I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around -
Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars.
One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
(edit: spelling)
From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense.
From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."
The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book.
Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.
My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).
Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time.
At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands).
One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
> Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. >
Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.
If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.
The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.
Who is paying for these unprofitable roads?
If it's the people (eventually) then it's just accounting.
All these things can be referenced, and checked. Rural roads are paved because they're used (the ones that aren't - they're gravel or mud).
How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?
Because they aren't. They enable almost all economic activity that involves moving things or people around.
Objectively they are not profitable. If you count gas taxes that are collected, we're only covering about a quarter of the cost to maintain them.
Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.
Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.
That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.
Even if you don't demand profitability, there still needs to be cost/benefit analysis done.
Do you build one rail line or two? Do you build one bus route or two? Do you expand a road or build a new one?
Making it a train vs car or rail vs road obscures the problem AND the solution.
I remember pointing this out to someone who said public transportation was unprofitable and his response was "I don't care".
People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:
- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)
- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)
- buses are ugly! (so is your car)
- it increases traffic (so does your car)
- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)
They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!
Someone’s going to push this and the result will be billing the bus for road usage per person …
Great, let's do that when the negative externalities of cars are properly priced into their usage. This is the number one reason that's causing such sentiments, and rightly so. Expecting people to approach it differently before that is fixed is unrealistic. Currently, cars are subsidized to an absurdly higher level than public transit. That's the status quo. A change of that status quo means moving car subsidies to public transit subsidies, unless you raise taxes, which will make the exact same people defensive and hate you.
> At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.
But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.
There was a city that did that - the busses were "on demand" - much more like a taxi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1yM9mzCAE
Minibuses are a thing. You could easily run them at off-times and on more sparsely-used routes.
> Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life.
Being on a motorcycle in a jurisdiction where lane filtering is allowed/tolerated is awesome during rush hour (or any hour, really).
I in fact did that too for a while. Definitely the most fun form of commute.
That said, my biggest gripe with driving/riding as a commute is that I get really bored of taking the exact same route every single day.
It's awesome but eventually I discovered people wanted to kill me for that honor, and mostly stopped it.
I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US.
It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.
> it's a shame that we've let it go so far,
It's hopeless to expect that things don't end up in this state. A decentralized system will naturally tend to a state of equilibrium balancing between desirability and pain, e.g. people will keep moving to a "nice" area until commutes or prices become unbearable.
I think the only way to end up with an utopia-like metropolis is to run it with a benevolent dictator government SimCity-like, which would probably involve restricted entry leading to very expensive real estate; therefore a lottery or similar admission system into low-cost housing would be needed to balance the needed support population. In other words probably unconstitutional in a dozen different ways and never going to happen.
That "state of equilibrium" is only unavoidable if there are infinite sources and sinks of people. That's a workable approximation if you're only studying one part of a much larger system, in isolation, but when considering the entire world, it falls down. If we have enough nice areas for everyone to live in them, that model stops being applicable.
And, well, a lot of people _can't_ have their own speed bubble.
Most of us, for quite a bit of our lives - when we're under 18 for a start, and over 75ish it isn't really a good idea (yes, I know, no viable alternatives for a lot of people right now, but it's still a bad idea). Whenever we've had a drink. There's a dozen or more medical conditions which can snatch your right to drive away with the stroke of a doctor's pen, and that's before we consider all the common meds which come with a don't drive advisory warning.
And then there's all the other times where it'd sure be nice not to have to. When we're tired, or stressed, or sick, or weather conditions make things dicey. Or when I just wanted to read that book, magazine, blog article, or watch that movie. Or we've got to be someplace with the kids but they actually need our undivided attention.
The point is, even if you drive and like driving, it's just basically civilised to have other affordable options. Even if they're a bit slower or come with other compromises, they should, y'know, exist. And sometimes allowing them to exist comes at a price of making driving your own speed-bubble at the times when you can and want to a little less convenient or more expensive.
Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
I have a 4 year old and an 18 month old, and I don't own a car (nor does my partner).
We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.
We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.
(I live in London, United Kingdom)
Sure, it works in your context, you live in a city with 9 million people and you sometimes rent a car - fine. I live in a city 100x smaller. I literally don't know a person that doesn't own a car, or at least has access to a car.
The context actually get far more granular than it. I lived without a car for 25 years of my life, buses and trains were enough. But all it takes to require a car is having a home 3-4 km from the city center bus stops (which probably covers >50% of population). Unless someone likes walking 1h one way in -10 deg in winter to get to work each day.
A city 100x smaller is a city with 90k population. That's half of the population of the Upper West Side. And the UWS has an area of only 5 square kilometers. Unless you specifically choose to, you are not going to walk 3-4 km.
You don't live in a city. You live in a suburb.
This is a problem with city design, not city size.
That's exactly what "making cities work for people instead of cars" is all about.
It sounds like your city is about the same size as the city featured in this article, which has a population of 83,000.
-10deg winters are certainly going to put a stop to much walking or biking, regardless of whether that's Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Not much of Europe ever gets that low though. Edinburgh occasionally overnight, but it's rarely below about -4c / 24f during commute hours. Berlin mostly the same, Stockholm's maybe the only big European capital that gets to "walking for an hour stands a serious chance of killing you" temperatures for days at a time.
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London has abysmal transport situation - any time I needed to traverse through city, it was 3+ hours of buses and trains/subway mix. Of course doing the same with car would be even worse.
Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.
Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.
Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.
I don't understand how you can spend 3+ hours getting around London. I live in Bristol and when we go to visit London, it takes about 3 hours including the train all the way from Bristol to London. Getting from A to B in London is probably 30-40 minutes tops using the underground.
> Thats how most of Europe lives.
THIS. Europe doesn't end on Paris. People visit huge metropolies and base their judgement on this, which really skews the perspective.
False. Cargo bikes exist and are capable of hauling kids and groceries. You can get them e-assist, so you don't have to be a dedicated cyclist.
If you need to travel more than ~2-3 miles or so to get groceries or get to school (in a populous area) that's a failure of urban planning.
Yes, there will be some people with mobility limitations who still needs cars, but that's a tiny minority of the overall population.
> Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
Most of these bike moms/dads still have a car at home.
As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.
That also depends on weather around the year in a given country. Here in Poland travelling on a bike ranges from uncomfortable to impossible for 1/3 of the year.
It must be much worse than the weather in Norway and Finland, then. Or perhaps just an infrastructure problem? I imagine if they didn't clear the roads then driving could get pretty challenging too.
How do you know? I know many parents who move their kids around in bikes (many of those live in cities with less than 200k people) who specifically opted not own cars.
I particular I know that many schools in Germany have car free zones around them due to the problems that car drop offs cause (there is nothing worse as a rushed parent in an SUV dropping their kids off at school. The number of near misses I have seen and experienced makes we want to globally forbid cars within 2 km of a school).
That is definitely not true in many parts of Japan.
In Amsterdam I guarantee you they don’t.
Source: grew up there.
> Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.
So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.
Sure, but these are multi-million cities. They have amazing public transport.
The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.
Pretty rich that you are complaining about generalization now where you made the initial statement that the "Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density" which doesn't seem to have any limits in scope.
You made a clear assertion about the need for cars, regardless of urban density.
But it turns out that actually urban density is pretty good indicator of reasonable public transport. of _course_ there are black spots, rural england lost its trains in the 60s and busses in the 2000s.
But
The british didn't make the tube for tourism, given that they've not built anything transport wise since the 90s (except the Elizabeth line)
Paris didn't make the metro for tourists, because they are french, they're not going to spend money on dirty tourists who get in the way.
the Netherlands didn't make trams for tourists, they can cycle like the rest of us.
We lived in Sydney until our oldest child was three, and never owned a car. Your statement is reasonable: for driving around small kids, car is essential. We instead took ferries, buses, trains and so on. From the hospital we took a taxi (or the modern equivalent), by the way.
A single newborn can be handled without a car (if you spend used car prices on a stroller system!) - but if you have three kids under three, or five under 7, a car greatly simplifies things - or you need to hire additional wranglers.
It's not about the good times (on a good day, moving five kids by walking/stroller is easy) - it's about the bad times, the crying, the screaming, the attempted suicides, etc.
Until you're the only adult in the car, driving along the motorway, and one of the kids in the back starts crying / gets car sick / needs the toilet when you're 15km from the next services. Granted, train toilets with a toddler aren't much fun either.
Don't need a crazy expensive stroller though. A sling when they're small and light, and once they get big and heavy, they're large enough to go in a more basic foldable stroller. The childcare products industry is honestly awful at scamming new or expecting parents into buying shit they don't need.
Singles - I agree. Even doubles, there are reasonable ones.
Find a good cheap triple or higher stroller. Then you're looking at used car prices.
And I agree - a train is nice with a family, because once you're in, you're in.
But a train is more like a plane than a car; it's the subway that's closest to short commuting trips, and they rarely have bathrooms and often subway stops don't have them, either.
(Sometimes the temptation to get an RV with a toilet is high, mind you.)
Yet, most cars you see in the streets are single-occupancy.
Very wrong. I'm not OP but I have two teens and we raised them from birth in a city and have never owned a car. We rent rarely and only to go on trips to places inaccessible by rail. All kids activities were walking distance or subway. Probably ten times as much as you can find in a suburb too. Also kids learn to ride the subway by high school if not middle school so they can be independent like no place else.
Simply untrue in many places. My next-door neighbour rides his bike with his daughter to school then rides to work at the nearby hospital (up a gnarly bank, too). I see many kids walking to school all year round. Kids are more than capable of making their own way to school from the age of 8-10, depending on the distance.
Driving your car is absolutely a choice in many cities, and a poor choice at that.
Really depends where you are. But not in a major city, in the UK its not.
Ask me how i know
I mean that's a depressing existence for the kids. I walked and biked around everywhere since I was 6 or 7 years old, I'm extremely thankful I didn't have to rely on my parents being free to drive me around so I could see my friends.
The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways.
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
> take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power.
Internet marketing, for example.
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
>The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.
You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
The case for public transit in the US would be strengthened if it weren't used largely as a vehicle for money laundering public funds into private funds. Another problem is that security tends to be poorly enforced, the last time I rode a public train there was a knife fight in our car over some ear-splitting gang music being played on the wrong turf (lol, literally the turf the train happened to be passing through at that moment as it passed momentarily from a latino to black neighborhood) which did not even alarm most the passengers.
Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us.
And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.
Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.
> Plan your route so you get access to a seat
What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this.
Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
In Beijing I would often take the long way around on a subway loop line so I could get a seat. The subway is just always crowded, and you could be standing for an hour if you don’t plan your route right. Most of the time I would just plan my day around a very early taxi ride to get to work and then return before the awful rush hour they had, but that was 10 years ago and I’m afraid it wouldn’t be an option anymore (I left Beijing in 2016), so smashing into the subway would be necessary, if you do some clever route adjustments you plan your trip through big transfer points where lots of people get off, guaranteeing yourself a seat (worked on my last trip there in April).
Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option. At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.
Sure, but at this point we are just hacking the system. Which is fine, I guess, no harm is done, but it feels wrong :)
Honestly this is one of the undersold advantages of public transit. It can be fun to optimize your path and switch things up both on a macro and micro timescale. In a car since I'm constantly aware of what I'm doing, taking a less efficient path feels like I'm wasting a part of my life. Taking a less efficient path on public transit feels like I'm taking more time to stop and appreciate my surroundings. Especially because sometimes that alternate path gives me a better view.
A coworker once told me his view of his commute drastically changed when he realized he could take the ferry to work. He got fresh air, it was less cramped, and it only took an extra 5-10 minutes.
> Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit.
That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."
When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.
The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.
But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.
One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.
And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.
But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.
Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.
Government policy should not be formed on the basis of "me" problems. (Not merely yours, but generally.)
I have some of that, especially when I haven't been out for a while. Moving to a place where English isn't the main language helped me quite a bit to get into the right headspace. Also realizing no one really cares about me. This is fun: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png
What a dream, planning a seat, in which country is such pleasure possible outside August?
Agreed - it was a bit of an adjustment moving to NYC and dealing with a packed subway but now I quite enjoy the density and people watching as a feature of the experience.
>I don't see myself ever not being a driver.
Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.
>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.
>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...
The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
> The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence.
This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by.
> It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/
[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/
[3] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people.
I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.
FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people.
Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.
Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.
I wouldn't qualify Tokyo's public transit system as poor. In fact, the only one that might rival it in Europe would be the one in Moscow.
Tokyo has better public transit than the United States, certainly. However it's public transit options and general design aren't that great by modern standards.
First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common.
Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason.
Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane.
Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate.
I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city.
London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better.
Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable.
I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!
From a perspective of "packing people in"? Tokyo is absolutely poor.
The MTA doesn't have to employ people to pack extra riders into full subway cars.
I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent.
To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.
Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces.
Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
That safety is illusionary. Cars are dangerous, more dangerous than subways.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...
I suspect many view intentional harm as being far more traumatic than accidental harm. This is less the case if the person actually dies, although it may still be the case for their families.
Someone crashing into you because they can't be assed to pay attention to the road, or get drunk and drive because they don't have public transport IS "intentional" harm.
Traffic deaths are rarely "accidents".
I suppose even if you sub in "goal to cause death/injury" vs "recklessness that could reasonably be expected to produce injury despite not being the goal" and it would still hold true.
Personally I think it's contentious whether drunk driving etc injuries can be considered "intentional" even if they are expected and reckless. When I think of intentional injuries, I'm thinking of ones where the perpetrator has that as their preferred outcome, something I don't think applies to most drunk driving injuries.
How many indiscriminate neck stabbings are there per year in your town? And I can’t help but ask the obvious, how many indiscriminate deaths by car (i.e young child struck by truck) are there?
I looked up, i.e. Chicago. There were double the number of homicides vs fatal car accidents. I don't pretend those can be compared 1:1, but I'll note when I took public transit it wasn't just the risk of being on the transit but also getting dumped out near areas that were violent assault / murder hot spots.
The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.
You forgot the "who didn’t even pay his fare"... which makes a big difference.
In this particular situation it doesn't appear to, but in many states you only have the right to 'stand your ground' in places you are legally allowed to be, so if you don't pay your fare you eliminate any sort of "stand your ground" defense as to why you stabbed someone you thought was threatening your life rather than ran away.
So this might kill his attorney's opportunity to even claim that the Ukrainian woman was tormenting and threatening his life or something. It's one of those things that sounds irrelevant but turns out to have a gigantic impact on self-defense claims, which really, are the only hope the neck stabber has of not going down for some kind of murder charge.
> Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
This concern never even occurred to me. Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?
> Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?
Indeed they are. GP has done an extremely poor job of risk assessment.
No. Gullible people who believe such nonsense are the bigger challenge ;)
I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.
I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain.
I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.
I generally agree but I'll caveat that subway at its worst can be far worse with trains going missing. "Metro apologises" is a running joke around the north east of England for how bad its service became in the past 15 years.
But 40,000+ Americans die in their cars (and run over by others' cars) every year. No subway caveat is ever going to beat that. And at least it's obvious that subways going missing is a _very_ solvable problem. We've completely given up on making driving safer.
EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D
No worries, it happens to us all. I was mostly venting at the shocking underinvestment of my local public transport infrastructure and seeing it degrade over the last 20 years!
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it.
I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.
And I say that while owning a comfortable car.
I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.
Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.
But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.
When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.
Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.
Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.
> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this.
I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.
> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.
The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".
I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
>I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history
Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may.
There are two big problems with this though.
First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball.
Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.
> From a quality of life point of view
The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".
Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.
For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
> I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)
The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.
> I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people
Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.
One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.
> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
Note that public transport in the Netherlands isn't particularly good, cycling is.
> just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...
Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.
The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident.
Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.
Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
As someone that lived in Switzerland, that is great as long as one doesn't live in small towns outside train lines, with buses that only go up to 9PM during the week, or hardly run during weekends.
Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.
>Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
Not for all the other people around you, no.
Their loss. But that's simply yet another reason to move towards a market-based approach; people can choose whatever works best for them as an individual even if others think it's a terrible choice.
Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.
Then you would have to make the case in such a way that car infrastructure costs reside with car users only, and not spread over tax payers who don't want to pay for your choices.
That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
That's not an unreasonable take in my opinion, but then the point of the person I'm responding to is 'let's silo costs and let the market decide' and if we're going to do that, however unpractical, I'd bet a lot of money that driving a car would become unaffordable.
I'd take that bet, were I a betting man. There are 0.85 vehicles per capita in the US. Making roads an average of 1/0.85 = 17.6% more expensive for car owners is very unlikely to break the bank for any significant number of people.
The current cost of owning and operating an automobile is around 12K USD assuming 15K miles driven yearly according to BTS [0]. This would push it up to a little over 14K USD.
Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]
Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.
[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...
[1] https://carsbibles.com/what-percentage-of-oil-is-used-for-ca...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
This wouldn't increase the total cost of "owning and operating an automobile" by 17.6%, just the portion of that which funds road construction. Hard to quantify exactly how much that is since it's currently just part of your taxes. I don't think it's included in the BTS numbers. At the federal level at least it's pretty insignificant, only 2% of the Federal budget at most (I doubt most would even notice a 17.6% * 2% = 0.35% increase in their federal taxes). If I'm reading things right, the DOT budget is an even lower percentage of my state taxes. I think most road construction is funded at a more local level than that though so it's hard to say the exact impact without looking at individual villages/towns/cities.
Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.
That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.
>The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics.
I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
> for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly
Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges).
As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
> Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases,
I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.
>I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position.
No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.
This isn't my experience, but I understand some countries have overloaded public transit systems. When I've been in those countries, it's been simple enough to just let an overloaded train pass and grab the next one.
Ok but you let that train pass you might lose the connection to the bus at the other end. Or the next train or bus might not be for half an hour. Now you're late to wherever you were going.
Right, so, again, it sounds like your public transit is underfunded or something. Where I live I can depend on there being another train within 8 minutes no matter where I'm going, or a bus, or I can just hop on a ubike and I can be confident there'll be a space and station within a couple hundred meters.
I sympathize with people that aren't so lucky, but, if Taipei can figure it out, there's really no excuse elsewhere. Good public transit really is the only viable way to move people. The private car is, objectively, the worst.
During the rush hour, the next train is going to be just as packed. And if you wait long enough for things to quiet down, you're not going to be at work on time.
This doesn't happen to me where I live. It's time to increase your city's transportation budget!
In many S and RE trains in Germany you do get to strecht a lot, assuming you manage to get into the wagon.
>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.
I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to get to the train station...
Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.
In switzerland you pay income taxes based on your city/neighborhood.
This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.
But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.
It's a very balanced system.
In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.
>> How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?
Some do, but many need to for work. As mobility for non-rich average people is reduced, more and more people simply must be in the city for work/services. (That is the only reason I am in a city. I would escape in a heartbeat if my job allowed it.) Where personal transport is cheaper and more available, people flock to suburbs and even "exurbs", which are a big thing now in Texas.
My example: I am often on 1-hour 24/7 recall (military, I don't get to choose my work location). That means I suffer on both ends. I need to be in the city and I must either live/sleep/shop within mile of work or have instant access to a personal vehicle. I guess could setup a cot and sleep beside my desk. That would reduce congestion. But is that a life anyone wants to live?
Good points but maybe cities offer something more than just proximity. I think cities is about the culture, meeting people and vibes.
> Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment.
That does not match statistics for pretty much anywhere in the world. urban/metro areas are growing while rural communities are dying.
>Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport.
I grew up in a city of 70k completely walkable, we had a supermarket 5min walk from the house. Why would I ever want to have to go on large shopping runs, if I can just walk up to the supermarket?
> I would hazard that most in fact don't.
Considering that, almost by definition, urban environments house a magnitude more people than rural areas, I'd wager a guess that indeed most people do want walkable cities, or at least they would if they weren't brainwashed by car lobbyists to believe that covering an entire continent in asphalt just to park our metal boxes wasn't an idiotic use of space and resources.
> Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store.
I'm not really familiar with what a "boutique" corner store means here, but fair enough if you don't, though this sounds like more of a "I'm used to doing things my way" type of thing. I buy groceries 3 times a week on my way back home from wherever I might've been, it takes me no longer than 5-10 minutes, all I need is a single backpack, and it's a 2 minute cycle from the store to my house. And it's an actual house, with a garden and all the other fancy stuff people have in the suburbs. At the same time, I know people who have cargo bikes and do the once-every-2-weeks shopping sprees that you're talking about.
> So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day.
Some of my colleagues take a 1-2h train journey once a week, and they live in farmland as well. I understand the US is very large, but rural doesn't have to necessitate a lack of transport options either.
There's a huge spectrum between dense city center and suburbia; at present, I do consider my area to be "walkable", but it's not anywhere close to a dense city and there sure aren't "corporate HQs" anywhere nearby.
I do value having several gyms and restaurants (and friends) within just a short bike ride from my current house; and since one of the gyms I visit regularly is in the shopping mall, if I have an interest to cook something specific, I can buy whatever's necessary with like 5-10 mins of extra overhead.
And I do go to the local convenience store more or less daily anyway, if only for some snack, produce or fresh bread. There's a shop in each direction wherever I'd want to go, so the only way for me _not_ to inadvertently pass by one would be if I didn't leave my home at all entire day.
I'm not discounting anyone's general preference for country life, it's perfectly valid; I'm just saying that some of the things you're saying seem overexaggerated.
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I've seen many times how some people react to a single bus lane or even a tiny bicycle lane as though cars are getting the raw end of the deal when 90%+ of infrastructure is for cars.
Some cities build dedicated bike paths. This is much nicer as you aren't fighting with cars that way.
Those get even more unhinged pushback! Read any comments section on an article with a bike lane being put in, even if that bike lane takes no lanes from the road!
In some places the only way to make a bike bath is to reduce a car lane.
I am all for it out of general principle, but most car drivers will likely disagree.
It makes no difference, I’ve seen people pushback even when that lane doesn’t remove a regular road lane!
I guess it depends on demand. If bikes are 100-to-1 then make a bike lane, if the other way around maybe not. Need to remember that tax-payers actually fund this stuff so can't just force random stuff on them.
That is true, but the thing is, without bike lanes, people won't switch to bikes in certain traffic conditions. Cyclists pay taxes btw. too and a bicycle with its low weight is magnitudes cheaper for the roads, then the SUV tanks.
I guess it is reasonable to run some experiments, set up some bike lanes for a period of time. If they are used, keep them, if not maybe consider removing them.
Good point regarding the costs. The other advantage of dedicated / purpose-built bike paths is they likely don't have to be built to the same spec as ones designed for vehicle use (I assume - not a civil engineer).
Careful, this often ends up with cities and towns building isolated pilot bike lanes that go nowhere and then ripping them out when nobody uses them.
The value of a bike lane isn't in the lane in isolation, in the same way that the value of a street isn't in that street alone. It's in the ability of that lane/street to get you where you need or want to go.
Because bikes on roads with cars suck for both.
It's nicer for the drivers too because you don't have to lag behind a slow-moving bike in a single lane.
And, more abstractly, if a dedicated bike lane means more people taking the bicycle, that also means fewer cars on the road, making it that much more pleasant for those who continue to drive.
Speaking as someone who enjoys driving, I'm all for dedicated bike lanes, even if that means reducing car lanes.
unfortunately i think the crab bucket mentality kicks in when sitting in stop and go traffic and seeing someone breeze by in a bike lane makes people so enraged they’re against cycling infrastructure for the rest of their lives
Or some of them can make the mental transition towards "hey, I could also be the one enjoying a free ride instead of being stuck in my car here"
I keep wishing there was a better way to project invitation when in this situation. All I’ve come up with is to appear happy and relaxed—sit upright, look around and smile, eat something as I roll.
We’re so instinctively competitive though it feels hopeless.
Depends if I seat cozy drinking my warm take away coffee while it is pouring rain or snow.
nah its more like no right of way on right turns. the breaking of fundamental rules by adding bikes.
I don’t think it’s the number of people transported that is hard to get one’s head around—it’s imagining using a subway to get to all of their destinations which are spread all over and separated by at least a quarter mile of parking lots and 8 lane highways. In their mind, this would require an absurd amount of subway or bus lines and tons of transitions and it would take an eternity to get to their destination and they might interact with lower class people and so on. The thing they don’t understand is that without cars you can build all of those destinations much closer together in a single walkable place that you just need transit to get to/from. When you take away the cars, you don’t need gargantuan parking lots or 8 lane highways.
People don’t pick their mode of transportation based on space efficiency.
They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
There’s also the matter of weather, which is less obvious to people who don’t live in locations that see extreme weather or deep snow. Safety and cleanliness is another issue depending on the location. There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
People who hold up numeric metrics like number of people transported per unit area don’t understand why people prefer to hop in their car and go to their destination rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
High-throughput transit isn't there to be better in 1:1 comparison with one person's car trip, but to make better cities possible.
If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.
The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.
Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.
> end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
And all the associated pollution, overheating and flooding issues that go along with it
People very much prefer sedentary lifestyle too, yet is very bad for your health. Likewise, cars are nice as long as you continue to ignore all the negative externalities it has - pollution, climate change and above all the massive waste of space in parking lots and highways that could be used better.
> rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.
> They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities.
Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.
> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.
> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...
You choose where you live and work
You have never ridden the TTC in Toronto.....
None of that matters when you consider the potential horror of interacting with another human.
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Subways are great for high-bandwidth routes. Cars are great for everything. It's like wifi vs cat6.
That's only true because of car-centric design, not a rule of the universe. We can easily make public transport the better transport option if we wanted to.
Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.
Well, in the Netherlands it's also very flat, which makes enabling cycling there a much smaller achievement than anywhere else, except possibly Vatican City. Now we have battery-powered bikes more things are accessible for more people, but the clock starts now for those places.
I mean sure, if you take a surface-level look at things that is true, but the Dutch government has spent a lot of time, money and effort into actually thinking about their urban design and how they tackle building their cities for the quality of life of its inhabitants, rather than the QoL of its inhabitant's cars. It helps, of course, that it's a flat country, but just being flat isn't enough, it takes deliberate planning and good choices being made at the governmental level.
What's the excuse with cities like Oulu in Finland, which isn't flat and is covered in snow more often than it is dry? Despite those 2 potentially huge issues, they still have incredible cycling infrastructure. Or Switzerland, where in my experience in at least Geneva and Bern the cycling infrastructure was also superb despite the mountainous terrain? No one's saying you need a cross-country bicycle highway, as long as the dense urban centers have good bike infrastructure it's more than enough.
Also I didn't even mention bikes in the comment you were replying to, I was talking about public transport like trains, trams and buses. Again, Switzerland despite being extremely mountainous has a world-class rail system that literally cuts through massive mountains.
Sure, if you pack people like sardines. If anything, trying to achieve this kind of density is what pushes people away from public transport.
You shouldn't be packing people like sardines. If your subway is that full then you should be adding more trains, or building more lines to ease congestion. (depending on your cities exact situation). In the US we have made building for a reasonable price impossible and then say it is impossible to fix the problems, but it shouldn't be like that.
I thought building more lanes does not work. So why would building more lines work. Soon there will be induced demand and they will be even fuller.
Building more lanes does work - but people misunderstand induced demand. Really induced demand should be called fixing suppressed demand. If you get induced demand it means you need a lot more lanes. We can't afford the 50 layers of highway bridges needed to build enough lanes, but transit is a lot more space efficient and so we could afford it.
Because rail infra scales really well, bus infra scales well, and bike infra scales well -- while car infra scales disastrously.
How about if cities were built in such a way that you would just have buildings and podium being pedestrian and bike friendly with all transportation network being 1 level underground (or 2 levels) all as self driving EV pods. This may increase the no of possible 'roads' and does not sound as far fetched in terms of overall costs. Emergency vehicles can be given an exemption to operate on the podium
Tunneling underground is extremely expensive. Individual self driving pods aka cars are very expensive. But most importantly cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground, plus now you have to build entrances and exits to the underground system everywhere. Traveling also becomes a lot less appealing when you're in a black tube all the time rather than seeing the city around you. It's also not possible because the underground is not just unoccupied but there is already other existing infrastructure down there.
What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.
> cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground
I don't think the entire "car tunnels" thing is reasonable either, but this one is wrong. The bottleneck for cars is the inherent interference in the 2-dimensional streets. If you shove them all in a few tunnels right until they get into a low-transit region close to the destination, it would increase their capacity by a lot.
It's also a huge amount of money that is better used some other way. But it has an effect.
Surface streets aren't inherently 2D, though - you can build overpasses and underpasses and above-grade highways. We just don't, because it's hideously expensive.
pods (i guess 2 to 4 passengers) simply do not scale. It doesn't matter whether you put them underground or not. The only solution is for people to not use them.
One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.
Underground is expensive. Cars are heavy and need a lot of ventalation. Lets leave the cars at ground level and move humans to underground or skyway systems - thus getting them out of the weather (I live where is snows so this is a very useful feature. People who live where it doesn't snow generally report hot summers and so again want to be inside anyway)
Yes, this sounds nice in principle. Also insanely expensive, difficult to build, and basically just completely unfeasible in reality.
What do you mean by "car oriented people."
People who primarily drive cars? People who primarily drive cars when competitive options exist? People who argue for cars in areas where its not very feasible? People who prefer car oriented cities?
I think most people who primarily drive arent estimating subways at all.
Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.
Life is full of impossible choices. Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or worry about death/disability from a drunk driver on the road. Car deaths per year in the US are about 40 - 45K; injuries, some of them permanent are most likely 20 - 30x. Deaths and disability from perfume on a lady on the train are most likely far higher.
I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.
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Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.
> Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or
As someone who will have a runny nose all day if I sit next to that lady, yes I do worry about her perfume more than I worry about the drunk driver. While the drunk driver is a worse situation if the odds hit me, the odds the perfumed lady is too close to me is much higher.
Thats right. The risks of a perfume lady are way too scary. Cars never have any odors, just fumes, soot and particulate matter, brake dust. The air quality of cities is so much better than that of forests because of cars. The risks couldn't be more clear: 10 million deaths from air pollution[1] and pollution causing every kind of disease (except STIs) from cars vs hundreds of millions of deaths from perfume lady in train.
This is what all economists get slightly wrong? They say humans are rational agents, soak in all the information, calculate the costs and benefits with the probabilities and make rational decisions. But humans almost always make emotional decisions. A perfume lady is way more scarier than a 5000 lb vehicle hurtling down at 60 mph, custom built to protect the person driving the vehicle, on surfaces built for vehicles and vehicles only (trillions of dollars in maintenance and tens of trillions of dollars healthcare costs).
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
For me the immediate effects of perfume lady are worse than the other effects. I'm not downplaying the others, I'm just stating the reality that she makes my life miserable in a way that is very clear.
Move to a different train car?
Statistics don't apply to individuals. If you are a single mom with a bad knee, a car will make your life easy, while public transport will be hard. The car will be safer, cheaper, more manageable because walking with kids and their things to the bus or train may be too challenging. An average human is a hermaphrodite because roughly half are men and half are women.
Oh yeah, public transportation is fucking horrible. Still, it is basically the only viable way to support a large population density and not turn everything into a wasteland of parking lots and car lanes. Let's face it: cars just take an order of magnitude or two more space than e.g. metro for the same number of passengers and, in big cities, space is a very scarce resource.
But why wouldnt I prefer having orders of magnitude more space, given the option?
Because there is only a fixed amount of land a city can ever possibly sustain. Urban sprawl all you want, but eventually you run out of land to keep expanding into or the city goes broke because there aren't enough revenue generating properties in a given area to cover the cost of servicing those areas. At some point more has to turn into better and more efficient.
If you think the time spent traversing all that space is completely worthless. Otherwise it makes sense to make things dense so that people can mostly reach whatever things they want to reach by walking a short distance or taking a quick tram connection, etc.
I mean, mine does lol. Of course this is the Netherlands so it'll be different to the states, but I literally live across the street from a train station, and it goes directly to the dead center of the city in less than 5 minutes. There's a train every 10 minutes. The same journey is, minimum, 15 minutes by car (or 10 by bus since we have dedicated bus lanes), at the end of which you have to find a parking spot. You then still have to actually get to your destination cause the chances of parking in the center are slim to none. People really underestimate how much of our public land is taken up by cars just... sitting there, doing fucking nothing.
With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.
> Oh and you might be odor sensitive
I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.
I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know.
I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
> it's a design choice
Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.
They by and large don’t though. Instead, big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation and developers just copy/pasting designs to save money.
There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
>big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation
Worse, they're not an option for more americans specifically because of zoning and regulation. If not for government micro management there'd be more density, more cheap housing and you wouldn't need to drive 4hr out of the city to find a single family that's affordable.
>There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing.
There would perhaps be if not for all the regulation. Maybe not brick, probably something with brick veneer, but someone would be shoehorning them into small lots.
> There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing
Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.
Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.
The mixed-use development, which was practically banned during the automobile era, is a great example of doing more with less. As you mention, being able to walk over to your local school, or park, or market, or clothing shop, etc. helps reduce the need for car travel for small things, which allows us to have fewer cars on the road, spend less on infrastructure, and make driving a little more pleasant.
But there are other benefits. That local coffee shop or clothing store is better able to compete, because they don't have to compete on efficient product delivery which is something that you see in the suburbs Ala Starbucks or Wal-Mart. This increases entrepreneurial activities and helps money spread instead of concentrate. It's no coincidence in my mind that income inequality has increased partially because of tax rates, but also because of concentration of businesses that can best realize supply chain efficiency.
To your point about brick, sure yea homes don't have to be brick, but generally plastic siding sucks visually, plus suburban houses are built incoherently, so if we could just get something that looks good that's half the battle. But perhaps the most important part, which I'm not sure suburban housing design can really accommodate, is the layout and streetscape design that enables a healthy mix of SFH, apartments, and other living arrangements mixed with businesses and amenities.
I think you are making an actively counterproductive conflation between "banning random crap" and the automobile. I think they only happened together because of luck and timing.
Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).
Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.
Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.
[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.
I broadly agree with you, and frankly what I'm advocating for is to get the government out of zoning and transportation precisely because of the problems you mention, but also because of the negative externalities caused by it.
Today we do not have market choices, because the Federal Highway Administration and every state department of transportation enforces and reinforces centralized design patterns that as we can see today no longer work (and likely never did). It's baked into their raison d'être. Unfortunately, as you also note, items like roads and housing developments live in the public sphere and so we can't and won't completely divorce the government from managing those projects or regulations, but we can examine what works well and increases attributes we want more of and do our best to drive regulation toward those attributes, and in some cases remove regulation to see more of those attributes. In my mind, work that increases walking, biking (or other similar transportation), and rail provide the best mix of low government regulation and effective development patterns which preserve most of the other things we like, such as cars and convenience.
I'm not sure I'm in favor of banning random crap, or maybe you read something into my comment that I didn't intend?
Plenty of big houses with yards in the surburbs in European cities, almost exclusively actually, and very often cheaper than much smaller flats in the city centers. They're still connected to the public transport system too.
If that’s what they choose then why make it illegal to build anything else?
Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain when you need to walk to the nearest bus station to get to work. You can reduce the issues with public transport somewhat (at the expense of its density and cost advantages) but you can never completely eliminate them compared to personal vehicles that get you from door to door.
> Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain
Sometime I wonder in what alternative world people live in which rain is a problem... Yes it's life, sometimes it' warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Buy a $10 rain poncho or umbrella and move on lol. How fragile are you that you can't deal with basic things like rain ? There are hard things in life, like your kid getting diagnosed with leukemia or your spouse dying, rain is waaay down the list.
We need a reality show about you people, I don't pay for netflix but I'd pay for that
Rain has been solved: with enclosed vehicles that take you from your home to your destination.
If you have streets as narrow as in e.g. Florence, the rain can only hit you from above, whereas in car-centric suburbia rain can hit you from the sides in basically all directions - so an umbrella blocking the top isn't enough, you need a car.
In other words, the problem here that the car is solving, is a problem that the car is causing.
Yes. People at ancient times like the 20th century had technologies that could protect them from the rain while they walked.
It's too bad that we lost that knowledge. But we could probably rediscover it with a moderate investment on research.
There's things like umbrellas, you know.
No need to wrap yourself in two tons of steel, aluminum and plastic. 100 grams is enough.
You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone.
When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
> You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km.
Yeah I mean that's like 99.9% of the surface of the world, nobody is preventing you to go live your dream. We're specifically talking about cities, a city without population density is not a city by definition
For some reason, urbanists like to attack suburbs while also saying that everything is so far apart and takes so long. If you want to live in a city, live in a city, but don't pretend that it's the only way to live.
Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day.
Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
There is great train service from the suburbs to Manhattan, but I worked from home and moved to a different metro area. As it stands, parking by the office in the city I live near is about $150-200/month. Taking the train there and back every day from somewhere in the city would be about $150/month.
> Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there.
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
You're just rejecting his hypothetical - Manhattan is dense.
Yeah, that's why you build stations periodically and run trains at faster speeds than cars.
I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.
For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.
But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!
Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.
I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.
So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.
Pretty similar for me - I travel to London from Edinburgh quite a lot and I much prefer taking the train.
Before Brexit I got the train from London to Amsterdam. 3h45 direct, clean, comfortable and so much more civilised than flying.
Even after brexit it’s very possible. I understand InOui may start offering competing services in the channel tunnel.
I actually don't mind the flying bit of flying - but I loathe all the faffing about and waiting at airports.
I'm actually the opposite, it really fucks with my ears - I think it's probably the pressure change but I don't care to experiment too much, I'm lucky if I'm not out of action for a week after landing.
I could stand to wait an hour, have to do a ridiculous dance for "security", traipse two miles across a vast building designed on the wrong scale for humans and so on, that's all fine, but the flying I do not like at all.
In Germany, even if it takes the same amount of time, door to door, usually flying is half price, and isn't hit as often in delays as having your ICE stopped in the middle of nowhere, and then miss one of the two connections yet to come.
It is an interesting exercise to see how frequently people start using their Bahn app, trying to work around what might be their way to still make it into the destination, as the pause times between stations increase.
I’m worried that my young child will die crossing the street. Sorry—these two just aren’t the same!
Exactly. Cars isolate you from other people and just as importantly the weather all the way.
>there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.
Or urine.
Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".
Come to Europe, especially northern Europe.
The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk.
US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infrastructure that has been intentionally sabotaged over half-a-century.
> Come to Europe
Anecdotally, among myself and my friends we have more stories of problems with theft and encounters with hostile people from very brief travels to Europe than all time spent on public transport in the USA. To be fair, I haven’t lived in NYC where public transport is famously more dangerous.
I also suspect that foreigners are more targeted for wallet thefts while traveling in Europe.
However, watching multiple friends get pickpocketed on European public transport and having to shake some sketchy people who were being aggressive with women in our group during our brief travels shattered my illusions that European public transport is universally superior in safety.
Edit to add: I also thought it was funny when we met up with someone’s friend in a populous European city who refused to ride public transportation with us. He would drive his car from point to point and meet up with us at the destination. He seemed to believe that the underground was not something people his age liked and was surprised we were riding it without a second thought.
Famously more dangerous? NYC? What on earth are you talking about
It’s mostly a meme not backed up by any serious facts. Politically, both sides get kudos for pretending cities are more dangerous than they actually are.
I was quite careful to say "Northern Europe" because there are some very touristy places that attract criminals who specifically prey on tourists.
I could imagine Paris and London in that list, despite both being very safe for locals (and.. both being Northern Europe)- but perhaps less safe for tourists.
I would imagine Prague being a middle-European tourist destination that is plagued much worse by this (but, also, very safe for locals- I lived there briefly).
Where were you in Europe?
Not to pick on you specifically as I think your comment was fine but I always get a chuckle[1] about the "duality of europe" that you see on the parts of the internet that are dominated by the white collar english speakers.
Depending upon the issue you might reduce europe down to the rich western bits. You might include or exclude the former soviet influenced areas depending upon the context. You might only look at nations on the Mediterranean or only exclude them, etc, etc.
Yet whenever you look at the US you always include the whole thing no exceptions.
[1]just to be clear, by "I get a chuckle" I mean "the way we just accept this behavior is a condemnation of the community and the people who make it up"
> I was quite careful to say "Northern Europe" because there are some very touristy places that attract criminals who specifically prey on tourists.
Okay, but then why can’t we Americans just exclude the bad parts of America and only allow you to compare to the good parts?
Why must every America-Europe comparison be about the worst case American cities (usually taken from headlines) but only compared to a select subset of European locations?
Because the USA is one country and Europe is a collection of vastly different countries.
You would likely agree that the USA and Mexico are incomparable and its sort of the same, though the EU evens some things out: its much less far reaching than a federal government.
That said: happy to compare the best case US public transport to the Nordics. Literally anywhere in the Nordics to anywhere in the US.
The upper middle class in the US also takes public transit, but there is not enough sense of social shame to get people to behave well. I also highly doubt that people who are truly wealthy in northern Europe take the train.
I'm in Europe. Hungary though, mind you, not the fancier part of Europe. Trains here are late, sticky, and lawless.
Southern Europe is quite far from the well connected city dream that often gets discussed here.
The same points also apply to EU public transport. Maybe your area is better but where I live it's definitely mostly the poorer and less domesticated that you find in public transport.
I am with you. It is not only about lanes but also parking. My in laws live in a very car centric city and it is crazy the way all distances are multiplied when everything need a dedicated parking space. There is almost nothing left at walking distance and every time I visit I have the feeling I spend all my day in a car instead of ... doing stuff.
This was one of the things I realized living in a very car friendly city without a car. SO SO MUCH of my walking was just walking past/through GIANT parking lots.
It's pretty amazing how much time you can save by being able to park in front of whatever you want to get into. Starting at the same point I've beaten cars that should have gotten there 20 minutes faster according to google maps.
I save a lot of time by taking a parking spot far from the door and just walking. People who drive spend a lot more time than they think looking for a parking spot close to the door. Plus nobody cares if I take up 3 parking spots way out there (so long as I'm not in a lane of course) so I can stop whereever without checking for the lines saving even more time not trying to get perfectly in the parking spot.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a biography of Robert Moses that's particularly focused on his long career in the government of New York, is, quite aside from a fascinating psychological portrait and a parable about how bad it is when someone has untrammeled power in a bureaucracy, an absolutely fantastic case study in how building more roads makes traffic worse. And it was published in 1974! For anyone that cares to find out we've know this for decades and have absolutely failed to do anything about it - pretty depressing.
Caro has a way with words; one of my favorite turns was when Moses declared traffic a problem "solved for a generation", only for Caro to begin the next paragraph with a description of the traffic jams that began to develop a few weeks after that particular road (I believe the Bronx River Parkway) opened.
Seconded - I'm currently listening to the audiobook of this book and I find it utterly fascinating.
Yeah, the reader of the audiobook is pretty good, although I slightly prefer Grover Gardner, who recorded the audiobooks for his series on LBJ, as a narrator. If you like The Power Broker, I'd highly recommend those.
Nobody likes to hear this, including me,
But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable.
So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.
Urban planning has a term for this - the Downs Thomson paradox. Over time, traffic tends to increase up to a point at which equivalent journeys on transit/bike/foot are quicker.
What this means of course is that an effective way of reducing traffic is by speeding up the alternatives.
"But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation."
Not if you are like me and likely to take a short nap after a long day at work...
Edit: I own a car, I use it all the time. But I also use the train a lot - all depends where I want to go and what I will be doing when I get there.
Edit2: I sometimes even drive to the train station, get out of my car and into a train!
> But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
I hate driving even when I'm alone on the road. I'm forced to stare at the road when I want to be doing something else. I can't even take a break, since a simple 5 minute nap has high odds of killing me even if I'm the only car on the road.
Plus cars are slower than trains or airplanes. Even on the autobahn with unlimited speed allowed, most people are not going nearly as fast as a high speed train, much less an airplane.
Don't get me wrong, I ride my bike to work, but it's abundantly clear that (at least americans) really fucking love cars.
To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.
No it isn't clear that Americans love cars. Some Americans love cars or course, but for many they are something they think they must have but they don't really care about the car. People want to get places, people need to get food, and so one - a car enables all of those things, but they are a tool to get things done, not the point. They do not think there is any other tool that will work, but that doesn't mean they care about that tool. They are against transit because they think it is a waste of money since even after spending that money it still wouldn't work (this may or may not be true) and so it isn't worth it.
Yes.
That's why everybody should heavily subsidize public transportation.
There is a reason everyone zips around in them on Wall-e. Wait until we have full self driving and drone delivery. Then even when you are in traffic you can get your burger, soda and TV in without wasting any time!
This is level one understanding of public transport systems. “We should build metros and then everything will be better”
There’s cities that are not setup for efficient public transportation or walkable living. Redesign it from ground up and put a metro smack bang through the middle. Until then, it’s just not going to work.
People, and especially people who like the idea of walkable cities that reside in council chairs, often miss this fundamental step.
“Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
You can adapt cities.
Most British cities predate cars. They have had tramlines put in, taken out, and put in again. They have had roads widened, then bus and cycle lanes added. Train underground lines have been built.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living.
You can build and change housing. We have lots of what used to be big houses that are now blocks of flats. You can encourage small retailers in many ways. Services can be reorganised or public transport routes designed to ensure access to them
Not sure what you mean about climate - there are cities you can manage without cars from the tropics to very cold places.
You can pedestrianise roads in existing existing towns and cities.
People always say stuff like this, but plenty of European cities like Utrecht have shown that it's very much possible to turn the tide. A few years ago Utrecht replaced an entire highway and turned it (back) into a canal and the area is indescribably nicer in every way, it's called the Catharijnesingel.
This canal was, in fact, always there, they just turned it into a highway at some point in the 70s. So the reverse is more than possible, it's a question of will to do so and convincing the, frankly, selfish car drivers. Having lived in the US myself for a stint, there's plenty of cities that could easily have work done similar to what happened in Utrecht, it's just that there's a lack of a will to do so to make things much better.
Sure, you won't have a direct train from NYC to Dallas (although, seeing China's high speed rail I don't see why that couldn't be on the table), but we're talking about individual cities making these changes a bit at a time.
I think you are being unnecessarily defeatist. Cities can’t be redesigned from the ground up, but at the same time we’ve seen that investment into roads can’t fix traffic in cities once they reach a certain population and density.
The first thing we should do is target development. For example, planning laws should require new development (suburbs etc.) to be built around some kind of transit (ideally rail). Zoning should always be mixed - for example it should always be permissible to have at least small apartment blocks, groups of townhouses (like row houses), and small shops and cafes in suburbs. The idea of mandating areas be dedicated to only detached single family dwellings should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There’s just so much like that that can be started right now. But we don’t - we just keep making the same mistakes and things get worse.
I beg to differ. A few Dutch cities did exactly that. Here's a video with a great example of the city I live near:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kql9bBNII
Utrecht did something similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPGOSrqXrjs
People centric infrastructure didn't fall out of the sky, we recognised bad ideas and reworked cities over decades to make them liveable. And it worked!
Car infrastructure takes so much space that you can repurpose parts of it in place. Just turn one of the lanes into a tram line, make dedicated bus lanes. On huge parking lots you can just split parts of and build housing or more smaller stores there.
Of course there are limits to this, but cities are often grown historically over centuries and city planning usually takes place in such constraints rather than planning cities from scratch. Don't let the perfect be the enemie of the good.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
Yes it does. It will take 20 years, but if you don't start now you will never get there. Are you willing to invest in a better future or just accept the status quo?
I grew up in London where it is almost always preferable to take public transport anywhere central (cars work fine in suburbs).
I prefer to walk and take public transport, but where I live now (small town) busses are infrequent, and fairly short journeys can require changing. It can take two hours on the bus to get somewhere that is less than half an hour by car.
I think people here would be delighted with more public transport. The main complaint I hear about roads is not repairing potholes which is not hugely expensive. The problem is that the political push is to use a stick (make cars more expensive and inconvenient) rather than a carrot (provide better public transport).
I completely agree. You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens. It's a self-destructive cycle and a betrayal of drivers. We're sold a promise of freedom and speed, but what we get is a constant, grinding battle. We spend our lives in traffic and our wallets on fuel/tax, and the very infrastructure meant to liberate us ends up imprisoning us.
The starkest example of this for me is comparing Orlando, Florida with Malmö, Sweden. Orlando is the end game of car-centric planning. The city feels bigger than its population suggests because you spend half an hour in a car just to get anywhere. The eight-lane highways and endless parking lots are supposed to make driving easier, but they create the very congestion that makes driving miserable. This architecture of disconnection means fewer spontaneous encounters and more social isolation. The city is designed for a machine, not for people.
In contrast, Malmö's population is actually larger than Orlando's, yet a 30-minute bike ride can get you literally anywhere. The largest road through the city center is a quiet, two-lane street that prioritises people over cars; as there are large crossings and lights. This isn't an accident, it's a choice. The city's excellent public transportation and extensive bike lanes make the car a choice, not a necessity and because it's penalised: the only drivers are the ones who need to be driving, for which now there are open roads (as long as you're patient).
The truth is, every person on a bus, a train, or a bike is one less car in front of you. Giving people real alternatives is the only thing that can truly reduce traffic. This isn't an attack on cars. It's a demand for sanity, a call to build cities that work for everyone, including those who choose to drive.
And if you don’t have a bike you can rent one instantly and nearby from an app like https://www.malmobybike.se/
> You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens
That is a bad reading. If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city. The point of a city is all the things you can do - otherwise people would live in a rural area with less options but not traffic - so limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city. You need to build enough to get out of this, eventually people will no longer find new/better opportunties opened up by building and congestion will no longer increase (if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway).
Note that I'm not advocating you build a road to get ahead of congestion. Generally it is much more cost effective to build a good public transit system. However system is the key here, roads only where because you can get anywhere on them anytime you want to go, if your transit system isn't the same people won't use it.
> If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city.
No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.
Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.
> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway
Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
> this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
If someone chooses to not make a trip then I count it as impossible. I could walk across the North Pole to Europe, but I think everyone would agree when I say the trip is impossible anyway despite that.
> This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
You absolute can and I disagree with the studies. Now I will agree that building 50 layers of highway bridges needed is not a reasonable thing to do, but it still a solvable engineering challenge if we wanted to put the money into it.
I mean, you’re right you need systems and people need to get places.
But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.
Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.
I suppose it is because Florida has a lot of modern development, but the number of disconnected subdivisions there is relatively extreme. In much of the US you can easily walk to the thing you can see.
There is always some private company benefiting when a town/city rejects public transport. I remember reading an article about a town that rejected public transport, there was intense door-to-door lobbying by some Koch brothers funded group. It was a small town, I suppose they were just testing their lobbying efforts before deploying the same in large cities.
All this to say, if the public is sufficiently informed, they are not going to reject public transport. We've been brainwashed that car centric transport is the best.
Then there is Japan, they kept a station open just for one girl, so she can get to school - https://www.ndtv.com/feature/kyu-shirataki-station-japanese-...
This is just a factor of car driving being wildly more inefficient at "people-carrying" than public transport. That is why "improving things" for cars just makes things worse-you're spending your sparse resources (money, land, manpower) more and more inefficiently.
Car-centric does not mean driver-centric.
Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric.
Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.
'Climatists' is a strange way of putting this because pulling everything we do back to human scale will be a huge boon to solving the climate crisis. As someone who's worried about threats to the future of the species in the form of climate change I'd be all for a human centric movement.
Exactly. If you have plenty of community spaces spread around an urban area - cafes, pubs, small businesses, public parks - you both reduce the amount of travel required, and strengthen local communities
Lovely way of looking at it
> Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers.
I 100% agree. I live in Newcastle, a city that is fairly car centric, but we have a Metro line and have had pushes to increase bus and bicycle transport (though Labour are generally bad for active travel).
My brother moved to Leeds, one of the largest cities in Europe without a Metro or tram. Driving anywhere in the city is fucking awful. The planners clearly kept trying to add one more lane and the result is congestion everywhere, even at quiet times.
I've also driven round Liverpool and Manchester and found, though they're better as they have Metro lines, the car-centric roads are still really awful to drive on.
Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.
One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.
I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals and always, always giving jobs to the lowest bidding contractor. The lowest bidder is always the most expensive, and they always waste time far beyond schedule to burn more money, yet North America as a whole just won't learn from the past 70 years and keeps doing the same thing.
I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10.
Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
It's because in the West, we decentralized and privatized too much. Interests at local/national/global level are divergent and misalign all the time, which makes everything take more time.
> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals
Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.
> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.
Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.
And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
okay, can't we have a middle ground then? On one side, nothing happens because of corruption, regulation, partisan interests etc. On the other end, there is authoritarian regime that can get things done at insane speed but at the cost of the environment and its people. Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?
Yes it is hard. What makes it hard is the analisys of the problem is wrong and so we don't know how to fix it. Some of the problems were hinted at above, but the response of why we do it that way was also hinted at and should give anyone wanting to fix the problem pause. There are many other problems that are at fault too that were not hinted at. Some of them I know (but I'd need a book to write out), but there are hints of more things that I'm not aware of. I also have reason to suspect some of what I "know" is actually wrong, but I don't know what and cannot know until someone tries it thus showing why it is wrong.
> Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?
It is, it takes political effort and most importantly it takes adequate staffing on the state/local government for supervision and proper tender processes, and both is really short in supply - one might say that the latter is done on purpose as an excuse to privatize yet another piece of public infrastructure.
Of course a private toll road company can build faster and keep up with maintenance, it doesn't have to deal with tender bullshit, it can hire enough of its own staff to make sure vendors don't screw them over, and if it's a large enough company they can hire their own construction crews. Oh and obviously it can provide a source of extra income for the grifter politicians that vote for the privatization...
> Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment
These ones aren't really accurate in this century. China is making massive gains in clean energy and undoing a lot of the mess they made in the 20th century. I'm honestly blown away by how clean the water, air, and everything as a whole is over there. And I'm a freak who loves visiting places in the middle of nowhere, so it's not some Potemkin village stuff like YouTube China Truthers(tm) pretend is widespread.
> When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged
Yeah, you watch a little too much YouTube. That stuff doesn't happen. Why would anyone be stupid enough to be an engineer if they risk having their entire family being arrested? Seriously.
>China just openly sharts on nature
You say this like China is the country openly flaunting the climate, purposely pushing for more carbon emissions to enrich a few people, calling climate change a hoax, 1984'ing all government research and policy on climate change, and forbidding agencies from even researching it, selling off public lands for profit.
That's not China, that's the good ol USA
Oh, and the USA also sent multiple completely innocent people to gulags.
Where's your high horse now?
Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway.
Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
But it's already being done. Now to propose new spending...it's really difficult judging from the financial status of major NA cities. (And take a look at the California railroad...)
> Public transport gives much better ROI for more people
That's a bold claim without data.
Just did some very light googling - building out, repairing and developing new road infrastructure seems to have around 2:1 or 2.5:1 ROI - Public transport, active transport seems to have around 4:1 to 5:1 ROI.
Not sure what any of this means in relation to the comment I replied to. Keep in ming that public transport is built only on the busiest routes while roads are required (yes, actually required) everywhere.
Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
So when shown the data you asked for, you find a way to dismiss it. Brilliant :)
You seem to be implying the opposite, also without data. Now THAT is a bold claim.
This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure.
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Well done video essays:
Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg
Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd
Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm
More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N
Articles:
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...
Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.
Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.
Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L
The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.
In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Thanks for this useful comment, too rare in this discussion unfortunately.
One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too.
> In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process.
A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.)
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
> A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween.
Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)
I see what you're saying and it exposes a gap in my logic. I think the reason _I_ see it as hard is because I live in one of those gaps, so service is relatively limited compared to places further east with more density. Buuut the whole point is that, even though there are 95k of us in my town, we're still expensive to service for a 50 mile ride to the hub.
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
Parking lots near stations make sense only at the farthest out place. They are for farmers coming into town for that big once a month trip, and hobby farmers driving from their "acrage" to their day job. The vast majority of people should be taking transit from their door to where they are going.
Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.
Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.
Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
The problem is, the Americans literally dug up a lot of the public transit infrastructure they had. Tramways and cable cars used to be widespread. You'd need to lay down all that track again.
What's wrong with buses?
They’re flexible (don’t need to rip up rails to change routes) but they cost a lot more to run (tyres, fuel, maintenance, staffing cost) to carry fewer people. A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver, and are way more energy efficient to boot.
Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because people know exactly where they are going to be - a bus can possible swerve and hit you but the tram will always be on its tracks so people feel (and are) much safer sharing space with them. And just because they feel more ‘premium’ than busses people seriously are more likely to use them.
> A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver
This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)
> and are way more energy efficient to boot.
This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
> the bus shares the cost of the road with other users
A bus does much more damage to the road than a tramway though (to say nothing of trucks, these are even worse). Anything rail based, the load from weight and movement is transferred via the rails and subterranean sleepers to the foundation, whereas a decently used bus road will need to be resurfaced at least every five years, more in a hotter climate as the buses will inevitably seriously groove the asphalt. Tramways is more like every 20 if not 30 years until you need to do a full replacement.
On top of that, this "the cost is already paid" math is annoying to me on a personal ethical level because it excuses putting people into cars and freight onto trucks because "they already are there".
> A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A single Class R 3.3 tramway vehicle (~36 tons) in Munich carries 218 people, more if you squish the passengers ("Sardinenbüchse" feeling). Munich's largest bus with a carriage unit, in contrast, carries 130 people [1] at ~20 tons. The gain from regenerative braking that you get on tramways actually matters at that scale, and as said, drivers are already short in supply.
Fully agree on your calculation regarding traffic by the way, however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/setzt-anhaenger-busse...
Cost is already paid is important. We need to get freight around. Roads because they are flexible are the best way to do that. When the roads are not congested (which if we are only talking freight they are not even in the densest cities) sharing with other users makes sense (in a dense city cars quickly turn into congestion, but we are only adding buses to the existing freight system so we can ignore that). Sure a bus does more damage than a car, but there are other freight users doing a lot of damage so you need to build for that use anyway. Thus we will have the roads anyway, the question is do we build something else as well and is that worth the costs - here buses are a lot cheaper.
What is the weight of that bus and tram when they only have 20 people on though? Similarly what is the cost of the driver or a bus vs tram when there are only 20 people you need to move on the vehicle? Because this is a problem you should be aiming to have: getting transit to those less dense areas that will never have 200 people on board with 5 minute frequencies. You should prioritize high frequency service over larger vehicles until you are running something every 5 minutes because that high frequency is the best way to kill complaints that transit is not convenient. It is of course expensive, if you are getting enough riders to need a bigger vehicle you should have the money from those riders to give them better service.
There are places in the world where you need the capacity of a tram. However I submit that most places should be building a fully automatic metro system anyplace they are thinking about a tram. Only after you have that comprehensive system can we ask if there really is enough demand to also run a tram for shorter trips. The down side of a metro is the grade separation means very short trips are not feasible because of the need to get to the tracks - but most areas can live without that additional service and they need the additional speed a metro can give.
> however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
Nothing you can do about bad planning. Though really if the buses are that full and not paid for you should have already had them anyway, and there are plenty of other places you that don't have service yet (because if you did you would see this coming and the buses would be paid for) that you can move the buses. The only issue is the cost of building the tram - buying a lot of buses is cheaper than building a new tram line. (I'm assuming you are not talking about Bus Rapid Transit - that has a place but it is rarely a good answer)
They're great, compared to cars. But while they have a relatively fast and cheap setup, over the long term light rail and trams are a lot cheaper to run and can coexist with foot & bike traffic easier since the rails make them very predictable.
I'd place serious concerns on the "coexist with bike traffic" thing though. Tram rails are a massive danger if you're running anything smaller than these "fatbike" wheels and have to cross them for whatever reason.
Compared with light railway/tram, they need more energy per km traveled due to friction and malleability losses in the tires, they emit fine dust from tires and brakes, and usually they pack significantly less people than a railcar so you need more vehicles and especially more drivers for a bus network.
I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
There's also the "south east Qld option" (which I'm certain is the region you're describing in your comment) where the government is so roadbrained that all public transport solutions inevitably end up as some form of bus, further adding to congestion and making it worse for everyone, drivers, public transport users and active transport users.
You guessed correctly :)
The other problem is that city councils historically have run busses, whereas the State Government runs the rail, so a lot of our bus network competes with the rail instead of working together as an integrated network. At least the ticketing is integrated, but the network still has never felt like it’s designed to work together as an integrated transit network.
Cars seem to live in a special category in peoples minds where the costs simply do not exist, and thus the problems can be solved by simply throwing infinitely more resources and space at the problems.
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
I think it is not just car-centric. It is "private mobility"-centric.
In towns, and large towns especially, public mobility should be the rule and private one the exception. If any.
And maybe also for long distance mobility.
Might I suggest bikes are a great form of private mobility?
I hold out hope that many more Americans will get E bikes, and demand separated bike lanes. There's plenty of room for them on most American roads especially newer suburbs.
American Fietser is in Carmel, Indiana and evidently loves using his Urban Arrow everywhere.
+1 to urban arrow. Schlep my infant and pre-k kid in it every day of the year and the older kid loves it, is more engaged with the community (she has mentally mapped it and we commonly stop to talk to neighbors in a way we can’t in car), and I can actually fit more kids in it than the car. The car requires a car seat for each kid, which won’t fit across the back seat— the bike takes in an infant seat, and space for two kids on the bench.
I can’t reply to sibling comment here but indeed, an urban arrow can carry 4 kids + adult if you put a seat on the back.
> Might I suggest bikes are a great form of private mobility?
Yes you may. They fall short though for distances bigger than a couple of km, when carrying something or by bad weather.
I do 5-10 km happily on a regular basis with kids and cargo
Only for short hauls.
But that's not a personal pod on a pseudo-train that a tech-bro could sell me
I’m sure we can find a way to make cargo bikes a status symbol.. hoodmaps already shows the part of Utrecht I couldn’t afford as cargo bike moms :-)
This. The quickest & most pleasant places to drive a car are the places with the fewest large single-mode roads & - importantly - even fewer cars on them.
Extremely off-topic, but do you have ADHD?
No, why?
Simply & beautifully satirized by the "bro just one more lane bro, bro I swear just one more lane and it'll fix the traffic bro," meme from a few years ago.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...
I actually counted these two: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/417/129/282...
If it's an average of 1.2 persons per car (which is the typical average) and counting roughly 1,200 cars on those images (in aggregate) it would take roughly 28-29 rail cars to transport this number of people.
That's 3-5 trains worth. All that traffic could have been saved (in theory) by 3-5 trains.
I don't imagine a train would serve all those people, but imagine the massive dent it would make to have good train systems between large population centers.
Katy Freeway's at 26 and counting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas
"One more lane" is so much easier to ridicule because of America, so thank you.
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