No really. Get them out of our cities.

You will probably see a lot of parody posts from pro-gun folks but it is actually a really important thing we need to do.

Car attacks and accidents aside, cars are really bad for cities. They provide a lot of pollution, congest the city, and make the experience unpleasant (noise, waiting, etc). At the very least, cars are a huge waste of space and a lot of the city's resources are spent on car-related maintenance. A lof of European cities are already implementing car-free districts but some are moving to become car-free altogether. Oslo is going to close of the entire urban area.

There really seems to be no cons here as it solves a lot of the problems we are currently trying to address (climate change, exercise). I stopped driving 5 years ago and feel a lot better. Its still a pain in the ass navigating bike lanes and the fear of being hit by a car.

Here is a great video explaining how it could be done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9qUvTTlF2Y

4/7/2018 3:10:12 PM

Allow development in urban areas without any parking requirements (minimum spaces, etc.) and make smart investments in urban public transportation (where its most viable) and this problem could possibly take care of itself.


The hard part is convincing the locals that less parking space per capita in their neighborhood is a good thing.

4/7/2018 6:09:53 PM

I live in Brooklyn and own a car. I drove it 30min ago. People still need to leave the city so they own cars. Or move things so they rent cars. Removing them is a silly idea.

4/7/2018 8:05:10 PM

Thats because of city planning not because of an inherent need for cars. Although new York is more ready than most cities, it still needs some infrastructure additions to underserviced areas.

With that said, in most of brooklyn you are still going to get to barclays for long island railroad, grand central for metro north or penn for nj transit or even acela faster than you can drive out of the city.

moving could be done with local freight trains, and electric carts, as shown in the video

4/7/2018 8:23:48 PM

There’s a part of me that totally agrees with you, but the reality of dentaldamn’s point about needing a car to go places outside the city needs to be addressed. As a father of two who did everything I could to avoid having a car in Brooklyn, I had to get one. I don’t see any reasonable alternative to going somewhere that’s not immediately near public transportation, especially with kids.

[Edited on April 7, 2018 at 8:43 PM. Reason : S]

4/7/2018 8:42:21 PM

just move to Europe

4/7/2018 8:54:29 PM

I'm with tulsi on this.

4/7/2018 8:56:26 PM

Every major city I’ve been to in Europe has tons of cars. Also people don’t own cars and then use an app to rent smart cars to drive around.

I take the train to work and rarely drive into Manhattan. Getting to some places in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx would be impossible without a car and we have a massive train/bus system

[Edited on April 7, 2018 at 9:17 PM. Reason : Which is falling apart. ]

4/7/2018 9:15:04 PM

I like how the narrator in the video mentions how tedious life is because of waiting at cross walks for the WALK signal

4/7/2018 9:22:55 PM

Cars are not always the best solution, but they certainly are a valid solution much of the time. Car-centric cities work just fine if you manage to spread them out enough. Our problem is that we make everyone get cars and then ban the sprawl that is needed to make the city work (green belts, densification programs, restriction of green-field building permits, diversion of funds away from new road construction, etc etc).

Of course, there is a strong sense that cars don't work, because what car development we have had was incorrect. Highways are great at moving people quickly over great distances. But, they are wholly unsuited to an urban environment. They cost far more to build and gobble up far more space than a non-highway with similar carrying capacity. Worse, their carrying capacity falls during rush hour far more than non-highways do.

Modern city building is built around increasing parallelism. Move people out of the existing dense urban areas to the periphery where are built new urban units, with jobs, shopping, and schools all of their own and plenty of road capacity to handle them. People living in these satellite areas will tend to stay within them, taking them off the existing road infrastructure, reducing congestion over-all.

This is what we see happening in cities that are trying to build their way out of congestion...congestion is actually falling. Despite rapid population growth, the congestion indices for Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso all improved. Meanwhile, the coastal cities with urban growth boundaries all suffered significant increases in congestion.

4/13/2018 5:54:36 PM

Forgot the data:
http://inrix.com/resources/inrix-2017-global-traffic-scorecard/

4/13/2018 10:42:07 PM

Banning cars is a very silly, tulsigabbard-esque thing to suggest. But only a contrarian like LoneSnark would suggest that the solution is greater sprawl.

He suggests it because he knows that the only viable solution is something he can't support: effective public transportation. (Well, public transportation and good mixed-development zoning, which presumably he could get behind, if he could get past what I presume is a bitter resentment towards the very concept of "zoning.")

If public transport is clean, reliable, and takes people where they want to go, people will use that in lieu of cars. In fact, even if it meets the barest possible standards for clean (not caked in feces), reliable (explodes less than .1% of the time), and going to the right destination (within a half-mile or so), people will take it. I know, because I ride the DC metro to work every day.

4/17/2018 9:23:03 AM

Greater Sprawl has been shown to work. As the data shows, traffic congestion is down in the cities that are perusing that policy. However, "effective public transportation to counter sprawl" has never been shown to work. Public Transport use is falling in nearly every city, regardless of how much tax dollars they throw at the various rail projects. Washington DC, the city you seem to enjoy so much, has increasing car use while the Metro continues to deteriorate and gobble up an ever increasing amount of tax dollars for a decreasing number of riders, leaving very little money left for road construction to carry the ever higher number of cars on DC roadways, with predictable worsening of congestion. Of course, DC is doubly stupid: it invested what money it had for road construction in highways. Stupidity all around.

So, yea, I love trains and find them pretty. But, they're not a viable solution to any passenger transport problem we have, except "how to spend vast sums of money." The Bus system in Houston is a possible bright spot for mass transit in America, showing a rare sustained growth in use after they grid-ified it, dropping the hub-spoke design of most cities and all metros.

As such, yes, buses can be an effective means of mass transit. Evidence from Britain shows you need to break the monopoly, deregulate, free bus lines to run where they want in search of riders, subsidize fares rather than routes, and build enough roads to prevent your buses from getting caught up in congestion. From the real-world evidence, is seems like transit ridership is only increasing (or, decreasing the least) in cities that are pursuing sprawl while investing in their bus networks (Seattle being the inexplicable exception, as they are certainly not allowing sprawl, but they do seem to be cannibalizing their bus network less than would be expected given on-going rail construction).

It seems the only way to make transit trains work in particular, is if you curtail cars enough. Either ban them or tax the shit out of them. Anything else just condemns you to a dysfunctional city of continuous congestion. That is what the evidence suggests. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears.

[Edited on April 17, 2018 at 10:15 AM. Reason : .,.]

4/17/2018 10:11:29 AM

4/17/2018 10:54:39 AM

Quote :

"As the data shows, traffic congestion is down in the cities that are perusing that policy."

Congestion might be down*, and it might even be down because of sprawling. I don't think the data really shows a clear causation there, and I don't think any such benefit will be around for the long term once in-fill between satellite areas takes off. But fuck it, sure, for the sake of argument, sprawl reduces congestion.

Congestion isn't the only problem.

In general, there is benefit to reducing the amount that people drive. Cars are dangerous and pollution is bad. There is also a general benefit to urban concentration. There is ample research indicating that dense cities drive innovation, economic development, and other significant benefits. They use significantly less energy per capita than alternatives.

*-Of course, according to your own source, LA and Atlanta are in the top cities for congestion in the world (and indeed, Los Angeles is #1). These are two cities that practically define sprawl, and they're blocked up like a guy whose diet is nothing but opiods and cheese.

Quote :

"Washington DC, the city you seem to enjoy so much"

No, I kinda hate it here, and I was late to work because the metro caught fire.

Quote :

"has increasing car use while the Metro continues to deteriorate and gobble up an ever increasing amount of tax dollars for a decreasing number of riders, leaving very little money left for road construction to carry the ever higher number of cars on DC roadways, with predictable worsening of congestion."

So all of this manages to be accurate while ignoring the staggering and unique issues facing the District that have nothing to to do with the merits of public transportation.

Here is what I know: proximity to a metro station is enormously desirable, and I'd guess it's right behind school districts in determining property values of similar homes. I don't actually know anybody who drives to work. They bike or they metro/bus. About half the people I know own a car; most of them drive about once a week, usually to run errands. I'm in this group.

Obviously a lot of people do drive in the area, creating the terrible congestion. That's because of all the goddamn sprawl - the people who live in surrounding towns and counties and commute in every day, ultimately deciding that the hours they spend stuck in traffic every week are worth the lower cost of living. For many, especially families, they're almost certainly right - rent alone is so high in the District that their time is worth less than the difference. Of course, this problem would be fixed if they would significantly open up zoning, loosen regulations on new multi-family dwellings, abolish rent control, ignore the NIMBY-whiners, and otherwise encourage the production of new housing stock. These decisions would make the city significantly more dense, put more people within the metro's range, and increase revenue through both ridership and a tax base concentrated in one core jurisdiction rather than three squabbling ones.

No, DC's public transit woes (among others) are the result of too much diffusion of population, not too little.

4/17/2018 10:42:02 PM

There is history. Los Angeles in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s invested its money in highway construction, which is dumb but still worked: sprawling allowed congestion to be kept reasonable while the population exploded. Then the 80s arrived, and sentiment changed. In the 90s and 00s and 10s road construction fell dramatically as Los Angeles diverted most of its resources to building a metro. During that time, sprawl was heavily curtailed, population grew dramatically, average commutes grew from 20 minutes to 50 minutes, and the bus network was cannibalized to pay for the metro. Net effect was far fewer people ride public transit today in LA than they did when the population was lower and they were building highways as fast as they could.

Quote :

"I don't actually know anybody who drives to work. They bike or they metro/bus. About half the people I know own a car; most of them drive about once a week, usually to run errands. I'm in this group."

Which is why anecdotes are irrelevant. We have actual numbers from Government Agencies to tell us what people are doing, and every year fewer people ride transit while more people drive and the average commute continues to grow.

So, you need to keep in mind we have more than one issue here. Sprawl allows us to reserve more space for roads, you seem to get that, and that is important. Road carrying capacity falls as congestion worsens, so we need enough road space to prevent that. But making room for cars to move is only part of the battle. The bigger battle is the battle against long commutes. If people commute half as far, then we only need half as many lane-miles to handle it. Or more accurately, we can carry twice as many people using the same road network. And here is where sprawl does the best work: keeping land prices low. With low home prices, as found in sprawling cities, people will move regularly to live near their work. They change to another job across town, they move to be closer. In DC where a home is hard to find and costs upwards of a million dollars, living close to work is almost their last consideration. They cannot afford a home near their work, so they buy a home they can barely afford 60 miles away (outside the DC greenbelts) and commute via stupidly built highways.

Remember, Houston is not single family home construction only. The green-field development on the outskirts is often dense too: apartment complexes and office blocks. People can reasonably afford an apartment on the same street as their work and walk if they like. Of course, Houston weather means people won't like. They drive their cars to get to their mailboxes. But you get the idea.

4/18/2018 9:21:51 AM

how the fuck do you deliver pizza then?

/BanCars

4/18/2018 1:45:54 PM

I know what the data shows. I'm not arguing with the data. I'm arguing with the conclusion you have drawn from it: "Because public transit use is down and car use is up, we should encourage sprawl." I contend that public transit use is down and car use is up because we have encouraged sprawl for so long. If we stop doing that - if we stop preventing densification of cities and implicitly encouraging revenue flight to the suburbs - then the trend will reverse. Obviously, I don't think we should make all these changes in order to save public transport; we should make them for a whole host of other reasons, all of which will have the happy side effect of encouraging mass transit and discouraging automobile use.

There are significant advantages to urbanization, which I have mentioned and which you have not bothered to refute. Which is just as well, because most Americans seem to be supporting my side with their feet. Every state except Maine and Vermont has been growing steadily more urbanized, to the point that now some 80% of Americans count as "urban population." Obviously that statistic must take a broader view of "urban" than I would like - if 80% of us lived in relatively dense cities, we wouldn't need to have this conversation - but the point stands, that people see value in living in cities. Unfortunately, the whole country has been actively discouraging densification since at least the 1950s, when interstates and the rise of the suburbs gave opportunity for urban flight and bullshit racism gave the impetus. As both tool and result of this trend, the country starts to fetishize home ownership - a very specific, often unhelpful kind of home ownership - and then backs up its fetish with lavish tax incentives. Meanwhile, the cities start to rot from within as we basically quit building skyscrapers, and the people who do remain NIMBY any helpful development into nonexistence.

I'm not saying we should discourage home ownership, or rural life, or suburban life. Some people want those things for purely personal reasons and that's fine. But history shows that, left to their own devices, most people like living in cities. They benefit from living in cities. If we as a society hadn't spent the better part of a century trying to scare them out of the cities, they'd be living there now - and once they lived there, they'd be using the goddamn mass transit.

You rightly pointed out that DC, like many cities with metros, is showing declining ridership. True. But you ignore that from about 1940 to about 2005, it also had a declining population. In spite of that, ridership increased pretty consistently from the system's development until about 2011, and the really steep drop doesn't come until 2015. Did the city suddenly go car crazy that year? Why the abrupt change? Why the years of robust and growing use in spite of a stagnant or declining population, if mass transit is so useless?

https://www.wmata.com/about/board/meetings/board-pdfs/upload/3A-Understanding-Ridership-TO-POST.pdf

I'd argue that the upward trends were due to the inherent benefits of a good mass transit system, and that the recent decline is due to the system becoming less good. WMATA estimates that about 30% of the drop was because of declining customer on-time performance. It's also around 2015 that the Federal government dramatically expanded its telework policy, largely in response to a series of weather-related closings. That is estimated to have caused around a 10% decline in use (a statistic that happily lines up well with my own anecdotal experience). It also coincides with the rise of lyft/uber, though the real impact of that seems hazy as yet.

Now some of those factors can't be or shouldn't be messed with, but the big one is the fact that the Metro is late a lot. If it isn't single-tracking due to some long-delayed and now ineptly-implemented repair, it's stopped in both directions because of arcing creating smoke. (Also a lot of people commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of trains, which really gums up the works). How did this happen? Well, I suspect you and I would agree that there is a certain amount of ineptitude built into a large and long-standing government-run project. That's true, and I'd be open to hearing ideas about privatization. There's also an issue unique to DC, which is that WMATA has to contend with three (really four) competing governments: the District itself, Virginia, and Maryland. Except the District is largely beholden to Congress, so let's add them into the mix. All of these entities are expected to have a hand in funding and managing the system, but they have very lopsided interests in it. 100% of DC residents (and voters) live within metro range, but only a minority of Virginia and Maryland residents do. When it comes time to fund much-needed repair, improvement, and expansion of the system, DC has a lot of incentive to pony up, while Richmond and Annapolis simply don't - even though their residents ride the stupid thing as much as anybody.

Most of the time you can't get one state to something it needs; getting three to do it and Congress to play nice is a fucking pipe dream. There's several things that could be done over the long term to ameliorate the problems that arise from this weird two-state-one-district-and-the-Feds hybrid. Statehood would be ideal; retrocession to MD, outside of a narrowly circumscribed area around the Mall, would be acceptable and perhaps more feasible; but regardless of either of those I think the city would benefit immensely from allowing itself to get denser and therefore richer.

4/19/2018 9:13:07 AM

I think instant gratification is probably the main reason why cars wont go away.

Closest distance between two points? My own damn car.

If you can financially afford to come and go as you please there is no incentive to wait for and then sit on some bus or monorail and make 14 stops at locations you don't give 2 shits about. Ain't nobody got time for that.

4/19/2018 11:52:44 AM

^ while this is true in many places, taking the train in NYC and other large cities is faster than driving. Looking for free parking will take up 20 minutes by itself if you're lucky

4/19/2018 12:01:29 PM

Why do you think I'd argue against urbanization? The millions moving to Houston to live many miles from downtown are most certainly enjoying urbanization. I too am a fan of urbanization. It is just that you and I disagree on what a city should look like. In my opinion, the purpose of a city is to achieve human desires as efficiently as possible. Whatever is efficient, I go for. You, clearly, have a different definition.

In effect, you are arguing for the status quo. You clearly want to the keep the green belts and urban growth boundaries. You want to keep the resulting skyrocketing land prices and the resultant miss-allocation of residents. You want to keep the massively expensive metro. You didn't address the suggestion of curtailing cars to stop people from commuting in from outside the greenbelts. So please, what do you actually want to change? Land prices are already insanely expensive in DC and other such anti-sprawl cities. High land prices don't result in New Yorkification while automobiles are a thing. People refuse to live in apartment blocks without attached parking decks, because they want to drive. That is why I said, in the beginning, banning cars or taxing the shit out of them is an option YOU need to entertain. Your city will never work without it. DC is dysfunctional right now, and the dysfunction is only going to get worse as more people drive every year and fewer ride transit in a city that isn't building roads.

In the case of the Metro, yes, ridership was up as they expanded it and is now falling as the Metro reaches its predicted end of life and must be rebuilt. But the extra ridership came entirely at the expense of bus ridership which peaked in the 40s (if memory serves). The fact is, in DC, the vast majority of trips are by car. In 2014 only 4% of passenger miles were via transit, the rest were by car (ignoring walking, biking, etc), and it has only gotten more skewed since then. It is just not reasonable to spend so much of the available resources and only get 4% out of it. We could shut the metro and bus network down, and it'd only increase the passenger miles by 4%, about the same amount as driving increased in DC over the last year anyways.
http://ti.org/docs/2014TransitSharebyUZAf.xlsx

So please, what more would you have us do? The status quo will only get worse. Until people say "I'm sorry, I can't take that six figure job because the metro can't get me there on time reliably" DC is only ever going to get worse. Of course, there go the benefits of living in an urban environment when "I just can't get there, so it might as well not exist" becomes the norm.

4/19/2018 12:24:35 PM

I am wholly uninterested in green belts and urban growth boundaries. I do not object to the existence of sprawl; I object to how it is perversely encouraged and incentivized over saner, natural city development.

What do I want to change? I want to significantly roll back building restrictions. Let people build bigger. Tell historical preservation people to fuck off; tell the same to closet racists who don't want lower-cost multi-family dwelling in their neighborhood because they're afraid it will put their houses "in the shade;" basically, turn them loose to expand the stock of housing and office space in this and every other city with these issues. With regards to mass transit, I'm of the same "fuck NIMBY" opinion; many of the more promising projects around here are held up by whining neighbors as much as they are by funding issues. From my perspective, perhaps I'm thinking much more about failed urban planning in general than I am about mass transit vs. car ownership in particular.

But this thread is about that part, so I'll try to focus in. I'm not interested in banning cars anywhere; people can own what they can afford. Taxing them is one solution, but I'm not all that interested in disincentivizing car ownership. Cars offer utility and flexibility. I'm more interested in disincentivizing their use. The situation you describe above, with Texans driving from their front door to their mailbox, is appalling. People can drive wherever they want, of course, but their doing so has negative externalities and I'm fine with a pay structure that encourages them to stop or, failing that, pays us for the privilege. I admit that the details here are tricky. Higher fuel taxes might be the best bet, to discourage driving generally and encourage people to look at hybrid and electric options. By the time these become prevalent, hopefully the overall effect will have sunk in and people will be out of the habit of driving everywhere all the time (and infrastructure will adapt accordingly). But they don't work so great on the local level because they're so easy to avoid; for example, I never buy gas in DC because it's nearly $1/gal cheaper right across the Maryland line. So the tax hasn't discouraged me from driving, and it's not optimally collecting revenue to be put into shoring up mass transit and existing roadways.

I suppose you could impose a mileage tax, but again, that would only affect people with vehicles registered in the locality, and in DC, at least, a huge portion of the cars are coming from neighboring states. I know a common proposal around here is a "commuter tax," but I don't know enough about what it would look like.

Quote :

" But the extra ridership came entirely at the expense of bus ridership which peaked in the 40s"

So...you mean it was declining for like thirty years before the metro came to "steal" its riders? You're trying to dismiss the decades of success enjoyed by the metro, and honestly not doing a particularly good job of it. There is a decline. There are reasons for that decline.

Quote :

" We could shut the metro and bus network down, and it'd only increase the passenger miles by 4%"

My guess is that relatively few people are concerned about passenger miles, we're concerned about passenger hours. Yes, I travel more miles in my car, because I use it to drive to things that are farther away than the metro. I don't use it to drive to work, because it takes an hour to drive there and about 20 minutes on the subway. You say you want to achieve human desires; I'd argue that most people want to get where they're going as quickly and efficiently as possible, more than they intrinsically want to own a car. Or, perhaps to put it better, more than they want to drive the car on any given trip.

Quote :

" If you can financially afford to come and go as you please there is no incentive to wait for and then sit on some bus or monorail and make 14 stops at locations you don't give 2 shits about. Ain't nobody got time for that."

Again, "time" is the key factor here. Obviously in a place like Raleigh I'd just drive; traffic isn't too bad (or wasn't when I left), and the bus doesn't go anywhere I live or want to be.

4/19/2018 4:23:22 PM

Quote :

"My guess is that relatively few people are concerned about passenger miles, we're concerned about passenger hours"

Absolutely. And average speeds in DC of car travel is about double that of transit. If they drove to work, the numbers suggest, everyone would get to work twice as quickly. But, people are fine with the slow speed of transit, since they get to play on their phone during that time.

Quote :

"I'd argue that most people want to get where they're going as quickly and efficiently as possible, more than they intrinsically want to own a car."

I am just following the numbers. If everyone wanted to ride transit and transit worked, I'd be good with that. But, the numbers scream over the ineffectiveness of transit, and the usage numbers show people want to drive their cars. Not because they love their cars, but because cars are faster. According to the transit factbook, the average speed of transit is 15.3mph. Car travel is usually twice that even during rush hour.
http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/FactBook/2016-APTA-Fact-Book.pdf

Quote :

"I am wholly uninterested in green belts and urban growth boundaries."

Uninterested how? Uninterested in abolishing them? Or uninterested in maintaining them?

Of course, it isn't really good enough to just eliminate the urban growth boundaries. There are cities without them that might as well have them, because the zoning commissions refuse to approve development and the DOTs refuse to plan, nevermind help build, a road network integrating the area into the larger network.

4/20/2018 5:40:17 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/opinion/cars-ruining-cities.html

4/25/2018 8:24:08 PM

^ Article contains no solution, only anecdotes. But, it is showing one of the two solutions I outlined above, namely making cars go away. The article is pro-that solution.

Of course, mass transit is expensive compared to roads and cars. According to the National Transit Database, the nation's transit agencies spent an average of $1.15 per passenger mile (2015, 87 cents was subsidies). Meanwhile, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported that Americans spent 24 cents per passenger mile building and maintaining all the roads and highways the government builds and buying/repairing and insuring all the cars that make up the nations automobile fleet (2015 again).

It is the case that transit is universally government run and unionized from top to bottom. As such, if you privatized much of it, it is reasonable that costs could be dramatically reduced. Europe operates mostly privatized transit, but I don't have the statistics for Europe to compare directly.

Nevertheless, given the numbers we have, you can take your pick how to build your city. You can tax the shit out of cars (high registration fees of $10k or more, variable priced tolls of $15+ during rush hour on every highway, quadrupled gasoline taxes, the whole shebang) and that will make mass transit work. It will allow you to jack up transit fares to at least double what they are now, and subsidize the rest to make transit agencies private and profitable, and you can build a mass transit utopia. Your citizenry will live in expensive cramped housing (expensive due to high density construction coupled with high property taxes), will be heavily taxed, and suffer commutes more than twice as long as their brethren in the automobile heaven. But they will ride the trains and buses you choose for them.

Compare that to the automobile heaven, where it seems true that gasoline taxes are too low and should be raised 20% or more to fund the existing backlog of needed urban road construction. Toll and HOV lanes are a great idea for highways. People will tend to have longer distance commutes, but they will cover that distance in less than half the time and at 1/3rd the cost. Housing will be cheap and affordable due to low rise (4 floors or less, no parking deck) construction and comparatively low property taxes.

What we do know is that the current model (BOTH!) doesn't work. diverting funds away from road construction and restricting car friendly development without heavily taxing automobiles results in ever more dysfunctional cities. Stop it. Pick one and live with it. You can't make everyone happy over this policy decision.

4/30/2018 8:45:18 PM

Quote :

"If they drove to work, the numbers suggest, everyone would get to work twice as quickly. But, people are fine with the slow speed of transit, since they get to play on their phone during that time."

What numbers you got for that second sentence? Because I'm guessing that I'm not alone among metro riders for choosing it because it is faster than driving. And much, much cheaper, parking spaces costing what they do downtown.

Obviously it's not faster for everybody, or even most people, because most people don't live and work close enough to metro or the bus to make it quicker. We can look at that fact and decide, "Oh well, fuck it then." Or we could just, like, build a couple more metro lines.

Quote :

"Your citizenry will live in expensive cramped housing (expensive due to high density construction"

Explain.

Quote :

"Housing will be cheap and affordable due to low rise (4 floors or less"

Explain again.

5/1/2018 7:58:38 AM

so, for all the pet owners, how they gon' take they dogs on these public transits?

5/1/2018 9:35:19 AM

5/1/2018 10:25:55 AM

touche. ok, i'm now on team #BanCars

5/1/2018 2:52:32 PM

Quote :

"What numbers you got for that second sentence?"

American Community Survey
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t
People who commuted by transit took nearly twice as long as people who drove, spending an average of 50.1 minutes vs. 25.4 minutes for people driving alone. People who walked took just 12.3 minutes, suggesting that people who walk live well under a mile away from their work. Carpooling added about 2.6 minutes to the times required to drive alone.

According to the American Public Transportation Association’s 2016 Transit Fact Book, transit speeds average just 15.3 mph because they tend to be inherently slow vehicles as well as their low acceleration rates, making needed frequent stops to load/unload particularly costly. Even in heavily congested areas, cars easily exceed this.

Transit centric construction requires passengers to walk to the transit stop, which means a need to maximize density so the whole population is within walking distance of a stop, and therefore higher densities. Meanwhile, high density housing in excess of 4 floors requires elevators, parking decks (if cars), and significant steel and concrete use to support the building. This makes them significantly more expensive in terms of price per square foot for construction. Also, the high taxes and fares for transit will drain the population of resources, and people will as a result settle for less living space per person.

Meanwhile, car centric planning has no walking requirement, as parking can be provided to every building. As such, people will avoid the cost of elevators and high-rise construction, building instead 4 or fewer floored construction with ground level parking. In effect, sacrificing land use in order to achieve significantly cheaper construction.

5/1/2018 5:28:52 PM

Quote :

"People who commuted by transit took nearly twice as long as people who drove, spending an average of 50.1 minutes vs. 25.4 minutes for people driving alone. People who walked took just 12.3 minutes, suggesting that people who walk live well under a mile away from their work. Carpooling added about 2.6 minutes to the times required to drive alone. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s 2016 Transit Fact Book, transit speeds average just 15.3 mph because they tend to be inherently slow vehicles as well as their low acceleration rates, making needed frequent stops to load/unload particularly costly. Even in heavily congested areas, cars easily exceed this. "

You need to account for the reduction in congestion from getting rid of cars, as well as improvements in the efficiency of public transportation routes, necessitated by everyone using it.

[Edited on May 1, 2018 at 6:00 PM. Reason : .]

5/1/2018 5:59:18 PM

Quote :

"What we do know is that the current model (BOTH!) doesn't work. diverting funds away from road construction and restricting car friendly development without heavily taxing automobiles results in ever more dysfunctional cities. Stop it. Pick one and live with it. You can't make everyone happy over this policy decision."

HOLY FALSE DILEMA!

While I agree that pleasing EVERYONE is a fool's errand, most major/dense US cities like NYC, SF, CHI, DC, BOS, PHL, etc can absolutely work towards reducing the number of cars on city streets and focusing on mass transit/ride-sharing/bike/pedestrian friendly infrastructure; sprawling sunbelt cities can attempt to make urban cores or major job centers more transit friendly and stop adding extra lanes to freeways that will just clog up eventually; and the rest of the expanding suburban/exurban US can learn from the mistakes of everyone else.

5/1/2018 8:45:51 PM

I just want 77 to be finished in my lifetime.

5/1/2018 8:52:16 PM

Quote :

"Meanwhile, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported that Americans spent 24 cents per passenger mile building and maintaining all the roads and highways the government builds and buying/repairing and insuring all the cars that make up the nations automobile fleet (2015 again). "

I don't really have a problem with anything you posted except the cost of living but you are externalizing most of the costs of "automobile heaven"

Low density construction requires less resources per project but uses resources much less efficiency and overall leads to overconsumption. Think about clear-cutting as well as total paved area. Its an environmental nightmare before you even start a car.

Then you have the pollution and the costs of pollution both direct and indirect. The health costs of a population that never walks and breathes polluted air. The health costs of car injuries.

You are also not considering the carbon costs. The carbon impact of low density living is going to be much higher not only because of the use of fossil fuels, but low density living leads to higher energy consumption in general. Even something as simple as heating costs add up when you have more exterior walls.

Quote :

". This makes them significantly more expensive in terms of price per square foot for construction."

You don't need those extra square feet so the cost isn't really higher, its just more efficient use of square feet. I grew up in a house with 2 dining rooms, 3 living rooms, a theatre room. At some point, it becomes excessive and it doesn't do a better job.

Quote :

"Also, the high taxes and fares for transit will drain the population of resources, and people will as a result settle for less living space per person. "

Where are you getting this? Where is the data? NYC unlimited metro pass costs 120. There is no way you could do all your travel for 120 with a car.
http://files.metro-magazine.com/images/public-transit-most-commuters-dark.jpg
https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editorialfiles/charts/2017/09/1506368646_how-americans-spend-their-money-0846.png

[Edited on May 1, 2018 at 9:37 PM. Reason : wayyy too big]

5/1/2018 9:36:38 PM

LoneSnark -

Your second sentence was " But, people are fine with the slow speed of transit, since they get to play on their phone during that time."

That's what I want to see you justify. Because I think people's motivation is relevant here, and I don't think it's "play on my phone."

But really it's all immaterial, because at this point we're just circling the same fundamental difference of thought. From my point of view, you are saying nothing more profound than "Decrepit, mismanaged, underfunded public transit doesn't work so good," which, well, no shit. And from your point of view I guess I'm just saying, "Let's throw good money after bad." Which I would agree was a valid assessment, if I thought that the issues with mass transit were inherent to the thing rather than a function of current, fixable problems.

5/2/2018 8:38:16 AM

One of the surveys that calculated average trip time by mode also asked why they chose that mode. "free time to do other activities" rated very high for those riding transit.

And yes, the issues with mass transit is entirely inherent to the thing. Given the laws of physics and human nature we are living under, transit is a poor solution to mankind's organizational problems. To summarize, passenger trains are killed by the laws of physics, full stop. They are a horrible solution to whatever problem it is you're trying to solve.

It all breaks down to friction. A train with metal wheels on metal rails has an offensively low coefficient of friction. This limits the amount of force the wheels can apply to the vehicle. This means that trains cannot accelerate quickly, especially when it comes to stopping. This means that trains must always be given primary right of way: gates at crossings, not just stop lights. It also means that trains at speed cannot be close to each other. A passenger train moving at 80 mph needs about a mile to stop. A MILE. That is a mile of track not carrying anything. It is no accident that the busiest corridor in the world is 2-dedicated bus lanes in Turkey that at one station has a bus leaving every 14 seconds. No rail line could hope to match that passenger throughput.

But the effect upon city planning is worse. Not only is rail low capacity, it is insanely expensive. Because train wheels cannot exert much force, they cannot handle any more than a 1% grade. Meanwhile, cars routinely cross grades of 15% or more over short distances (climbing an overpass to avoid a train track, for example). As such, the train track dictates the land use all around it. If the track needs to be elevated here to clear a river further down the line, then the land around it must be bulldozed to do the land-fill to support it. The biggest cost driver that makes rail so much more expensive than roads is tied up in grading the land and the land around the tracks. They are similarly handicapped when it comes to turning ability, which means long sweeping turns, everything else in town must be moved out of the way to let the train make the turn at its own slow pace.

Trains are a technology to solve one problem: the high cost of energy. Steel wheels have very low rolling resistance, so they can carry heavy loads efficiently. To do this, they sacrifice nearly all their performance. This is worth doing when it comes to moving freight, which is both very heavy and doesn't mind going slow. It also can dramatically improve capacity, as a mile long train makes a mile long stopping distance not seem so bad at a 50% hypothetical utilization rate. Meanwhile, passengers are both very light (the vehicle to carry them always weighs far more than they do) and are in a hurry to get there. This can be a tradeoff worth making for passengers if you live in the 19th century when steam engines were 2% efficient and coal was mined by hand. But as of the 20th century and especially today, energy is ungodly cheap compared to everything else humans care about. As such, passenger trains should be limited to corridors that make sense: rail corridors built and maintained to carry freight can carry passenger trains for a marginal cost, so no good reason not to use them as such. But dedicated metro lines are simply bad engineering and should never be built again.

Buses, however, are a useful tool in any well rounded transportation system. Privatized and self organizing bus lines can compete with cars in many instances. They can also share right-of-way with trucks to move freight and cars as well in most instances. But, even done well, they will always complete a small share of all trips, depending on the urban area. Some urban areas will be well served by buses and jitneys, most will be poorly served. Whichever it is, they require a well built and flowing road network to operate. Zone and plan accordingly (see my prescriptions above).

5/3/2018 12:42:14 AM

Holy shit. That was a lot of words about trains and physics, but have you ever left the Americans and been on a train anywhere else? Like in a developed, modern country where trains are the complete antithesis of what you’ve boringly described? Cuz ya should...

5/3/2018 2:39:49 AM

Oh sure, a logical fallacy. Great argument. As if the fact that I hadn't been to Europe and Asia meant I didn't know they existed and had never read anything about them.

Sure. I love trains. I've enjoyed the London Underground, train journeys from London to Glasgow, Munich to Prague, along the canal in Panama, and a few others. I don't know what being a passenger many times has to do with understanding basic physics and the engineering repercussions. Was i supposed to see trains travelling at high speed really close together anywhere? Because I did not, and neither have you.

Other countries tax cars far more than Americans, and subsidize rail far more than Americans. And just as I said above, do that enough, and trains can certainly look like they work. Throw enough money at anything and it will look like it works. But London grinds to a near standstill during rush hour, and 80+% of all travel in London is still by car.

5/3/2018 7:34:52 AM

a real r/iamverysmart dissertation on trains ITT

5/3/2018 8:09:18 AM

^ I love the fact that he mentioned Prague in his far reaching travels. Clearly he’s an expert on passenger trains, physics, AND matters of refined taste.

[Edited on May 3, 2018 at 9:50 AM. Reason : .]

5/3/2018 9:49:14 AM

Grumpy asked about problems inherent to the thing. So I told him. You don't need to be an expert to know and understand the things I said. High-school physics should do. That people don't know the fundamental flaws with trains is just because they've never bothered thinking about it from a physics standpoint.

^ you seemed to think me having ridden a train overseas would make me an expert and therefore I'd have a different understanding of how they worked. I myself think this is absurd, my train riding history should have no relevance whatsoever to comprehending what a train is and how they work, but given your only criticism of what I'd said was that i hadn't ridden trains overseas, I figured I'd let you know I had.

[Edited on May 4, 2018 at 8:58 AM. Reason : .,.]

5/4/2018 8:56:37 AM

I think he's made a great argument for why trains would be inefficient at transporting one person. I don't think he's done nearly so well when it comes to large (dare we even say, "mass") numbers of people.

I do like that he used Turkey as a success story for road transit, though. I haven't been yet, but most of what I've heard jibes well with this description of traffic in Turkey:

Quote :

"But for the most part, the words usually used are "infuriating","shambolic" and "nightmarish". ...Given that Turkey‘s roads are so chaotic and unpredictable, it's apt to compare them to the post-apocalyptic future filled with uncompromising road warriors of Mad Max."

[Edited on May 5, 2018 at 1:43 PM. Reason : ]

5/5/2018 1:41:40 PM

Quote :

"I do like that he used Turkey as a success story for road transit, though."

reading comprehension. I gave the record holder of the busiest transit corridor in the world, which happened to be in Turkey. I didn't choose Turkey, the statistics did.

Quote :

"I think he's made a great argument for why trains would be inefficient at transporting one person. I don't think he's done nearly so well when it comes to large (dare we even say, "mass") numbers of people. "

I guess you're busy and don't want to take the time to comprehend what was written. But then why say anything at all? Nearly everything I said was under the presumption that the train will have lots of people on it. But the physics is physics: the stopping problem means that the vast majority of track space will be empty, carrying nothing at all. The theoretical utilization limit (540ft train, 5280ft stopping distance) is 9%. But no one runs trains this close, so the real utilization limit is 1% and less. Meanwhile, roads in reality are regularly utilized at 30% or more, be it buses or cars.

5/6/2018 12:12:42 PM

In spite of taking time on my leisurely Sunday to try to comprehend your point, I'm failing; help me out. Why do we care about the utilization limit? I understand that most length of a train track will not have anything on it at any given time. I also get that roads have many more things on them at any given time. This, of course, is the whole point, that the roads are too crowded.

So what is the problem? That metro/train systems use space inefficiently? So we put them under ground, or we elevate them.

And as we've gone down these rabbit holes of utilization limits and ridership and other metrics of efficiency, let me take a moment to remind everybody that LoneSnark has managed to avoid some other important numbers related to safety and pollution.

5/6/2018 2:31:07 PM

Quote :

"So what is the problem? That metro/train systems use space inefficiently? "

Yep. for the given space, they don't move as many people as quickly as cars do. Meanwhile, buses can move several times more people than cars do on the same space. Trains also cost several fold more than those alternatives regardless of space, too (as I expounded on, at length, above). And given that government budgets are finite, spending money in this way means insufficient transportation options will be provided (not enough road space, not enough buses, etc). And going underground just multiplies the cost of anything by ten fold again.

Quote :

"has managed to avoid some other important numbers related to safety and pollution."

In terms of injuries per passenger miles, metro trains are comparable to cars. Most of the injuries are people falling off platforms, getting caught in closing doors, or hit by trains (which, remember, can't stop if someone or another vehicle is in its path). DC in particular has extra deaths on top of these due to substandard maintenance.

In terms of pollution, all electric trains do is switch you from burning oil in the vehicle to burning coal at the power plant. Coal is more polluting than oil, so what matters is energy efficiency.

Which brings us to the surprising fact that trains, intended to be energy efficient, are not. Outside of bullet trains, metro trains are heavy steel which takes a lot of energy to get to speed and stay there. Meanwhile, they spend most of their time running empty, as it is institutionally difficult to take the trains out of service so you can pair them down to fewer cars during off-peak hours, as such they continue running with 8+ cars when 1 car is enough to satisfy the demand. As such, here is what you get in terms of energy use:
http://coyoteblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/light-rail-energy.gif

So yea, I hadn't mentioned pollution or safety yet, only because you hadn't asked about those yet.

[Edited on May 7, 2018 at 2:33 AM. Reason : .,.]

5/7/2018 2:04:08 AM

Quote :

"In terms of injuries per passenger miles, metro trains are comparable to cars. Most of the injuries are people falling off platforms, getting caught in closing doors, or hit by trains (which, remember, can't stop if someone or another vehicle is in its path)."

"Injuries" is some nice slight of hand. I could give a shit about someone who got their hand caught in the closing door and decided to try for a frivolous lawsuit. Cars have 7.28 passenger deaths per billion passenger miles. Trains have .43. The subway has less, .24. Cars are objectively more dangerous than mass transit, by an overwhelming margin.

[pollution later, had to run]

[Edited on May 8, 2018 at 8:09 PM. Reason : ]

5/8/2018 8:06:07 PM

Yes, "Passengers". You're statistics are purposely leaving out all the pedestrians and people in other vehicles (non-passengers) that transit kills every year. Light rail kills 12.5 people per billion passenger miles (BPM), buses kill 4.5 people per BPM, and urban roads and streets kill 8.2 people per billion vehicle miles, or 4.9 BPM given cars carry 1.67 people on average. As such, buses kill fewer people than cars, and light rail kills about 2.5 times more than either. Again, the biggest difference is because vehicles on rails cannot stop when someone is in their path.

There is a reason we put up fences around train tracks and big gates that come down when a train is approaching a crossing and we don't do the same when a bus is coming.

http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_35.html
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2012/fi30.cfm

5/9/2018 12:02:09 PM

can you please explain the science behind why they cant stop quickly?!

5/9/2018 12:29:23 PM

Why is everyone limiting their discussions to rail for mass transit? WMATA and MTA are recommending dedicated bus roads instead of rails for future mass transit extensions out of Branch Avenue and Shady Grove stations. Cheaper to construct, smaller space requirements, and they don't have to worry about all the stray current issues they have with their current systems that are making the system eat itself away with galvanic corrosion and occasionally catch on fire.

http://smrtmaryland.com/images/library/SMRT_Final_Alternatives_Report/SMRT%20Final%20Report%20-%20Executive%20Summary.pdf

http://www.cctmaryland.com/en/component/content/article/1/47-description-of-project

5/9/2018 12:59:29 PM

I just can't help but think of all of the places I'd like to go, on a whim, with a car that would be more problematic with any type of mass transit.

Say Raleigh banned cars, and I moved to Raleigh, got rid of my car, and M-F everything is fine because I work a few blocks away. I can walk or ride a bike, whatever. But what if I wanted to go to the NC Zoo in Asheboro one Saturday last minute. How would I get there? In the scenario where people don't have cars, would there be bus routes to everywhere? What if I wanted to go out to Seagrove to buy some pottery? Do I rely on Greyhound? Does Greyhound have a route to Seagrove?

5/9/2018 2:00:32 PM