time to check out decreases, some people will start making the trip - this is latent demand.
As time to check-out decreases further, some people will start making multiple trips instead of just one - this is induced demand. The people making multiple trips are still checking out the same number of books overall - illustrating there is demand for high frequency and not just an absolute number of books. If all you wanted was 'X' many books, why take more than one trip to get them? The frequency provides flexibility and relieves other costs (carry capacity cost & storage cost).
For example, an expedition to antarctica would be very willing to pay a high cost to have a high carry capacity in order to transport a lot of food (they'll buy a literal boat to carry it) and another high cost to store it (storage space is not free). The expedition is willing to pay these costs because the cost to get more food is so high.
One can also ponder, why not get a lifetime supply of books from a library (ignoring late fees)? To one extent, fitting that many books in your arms and then getting them to your home, and then storing them are costs. Why do that when you could make another trip a week later?
Though, let's say for some reason you knew this was your last ever trip to a library. In this case, you would be highly incentivized to invest in higher carry capacity (eg: rent a truck) and to also invest in storage for the books. (Or, the person would be very incentivized to find alternatives). The really interesting part of induced demand IMO is that typically for existing road resources, we are pretty well into the state where many people would prefer to make more trips than they do today. So when we think about the inverse, as travel costs go down, the incentives to carry more and store more go down - which results in more trips being made. As more trips are made by more people, congestion increases, which creates a balancing effect and a steady state of traffic congestion. Naturally, other factors can break the steady state, the fact there is this counter-balancing force is the (IMO) interesting part of induced demand.
In your example, replacing bulky self-checkout machines (analogous to removing road/surface parking real estate) offers a significant benefit to everyone. More room for what everyone actually wants most: books. The preference for self-checkout machines forces a cost on everyone for the benefit of a few.
And in a lot of cases it does, but the important point is that the argument needs to be framed as you've put it: how do we get everyone what the most of what they want [transportation/books]? Most cost efficiently being implied of course. Being dogmatically "anti" or "pro" anything is looking at the problem wrong.
To the specific example, removing self checkout lanes makes sense if the removal adds more value than the lanes were providing, but not if they are providing more value than their opportunity cost -- perhaps because of woefully understaffed registers and a buggy mobile checkout app the self-checkout machines are responsible for a large portion of checkouts. Which would make them counter productive to remove.
And since the self checkouts exist, there is no interest in paying to have librarians at the register, or drivers on buses; so the self checkout is the excuse for not providing a librarian, which effectively cuts off some users from checking out books at all.
If you are stuck in gridlock in a two hour commute with a soulless car that functions as nothing more than an appliance, then sure, that sounds like my personal version of hell. But for me “The driver’s objective is arriving at a destination.” couldn’t be more of a false statement.
Give me a nice European sports car, a manual transmission, an empty highway and some nice scenery and commuting can be an incredibly relaxing experience. Even when I lived in the Bay Area commuting this way off-peak was awesome. In fact the commute was the highlight of my day.
Same minus the highway (sports car != touring car). Well, Except that I have it: depressed man driving a new MX-5 in the south of France, driving is one of my last joys in life together with food and sleep.
From my personal experience, growing up, people used the term induced demand in a strictly negative sense to describe road expansion plans. Then I lived in cities as an adult where new metro lines opened. The effect is real! Whole neighborhoods would get much more foot traffic after a new station opens. In this case, most people would describe the induced demand as positive.
I agree, "induced demand" is a word phrase to rally behind.
The argument must be (and, I believe, is) that induced demand for buses and trains is far cheaper to a society than induced demand for cars. Adding a train car at a peak time serves a lot more people than adding a highway lane at a peak time.
I'm actually curious to compare them.
Apparently, 100 people is a reasonable capacity for a train car (200 is possible for BART at rush hour). A lane of 100 single-occupancy cars in a traffic jam is about a third of a mile. So, an extra car lane a mile long is about an extra half a train, give it take.
> So, an extra car lane a mile long is about an extra half a train, give it take.
The problem with this math is the last mile.
With a road network you have highways with multiple lanes and a lot of traffic, and those branch out into streets with fewer lanes but more destinations.
You can run a train next to the highway and it will achieve much more throughput, but as soon as you get to the offramp, what now? Those 100 passengers all have different destinations that fork off in every direction. You can't run 100 train cars one for each passenger, that's even worse than the road cars. But you also can't just dump them all right there, miles away from where they want to be.
The reason this works in NYC is the density. You can actually get 100 people who are all going to the same place at the same time. Which is also the only way to make it work anywhere else: Build higher density housing. It cannot work in the suburbs because there isn't enough density to run high-occupancy mass transit at a viable frequency.
Whereas in that environment having the occasional four or eight lane highway increases carrying capacity along more than its own length. The single-lane surface streets that branch off in every direction have a vast amount of otherwise unused carrying capacity, which a highway lane unlocks by connecting low-density destinations together. And which you can't unlock with mass transit because those destinations don't have the density for mass transit, even if the path directly parallel to the highway does.
The problem isn't cars or highways, it's zoning density restrictions.
These are all good points. High-density housing makes trains easier. Conversely, trains induce demand for high-density housing near the stations. There are many other considerations that need to be taken into consideration to make trains useful: frequency, right-of-way on road crossings (often a problem for light rail), right-of-way vs cargo trains (long-distance trains in the US), ...
> The single-lane surface streets that branch off in every direction have a vast amount of otherwise unused carrying capacity, which a highway lane unlocks by connecting low-density destinations together. And which you can't unlock with mass transit because those destinations don't have the density for mass transit, even if the path directly parallel to the highway does.
In a lot of suburbia, there are large parking lots near train stations. In theory, your point is a great advertisement for this setup. In practice, I never lived in a place where driving to the train station was convenient, but it's quite possible that is an accident. For one, parking lots have to be truly large to fit the number of people that would fit in a train car.
> Conversely, trains induce demand for high-density housing near the stations.
The primary existing problem is that high-density housing is prohibited through zoning, or made prohibitively expensive through other regulatory rules. It doesn't matter how much demand you generate if increasing supply is constrained by law. Whereas if you could fix the zoning and building codes then you wouldn't need to induce demand because demand is already there -- it's why housing is so expensive.
> There are many other considerations that need to be taken into consideration to make trains useful: frequency, right-of-way on road crossings (often a problem for light rail)
These are all density again. You get frequency by having enough passengers to fill the transit car on that interval, which you get from higher density. There is no point in sending a bus to carry one person to one house, it might as well be a car.
This is also why right of way and bus lanes are the wrong way to think about it. If you don't have enough density you're going to lose regardless and all the bus lane is going to do is make the traffic worse, because people can't take the bus if it doesn't go where they're going when they're going there and then you're just wasting a lane. Whereas if you do have the density then you still don't build a bus lane because instead you build a subway.
> In a lot of suburbia, there are large parking lots near train stations. In theory, your point is a great advertisement for this setup.
That's trying to have it both ways. If you have to drive to the train station then you have to buy a car and insure it and unless the parking at the train station is free you're now paying for parking. At this point people start wondering why they're hoofing it up to the train platform and paying for transit tickets and waiting for the train instead of just driving the rest of the way to their destination.
To fix this you need more people to live within walking distance of mass transit. Which is to say, you need to build higher density housing or allow mixed zoning so people can live closer to where they work.
>At this point people start wondering why they're hoofing it up to the train platform and paying for transit tickets and waiting for the train instead of just driving the rest of the way to their destination.
Usually, it's because
1) the highway to their destination in the city center has too much traffic, and the train is faster, and
2) there's no parking at their destination, and no place to build it at any kind of affordable price.
Just look at Washington DC: tons of people commute by car to suburban train stations, pay a monthly fee to park in the big parking garages there, and then commute the rest of the way into the city center by train to work in government offices.
You can think of it in terms of simpler concept: "giving people free stuff causes more people to take free stuff".
Cars and infrastructure for them is heavily subsidized so building more if it (giving free stuff away) induces more people to use it.
As car infrastructure has a cost which car drivers don't cover building more if it is very expensive for everyone else that's why we shouldn't want more if it.
i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown.
it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize.
That downtown is now a concrete hellscape instead of a pleasant place to be. Your solution ensures that always happens, overall people prefer less infrastructure built for cars, but if it is there of course they will use it.
You say NYC and Chicago has enough highways to fill demand so there is no congestion? I am fairly certain that isn't true, I've read so much about congestion problems in NYC at least. Adding enough roads to fill all demand leads to concrete hellscapes, that was the point, the guy I responded to thought it was reasonable to add roads until all demand was satisfied.
No one is saying no congestion. The idea of highway expansion is to allow more people to travel while keeping congestion about constant. NYC and Chicago's highways allow the massive suburban areas and the tens of millions that live in them to semi conveniently go to the city. To do that with trains would require driving to a commuter rail station and then transferring to the metro to get where you want to go. Suburbanites just wouldnt go to the city in that case unless the destination is easily accessible on the commuter rail
Chicago and NYC have huge commuter rail networks that accomplish exactly what you’re claiming is impractical.
The Metra commuter rail in Chicago handles over 2.5 million trips per month.
59 percent of the people who commute to Manhattan do so via public transit. People commute to work to Manhattan from Connecticut and New Jersey by train.
Penn Station is the busiest transportation facility in the Western hemisphere, serving 600,000 passengers a day, primarily commuter rail and regional rail. And that’s just one station.
One subway tunnel with two tracks is equivalent to something like a 15 lane highway in passenger throughput. That’s where highway expansion truly falls apart: it only really scales up to a small to mid-sized cities before the land waste becomes a burden.
A lot of urban highways have no way to add lanes because there is no more physical space, or you have to destroy the actual destinations that the highway is supposed to serve to expand it.
I will also add that there are a decent amount of suburbs with walkable downtowns along those NYC and Chicago (and Boston!) commuter rail networks where you can buy a condo, rent an apartment, or even a buy a single family home within walking or biking distance of commuters rail and go downtown. In addition, suburban bus lines that feed people into commuter rail stops also exist. So it’s not all park and rides.
And park and rides still help spread traffic across the metro area highway network instead of sending all traffic into to a handful of highways going downtown. If I drive to my town’s commuter rail stop my car is probably not even getting on a highway.
Commuter rail only works if you want to go within a mile of one of the stations. No one wants to take the commuter rail and then get on another train. The people who use commuter rail in Chicago at least all also have a car that they use to get to the city whenever they’re doing anything else since the train only goes to the business area
I think that detractors of transit believe that eliminating cars is the goal like it’s this black and white thing. It’s either 100% cars or 0% cars. “If I can’t do 100% of every possible trip on transit, it’s not a good investment.”
But the reality is that reducing car trips is really helpful to congestion and traffic for everyone, and having alternative options can make a lot of sense to a lot of people if they’re planned well.
If I take all my daily commutes in with the Metra but then my weekend trip to the city outside the business center is in a car, I still reduced my dependency on my car by huge percentage. That means more of my miles are being spent on safer, more energy efficient, less costly mass transit.
And anyway, you’re not really correct here in the first place. Chicago commuter rail stations downtown have easy connectivity to the L and numerous buses.
You just brazenly claim that nobody wants to transfer but it happens all the time.
Yes, it can take longer than driving…except when it doesn’t, because Chicago has two or three of the nation’s slowest highways. Metra plus a transfer is often a trivial difference in travel time, plus on the Metra you can relax, use the bathroom, and even legally drink a beer if you wish.
Many trips using the L plus Metra transfer are pretty competitive to drive times. Obviously it doesn’t work for every trip but doing a Metra ride plus a $10 Taxi ride will beat parking costs, plus you’re not operating and maintaining a personal vehicle.
Finally, for those who can’t drive at all or have difficulty doing so, having an option that’s slower or less convenient than driving is still a godsend. Being able to get somewhere via transit in 2 hours will beat a 1 hour car ride when the alternative is not taking the trip at all because you’re elderly or disabled and can’t drive yourself. If your car got totaled and you can’t afford a new one having a transit option solved the catch 22 of needing a job to pay for a car and needing a car to get to your job.
I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and have never heard of anyone transferring to cta after taking the metra. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s not scalable solution that people will buy into. The vast majority of people will just drive in that case
I did it every day getting to Ignatius from Beverly, and again getting to my office in South Loop when I lived in Evanston. One advantage the Metra often has is better parking, so even if I could end-to-end take CTA, I might park and ride a scheduled Metra instead. (Doesn't matter anymore, I live a short walk from the Green Line).
As an example, there are 12 different bus lines that are directly adjacent to Millennium Station. You barely even have to step outside to use them.
Hell, you don’t have to step outside at all to transfer from the blue or red line to Millennium station trains.
All loop CTA lines are a 10 minute walk to Union Station and Ogilvie.
You really think with these kind of stats that nobody is transferring?
Not to mention the fact that the Metra runs express trains during rush hour to high population suburbs. You can get from Downer’s Grove to non-downtown neighborhoods like Lincoln Park or Wrigleyville faster than a car during rush hour via express trains + purple line.
The advantage of cars isnt that they are faster than public transit. Its that they are private space and usually a bit more convenient. Arguments about speed will convince no one. The loop buses are doing horribly fyi, the BRT is a complete failure in terms of ridership.
I think the counterpart question to that is, given how space-inefficient cars are, how many actual people do you enable by adding that car capacity, and how does that number compare to even basic public transit options?
If it means way fewer people took alternative means, then perhaps it is not good. Particularly when OP mentioned the original goal was to reduce travel times - which the widening did not.
"it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize."
At some point when you clear out all the actual places to go in order to add parking and make it easy to drive there, people realize there is nothing down there and stop going, at which point you just have what happened to Detroit.
My experience is the opposite. The harder it becomes to visit a locale, the less likely I become to visit it. Eventually I decide it's not worth visiting at all.
That the roads were added based on a request to make it quicker for existing commuters, not to get more commuters there in the same amount of time. And that if you’d used that time, space and money for a dedicated bus lane, a train, a tram or whatever, you might have done better on both adding to the number of people downtown and making it quicker to get there.
the dream is that if i already have to drive downtown, if only there were more parking spots, i could always find one easily instead of driving around searching. but this often won’t happen.
Except that having more car traffic induces more pollution, more casualties, and more time spent unproductively (you can do other things on public transit, or get exercise commuting by bike), whereas more book reading has few downsides.
Investments in infrastructure is investing in huge net benefits for all members of society and the economy in the broadest sense possible. That's why it's been an unparalleled success all over the world to invest in roads for motorized vehicles and invest in electrification. Getting energy and goods to where they need to be as fast as possible is beneficial to all, no matter how you structure your government or economy.
It's not really a benefit to all the ecosystems destroyed by suburban sprawl, or all the people affected by the externalized costs of that economic activity. Unrestricted growth may not be so great of an idea in the long term.
Get harassed by homeless? Or just men in general, if you’re a remotely attractive female (using the broadest term available as it certianly isn’t restricted to what we’d appropriately call “women”).
Do you think public transit is full of drunkards? Its mostly tired people getting to or from work, those doesn't harass a lot of people. When its late and its a lot of drunks on public transit sure, but not on normal commutes. Columns I've read from women getting harassed its mostly about dance floors at clubs, not commute trains, when people aren't drunk they mostly keep their hands to themselves.
That is true everywhere, drunk or affected men are overwhelmingly more likely to harass women than sober men are. Subways here in Europe are full of pretty women, they don't go out of their way to take a car any more than men are, when I count gender on subways there are usually more women than men.
When was the last time you saw women avoid grocery stores because they are afraid of getting harassed? Well used public transit is that level, it isn't something women worry much about compared to many other much larger threats. There is no reason at all for public transit to be worse in terms of harassment than grocery stores are, its just that USA choose to let their public transit become shit.
Grocery stores are different because bums aren’t allowed to sit around there waiting for a woman to come by for them to harass. If they were, I’m confident many would object.
It’s clear that you don’t have much concern for the harassment experienced by those woman columnists you read, so I don’t think there much more I can say here. I imagine if you were to have any direct experience at all with the problem, your position would be different.
That all said: what’s your upside? What do you gain which you consider to be worth these women whom you do not know sacrificing their safety?
That happens because the transit isn't used by enough normal people. The need for security personnel doesn't go up with more normal people, when you have the levels Europe has the crackheads etc gets removed from the trains.
You basically ensures your transit system will remain shitty forever, but that is easily fixable. The more good actors that use it the cheaper fixing it gets per person, you can have people who clean and security remove such bad actors at low cost since so small fraction are causing bad events or pissing where they shouldn't. Good people overwhelmingly outnumber bad people in the real world.
you can reduce the per capita rates of incidents by adding normal people, but even in a city like NYC where most households don't own a car, the subway still has an unacceptable amount of non-violent incidents like the aforementioned one (yeah yeah yeah i know the likelihood of dying on public transit is less per mile than driving)
I agree with the urban planning bias here, especially the idea that you shouldn't build more roads to fight congestion because more people will use them, and thus they'll reach the same saturation point anyways. Mind boggling that this is an accepted principal, and one that is completely disregarded when it comes to any form of transport that isn't a car.
Perhaps a library vs a commercial book store might have worked as a better analogy. The queue theory part of it I think breaks down a lot. Induced demand is not only about queue theory, but also choosing between options.
In short though, induced demand is somewhat simple. If it takes 10 minutes to drive and 30 minutes to take a bus, then I drive. If it takes 30 minutes to drive and 10 minutes to take a bus, then I take the bus. Eventually enough people choose to drive, or take a bus, that that mode becomes congested/inconvenient enough that people start making other choices. In other words, there are some people who avoid highways during rush hour because the traffic jams are bad. If the highway is widened, then they would join the rush hour once again and be part of the traffic jams. Induced demand is about taking away the reason why people avoid something, and thereby doing so they change their behavior to start doing that thing.
Yea but really the choice here is "go somewhere vs stay home", not "car vs bus". Highway expansion leads to more people travelling because bus service is non existent in the vast majority of the country. Of course some people need to go where theyre going, but on the margins more people will go to the city or what not if traffic is lower.
Good points. Yeah, as the cost of travel goes up, people make various decisions: bite-the-bullet, find alternatives, delay, consolidate, and/or go without. As the cost decreases, the incentives to find alternatives, delay or consolidate trips goes down (which means roads are then used for less important reasons and less efficiently - why go to the grocery store once a week if you can go every day in half the travel time?)
I would agree, at some point when all alternatives are equally unattractive (or non-existent), then going without is a more attractive option.
Though, the "consolidate" option is a big one to consider. Rather than going to the city every day, perhaps people could do so every other day for the same benefit. If traffic is bad, then people will go less often (frequency of travel is a function of cost). Thus, in some cases, highway expansion is filled by people that want to go to the grocery store every day rather than going once a week. Meanwhile, those that commute to work, are still going to do so because they have to. If the commute gets too bad, then some people will decide to move.
On the other side of the spectrum, at some point there are so many people that want to go into the city every day - you can't do it with single occupancy vehicles and roads. It's a scaling problem. For example, someone did an analysis of parking decks in Seattle and whether there were not enough of them. They found if there were all filled and everyone then tried to leave - it would take 2 days for all the vehicles to exit the city.
Absolutely agree. I really think the concept of induced demand with highways is misleading. Im not even sure reducing traffic is the point of highway expansion, pretty sure induced demand is literally the goal.
> The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!".
What you are missing is that every time we widen roads to allow more car throughput we are making every other type of transit and mobility less attractive. Busy streets with big parking lots are unpleasant to walk or bike along, so people just drive to their destinations instead, which makes the street even busier, louder, and smellier starts this cycle all over again. Every time a road is widened or a new parking lot is added the city also becomes less dense, making getting anywhere useful more time consuming. Drivers have to spend longer on the road to get where they want to go, public transit gets more expensive as routes get longer, and walking and biking quickly become too time consuming. There is just a maximum density that cars can support which works totally fine for suburbs but breaks down in denser cities. Personally I think Park and Ride programs are the most reasonable compromise.
People always seem to forget the bus takes advantage of having multiple travel lanes and faster intersection clearance too. City of LA is starting to take advantage of their wide roads and put in bus only lanes, something they could easily do with some paint since the pavement already exists.
Books are not a finite resource? Obviously there is a finite number of trees but there are enough for it not to be a bottleneck. Land on the hand is a finite resource, especially in large, urban cities. There is no way to design a highway or other car infrastructure that will meet the demands of any reasonably sized city without dedicating an unreasonable amount of land to cars. Anyway, Ray explains it better than I could and he agrees that the term is bad: https://youtu.be/za56H2BGamQ
> To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen.
Yep.[1]
The governor is _trying_ to build comprehensive transit in Colorado[2], but between an incompetent transportation district and the difficulties of building public transit infrastructure to serve our metastatic urban sprawl makes public transit difficult to fund over cars.[3]
Our state metro areas just refuse to accept that if they want growth they'll need density. They'd rather pave their farms because they value the taxes they get from McMansions more than actual food.
All they have to do is restart the old passenger rail system they had in the 40s. It connected the entire front range with salt lake and all the major cities in utah including park city, went down to santa fe in the south, and hit just about all the towns and ski resorts that were around at the time. Even the ones that are a little more annoying to get to today like aspen or telluride.
What is even more tempting is that all this infrastructure and right of ways are still there. A lot of these towns have the old station land empty still, some have the old station preserved even. A lot of the rail grades are either sustained by freight rail or have been railbanked as trails. Its practically turn key as the hard part of gathering all this land was done over a century ago.
Too bad rail ambition is so paltry in comparison today.
That system was slow and doesn’t solve the same problems. It’s competing with long range travel and all of those track routes were far slower than just driving.
The problems that Colorado faces are transportation within urban areas. Driving to salt lake and ski resorts isn’t an issue.
All those routes could be made faster and it also had routes running down the front range too. Either way traffic on 70 into summit county is stupid and this is the salve. Already exists. Already graded. Already set up to serve vail and many other destinations that people rent a car from DEN to reach today.
Totally, which is why Colorado is producing less and less food. I mean towns sprouted up where people settled and people settled to grow food, so this has been happening in Colorado since farming began here. As a result the land left for farming is getting worse and worse. The good spots have all been paved.
But say we have to keep that, my next question is, what's the tax haul for a house compared to an apartment complex? Cities out here will choose the former as much as they can, increasing sprawl, because "quality of life."
Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex. The people also want houses opposed to apartments (hence the higher price).
This seems to be an ideological conflict where some people are trying to force everyone else into options they dont want- why?
The solution seems simple. relax zoning where it exists and let people who want to live in tiny urban apartments do so, and let people who want to live in suburban houses do so too.
> Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex.
I thought is is pretty well established that in US cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Because 10 houses need 10 of everything, paid for by taxes: street pavement, sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc. A 10 unit complex needs only one. It all needs maintenance too, starting some 25 years after being built. Most US suburbs can't pay for their own maintenance from taxes.
Sewer, water, and electricity hookups are cheap to maintain and are on the burden of the home owner to repair. The initial hookups and construction are absolutely not covered by taxes (this is one of the significant costs you will find out when you build on a plot).
Street pavement is the only thing you mentioned that does cost the tax base, but how much the poor dense area subsidizes the suburbs is completely dependent on the split of funds. In many of the suburban sprawl regions of the western US, the dense urban city (e.g. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA) has a small jurisdiction and the suburbs are in completely different legal cities with their own road budgets.
>cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Definitely not well established. What you might be thinking of is poor dense neighborhoods subsidizing rural areas that depend heavily on federal or state grants for pretty much all of their infrastructure.
That's a weird way to put that. Tax haul for 10 houses is definitely higher than the tax haul for a 10 unit complex, but how many 10 unit complexes can you fit in the space you need for 10 houses? The complex has a much better tax haul per square foot.
You are assuming infrastructure costs would be the same for a 10x denser population. I’ve read articles where even on a per capita basis just about everything is more costly in dense cities, from sewers to schools. It would take some careful scrutiny to identify what is actually optimal, and I expect that to depend heavily on the local economy. For example maybe the fact that the lima peru skyline looks like lima peru and the san jose usa skyline looks like san jose usa is as simple as being due to the cost of labor and materials and what best pencils out. Of course we won’t know the answer to that experiment without removing zoning limits on density and seeing how the market responds over decades.
Here is one. Njb is another one of these strong towns esque orgs that parrots the usual points to people who get their text based content through a talking head speaking it to them.
Careful how you swing that axe of relaxed zoning. Got me nearly kicked off my local town council. "Why can't that town two towns over build more apartments for our day laborers?" they all ask in unison.
It seems weird but you have to look at the market effects evangelist perspective to understand their position. A person believing in these forces might say that by having a large day laboring population and not building housing for them, there is now strong incentive for other areas to approve new housing and take advantage of guaranteed demand. And then they might go on to cite a location like (EDIT: not daly city but there is a bay area city that recently approved a ton of apartments whose name escapes me) that has taken this approach and really changed their municipal budget for the better as a result.
However, the market evangelists don’t understand that just because there is a business case to do something, doesn’t mean anything should happen either. People and therefore their markets don’t operate on entropy alone. There is a lot of irrationality that is hard to quantify.
And the problem is, zoning is almost never the answer to healthy growth. Is it useful for segregation? Yes. Is it useful for temporarily sustaining property value. Yes.
I know there are some counter examples, but I always think about the beautifully organic growth from some of America's greatest cities in the early 20th century. And how that growth would be categorically impossible today because everyone's afraid someone's gonna build a lard rendering plant next to a single-family house. Or that poor people will move in across the street. Goddamn I'm sick of selfish assholes.
Colorado producing less food is probably from market conditions and not urbanism. Like just consider the land area here. Sure denver is sprawly suburbia but what percent is that really of the massive swath of farmland that is all of colorado east of the front range? Its got to be in the single percent range just eyeballing it on google maps. And farm yields have absolutely soared over the last 100 years so fewer farms are needed to produce the same food.
There’s another huge way to put a dent it and let people live where they want: work from home works. The pandemic proved it. It’s not a 100% solution but there is seldom a 100% solution that doesn’t involve totalitarian government since not everyone wants to live in the city in concrete towers.
Until they decide to make it their decision and do something like tax companies per onsite worker and/or increased property taxes for office space that could have been better used. Lots of options.
Cities also have their own perverse incentives to maintaining the 9-5 downtown status quo. A whole host of businesses depend on these workers and they are involved in the chamber of commerce and various other orgs city leaders listen to when making decisions.
So you drive the office workers out of the city and then what do you do with the other commercial business? They still commute or you raise taxes enough for the city center to die out and hope for suburbanization?
You tear down those old, unsafe office buildings (we have lots of them in our city) and put up modern mixed use buildings. More people == more workers == more customers == more businesses. Add in some cultural features and you have a vibrant downtown that doesn't rely on commuters and doesn't become a ghost-town after 5:00.
Or even better, spread out work for those who can't work from home.
I live in a small country, where a lot of jobs are in the capital, A LOT of people drive to the capital daily (20, 30, 50, even 100km one way), and complain about it... and complain how everything is there, complain about centralization, etc...
..and then also complain when a company in their smaller city wants to expand or when someone wants to build something new there. Also complain against the current companies that exist there.... even though their house was built due to closeseness to that factory in the first place (like whole neighhbourhoods that were built by workers in that company nearby, and now, 30, 40 years later, their kids want the company to close, due to a lot of random reasons).
for americans: not all tech has to be in california, other states exist too
A lot of american metros are polycentric with their job markets already. That was one of the sells of suburbia: spread out and therefore lower the congestion that was bogging down urban areas at the time. There was a time when it was predicted manhattan would flood with manure in the future should horse traffic increase how it had been. Then of course the car came but still, these were concerns even back then. Someplaces instituted height limits to attempt to spread congestion too, especially done in europe where many cities today have denser urban sprawl but its pretty clearly capped at a height limit which forces it out.
They say 10% of traffic being replaced by motorcycles reduces congestion by 40%. California has pretty good weather so it's probably feasible to commute by motorbike almost every day.
Motorcycles are substantially more dangerous than cars. We can’t even convince people to buy European style compact cars instead of large trucks and SUVs
You are more likely to die from lung cancer, than from a motorcycle accident, statistically. You are also wasting a lot of your life sitting in traffic. The cost of ownership is much higher, so you could say you’re wasting more hours at work to pay for the large vehicle. I’d say it breakeven at best.
Colorado with 300 sunny days a year is a great place for motorcycles. Most of the year it's warm enough too with somewhat decent clothing and a pair of balls. I'll take the bike any day the road is dry and temps are double digit. But if you really want to increase throughput [FWIW, I don't care that much], just enforce driving on the right lanes when not passing. Then anyone who feels they need to go 15 over the limit can safely do that while at the same time funding the police that the metro is trying so hard to defund. Everyone wins. Bam.
It is not. At most you get 8 months of the year. The rest even if the weather is sunny you are looking at strong wind or unpredictable storms that pop up. We just had golf ball sized hail at the end of may.
That sounds about right.
Rode a motorcycle in SF traffic for years. About twice a day people would do something that could have killed me. Changing lanes without looking, blowing a stop sign, just generally not paying attention. I had a woman pull up while I was waiting to pull out of a gas station. She somehow thought that I should back up, up hill and let her in. I don’t think she realized that motorcycles don’t have reverse. She got super mad and her boyfriend wanted to fight me. He stormed over with chest puffed. People are dangerously stupid and clueless. About half way over he noticed the armored knuckles on my gloves and realized it probably wouldn’t go well for him.
It is super dangerous. I couldn’t stop though because my commute was 4x as long in a car and 6x-8x as long on public transportation.
How much of these fatalities involve some daredevils?
I became a motorbike in my late 30's and I see I am not taking risks like a lot of riders around me. I am taking ample distance between me and cars, act as if I was invisible and other users would do the most insane thing possible at all times and don't swerve around vehicles. I am even slower descending a mountain pass on my motorbike than I am riding my road bicycle.
I know from my experience driving cars at the same age that it would have been totally stupid to let 20y old me ride a motorbike.
OTOH motorbiking would be much safer with less cars on the road.
I’ve seen way too many clips of bikers to no fault getting wrecked that its just not for me. At least with a human powered bike you have the physics of only going about 15 miles an hour on your side and aren’t going to turn into a crayon.
Well from these clips, the road doesn’t have to be congested for things to go sideways before reaction time kicks in. And even from my own experiences, I once hit a big board with my car on the freeway. Didn’t see it until there it was. Four flats and a bit of a scare vs the end of my life probably right then if I were on a bike in all likelihood.
I'm a daily bike commuter, though I also own a car.
I certainly can't rule out freak accidents. However, I think that both speed and situational awareness make a difference on a bike. I tend to notice things that come into my field of vision, with plenty of time to react. In fact, I probably steer clear of things like debris and potholes on virtually every ride.
The reason why I mention congestion is threefold. First, getting hit by a car is by far the predominant hazard. I consider avoiding cars to be the #1 safety measure for cycling. If you take away that factor, then I doubt that cycling is more dangerous than driving. Second, beyond a certain level of congestion, drivers are not fully in control of their cars, but are controlled by the pace of traffic. Third, dodging traffic is the primary distraction that would make a cyclist fail to notice something like debris on the road.
I'm lucky to live in a town that has a network of bike paths, bike lanes in the more dense areas, and ample routes along sleepy residential streets. I encounter very few cars, and don't have to mix it up with heavy car traffic. Granted, living in a mid-sized town doesn't solve the car problem for humanity.
Edit: Re-reading our posts, I realized that I should clarify. "Bike" is a pedal bike in my case.
Yeah I was referring to motorcycles. I think bike danger is overstated honestly. Most speeds you go you end up with scrapes and bruises laying the bike over. Sure there are freak accidents where you land wrong on your neck, but that could happen in your kitchen or shower or going down the stairs as well.
You have probably hit that big board because you are driving an extension of your living room and are thus totally incentivised by dangers and not following legal and recommended security distance between you and the vehicle in front of you.
Also dangers are easier to avoid on a bike provided you are going at reasonnable speed because your own vehicle is smaller. The biggest danger is target fixation but that is something riders need to train against.
Obviously training both of riders and drivers vary a lot between countries and that is where lie most of the problem as well as considering that driving/riding is a right and not a privilege accorded to people serious enough to operate vehicles safely. I find it completely insane that some countries like the USA allows kids to drive with barely any training. IMHO before 24-25 year old, there are very few adults that are mature enough to drive safely. I also fThat is probably ind insane that a country allow people to buy, rent and drive a vehicle after more than 2 DUI convictions. That should lead to a lifetime ban.
You can’t imagine that someone driving safely wouldn’t hit a board? On a highway you are rarely afforded the luxury of having a full stopping distance anyway. I think the book says for every 10mph you go you should factor in 10 seconds. So 60mph would be a 6 second stopping distance, so I would need to see a car pass something and count to six before I pass that. If I had that sort of spacing on my commute, people would immediately merge into it. Thats just the reality. Then I am left with what three seconds to recognize a board emerging from the rear tires in front of me and somehow also check to see if its clear and also merge out of the way of this board. Its just not happening you are hitting the board almost as soon as you recognize its there.
Indeed, I speculated that this is what happened based on your comment. It's also what I mean when I say that drivers are not fully in control of their cars in congested traffic, and why a cyclist would avoid those situations -- to avoid being that board.
I would not because you don’t go 60mph with a leather jacket for protection on a bike, you go about a quarter that if you are really pushing between lights.
And honestly as a biker taking the entire lane is so much safer than some bike lanes even. Sure people honk but they arent psychotic they will pass you by merging the lane. If you ride on the shoulder they try and squeeze by and thats where there are issues. You are also more visible to turning traffic from other directions when you take the lane.
I suspect driving a motorbike in sub 40mph areas in London and other major cities is actually safer than pedal cycling.
You’re subject to fewer overtakes and have much better protective equipment if anything bad does happen.
However I’ve not been able to find any data or studies inspecting this directly. There’s some urban data but I think that can include certain motorways and high speed roads.
I know a large number of people who commute by bike in Melbourne. Every single last one of them has at some point been hit by a car or has suffered serious injuries trying to avoid being hit by a car. Many of them have had this happen multiple times, and these are all cases where they have dedicated bike lanes — they weren't riding with general traffic, which is of course far more dangerous.
Motorcycles are not safe, and certainly not safer than cars. However, you can reduce the extreme fatality rate significantly if you cut out drunk riding and even more so if you have more than six months of experience and wear all the gear all the time. It’s a risky activity that attracts people that don’t make smart decisions. When I got my license, the five others in my class all owned a motorcycle and rode them for a year without a license or training.
It’s a weird activity that’s simultaneously very unsafe due to car drivers but also due to the average rider themselves.
I think that’s limited to the US. In Thailand, kids ride motorcycles from a very young age, and don’t exhibit the crazy driving on that they do here. I think if more families drove motorcycles, it would no longer be considered cool or extreme, and that behavior would disappear. It reminds me of the high drinking age situation in the United States. When people here start drinking, they end up in emergency room, which is not the case in Europe, where they have a much lower drinking age.
The average age of first drink in the us is like 16 years old. The law doesn’t stop anyone from drinking it just serves to ruin peoples lives with a criminal record for behavior a huge percent of people engage with.
Pollution caused by congestion and manufacturing cars kills everyone. By riding a bike people can put their money where their mouth is regarding views on climate change; you're making a statement that says "I'm putting the environment ahead of my personal safety". Also, if you convert enough people, motorcycle riding becomes safer for everyone. Getting bumped by another 150lb Vespa isn't as nasty as getting hit by a "green" 6000lb tesla truck.
Motorcycles are dangerous because of the speed honestly. Especially a lot of these bikes people buy that are just way too much power for anyone to be reasonable with. Like why do you need to strap yourself to a rocket that can go to 60 in less than 2 seconds? I’m sorry you aren’t even strapped in you are holding on for dear life. Theres no where you can do that and claim to be safe and responsible short of being a trained rider on a track.
Imagine stop and go traffic for a minute. Now imagine it with all those cars replaced by ninjas and dirtbikes and harleys. You can’t even hold a conversation when one of these things goes by. Imagine that being everything that goes by.
This is america though. Rather than a sensible commuting vehicle, the best selling vehicle is the f150. There is a subset of truck owners that will put a nut sack on the hitch and blow a cloud of black diesel exhaust at a car like a prius at a light.
As a passenger in a car, watching motorcyclists zip down at high speed on the lane markers between cars in dense, stop-and-go traffic was incredibly unnerving. I can't see how that's safe.
Everyone sitting in line day in day out, breathing each other's fumes is not healthy either: https://dceg.cancer.gov/news-events/news/2023/ultrafine-poll... The motorcycles also aren't contributing to traffic congestion. The auto industry wants to sell big cars with high profit margins, they don't care about your lung cancer when you're 60 years old.
Thats what they say but at the same time seems like there is really hardly any room at all oftentimes. I don’t know how these guys have the nerve with the big chopper handlebars sometimes. Seems like they are like an inch from either car on some of these splits and all it would take is a driver to wiggle the wheel a little and they are launched over the handlebars. Doesn’t seem like anyone looks back for bikes coming up.
you don't have to zip down at high speed on the lane markers when you ride a motorcycle.
It is like the stupid people who say all cyclist burn the lights. They are just so jealous they only see the one that do and completely ignore those that stop at the lights.
Depends where you live. In Colorado there’s no minimum age to be a motorcycle passenger. In California, the minimum age is eight, So you would need to find some alternate transportation.
The #1 killer of people I know up to this point in my life is motorcycle accidents. I would never ride one and would do all I can to prevent my kids from doing so.
Yes, I'm aware of how one would do it, I am questioning whether that was actually done in this case or not. Further, I would question, what other places outside of your commute have you measured air pollution?
They offered it as a data point. I think it's fine form to question it.
The EPA Air Quality Index isn't everything, but it is a standard value displayed in a phone weather app. I'll notice in times and places when I suspect its bad. If you live outside a city in place without forest fires or other environmental issues you might not notice its there. Some people with respiratory issues monitor this stuff constantly.
IIRC, pollution from the tail pipe of a car falls off as a cubic function as you get further away from it. Similar for other sources of pollution. Pollution is very akin to smoke, hard to predict, and very localized. It can depend on wind, terrain, can get caught in places, underneath temperature inversions, etc.. All that said, the pollution you experience on a sidewalk next to a road, would be significantly higher than at the weather app meter station.
Determining pollution exposure can be done anecdotally. I've done a number of long distance bike trips, the few times where I was next to a highway for upwards of 8 hours - having a nose bleed by the end of that is pretty common for me. In that vein, recognizing air pollution effects is not necessarily that difficult. Symptoms include: sore throat, headache, burning eyes, etc.. The other side, people do get used to low level irritants, and yeah - you don't really notice its there until you go somewhere else and realize "the air smells different."
Since its my experience its anecdotal. That said higher particulate from diesel engines its pretty common when not at highway speeds. Combine significant traffic with highways/interestates close to buildings and residential areas, its a bit nasty. Sure rush hour in Saigon is without a doubt worse but the bay area is pretty bad on a localized level. Keep in mind I am saying localized, just the immediate areas around these high traffic areas. I can recount a number of buildings I have been in where you would get significant soot buildup on a weekly basis.
CA is fairly unique in this respect in that there are major road ways with residential close by.
> You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.
Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.
Totally agree on this one. I am a free market proponent but when it comes to infrastructure projects, often its hard for even the free market to get it right and its often better for a central plan to work off of (roads, electrical transmission lines, etc)
Mine is we need to stop pandering to weirdos when it comes to public infrastructure projects. There is a political process for approving them. And we shouldn't let weirdos get endless do overs in the courts when they lose.
but there is a solution to this problem: education.
and i don't mean propaganda, but teaching people not to be selfish, to care for others and consider others needs, to contribute to the betterment of society. to have compassion, remove prejudice, etc.
if these values were taught in schools, then the next generation would make better choices and they would know better and vote for better infrastructure.
It's hard to educate the next generation when everyone of all ages is exposed to relentless propaganda (also known as marketing, in all forms including the fully legalized corruption of US politics) at the same time.
Oil and car companies' futures depend on continued public support for free parking, more lanes and housing far away from destinations. It's in their interest to manipulate people into opinions that are beneficial to their bottom line, and they will continue to do so.
no, it requires even more critical examination. people need to learn more about the issues involved, and try to understand the needs and fears of others, and to work out a solution that everybody can live with.
a consistent vision is that everyone has a right to live their live according to their own ideas, as long as that doesn't affect others. but this vision requires an understanding that we all are contributing with good intentions.
it is the good intentions that we need to instill in everyone.
What you’re describing absolutely does not exist if you have any of the current religions.
Look at the abortion debate. One side is about the rights of the woman and the other side is about the rights of the fetus. When people see the fetus as a baby, it suddenly becomes murder. There isn’t much nuance there for a compromise.
What you’re describing absolutely does not exist if you have any of the current religions.
what are current religions for you?
i do not want to promote a particular religion on this site, but there are options out there that you may not yet have considered.
i also believe that while peoples behavior reflects their religion, the religions do not control or limit anyones ability to examine things critically. if you are in a religious community that does that, i'd urge you to get out as soon as possible.
Look at the abortion debate
that kind of feels like moving the goalpost. just because there is one topic where a compromise is difficult, if not impossible, doesn't mean the whole idea of finding a solution that works for everyone is not possible.
i am not american, so i am observing the debate as it happens there only from the sidelines. one of the primary criticisms i see against the anti abortion crowd is that they don't consider helping parents with resources they need to raise the baby. where i come from this is mostly a solved problem, because parents, including single mothers, receive plenty of support to raise children.
but more importantly i have a problem with the major religions being obsessed with punishing people for breaking god's laws. as humans we need to concern ourselves with those crimes that actually cause problems in our society, and leave the punishment of breaking god's laws to god.
the compromise is to recognize the needs of the mother as well as that of the unborn child.
You completely lost the thread. My reply is that your notion of “education will make everyone agree on things” is childish and completely ridiculous in light of even basic religious and political debates. Very smart people on both sides are definitely empathetic yet want to vote to stop the other side.
It’s not shifting any goalposts at all. All it takes is one example to show how the idea fails and that’s what I provided.
well, one of the goals of education needs to be to show that there is no other side. we are all humans, in one global society, and thus we should all be on the same side. there should be no opposition. we need to be open to everyone. and the only thing we should not tolerate is intolerance itself.
education means teaching people that it is desirable and beneficial to cooperate, and that it is necessary to put aside our differences in order to achieve that.
you assume that current religious doctrines trump any hope of achieving that. but i beg to differ. every religion in its core is based on love, and therefore any form rejection of non-believers is already a failure of the core beliefs of every religion.
and for every claim that their rejection or hatred is backed by their holy scripture, we can find another member of that same religion who disagrees. i have been participating in interreligious dialogue and i know that peaceful coexistence and cooperation among religions is possible.
The divine teachings are intended to create a bond of unity in the human world and establish the foundations of love and fellowship among mankind. Divine religion is not a cause for discord and disagreement. If religion becomes the source of antagonism and strife, the absence of religion is to be preferred
The establishing of the divine religions is for peace, not for war and the shedding of blood. Inasmuch as all are founded upon one reality which is love and unity, the wars and dissensions which have characterized the history of religion have been due to imitations and superstitions which arise afterward. Religion is reality and reality is one. The fundamentals of the religion of God are therefore one in reality. There is neither difference nor change in the fundamentals. Variance is caused by blind imitations, prejudices and adherence to forms which appear later, and inasmuch as these differ, discord and strife result. If the religions of the world would forsake these causes of difficulty and seek the fundamentals, all would agree, and strife and dissension would pass away
>as humans we need to concern ourselves with those crimes that actually cause problems in our society, and leave the punishment of breaking god's laws to god.
Religious leaders mostly disagree with you, and in religious societies, their beliefs are reflected in public policy.
well that is something we need to fix then, isn't it?
for starters, better education will also affect future religious leaders and make them better leaders. but the religions themselves also need critical examination. examples for a better model for religions exist. we need to look at them and adopt some of their ideas.
this discussion shows how the process works. we identify a problem, look for potential solutions, and in the process we find other problems that get in the way, so we work on those problems, until we find issues we can actually fix. and once fixed earlier found issues can be fixed as well, and so on. every step along the way we are making the world a little bit better than before.
Sorry, no. What you write makes absolutely no sense to a religious person. A religion (any religion) is, by definition, correct, and doesn't have any problems. It's not a thing based on any kind of rational thought, but rather pure fantastical belief. You can't "fix" that, when its believers don't think there's anything to fix.
Of course, you're looking at this as an outsider who doesn't believe the religion, so you don't see it this way, and you have entirely different goals in mind. You're probably thinking about people living together in a pluralistic world or something like that, but that's not a concern to a True Believer in a religion, where anyone who disagrees with the religion either needs to stay out of the way or be killed if necessary.
so the spanish inquisition, or the burning of witches, and whatever else atrocious people did in the name of religion was ok, and reformation was unnecessary? have you not noticed how christianity has changed over time? same for other religions too. is everything religious leaders and people do in the name of religion today backed by their holy scripture? i think not. and until it is, there is room for improvement.
i am a religious person, btw. and i absolutely believe that religion needs to change and advance just like everything else on this planet. the purpose of religion is to address the problems a society faces in its time. as our society advances, so must religion, to be ready to address the problems of a modern changing society. if it can't do that it needs to be replaced by another. this is exactly what jesus did, and the reason why he came to earth. and it is the reason why he promised to return. it is the purpose of all of god's messengers to advance and reform our religious beliefs.
>so the spanish inquisition, or the burning of witches, and whatever else atrocious people did in the name of religion was ok
Absolutely, yes, if you ask the religious people who did those things. Of course, non-religious people (or people of a different religion) disagree, but that's simply a difference of opinion.
>have you not noticed how christianity has changed over time?
It's changed in many ways, and depends on which group of Christians you're looking at. Are you looking at the Mormons, the "supply side Christians" that are popular in American mega-churches, the rather liberal Presbyterians, or what?
>is everything religious leaders and people do in the name of religion today backed by their holy scripture?
I'm pretty sure it is. You can interpret that scripture an infinite number of ways, so they always seem to find some way of supporting their claims.
>there is room for improvement.
"improvement" is your opinion only. For them, your idea of "needed changes" are anathema.
>this is exactly what jesus did,
Jesus specifically said (if you believe the quotes in the bible are true) that he did NOT come to replace anything. Of course, the teachings attributed to him are quite different from the religion he claimed not to be replacing. And of course, there's no real evidence to support any of this, either his existence, the words claimed to have been said by him, the previous religion the people in that region followed, etc.
It's changed in many ways, and depends on which group of Christians you're looking at well, i am primarily looking at the catholic church itself, and protestants that came out of it. both changed a lot over the centuries.
Jesus specifically said that he did NOT come to replace anything
and as for the words, well, the bible is authentically almost 2000 years old. so someone must have said the words that the people in the bible report. of course, given how the bible was written it is hard to find real evidence for that. so i am not faulting you for not believing it to be real.
to me that doesn't really matter. whether religions are of divine origin or a fantasy, they clearly have a strong influence on the world, and therefore we must subject them to criticism and to reform if they want to keep their relevance in the world.
alternatively, it's time to look for their replacement. it is possible that jesus already came back and the majority of the world missed it.
It sounds like all you need is some education. From first principals you should immediately discard a book filled with nonsense to a modern day society, especially when the veracity of the authors can’t be verified.
If that sounds ridiculous to you, it’s not. It’s what all of the other religions that don’t stem from Christianity think of it.
This is why “education” will not fix any of this. There are very fundamental rifts in what the truth even is.
again, you can't simply reject a book that has dominated europe for two millenia. whether it is nonsense or not. if it was pure nonsense then it would never had a chance at dominating our culture for that long.
the legitimacy of the bible or of christianity has also been confirmed in the koran as one of the religions of the book.
i agree with you that this book and others are not suitable for our modern day society. hence the need for reform or replacement.
but the interesting part is that the replacement has been announced in the bible itself. in it jesus states that he will return.
and in the past 200 years some people have made the claim to be the return of jesus. it is now up to us to investigate these claims and find out which of these, if any, is genuine.
the primary goal of education here is that everyone needs to learn and understand that they need to critically investigate and search for the truth. all of us. and that search is not done as long as there are conflicting ideas of what the truth is. so we need to keep searching.
>to me that doesn't really matter. whether religions are of divine origin or a fantasy, they clearly have a strong influence on the world, and therefore we must subject them to criticism and to reform if they want to keep their relevance in the world.
Why do they need to stay relevant? If you're willing to accept they're fantasy, then it'd be better for everyone to read Lord of the Rings instead. At least it actually promotes wholesome values and thinking, unlike the Bible which promotes rape, slavery, and genocide. The god of LotR is consistent, whereas the god of the Bible seems to be narcissistic, sociopathic, and worse, schizophrenic (somehow going from directing his followers to commit genocide, to later reproducing somehow and then promoting peace and tolerace, but only sometimes).
And at least with fantasy epics, everyone knows they're not real, so no one is setting up theocracies based on their interpretations of them and committing atrocities to support these.
they don't need to stay relevant. reform is what they need to do if they want to stay relevant. otherwise they will soon stop being relevant. however as long as they continue to have a strong influence, we need to keep an eye on them and look for their replacement
It is crazy to honestly believe that those living in car dependent areas lack empathy. I'm sorry as someone who loves transit and will wax poetic on my lovely light rail, I am not okay with literally dehumanizing people I disagree with and saying they lack the ability to feel compassion.
Come on.. you're better than that. Compassion, empathy, etc are found almost anywhere.
Do people need to be shown it could work? Yes. They don't need to thought of as deficient people.
i am sorry, but from personal experience, inside a car as a passenger and outside as a pedestrian or cyclist, many drivers believe they own the road. that's not dehumanizing them. that's reality.
after further looking it turns out that it was also categorized as working before 2020 and after 2020. the difference being 0.01 points. in 2020 it took a dive in rules settlement and implementation for which there is an obvious culprit: covid.
Sounds like terminology slip, then. People use the term democracy to describe the US, often in contrast to authoritarian dictatorships; but that is more of a crude definition, a colloquialism rather than an accurate description of US governance.
Disagree. I could have done a better job describing it though. In the current paradigm, the N houses/people negatively impacted by a given transit project will be given the same weighting as the N*Y people positively impacted by the project. You cannot have progressive transit projects that work when you allow those N individuals to stop the project. Nothing to do with democracy, different states and local governments handle it differently.
Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus.
I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer.
Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.
Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.
No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.
> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.
That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!
Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.
With perhaps the exclusion of the Amtrak northeast corridor/Acela and a couple of the US subway systems (e.g.NYC) most of the train projects in the us seem like they were designed to as an example inferior alternative to driving. There are so many comically bad examples: the air train to EWR, JFK require multiple transfers and are slower than driving at all but the most severe traffic conditions. The Houston light rail that doesn’t really go anywhere convenient, and is in the street going slower than the cars around it (stopping at traffic lights as well).
It seems as if most of the rail networks in the us are built to serve people with no other alternative as opposed to providing a better alternative to driving. Speaking of airport connections it blows my mind that US cities haven’t built trains like the Heathrow express.
Switzerland has incredible trains and train networks. Just before people chime in with "Trains are good but mountains are too much of a challenge so might work in other places better with a flat geography".
Sounds reasonable until you see how the Swiss do it. Nobody said that but that's where I feel this conversation is going and the previous commenter did say 'buses first'. Probably to exploit the existing road network and achieve ambitious goals in a piece meal manner.
What's silly is to state that we "can't" make things cheaper.
The rest of your statements are relative to the myriad costs of no cars and other transportation. It's narrative.
>That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!
What? Get a grip.
We already have buses and trains. Trains are great but can't go everywhere a car is required. Buses are a poverty pattern and the working class should be elevated away from their necessity rather than toward. The practical tax is such that it is racist to mean to force people into bus transportation.
Automotive transportation has always been the future. It is not only a form of wealth but a form of anti-poverty and anti-strife, as is freedom of movement that they better facilitate.
I don't think it is mathematically possible to build trains for everywhere people want to go. Fine for extremely dense areas, otherwise inconvenient and dumb.
It's similarly impossible to build roads with enough capacity for everyone to drive. Cars work fine in small towns and low-density areas, but once the population and/or density grows too high, traffic becomes terrible. If you fix the population density and let the city grow, the traffic that needs to cross any particular cross section of the city grows asymptotically faster than the length of the cross section (and therefore road capacity). The traditional solution was lowering the density by replacing houses with roads, but that's no longer popular.
Traffic is a hard problem. There is no single solution that fits everywhere, and you will never be able to go everywhere with your preferred means of transit. At least if you are not a major political leader such as the US president. If you are, you can just stop the normal traffic and let the peasants wait.
Sure. Trains in very dense areas with homogenous travel patterns (e.g, commuting to work) and roads everywhere else. Essentially what we have today in many places.
Of course, commuting to sit in front of a computer all day is pretty absurd. Maybe unnecessary commuting is the real problem.
The only reason we have cities with crap density is cars, and their super-wide roads and giant parking lots spreading everything out. So, yes, we can't just put a subway system under Dallas. That's why I said busses first. At the very least stop building more lane miles and making it worse.
Or do keep building more roads. I don't really care. If people love traffic and want to live in their car, there should be a city for them (so long as they are not sucking up federal dollars to do it). The problem is that right now, in NA, all we build are roads. Every city is a shitty carbon copy of the next one. No one is trying anything new.
His account is 14 years old. He knows the guidelines. Why did you spend your time itemizing supposed violations of them?
Meanwhile, I see in these comments many such violations while advocating the other side of the issue, and none of them are downvoted, flagged, or chastised.
There is a persistent pattern on one side of the political spectrum to hold their opponents to various rules while allowing themselves to be exempt, and it is prominent on HN as well.
If you are here for open, honest, and civilized discussion, will you vouch for some of the comments which violate no guidelines but were flagged because they are in favor of the use of automobiles? Will you chastise some of the shallow dismissals which are against the use of automobiles?
Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.
Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.
ICE vehicles don't have tires? A good way to estimate the environmental cost of a mass consumer product is its price (capex & opex), with the caveat that the unaccounted cost for burning gasoline is probably around 6$/gallon, right now.
100 gallons of gasoline produce ~1 ton of CO2, and it costs ~600$/ton to perform CO2 air capture.
Carbon emissions are not the only type of pollution. EVs and ICEs both have tires, so replacing ICEs with EVs does not fix the problem of air pollution in cities because the vast majority of particulates generated by the car while driving it are coming from the tires, not the tailpipe.
Atlanta is barely a city compared to New York or Tokyo. New York City is 8 times denser. Tokyo is even denser if you're just counting the special wards, which is what most people think of as Tokyo. You need trains to alleviate the traffic unless if you want to end up with worse traffic than LA.
Then clearly you have not spent much time in Tokyo, the trains don't run between 12 and 5am. That's a lot of the day to not have access to public transit, especially for peak partying hours on a weekend.
You mean even the part where people get stuffed into already packed trains? [1]
I get it. Japanese trains are some of the best anywhere but lets not make them into some downside-free experience, not including the amount of walking thats involved trying to get into and out of the maze of levels at some of the stations, dodging salarymen and other straphangers.[2]
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Japanese transit system. It’s a marvel. But rich people in Japan usually drive because it’s faster than even an amazing transit system. And the beauty of somewhere like Atlanta is that everyone can live like that.
It’s also extremely inconvenient with three kids, especially if you’re trying to bring a stroller onto the train during rush hour. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every city with excellent public transit is also dying because people aren’t having kids.
Americans have an obsession with strollers that I haven't understood. I took my infants on Caltrain, BART, and light rail using a baby bjorn. When they could walk, they walked or were carried. It's not something you should avoid having kids over.
Try taking three car seats/booster seats on the train because you can’t walk to your final destination from the train…unless you live in NYC/Chicago etc. there are very few us cities where most of your trips can be completed only via train/walking
American babies are about the same or maybe a bit lighter than their European counterparts at birth. Perhaps the issue is that American parents are physically weaker. It's hard not to imagine the SUVs and strollers are components of a negative feedback loop.
My kids hated the bjorn and so did my (very third world communist country) foreign wife. I liked it.
The stroller also has storage space for, for example, the medicine bag that keeps my last kid alive in case he swallows <insert long list of allergens>. The stroller has everything ready to go except the baby and we don't have to don our various accessories.
Finally, as Europeans, we find those Americans and their various polyester bags (back, front, bjorn, fanny, etc) look ridiculous. One looks like a marine about to assault Fallujah. The stroller has a dignity to it that all those bags lack.
? The reason no one wants to take the bus or subway in America is not because they are undignified but because they smell like piss. Unlike the buses in Switzerland which are great.
In fact, despite the smell of urine, I used to love Atlantas MARTA for its brilliant airport exit.
There's nothing inherently undignified of public transportation system. America's indignity comes from our inability to clean.
It's not just that the transit is faster by car but there is less mental overhead. Just get in the car and drive at your pace instead of memorizing schedules (or futzing with an app) and negotiating crowds.
Also, virtually any train system that is good enough to be comparable to driving time-wise will also be busy enough to require standing through the trip during commuting hours.
In Tokyo, that’s true. A fairer comparison would be average commute times in places that are built around cars versus ones built around trains. Average commute in Austin Texas is 22 minutes one way: https://www.ktalnews.com/news/business/shreveport-has-one-of...
And that's because Austin is a much smaller city. Of course traffic is much easier if you have 15x fewer people going anywhere. If you go by administrative borders, Tokyo is roughly 2.5x larger by land area, with 5.5x higher population density. And if you look at the metropolitan areas, Tokyo is 20% larger by land area and has at least 13x higher population density.
I'm from Los Angeles so excuse my hardy laughter. I'm sure Austin is great but that commute time will surely balloon as the population density continues to rise. Austin has ~3000/sq mi vs Tokyo's ~16,000/sq mi.
In both Singapore and Hong Kong, I never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a train and the stops were pretty much within 3-4 blocks within anything I'd want to get to.
I stayed recently in Askakusa on a family trip and the train was about a 15 minute walk away. Even in the close in districts there are many residential places that are a 15-20 minute walk away, and on top of that you might have to take a bus to the train, or transfer lines, etc. Even in Tokyo the door to door time is usually much faster driving.
I don’t know about Singapore or Hong Kong. But I suspect rich people there drive rather than taking public transit.
I believe you're vastly overselling driving. We're talking saving ~10 minutes on the mean ride, at a huge increase in cost (and IMO, health).
Source:
>>> Differences between cities [public transportation vs car transportation times] mainly concern the magnitude of the ratio, where the car is remarkably faster than public transit in Los Angeles but _not that much in Tokyo and Seoul._ (Emphasis mine)
```
PT travel time (minutes) Min: 9 Max: 121 Mean: 52.8
Car travel time (minutes) Min: 11 Max: 123 Mean: 41.8
Car travel cost (¥) Min: 149 Max: 6138 Mean:2102.6
```
Source: Altieri, M., Silva, C., & Terabe, S. (2021). Keep pushing! Analysing public transit and car competitiveness in Tokyo. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9(2), 457–465. doi:10.1016/j.cstp.2021.02
I spent some time in a managed apartment in singapore. Public transport was terrible from the suburbs, took about 1h30 to do a 7 mile commute to my office. I ended up taking taxis every day, which were generally ok out of town, but getting one in the morning was always a bit of a risk - could take 5 minutes one day but 30 the next.
Great, so all Colorado needs to do is break itself off into a tiny geography on an advantageous sea route to 1) force density due to this unique geography 2) become a global shipping hub and tax haven for the super rich to get the capital to build mega real estate/transit projects 3) 5X population growth rates for 50 years and 4) force all families out of their comfortable homes and into tiny, absurdly expensive apartments. Easy!
Well, 1864 was long before the automobile. However, Atlanta, like most American cities that were getting big around 1900, had lots of streetcars, so it was never going to be walkable in the same way that European cities are. Despite the nostalgia for them, streetcars were definitely not as good as busses and cars - they were pretty slow and got stuck in traffic because they ran down the middle of the street without any barriers. The thing with cars is that they let people spread out much further than even streetcars could feasibly go, and as you said, Atlanta is pretty much the best-case scenario with cars.
Even LA became an automobile city, and it has much more substantial barriers to expansion. Now that it's built out, LA is developing a pretty expansive metro system, but it will take decades to truly cover the region. It would have been nice to at least lay the main lines of the metro when land was cheap. One thing China got right is learning from these mistakes and building out their metros ahead of their city growth.
I can get everywhere I need to go in NYC with a few bucks loaded onto a transit card. In Atlanta I need to rent a car for $100s a day, drive it myself, pay for it's gas, its insurance and parking, prove to the local government that I'm certified to drive it, and also not impaired from driving it at the moment. How do you get "cheaper" from that?
"nicer" and "cleaner" mean the same thing, and I'll give those to you. When you create a transit system that poor people can't afford to use... you don't see poor people anymore. But they didn't disappear, and you didn't solve a problem.
Okay, if you can't handle being around other people, then don't live in NY. But, what's your point here? Cus I know you hate it, but supply and demand says that waaaay more people like NYs than there actually _are_ NYs. People who can only exist in giant metal boxes, sealed off from the world at all times, can choose to live in nearly any city in America and live their bliss. But not everyone is you. You shouldn't have to be a millionaire to live in a real city. We can make Seattle and SF and Portland and Boston and Philly better without Houston and Atlanta even noticing.
NYC has a net negative out-migration rate. If it wasn't for foreigners moving in the city would be shrinking. And foreigners (like many of my family in Queens) don't move to NYC because they like a city that's just one step up from Bangladesh. They do it because of the access to jobs, people who speak their native language, etc. They tend to move to Long Island (or, these, days, Texas) as soon as they get their feet under them.
My larger point is that public policy is a meta-market. We subsidize the suburbs because the majority of people like the suburbs. The net migration patterns in this country are to places like Dallas and Atlanta because that's where more people want to live.
Well, somehow housing in NYC is up 3% this year. I’m the biggest urbanist shill you’ll meet and even I don’t live there, cus it’s too damn expensive. We build only suburbs, only suburbs are affordable, and that’s where people live. Shocking.
I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.
> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.
what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.
since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?
though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.
He’s right, though. There are as many if not more lifetimes saved in aggregate.
You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.
I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)
personally lose someone, no, but i've gotten the chance of being a citizen first responder to a lost of life one. i feel like your's and OP's response are because you've never seen or been impacted first hand what dying by car is like. it is usually horrific and violent that to be able to say those outweigh the time saved traversing the sprawled built environment created for the sake of those very same cars shows a lack of any lived experience. your argument fundamentally relies on the idea "all i know is cars, and there is nothing better". it's uncreative, unrealistic, and devoid of humanity. it's terrifying you and others with your mindset are on the road.
I think that in North America the deal is done, there is no way of going back this far down the path and private vehicles on the road are never going away until the fall of said civilization (or plan B: making the country dirt poor, but this may lead to plan A anyway)
And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
Rethink your misanthropy. We live in a free and rich country, and you hate people so much that you assume they’re being duped by “automobile manufacturers” instead of making their own choices about how they prefer to live. The fact is that Americans live like we do because we can afford to be comfortable. My mom, an immigrant to the US who grew up in Bangladesh, went to Australia recently and came back complaining about how cramped everything was over there and how small everyone’s houses are. She didn’t come to America until nearly age 40–she didn’t grow up being brainwashed into car culture. She just has eyes and can see what’s a more comfortable life.
There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.
> For every person who d[i]es, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.
That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of your world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)
May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.
Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference. Public transportation (and particularly buses and coaches) are ubiquitous in some transportation systems in some very rich world cities. London comes to mind. The double decker buses are beloved.
Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains.
I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.
Even the best bus systems are slow and inconvenient compared to cars. I went to see Taylor Swift in Tokyo this year, and took the bus to the subway. It was timely, clean, and efficient—far better than anything America could ever be able to do. But I still took an Uber back, because I wanted to get home quickly.
>Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference.
You haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about. See "little to no experience with daily reliance on buses for urban transportation".
You should at least mention what city you lived in. Your initial comment is hardly credible. Lots of people have ridden buses for more than 18 months in their entire life and appreciate it.
The biggest problem with public transport is usually the public.
Segregated services for commuters are great, but catching a bus to shop/recreation/restaurants is miserable and restrictive.
As as aside, developing mass transit always has the problem of being at the whim of the next political goal (subsidised bus routes especially). Roads are physical easy to understand, so less subject to political vs.
Yes, roads require less 'active upkeep', an austerity government might stop funding transit but they will not close roads. However, this is more of a feature of the supposed 'independence' of car transport, not 'easy to understand'.
In addition, defunding transit would be a lot harder and weirder if it is in a form that requires actual infrastructure (metro, train, tram) rather than some stops and a schedule (bus). That's one potential reason to trust bus transit projects less.
Do keep in mind that roads aren't free after construction either; they typically require pretty significant upkeep (especially things like repaving, but also e.g. traffic signals).
I have seen many public transport systems privatised and worsened over time; since there are many ways to play with funding and quality, you can hide a whole lot of bullshit. Frequency, hours, cleaning, security, ticket price, and maintenance... It can be unclear why a service is declining or who is accountable. That's what I mean by easier to understand.
Roads are public in a way that introducing a toll on an existing road is not politically viable, and maintenance issues are easier to spot.
From my experience most people have no understanding of how road maintenance works. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say they refuse to pay more taxes, after all they won’t even fix the potholes in our roads!
Ehhh, no. Does anyone prefer buses stuck in traffic over a train? And if the buses are so great, why they build The Elizabeth Line (and dream to build the north-south equivalent)?
You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London
Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level
lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived without in some of those other cities for 15. without was way better. When I really needed a vehicle to carry something I could get a taxi.
Trains are slow when poorly designed. good train systems have multiple levels of express trains.
dont poor people in Paris live on the edges of the city far away from the good jobs downtown and are closer to the highways?
I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america.
The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cities probably dont have anywhere near the crime levels of the US) c) its easier to raise kids because decent schools dont have waiting lists and basic stuff like grocery stores are cheaper
I know it's a meme on Reddit but people living outside metropolitian areas aren't there simply because they are pro-car.
The poor in Paris indeed live far from the center. These suburbs are dreary like most but the French public transit system is good enough that getting to the center areas from many suburb is still relatively quick.
yes but local government regulation prevents it, zoning and other overt policies manufactured suburbia, not supply and demand, while NIBMYism kills any possible development in urban areas or suburbs on the edges of cities
I don't want to live in a city. It's noisy, polluted, crowded and I really like my small countryside house with plenty of land around it. Lived in a city for 20 years, got fed up with it, despite all of the alleged 'advantages' it offers. I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?
No, you don’t. plain and simple. Tons of people living together share the costs. the few in the suburbs need to pay for their own infra. They’re not now. The cities are subsidizing the suburbs. that’s not fair.
I've watched that video and seen it quoted a fair number of times, but I don't see how it jives with the reality of tax collection and spending - at least in my area of residence (ATL). I'd love some hard data on how the city is subsidizing the suburbs.
Instead, the recent trend has been that wealthy areas near downtown (e.g. Buckhead) have been trying to incorporate so that they're no longer subsidizing the rest of the city.
dude... where do the imports of petroleum and fixed nitrogen which are critical for Ag come from? hint: look at the US ports and see what surrounds them.
farming and suburbia are subsidized out the wazoo. and a lot of Ag doesn't go to feed people... you're bark is much, much worst than your bite.
Your sentiment can be summarized as "Fuck you, I got mine." Hardly convincing.
As an aside, the countryside can survive without cities but cities cannot survive without the countryside. Perhaps consider your dependences before brazenly brushing them off.
There's absolutely no way farmers can be more than subsistence farmers without selling to the masses in the city. Country farmers like to pretend they enjoy living off the land but outside of what they actually sell to make money, they would be losing same amenities as the city that they are not willing to give up.
no, my sentiment is you’re stealing from me and not even aware of it. you’re taking more than your portion.
Cities need farms (a few people and a few roads) they don’t need suburbs (people wasting resources, living large, and stealing tax resources from the cities to subsidize their lifestyle)
I think it's great to live in the country but you should not expect the government to bail you out. That's part of the deal. I myself have thought about buying country property, but as a responsible property owner, I bear the cost for adding infrastructure, and, in return, I get the sole enjoyment. That's the deal. If you want the infrastructure built for you then you need to accept public use of it. That means the government gets to decide how large that public is too.
You can have whatever local infrastructure yourself and your community can afford.
You can have whatever connection to the rest of your state your community and the state can afford and decide upon.
FWiW I've very much been there, I grew up in the most remote corner of a state 3x larger than Texas with a population (then) of under 1 million.
We graded our own airstrip, 150 km of road, maintained our own vehicles and aircraft, fed and managed our horses and camels, loaded and unloaded ships off the mud flats at low tide.
That buses take 1.5 hours to an urban center while cars don't is not an immobile fact of life: it is the result of decades of policy decisions that used limited budget on more roads rather than buses and trains.
If, for example, Denver, CO had an actual functioning transportation network, it would cover a decent chunk of its neighboring suburbs, and these parts will be considered more desirable because you don't have to waste time driving in and out of Denver. And then these parts will be developed faster, providing more housing to people who don't like the hassle of driving and parking, which will create even more public demand to extend existing infrastructure.
That it doesn't happen just means Americans are stuck in the worldview of "I have never seen a functional public transit system in my life; I can't imagine why anyone would waste money on that!"
Hard agree - look at the development of large apartment complexes right next to lightrail stations in Denver. These were promoted by policy changes, but are effective in providing mass public transit of reasonable quality into the city center from the (extremely small) suburb-ish locations they exist at.
If denver built out that light rail into a network dense housing could exist in the suburbs at an extremely reasonable cost (suburbs are cheaper than downtown, apartments are cheaper than housing). Like the article says, the neighboring counties/etc just don't want this, as the HOAs/homeowners in the suburbs want to entrench themselves and increase property values.
Buses that can drive in the shoulder are better for people who already take the bus, but they aren't going to get many more people riding the bus. A light rail that actually went all the way to Boulder would help. Or a lightrail that actually went to Golden, and not only the government building 3 miles uphill from downtown Golden.
Just because public transport is a poverty tax where you went to school does not mean buses and especially other transit are inherently for poor people. Buses do tend to be mediocre for longer distances, but the main issue is general quality of service.
I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise.
When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all.
Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.
My dad lived in a Colorado suburb and took the bus to work. He saw firsthand how the bus deteriorates when bad policy doesn’t fund public transportation. When he retired in his sixties, he was running on the order of 50 miles a week or so for his morning commute.
Our governor adopted budget cuts that forced the public busses to run private ads, then called them an “eyesore.” People—especially poor people or families that don’t want to rely on cars — need reliable public transportation!
It's not just poor people who don't want to rely on cars but also those too young to have a license, or momentarily too sick or simply too old to drive safely and of course those with suspended licenses for whatever reason. Mobility should be a right for everyone, not just car owners.
I took public transport that was pretty bad, and now that I am older, I am still very supportive of public transportation. Unlike personal automotive transportation, it's been made to work somewhere. Cheaper and faster automotive transport does not mix well, people have been dreaming about it for a century and somehow it never worked anywhere. It's a shame you're throwing words like ivory tower around because it's exactly the acceptance of observed reality that is forcing people to think about new ways of doing things. Let's care about working people in ways other than making them spend a huge chunk of their income on inefficient transportation that always takes forever no matter how many lanes you build. Transportation they have to use because it's exactly the middle class that wants to prioritize its own comfort instead of the common good and there are no alternatives.
well i rode a bike for several years and i would love separate interlocking paths for bikes to be everywhere.
right now i cannot even go half a mile to get groceries because someone obsessed with "not modeling poverty" decided there should be no way to safely cross the 6 lane street between me and the grocery store.
Your proposed solution makes the world a dangerous, more hostile, more lonely choice for people who do not drive (and those who do, for that matter). Among other things, car-focused landscapes are terrible for raising independent children. You are removing the ability for them to travel on their own safely and replacing it with sprawling auto-focused landscapes.
>Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus.
It must be very cultural. I'm pretty well off (as most experienced IT people are), and I travel with Bus (or a Bike) to my job every weekday. Most of my friends and coworkers do the same (I don't even know anyone in my team who drives to work).
I'm sorry about your experience with school bus - this sounds disastrous. But believe me that it's possible to improve. In my (big, European) city public transport and biking infrastructure is pretty good, cheap, and useful.
As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great.
But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
Expensive. Here in North Virginia (just outside of DC) it was $26k OTD for a 2021 Camry LE. We pay $223/mo in car insurance for my wife and I and $1k/yr in property tax for the car.
Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.
Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.
Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)
I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.
That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.
I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.
Really? I feel like this sort of thing is hugely dependant on start and endpoints. Trains crush cars during peak, and are usually still better in dense areas, but add 10-20 minutes of last mile either end and driving quickly ends up faster (although in dense areas parking is not cheap)
Car ownership costs vary widely. If you buy a new $50,000 car every two years, that is obviously very expensive, and then will be expensive to insure, and many of those luxury vehicles aren't amazingly efficient.
Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.
By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
I also took transit for 1.5 hours each way when I moved to Toronto, Canada. My monthly transit cost + Ubers was around $400-1000 (I had to take two systems and frequently took Ubers when the bus was cancelled or delayed).
My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400.
I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment.
Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
Cars can be expensive, yeah. I live in a very car-centric area (zero public transportation, with many things too far away for realistically walking there).
To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive.
But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car.
Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month.
And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work.
The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68.
The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62.
The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true.
--
But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute.
So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out.
With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day.
With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them.
On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason.
So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)
Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time.
Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.
Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.
My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.
In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.
Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
If scrolling through your phone were worthwhile enough that being able to do it made up for the loss of time, people would deliberately take trains instead of cars just so they could take a little longer but be able to scroll through their phones.
The bottom line is that it is geometrically impossible to get everyone in a city to work by car. End of story.
You can lament all you want, but the difference in space between a car and an apartment/office building makes the problem you're discussing completely unsolvable.
So, if you really care about making everyone richer, the only question you can ask is how to improve public transit. Anything else is pure make-believe.
this is just bizarre. cars are extremely expensive, polluting, dangerous and highways aren’t good for nature or human living.
nobody should live in a sprawl or rural area so far they need to commute two hours. make transit and trains fast and cheap and frequent, build opportunities in cities, and design cheap housing in desirable areas.
No, in most cities most people by far use public transit for their commute. And in most cities, especially where this is not exactly true, car traffic is already hellish at rush hour.
I do agree that work-from-home should be a part of the transit solution. But not even the entire software industry can work from home, nevermind all the other industries that sometimes use computers.
Buses are only bad because everyone else has cars. They get all downsides of car travel (plus more) with none of the upsides. It wouldn't be a "poverty tax" if the alternative was walking or cycling.
I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like.
I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction.
In the end these are policy decisions that can change and I can imagine this backfiring long term in some ways.
The Colorado example is about no longer giving out carrots rather than using any type of stick. Tolls and higher taxes would be examples of sticks.
> clogging the roads
The roads already be clogged and adding more lanes is not likely to unclog them. Single occupancy vehicles at the end of the day are not a solution for moving hundreds of thousands of people around - there's an intrinsic scaling problem that can't be solved by building infinite roads.
It's kinda like trying to get high speed internet by adding more & more 56k modems.
Hang on, this isn't taking anything away from drivers at all - the roads aren't suddenly going away or falling into ruin, they're just not getting enlarged. It's not much of a stick and nor is it a punishment, any more than building a road without bike lanes is a punishment for cyclists.
This would only be true if additional lanes were built on top of each other instead of next to each other. As lanes are widened though they just keep pushing things apart and making other types of transit less pleasant, which will then create demand that wasn't there before (because people now need to be on roads longer to get where they want to go). There is a maximum density that cars can support that is LOWER than most cities are built up at.
You've totally misunderstood induced demand. You can build unlimited roads and they will all be used up and commutes will increase for everyone.
People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it.
This is why initially highway projects look like successes. Wow. My commute is so much better. And then. In a decade. They're even worse than they were originally.
>People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it.
well yes, that is the objective of building transit[0]: to get people where they would like to go. That people 'induce demand' by moving to a place where they can go where they would like to go with (initially) less friction is the system reequilibrating - from places where demand was not adequately sated[0].
Consider the opposite situation: we remove one lane from all highways, and drop the speed limits on all surface streets by 25 percent, and reduce the departures of all trains and planes by 25%. If adding capacity is bad, then reducing it must be good [for the economy and people's quality of life].
[0]If demand was adequately sated, where was it induced from? Adequately sated here might also be read as 'optimally sated' or even just 'less well sated'. Obviously there is a point where cost exceeds the marginal benefit, e.g. adding 10 new bay bridges would surely reduce mean transit times across the bay, but at a patently unreasonable cost-benefit ratio.
[1]Unless you like to argue that we are at the local or global optimum for transit capacity?
It's not that adding capacity is bad, that it can be ineffective.
Given that personal transport is such a large percentage of the nations' carbon footprint, adding more cars detracts from that goal. From that perpsective, or a localized pollution perspective, or people wasting time in traffic jams (because NO alternative exists) - those are bad things.
I've generally lived in places in the US where driving is the ONLY viable option. By adding lanes, an ineffective tactic, instead of investing in more scalable (ie: effective) solutions - therein lies a problem.
> well yes, that is the objective of building transit
The US traffic engineer currently tries to optimize for throughput as defined by vehicles per minute, rather than passengers per minute. Therein lies the rub. Take a 2 lane road, dedicate one for buses, and it turns out the passenger throughput per minute goes way up, a single bus can be equivalent to 50+ cars.
Which is all to say, build more lanes of road for single occupancy cars has a limiting factor for when that is no longer an effective solution to the transit problem. Yet, adding more lanes is often still the only solution applied in many jurisdictions.
in some cities where traffic was reduced in specific areas (usually the center), business went up, because, as more people were forced to walk, they also were more spontaneously entering shops and buying more.
But it will increase. People move farther away ("this commute used to be bad but now there's another lane so I can live in a bigger house further out!"), businesses build "enough" parking so things are spread farther apart, and all of this increases the miles driven, thereby increasing traffic.
No, there is no such point, because there is simply not enough room to transport every person in an office building or high-rise apartment building in a personal car to and from work.
Imagine if there was a portal on your front lawn that allowed you instant access to downtown London. How much more frequently would you travel to London if it took you literally no time at all? All of those trips are induced demand--that is, it is extra demand that is induced by the ease of the trip. Shifting demand from one route to another is, by definition, not induced demand, since it already existed!
Every time you decide to delay a trip during rush-hour, because of rush-hour - that is an example of what you are describing.
As an example, in Bellevue, Washington - the evening rush hour starts (and is really bad) at 3pm - there are that many people leaving work progressively earlier that there is still a rush hour of people leaving work early to avoid the big rush-hour.
More lanes only helps the car manufacturers. A nice train system up and down the front range would be great. Would also help people get their 10,000 steps in every day walking to the train.
People are already complaining about traffic! Drivers taking I70 between Denver and Loveland on weekends aren't doing so because of their love of the road. Why would we want to increase the number of people experiencing traffic? To assume my prior hyperbolic tone: Widening roads is punishing people for driving!
I'd argue the true goal of the exercise is to increase the capacity of the transit system, and that includes the proposal to not widen the roads. This isn't being done to punish drivers, regardless of how someguydave wants to frame it. The money (to the tune of a cool billion dollars) is being reinvested elsewhere in the network with the intent of increasing the number of people the city can move. The naive proposal of widening roads does work! It increases capacity, but it also makes everybody's experience worse via traffic and pollution. Let's see if there's something better!
People complain about everything. Certainly the bus is a common complaint here in Chicago even though it’s difficult for me to imagine it getting much better. Even if they add BRT people will complain about that. Of course the goal is increasing capacity of the transit system the question is how to do it.
I think the US has a big problem where SFHs are the epitome of what it means to be successful for a huge number of people. These people will always vote for policies that enable living in a single family home, even if they don’t live in on themselves and will never be able to afford to because the freedom to do so is so deeply ingrained. Highway expansion is a policy that enables single family home living as it enables people to live farther and farther from the city center so I suspect it will always see a large amount of political support.
Roads are widened all the time with the goal to increase average speeds.
I can think of counter-example where it's more clear that travel time is not an independent variable to road width:
- lanes on highways are extra wide so you drive faster. (The wider the lane, the faster people will drive, the margin of error is greatly reduced allowing a faster travel speed). If what you were saying is true, then there would be first a lot of projects to narrow lanes to the minimum in order to increase the number of travel lanes. IIRC, US highways have as a standard a 13 foot width (I might have that somewhat wrong), IIRC as well, the absolute minimum width is more like 9 feet. There could be almost 50% more lanes by narrowing, but that would reduce traffic speeds.
How do you propose doing that, though? Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already and if we're talking buses then there's a significant driver shortage. In the US the distances and routes required outside of dense urban centers also pretty much necessitate a huge increase in transit time compared to driving, making the whole thing a bad value for people who can afford a car.
Personally I feel it's fine for them to operate at a loss, it's a public service, akin to the fire department or library. The amount of good it does society to get cars off the road is staggering.
The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.
Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and business that is enabled by a decent metro system you see that they pay for itself several times over.
That's even easier to measure because these gains are localized.
yes but I am about to go to bed so the link mihht come only tomorrow.
Also some studies have calculated the impact on health in the society and calculated a cost to the society per km of driving a car and the money saved when doing the same km walking or with a bicycle.
From what I'd read, the majority of road wear comes from tractor trailers, who don't nearly cover their costs.
It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and lowering infra spend.
The difference is that the gas tax or similar user fees could easily (if politically feasible) be scaled up to cover both capital and operating expenses for the entire road and highway network.
If you tried to do that for merely the operating costs of many transit systems, they’d enter a death spiral.
Thankfully, Massachusetts has shown how to do that.
The governor has to make a public statement that he will not allow any more eminent domain takings for highways on his watch (and issue executive orders to that effect.)
After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.
>After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.
They always have the option to leave the state due to a perceived reduction in QOL.
>Massachusetts is hemorrhaging people. In fact, it’s seeing the highest outmigration numbers in the last 30 years, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. A net 110,000 people moved out of the Bay State over roughly the first two years of the pandemic within the United States, most of them between the ages of 26 and 35.
>The question is: why? Rent is certainly a factor. Boston has the second-highest median rent in the country after New York City. Traffic congestion and the many woes of the MBTA have also dominated headlines.
Yes, people have the option of leaving. That option is so unattractive that even gainfully employed and employable people will sleep rough rather than leave.
Our biggest challenge in MA is building enough housing capacity so people can park their heads somewhere safe every night. Since geometry brooks no compromise, it's nice that none, absolutely none of our existing building stock can be torn down for highways.
It's also nice that our inner ring cities have abolished parking requirements, which makes it easier to build more housing.
You're making the assumption that roads pay for themselves, but that isn't true at all either. Across the US cities are going bankrupt because they can't maintain roads and other infrastructure. California has a gas tax that pays 80% of road maintenance, the rest of which is often paid from local city taxes that drivers and non-drivers alike pay. Many cities are falling behind in road maintenance though, the true impact of which won't be felt for ~20 years. A hidden cost of car infrastructure is also that the low density increases the costs of other infrastructure maintenance, such as sewage, gas, and power. Good mass transit is ultimately cheaper for everyone.
Ideally you would have to change how zoning and planning works to create denser more integrated neighborhoods that can be efficiently used with public transit.
If that's too difficult the next best compromise is a park-and-ride scheme. Put a couple stations with huge parking lots in strategic locations between suburbs, and offer good rail or subway connections to work places and shopping destinations. That doesn't enable anyone to get rid of their car, but it gives people a faster alternative to the most congested roads
> Mr. Tafoya was working for the City Council when he heard about the plan to expand the highway just blocks from where his mother still lived. “I-70 radicalized me,” he said. He quit his job and helped organize a statewide coalition of activists and community members who tried to stop the Interstate 70 expansion with lawsuits and protests. In the end, Interstate 70 was expanded. But the fight served as a warning to leaders like Ms. Lew that future highway construction would face spirited opposition.
> I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way
Where do you think the money is going?
> Within a year of the rule’s adoption in 2021, Colorado’s Department of Transportation, or CDOT, had canceled two major highway expansions, including Interstate 25, and shifted $100 million to transit projects. In 2022, a regional planning body in Denver reallocated $900 million from highway expansions to so-called multimodal projects, including faster buses and better bike lanes.
People are driven by the cattle prod. If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use, i.e. sin taxes. It's worked on cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc. to varying degrees. The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.
I ultimately agree with the approach they're taking. It isn't going to be accomplished by building additional lanes and subsequently asking people to pretty-please take transit.
It does need to be weighed against the practicality of transportation to/from where your transit riders need to go. Given the vast majority of Western states are sparsely populated, transit dollars can only go so far.
> The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.
It seems weird that the response to "a democratic government, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, has lost the confidence of large swaths of the electorate" is to give that institution more direct social control.
That seems like the opposite of what a sane system would do.
everyone's morality is different, one would hope the government optimizes for something else, like you paying more to slowly kill yourself because it costs the government money when you stop paying taxes early and use your social security net instead of working
There is an difference between the government punishing murderers and government bureaucrats employed by elected representatives to build roads deciding to punish the general population by not building roads (and still being paid tax dollars)
People may use sin taxes or similar as an outward excuse, but I doubt rational individuals want to overthrow the government because they are paying an extra 25 cents for soda or haven't had their wetlands paved over for additional parking spaces.
>I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like.
Impossible. Mass transit, walking, and non motorized bicycling do not mesh with individual motorized traffic. It’s just physics.
The classic individualist vs collectivist dilemma that nature presents. You have to sacrifice one for the other.
As proof, simply look at all the best places for mass transit. Individual car usage is painful in all of them. The more painful using a car is, the better the public transit can be.
Yeah, cars are a tragedy of the commons. They're great if you're the only person on the road: you can get to anywhere you want on your own schedule. But then everyone rationally chooses to drive, which makes it a pretty crummy way to get around. Not to mention all the externalities and inefficiencies involved.
In order to make mass transit more attractive we will have to do something about the other riders. A lot of people that I know in the SF Bay Area simply don't feel safe on buses and light rail (although Caltrain seems to be fine). Our failures in housing and mental health public policy have turned mass transit into ersatz homeless shelters. Plus there are plenty of regular antisocial assholes playing loud music, yelling, littering, sometimes begging. Rules are not enforced.
Punishing drivers isn't a solution. We need comprehensive solutions that make regular people feel welcome on public transit. Otherwise those people won't support public transit funding.
As someone who loves trains and buses and planes, I wish that people who pushed public transport would actually engage with the reasons why people don't want to use it rather than just making alternatives worse.
There are three main issues that need to be solved for even me, a train lover, to prioritise using them.
1) Undesirables need to be removed. I don't want to deal with beggars or other general hoodlums. Transport police need to be aggressive with stamping out these behaviours. If I have to interact with these people I won't do it.
2) It needs to be clean and comfortable. My car has air conditioning. If I have to feel sweaty and worry about touching surfaces I'm just not going to do it.
3) I like a good walk, and there are also real limitations to scaling here, so I'm less rigid on this, but it does need to go roughly to where I want to go and it needs to be frequent. If I'm out in the rain for fifteen minutes waiting for a bus I'm just not going to do it, I could already be halfway there by car.
I don't think these are insurmountable, Japan does pretty well, but in the absence of that, the stick just isn't going to work. If travel times via car doubled, I'd probably just do less and then eventually move out of the city.
edit: I can't reply about libraries due to rate limiting.
Libraries are a great example of how public transport _could_ work!
I love libraries!
The British Library is truly public. Anyone can go, anyone can enter the reading rooms. It is a lovely environment to read or work in, as they have strict rules. It is peaceful and pleasant because of the way that it's set up.
It's also a great example of how the many can come together to do more than the few. Almost no-one is able to create a home environment with that sort of atmosphere, and by sharing it we all get more.
I would love it if public transport were like the experience of using a good library.
If the answer is to throw up our hands and say that nothing can be done, then I'll just drive instead, because there are no beggars in my car, I don't let them in.
What I'm saying is that public transport is a reflection of the local society. You can accept it, work to improve it, or hide from it in your private vehicle.
Here in London, hardly a quaint and sleepy village, everyone uses public transport, including beggars and hoodlums as you put it, and it's fine.
> including beggars and hoodlums as you put it, and it's fine.
Nope in a waymo I don’t have to smell piss snell, get begged at, have a crackhead grab my girlfriend’s hair, have another crackhead leer at my female friend, have another crackhead catcall my female friend, etc etc etc
We simply disagree that public transport (or society in general) has to accept everyone regardless of how badly they behave.
It has nothing to do with "sectors of society".
If you want me on the bus, kick off the dickheads. Making driving worse will not get me on the bus however much you attempt to manipulate me emotionally.
Comparing someone cutting you off while driving to someone with their hand down their pants or smoking meth in front of you is like comparing an apple to an elephant. Surprisingly, from my own experiences, you grow numb to it all before long and just continue about your day.
Boston has successfully moved one highway underground (the big dig) and shot down an extension of I-95 (there are parks and a train route where it was planned now). The city is much better for it.
We're actually going in reverse. In the next 2 years a horrible little spur of elevated highway that cuts through Somerville (McGrath) is getting demolished and replaced with a nice boulevard. That whole area is just blighted at the moment. It's going to become some of the nicest housing with parks and shops.
I get its supposed to be a funny joke, but CA has some of the biggest transit projects in the country going on currently. CAHSR is wildly expensive, but its still being built, and will far and away be the best rail corridor in the country when its done.
LA has been building a decent amount of transit for how hard it is to get anything done there.
SF already has a fairly robust and solid transit network, and there have been some great maintenance projects done in the last 10 years to keep it going. Its only current major issue (imo) is the frequency, which still isnt the worst ever. MUNI is also getting new signaling to improve frequency, and a massive underground train station is going to get built at Salesforce (finally making use of a great transit hub).
BART is a great system with some much needed improvements happening currently, including new fare gates and all new signaling. They also just finished upgrading to the new fleet of cars, and came in under budget!
CalTrain is also rolling out their brand new electrified system in September, with hugely upgraded frequencies, that will make transit up/down the peninsula much better.
It isnt a ton when compared to other countries that build much more efficiently, but its still more than anywhere else in the country.
Above link says construction to start this year and take 12 years. So eventually you'll have CalTrain, CAHSR and BART as connected system.
A good point is the projects are being rolled out they way they are due to funding constraints and a desire provide ongoing side benefits, like the electrified CalTrain and the grade separation projects in the central valley. (Every over pass over the existing rail is a benefit).
Los Angeles is indeed building a lot of public transit. As is the nature of any of these projects, especially in California, it will be many years (decades) before much of it is complete. But it's happening nonetheless.
A lot is complete already like over 100 stations. Only got started about 30 years ago too so they are building at light speed compared to the rest of the country.
What do you mean they just ripped a chunk out of bakersfield a couple years ago for a highway? Also its easy to say no new highways when you take a random dirt road probably laid by the spanish out in the countryside, call it a state highway already, then then turn it into a six lane cement dragon while saying “see we didn't build a new billion dollar highway”.
It would be nice if they brought back train service from Denver to Ft. Collins and Laramie. In Europe you can go so many places with just a bicycle and a train ticket.
I kinda hate that this topic almost always devolves into similar arguments about what exactly is induced demand. Despite that, these conversation threads did give me a new perspective on induced demand that I feel is worth sharing.
That new perspective - I would now say that induced demand relates the efficiency of how well a resource is used to the cost of using that resource. If cost of use is high, then the resource is used more efficiently, and the inverse is also true.
An example, if going to the grocery store takes a literal minute, then buying one item at a time per trip is very viable. OTOH, if that travel time takes one hour, then a person is likely going to avoid that trip, and when they do make it - they'll buy two weeks of groceries at a time and be very careful not to forget anything.
In the latter case, the number of items transported per unit distance increases, usage efficiency goes up. If the cost goes down, then the number of people for whom it is economical to use that resource inefficiently will increase. That's induced demand.
Induced demand gets thrown around a lot, without understanding why it is invoked.
Inducing demand can often be good. We build things so that we can use or sell them. A railroad should induce new trips just as a highway should.
The problem with highway expansion in 2024 in the US is that each new mile of highway gets ever increasingly more expensive and hard to build and produces diminishing returns, at high cost to the neighborhoods that will be bulldozed and divided. And these high costs are sucking the money away from not only the development of alternative modes which could be good backup options, but also the maintenance of the current network. It is not unheard of for a single highway interchange to now cost nearly $2B+: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Interchange
I would quibble here, it depends. Another example I am thinking of is toilet paper during the pandemic when it was in short supply. At that time, when we were counting squares of toilet paper and predicting when you were going to run out, people used their toilet paper very efficiently. When it is plentiful, suddenly you don't care about using every last bit as efficiently as possible.
In my previous example in the parent post, everyone is still making it to the grocery store and/or work, but it's a question of how efficient people are incentivized to be when making those trips.
When it comes to highways, I'm guessing that it's more the case that inefficient/unnecessary trips become more economical than typically enabling people to make a given trip at all. I know a lot of people are pretty lazy about planning their trips, I'm guessing there are a lot more of those people than those that cannot go to a city because it requires 45 minutes instead of 30. Just my guess there though, and certainly that is context dependent.
I like your points regarding efficiency of cost for expansion as well. Though, my point is more that induced demand is the minimum efficiency of a resource someone is willing to incur for it to be worth the cost of using that resource. That latter part, is a bit independent of the cost of building that resource in the first place, though that construction cost is still an important thing to consider.
It's just Jevon's paradox. High prices suppress demand because possible use cases are infeasible/unprofitable, but lower costs make them possible until you have total oversaturation (but e.g. subsidized US corn results in it used in all products!)
Indeed, not only is total demand a function of cost, but so is frequency of that demand. If my analogy were an actual hypothesis, it could be tested by checking that those who live closer to a grocery store will have on average a lower grocery bill (per visit) than those that live farther away (normalized by the number of people per household and household income), and the absolute total number of trips taken by those that live close by will be higher.
Which is to say, it's profitable to go to a grocery store for very few items if you live close by. Live farther away, and it's less profitable, perhaps to the point where it's not worth doing unless you buy a lot.
I agree that latent demand becomes a factor for sure as well.
It all depends on how you define "efficiency". For the grocery example, getting food items Just-in-Time would result in fresher food, less wastage and more flexibility.
I would define it as simply number of items per distance traveled. How much you get from a location X is a function of how often you are willing to travel to location X. As the cost of travel goes down, your willingness to increase frequency increases.
Food spoilage does come into play and creates a lower limit on the frequency. At some point you'll buy so much you can neither store it nor consume it before it spoils. At some other point on the other side of the spectrum - the cost to travel is not worth the convenience of buying exactly what you want each day. All in all, people would indeed prefer to go more frequently for less, but there are reasons to not do so.
Thus, high frequency does give flexibility, and that is really important. It's a big reason why people like to have their own car, and do things like buy one weeks of groceries and not a full months at a time. That same flexibility is why people rationally choose to make multiple trips when they could make fewer. I do find it quite interesting to think about the various 'sweet spots' in these equations, and the various constraining factors.
Widening I-25 probably won't do any good (didn't do much good last time we did that), but we keep talking about light rail all the way as far north as Fort Collins, and nothing ever happens other than RTD making money earmarked for new light rail disappear into the aether.
Since I moved here in the mid 1990’s we now have added light rail to Golden, down to Lincoln on I-25, all the way up I225, and I70 from downtown to the airport. Not exactly nothing. Rail to Loveland/Ft Collins would be a great addition.
Sure, maybe a little more trackage around Denver, but don't you remember all the controversy how the space and money to run light rail along 36 went away and we wound up with just a new express lane in its place? Maybe Jared will actually get something done and they'll run light rail in tandem with the BNSF line from Denver all the way north, but I'm still really skeptical because I've heard "it's just 3-4 years out, we have a plan" for at least 15 years now.
The airport lightrail is incredible, but the Golden one is useless unless you're going to court. Great example of politics getting in the way, since the lightrail only serves the government building which is miles away and very uphill from downtown Golden where people live and work.
I wish bus stops where I live weren't so hostile to the user, no one wants to sit on metal in 100 degree weather, especially with no shade. Also if the buses came sooner then every 30 mins I would consider them more often but if it takes me 30 mins to walk to a stop where I sweat in the sun with no shade and the bus left early before I arrived I might end up waiting an hour hoping it arrives. So then I have to leave extra early and it's too much effort especially when I have a car.
They did that in northern Virginia. For decade after decade, they refused to build highways, and after a few million people moved there, it was no longer possible to build or expand what they have without immense expense. The traffic congestion is constant thare.
I felt like congestion is nonexistent the few times i am there. Maybe I am used to real congestion like in nyc though. All those parkways and fast roads are basically highways anyhow. People go 60-70mph on them and some have full on freeway style interchanges. Theres probably what a couple dozen at least in nova alone? Way more when you factor dc and maryland. Crazy highway lane density per capita if the metrics actually considered these highways. West coast has nothing like that honestly. Big old arterial stop light grid no fast stopless cuts through every ravine.
Pipe sizes are 3d, so as you go from 1" to 2" to 3" to 4" the amount of throughput skyrockets.
Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes.
So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more? Trains.
In many cases people will continue to not want to share their space with someone with boobs hanging out, pee all over the seats, weed smell 24/7.
Hmm, so I guess we're just in a stalemate at this point.
> Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput.
Per-lane efficiency drops with additional lanes. It doesn't stay the same, and definitely does not increase.
> that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more?
Yes. A typical city transit bus can hold 40 seated people, and a "crush" capacity of about 70. Coach numbers are relatively similar give or take. Typical rush-hour max capacity is probably around 60 which is fairly comfortable.
40-60 people taking up about the space of three cars, instead of (if we're being very gracious) 20 cars, to as many as seventy cars.
If we graciously figure that when stopped in traffic each car is 15 feet (length of a compact SUV) and there is one foot of spacing between them (also gracious), that means anywhere from 320ft to over one thousand feet of lane usage, compressed into about forty feet.
Now think about how much roadway space is used when those vehicles are traveling; those cars have to accordion out to have, say, about one car length between each of them (likely more, but we're being gracious.) Now you're looking at 600 to two thousand feet of lane.
This is why bus-only lanes (either during rush hour or all day) and traffic signal prioritization for busses is gaining popularity in municipalities. One full bus erases two thousand feet worth of cars on that road.
We should be looking at the status quo as "look at how much road capacity is being wasted by single occupant vehicles."
However, busses and trains usually only run every 10-20 minutes compared to a road which is going constantly. I can easily see cars on roads having higher throughput.
It is very easy to scale them as demand increases. There is a train to the next city over where I live in the Netherlands (both around 150k) around 10x per hour on weekdays. And that's on a single, dual track with a mix of 3 direct (intercity) trains and 2 slow trains that have 3 stops inbetween.
The intercity trains, when in a maximum length 6+6 car configuration of 2-floor trains, can carry over 1200 (sitting!) passengers. That's as much as a single lane of road can carry in half an hour with average car occupancy (low). So running such a train every 15 minutes should give a similar capacity to a free-flowing road with 2 lanes, while needing less room for infrastructure. Plus people mostly go to the station by foot, bike or bus rather than car, which is also nice capacity-wise and pollution-wise.
"Induced demand" as a reason not to do something is illogical.
The Green Revolution increasing crop yields induced demand for humans. Metro systems existing and building new lines induce demand, in some cases resulting in overcrowding. Building housing and offices induce demand in a location.
There is nothing wrong with improving a thing so that more people are able to do that thing.
I can understand concern about emissions without necessarily agreeing. But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.
>But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.
projects usually have a goal. especially multi-billion-dollar transportation projects. if the goal of the project aligns with the behaviour it is inducing, then induced demand is good. if the goal of the project (according to the people making decisions about funding it) contradicts the behaviour it induces, then induced demand is a bad thing and it's not going to get funded.
for a highway project, the goal isn't usually to allow more people to drive cars. it's to reduce congestion, improve safety, or to improve the flow of commercial vehicles through a corridor. the demand that more lanes induces is contrary to that goal, which is why the induced demand is a reason not to do it.
That depends on who you're talking to. If you're talking to people out in the periphery who want their towns to grow, induced demand is not a problem.
But for someone in an inner ring suburb, induced demand means that if the interstate near my house is widened, I don't get an easier commute. I just get more pollution and more noise and the same traffic misery as before.
Main issue is that traffic ‘misery’ (my term) is the constant. There is a maximum amount of gridlockedness before people naturally stop bothering to think they should begin using a given road (say, by moving farther out into the suburbs, or moving into some far suburb from outside the metro to take a job in the city). You can add 3 more lanes, and right away, more people believe they can make that lifestyle change, and we end up in a couple months right back where we started, with the same gridlock, but an increase in both miles driven and human time wasted, which most people would agree are metrics we don’t want to increase. People should live near where they work, or work near where they live. Let the market fix things — if roads are gridlocked and people can’t afford to live near, the jobs will need to move or to pay more.
this analysi simply ignores the upside. you say that both miles driven and human time wasted are metrics we dont want to increase, but people are clearly willing to trade them off. You say people should live near work, but at what cost?
In practice, they are public funds so it ends up being a public decision. Do people support spending $X so that Y people can obtain Z preference.
I'm off to my 1 hr commute right now, which I chose because it is preferable to my housing options near work. You couln't pay me enough to live in a condo downtown. I wish transportation infrastructure was even better so that I could live further and this is where I would like my taxes directed.
You have a 1 hour commmute because the good house you can afford is about 1 hour away. I would propose that if we (all taxpayers) added 6 more lanes to the road you drive to work, your commute would dip for a short while, more people just like you would move to the new suburbs beyond yours, that are now an (improved for them) 1 hour commute, eventually re-saturating the new wider road. Now your commute is, best case, the same, maybe a little worse, because if it gets better, more people will squeeze into your suburb. You also have the option to move even farther out, but your commute will on average always be roughly as bad as it is today because people in your situation tolerate about that level of 'misery.' (Again that's how i conceptualize the variable, not saying you're literally miserable).
Yes, I suppose stimulating another splash of suburbs out in the countryside does provide Y more people an opportunity to become long-distance commuters, but I'd say:
Surely there's some limit, right? You wouldn't say that California should bulldoze neighborhoods in all the closer suburbs in order to make I-80 30 lanes wide as it gets closer to the Bay, so that people can commute from new suburbs built 150 miles away... right? And if there's some limit to reasonable highway size, why not the current size. And if we want to further increase capacity to bring in humans to a city, build a bullet train and bring them in in a way that's more efficient than individual 6,000 pound SUVs for each commuter. That's where I'd direct incremental transportation dollars. That, or subsidize commercial development nearer population centers so that people who live 2 hours from the city have other options.
To clarify, I'm not dogmatic about Transportation methods, at least for work commuting. I would love if cheap mass transit took some load off of local roads and the highway system so that they could be more effectively used for tasks besides commutes.
I mostly wanted to highlight that there's a trade off of preferences at play. Using your terms, Urban living is also a misery for many people. If you want to talk about Misery, listen to some Millennials and Zoomers that feel priced out of ever owning a home or starting a family.
It seems like most of these induced demand arguments I see start from the conclusion they want (dense Urban living) and reverse engineers a justification.
As you point out, High speed rail also induces Transportation demand.
It's not that increasing highway bandwidth doesn't work (it does). This doesn't preclude the idea that alternatives solutions or a hybrid can't be more efficient.
The fact of the matter is, roads and highways required a lot of space for use and storing vehicles. Space that would otherwise go to homes or supporting mass transit or other more desirable infrastructure and uses, part of the puzzle why owning homes are so expensive but of course, not the only reason why.
You can add lanes, and more people can attain the life that they wish to lead.
You're not back where you started, because more people get to do what they want to do.
It seems as if you have the intrinsic axiom that people should travel less and the fact that they are not doing this is somehow wrong. Your model is wrong.
Allowing people to realize their desires is not necessarily a good thing or the role of government. The majority of people would like to pay 0 taxes and never pay for healthcare.
Sometimes it is. If you desire to be naked on the subway, the government will punish you.
You don't just get to do whatever you want. The government's job is to look after The Public and ensure that most people get what they need—not to ensure that all people get what they want.
That’s kind of a straw man argument because the original argument isn’t “it induces demand therefore it’s bad.” Induced demand is the explanation for why building more lanes (which costs money, especially if you include future replacement costs) doesn’t actually fix traffic, except temporarily. It also increases VMT (vehicle miles travelled) which has its own externalities (pollution, deaths, etc.) but that’s almost a separate matter, but helps explain why encouraging more driving and car based urban design (everything spread far apart, unproductive land use in the form of parking lots) isn’t a great idea either.
I didn't see anyone saying induced demand in and of itself is the thing being avoided, just that induced demand for driving caused by highway construction is being avoided, as this implies that traffic won't be alleviated by increased capacity.
Induced demand can be positive, yeah, but I think induced demand is more complicated. It concerns a positive feedback loop phenomena that leads to the saturation of a system beyond its intended capacity. Like more people taking the metro is good, but more people taking it than it can handle can degrade their impression if it.
Induced demand isn't necessarily complicated. The simple answer is transaction costs.
If people are willing to spend an hour in traffic to go to the beach, you are basically stuck with that travel time. You can only increase the number of people that end up going.
I meant complicated as in not necessarily good/bad. I agree it's not complicated in the general sense that it's an intrinsic part of supply and demand.
That said it's definitely more complicated in how to article is discussing it. The article is clearly talking about a Braess's Paradox-like situation where an individual's optimal decision incentivized by changes in the system is worse for more participants than the previous system, due to anticipatory and dynamic effects. This is inherently more complicated to measure and predict.
I wish governments would incentivize working from home. We've already seen that this can be done effectively for a huge percentage of the population. In 2019 I was spending about $250 on gasoline a month. In 2020 with mandatory work from home that dropped to about $50 a month. When I did go out there was no traffic which lead to even less fuel wasted. Instead we have politicians and business leaders pushing for people to return to the office. I work in a huge office park with huge parking lots. That is so much land that could be used for apartments, condos, single family homes, or anything more useful than half empty offices that very few want to go to.
Anyone interest in the subject of traffic - I’d highly recommend the book:
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us by Tom Vanderbilt
> more than half of $1.2 trillion enabled by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 will be spent on highway expansion and resurfacing.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like enough to build a China-like countrywide rail network. Spending it on resurfacing asphalt would be criminal.
The people pushing these solutions have decided it's too hard to make public transit compelling so they will have to make car driving worse. Which is a net negative for everyone.
> If every car on the road were battery-powered and those batteries were charged entirely by renewable energy, transportation emissions would be close to zero.
This is entirely false. I'm surprised to see it in the NYTimes. They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high
I recommend reading it. It's actually pretty well done.
Secondly, the report itself and common sense dictate that regenerative braking on EVs (or hybrids) greatly decrease brake usage, therefore brake dust. Some EVs have "one-pedal" modes where you don't use the brakes at all in normal usage.
Looks like tire issue is a toss up, and it depends on what the type of tire and how you drive. The much higher torque on an EV and a heavy foot will wear down the tires a lot more, but that has more to do with driver behavior than EVs.
Also, this whole issue is kind of a red herring because tractor trailers and heavy pickups and SUVs are a much, much larger source of brake and tire dust, and overall particulate pollution.
You are dismissing the weight factor a bit too quickly. Many EVs regardless of their size weight as much as some ICE heavy pickups, especially as the trend of driving SUVs hasn't disappeared with EVs.
EVs don’t actually use their brakes that much due to regenerative braking being the dominant mode. They are certainly heavier, though, which affects road and tire wear.
Road wear is not an issue for 99% of consumer vehicles. Roads are impacted by loaded semis, not a 3-6k lb vehicle. Same goes for brakes as most EVs implement regen braking.
It's not false, it's misleading. Emissions are from exhaust only according to the EPA https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/smog-vehicle-emissions . Greenhouse gas and pollutants from building the vehicles and roads get lumped into another category. There is a valid reason for this, in that that's the main thing the EPA regulates with respect to vehicles, but it also lets people make misleading statements like this one.
that sounds right. Tire rubber microplastic generation would go way up, though, because of the vehicle weight.
I propose small motor scooters (as is common in asia) as the solution. Cars also take up a godawful amount of space, all the time. Especially in a city. That's the real harm, the tailpipe emissions are trivial compared to the space consumption.
Trivial compared to space consumption... in what sense? That sounds very difficult to compare. I also live in New Mexico, which is a huge state full of next-to-nothing but space, so perhaps I'm missing context.
There's some offset due to the increased weight from the battery pack. Highway driving is better, city driving is worse. Also, the tires emit more, since wear is also a function of weight.
The goal is zero carbon by 2050. So they might not be now but they should be in the future. Zero-carbon transportation is a large part of decarbonizing infrastructure.
Also, roads and tires are made out of the goopy parts of oil, so their manufacture impacts the price of the fuel parts of oil. Your EV's roads and tires make it cheaper for others to not buy an EV.
I'm personally okay with this in principle but I rarely see it accompanied by a policy to build anything else. If you tell me they're going to invest in trains and actual transit, I'm totally in, but I've not heard anything.
I mean this. I ride transit multiple times a week. I love the experience but it requires actual investment and many cities don't do that. In general, most government in America seems unable to actually build anything. I don't think we should applaud that they're now also choosing not to build highways.
The conclusion people seem to draw from this is that widening the highway didn't help. This is wrong.
4 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph is still creating twice the value of 2 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph. With the 2-lane highway you were just forcing half the people to divert to other roads or to give up on their plans entirely. With 4 lanes you're serving twice the people.
But if the highway is still full it implies that there is still demand for more travel. By refusing to widen the highway further you are still forcing some number of people into a worse outcome where they aren't able to exercise the travel that they wanted.
I'm all for public transit alternatives (I personally love taking trains when I can), but the goal should be to make the public transit better, not to make the highways worse.
High density is awesome right up until you have kids and then it's awful. I think a lot of young people who don't have kids have trouble understanding this.
If I had no kids I'd love to live in a downtown high rise apartment. Really wish I had done so when I was younger. Among a lot of things I wish I could go tell my younger self to do...
I love having kids that I don't have to drive because they can go to school or meet their friends by walking.
I'd rather have that than spending half an hour or more driving 2 overweight kids to school twice a day, then having to taxi everywhere they want to be after school.
plenty of non-Americans live in high density areas, have children and are very happy they don't have to drive them anywhere and everywhere all the time.
Yeah, it seems like a huge personality disconnect and critical lack of comprehension that other people simply dont like what they do. Ive spent a lot of time in excellent dense European cities and it still doesnt appeal to me. I dont like going out to bars, crowds, or general city life.
I like privacy, having a workshop, chickens, fruit trees, and a garden. I like having a huge kitchen, a pantry, a meat smoker, and hosting dinner parties. I like having room for an off-road vehicle and camping gear.
It is hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head when someone tells me how much better dense urban living is. I have never met anyone IRL that would happily trade their suburban home for urban life.
Well meet me. I hated having to spend hours taking care of a garden instead of going for a bike ride.
Also you can have a workshop while having high density.
Suburban is probably the worst of both world for me: expensive, impractical and not even quiet/isolated enough for when you need that. I'd rather have a flat in a european city + a small rural house in the middle of nowhere than a house in US suburbia.
All this to say that we don't have to agree on what is best for everyone because everyone do not value things the same way.
Im all for options and understand that my preferences are not the same as others.
Im mostly rejecting the idea that this is a "solved problem" and dense flats are the best for everyone.
It probably isnt worth trying to communicate the folks in this thread that think everyone should be forced to live in government owned flats which are assigned based on family size
I agree, but I think we draw different conclusions. I like both having housing and being treated when I am sick.
The point of building and expanding highways isn't to reduce traffic, but enable more people to go places. Zero Highways would mean Zero traffic. a $1000 toll would mean zero traffic.
People around me go less to the doctor/hospital for "small" things, mostly because of perception of how long and expensive one session can be. Sometimes it makes them neglect preventative things. More hospital would induce this demand and make people consult doctor more often.
If you ask people: would you vote for bonds for a highway expansion that will not make your commute better, but will add a lot more cars to the road, they will overwhelmingly say no.
There is only one reason why the public agrees to highway construction: the idea that their commute will get better. But it won't after a few years.
The highway will always be full! That's induced demand. If you have a highway to a desirable destination people will build out along it until it's full. You can expand that highway as much as you want, it will always be full after a few years.
This isn't a solution. It's just a way to design horrible cities that punish drivers with stressful, unproductive, and long commutes.
You cannot win by adding highways. You can only win by not playing that game.
How about you ask people: Would you vote for bonds for a highway expansion that will not really make your commute better but will provide more accessible housing, bringing down housing prices, and thus allow you to have a bigger, nicer home for less money? (Even if you don't actually use the particular highway!)
If people are filling up the new lanes it's because they are getting value out of it. It's making people's lives better, even if the traffic doesn't go faster (though in many cases, it does).
You're saying that highway construction encourages building of new housing, enough to use up all the new highway capacity, but that this doesn't bring down housing costs. This is quite an extraordinary claim that goes against basic economics. I don't believe it.
I think you and others have convinced yourselves that this is true because you like the conclusion: that we should stop building highways. But it's a tortured argument that doesn't make basic economic sense.
> They could have better lives with transit.
Then build the transit! I am all for building better public transit! I am all for dense urban development, downtown residential highrises, mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, etc. We can do all of these things -- and also expand highways. With all the options available, people will choose what's actually best for them. If you're right, then people will stop using the highway and it won't be congested anymore. Win win!
I really do not believe in refusing to give people what they want because we think they'd be better off with something else that we're also not building.
Highway and car infrastructure are the most inefficient way to use land in urban environments. The higher density, the worse cars are. I can't really justify using cars except for interfacing with rural areas.
Physical systems don't care about your feelings. Live somewhere that ignores science and is financially irresponsible with infra dollars if that is your MO. We're not going to spend to build roads forever because people are ignorant and selfish, we can't even pay for the road infra we have today. And some folks are demanding more? Absolutely silly. "I'm not happy they're not building roads we cannot afford and will end up congested again, won't you think about my happiness!"
Bringing morality into an economic, fluid dynamics, and behavioral argument is not helpful, and the private car entitlement (which is demonstrably unaffordable and unfunded long term) is wild.
Fossil energy is artificially cheap (the price its consumers pay does not even begin to pay for the negative externalities of producing and burning it -- and most of it goes into private hands that don't intend to use it for any kind of mitigation anyway).
This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at the very least we shouldn't deliberately make it worse by also artificially juicing demand in one of the main fossil-fuel-burning sectors of the economy (any more than we already are). Every petroleum-powered mile not traveled (and energy is to a certain extent fungible, so in principle this also applies to electric cars burning "free" solar energy) is a win for human civilization.
This isn't hippy-dippy environmentalism, just soulless Chicago economics: mispriced commodities do real damage to a political economy, and in the globalized era, there is effectively only one political economy anymore.
The induced demand argument is sort of crazy. It is saying you shouldn't build something because if you do, it will be extremely popular and widely used. We shouldn't build libraries - if we do, people will want to check out books. Instead, let's penalize people who read books. That will destroy the demand for books. Problem solved.
Yep, being simply “anti-induced demand” is pro-human suffering.
I agree that there could be alternatives to widening highways that will make everyone better off but I rarely see all the tradeoffs being carefully considered.
Bad traffic is bad for industry/business. Boeing threatened to move some manufacturing out of the Seattle because they'd have parts delivery delays due to traffic from Everett to Renton. Eventually I think they moved some to SC, but not a lot because the WSDOT gave in and widened some road infra.
The Amtrak Cascades 518 goes from Everett (Tukwila) to Renton daily. Surely Boeing should do their part, show a good example for the community and take public transportation.
Sometimes people on the left are concerned about nepo babies and the outsized influence of the wealthy and powerful, sometimes people on the left are not concerned.
I totally understand why people hate public transit, I relied on it for years before I got my license/car. I happen to live in a state where public transportation happens to be very good on paper, but in practice is actually a hellish, miserable experience; Buses are constantly running late, they’re usually filled with sketchy people (homeless, drug addicts, etc) who make you feel uneasy and in some cases is actually unsafe (such as some having a drug induced episode, this happens a lot more common than you might think.)
In the end I told myself I don’t have to go through all that crap, so I got myself car and it very quickly dawned on me that this was indeed the correct decision and I should’ve done it years ago. The laundry list of positive changes outweighed any negatives associated with owning a car.
Only way I’m giving it up now is if we manage to invent portable teleportation devices.
I like vehicles and motorcycles and, barring some transformative life experience, could not imagine going more than an "extended vacation in NYC" without a car in the United States.
But I also love good public transit, and think it's a huge competitive advantage for 2nd tier cities in the US. As remote work becomes a norm for the middle class, transit will be one of the main ways cities can lure people.
I agree that public safety is critical and that cities must take transit safety and cleanliness seriously. (And for that matter, take public safety in general more seriously - my city of San Antonio doesn't seem to take action on crime unless police are able to get there while it's in progress or if it's high-profile.)
